D&D 5E What does "Railroading" actually mean!? Discount Code on Page 8

[DND_Reborn]

In a discussion with one of the other players in my group yesterday, I keyed him into a little secret. He asked me, "When has a player or group just completely thrown a wrench into your DM plans and not done what you expected or wanted?"

I told him, they always do what I expect/want, or at least what I have prepared.

Just how they go about it is up to them, but that's about it.

Now, with that being said, when we finish one adventure I find out what the general plans are next. Do you go here? Want to do this or that? Start working on the other thing? That is completely in the players' hands. But once that choice is made, that is what I prepared for, and it will happen eventually.

 

[kieran_of_the_dark_peaks]

Well, you can find out if I manage to avoid this cardinal sin of adventure writing tomorrow, when the BLIZZARD OF AXE AND SWORD is released through DMSguild! It would be great to get peoples opinions on if the adventure does manage to get the balance right.

[mandatory, but new, advert]

 

[aco175]

I had a situation in town last night where the PCs were resting and going over loot from the last adventure. Groups of dwarves started showing up and asking about the burial masks the PCs found in the last dungeon. The PCs finally met up with them and some roleplay ensued where they gave the masks to the dwarves. Then they found out that a group of giants has been following the dwarves and they were asked to help kill the giants or else it looks like the giants are heading to attack the town.

The PCs were free to choose to help or not. They could have packed up and left before the giants came, but it is kind of a railroad for good parties to aid the town since they have been coming here since level 1 and are local heroes. They could have waited and let the last dwarf come crawling back to town after the giants killed the rest. They could have set up town defense and made a stand. It was suggested that the dwarves were going out to meet them to prevent the town from being attacked and the PCs went along which is how it was planned.

I think that the DM needs to present choices and let the players make decisions. In the above example the players could have chosen to go back to the main dungeon and not bother with the giants, but the town they come back to would be destroyed and hostile to them, or maybe another group of adventures saved the town and are now the new favorites. This last part may feel like punishing the PCs for not doing the 'right' or 'good' thing according to the DM though.

A whole new discussion could be had on how the DM influences the world and players through his tastes and ideas of how the game should be played and how to act.

 

[Coroc]

Out of the Abyss is right there for you! A whole campaign build on this premise...

freedom, i intend to use this classic ds module on my players. Playing oota atm, spoiler






I did not like that you were basically expected to escape the drow starting prison almost as naked as during your stay. We only left after we found some of our gear, and i believe the dm had to wing it a bit to make it happen. Seriously no adventurer would run of into the underdark unequipped.

 

[Neonchameleon]

PCs and players are often more inventive or creative than a DM plans. If the DM designs a dungeon or scenario that blocks many potential courses of action, the question arises as to what happens when the PCs work around the design and come up with an approach that bypasses the blockage

As a DM who normally writes their own adventures I consider this both inherent and part of the fun. I consider myself decently creative - or I wouldn't DM. The most creative at my table? Probably not, but up there. But even if I was the most creative at the table I'm still matching my creativity against five people at once who are bouncing ideas off each other. I'm outnumbered.

And even if I was more creative than the five combined I'm still playing defence. If there are nine ways out of a situation, I've seen six, and my players only find four that's no guarantee that the four they find will all be among the six I have, especially as trying to find ways out is like trying to proofread your own work.

Besides. If they always did what I expect I'd be bored.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I think this is a good example of "too broad and too narrow", again, because a lot of times, that's not actually going to have most players thinking "railroading", and they might not even be mad, if the fiat is clever enough.

That would depend on whether it needs to feel like a railroad in order to be a railroad.

Thought experiment: months after a game has concluded, the players and DM are talking about a great session they had. The DM reveals that what the players thought was the result of their decisions was actually the DM making stuff up on the fly to keep the plot on the path he had planned out.

Was it a railroad?

(I don't necessarily have an answer; just throwing this out there.)

 

[Maxperson]

Railroading (verb) is when the DM artificially blocks off options that don't fit the predetermined story. This is usually a bad thing, although it MAY be beneficial when used judiciously to make sure players get the plot hook or to keep a story from going disastrously off track. Even then, though, it should be a last resort and should be used as little as possible.

Just to offer up an example of this that wasn't bad.

One of the players in my group wanted to try his hand at DMing. He picked out a 3.5 module to run and studied up. Before the game started he came to the rest of us and said that even though he knew there were a lot of other places in the area we could go(it was set in FR), would we please not deviate from where the story was going. He didn't want to be overwhelmed while he was learning how to run the game. We all agreed and away we went.

He cut off options that didn't fit the predetermined story, but did so in the right way. He got our buy in and had a legitimate reason for doing so.

 

[Neonchameleon]

In practice, this always seemed an example of the GM fixing a problem they created themselves - we insist on "skilled play" for the players to avoid traps and not get smashed by encounters that are at the edge of their power, and whatnot, so they turtle up. We then put in wandering monsters, to punish them so they don't do the thing that we'd been training them to do.

I'd have said that was an example of the game designer rather than the DM tbh.

Hey, there's another thread around here about the Kobyashi Maru scenario...

Except that "Every way has its own challenges and there is no One True Way - but boring ways will have additional 'impartial' challenges" is a very different statement to "You are always going to lose this scenario. The PCs are expected to win most adventures.

 

[CleverNickName]

Railroading is:

....invisible, if your DM is clever.

 

[Imaculata]

Whenever I design a sandbox adventure, there are always bounderies regarding where the players go. The adventure is confined to one region, and I ask my players to respect those bounderies. Likewise, the plot will have a predefined beginning and end, with some plot points that we'll probably come to in the middle. The players are free in their choices, and I adapt the plot to those choices, while also steering it to a satisfying conclusion. I think it would be a mistake to catagorize this as railroading. What it is, in my opinion, is inserting some lineair elements into the adventure. A predefined or partially predefined plot is not a railroad.

Some people may argue that this is a railroad with multiple paths, but I think this muddles what we mean when we talk about actual railroading. Railroading the players, means negating their choices or ability to choose entirely. It refers first and fore most to action resolution. In other words: the players can't attempt to escape, or I've made it nearly impossible, because as a DM I've decided that they get captured. This is different from an adventure where the players start in jail, because no action resolution has occurred, and so no choices were negated.