D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Demetrios1453]

Someone once suggested in a thread on this topic not that long ago that the very existence of boxed text(!) was railroading and that was when I knew there was no reasonable discussion possible about this topic with some folks - though some of you in this thread are doing a very good job of it.

Personally, I think railroading is only definable against the (hopefully explicit) understanding of the table of how much player agency is to be expected in the campaign.

I do think you're right on this. Some players want a lot of agency, some don't (or don't care). It's something that should probably be gone over in a Session Zero, in a discussion concerning DM and player expectations...

 

[robus]

My group wanted to go on adventures and they were happy to go chasing the plot hooks I dangled in front of them. Does that mean I railroaded them? Probably, according to some here, but instead I think I provided the fun they wanted.

 

[robus]

I feel a huge reason why railroading has become such a common occurence is because new DM's don't know how to write adventures.

What I don’t understand is why people expect DMs to be stellar from session 1. DMing is a hard skill to learn and takes a lot of practice. Getting to a point where you feel comfortable enough to just roll with the players whims takes time.

Beginner DMs need simple linear adventures to get started. I remember the “deer in the headlights“ feeling when my players did something unexpected! Having a path is like DMing with a safety-net.

 

[Ovinomancer]

See, I don't really bother with trying to make the distinction here.

Linear is a plausible set of scenarios where progression is A to B to C. If you are traveling from New York to Boston, it is EXTREMELY unlikely you will pass through Rome. And, frankly, a player who decides that he wants to go to Rome and is prevented from doing so is a different issue from railroading. That's a complete failure of player buy in. Now, if we add a time limit to the scenario, and you must travel from New York to Boston in under 4 hours to stop the assassination of the very important NPC, then, well, you have to fly. You cannot take a train, boat or walk from New York to Boston in under 4 hours.

So, we have a linear scenario where choices are constrained. Is it a railroad? No. It's entirely plausible and no meaningful player choices have been removed. There is only one way to travel that distance in that amount of time. You aren't "forcing" the PC's to fly as opposed to any other choice because, well, there is no other choice.

No, I'm sorry, but the "there's no other choice" bit is a tad circular. Why is there no other choice? The GM says so, because that's how the GM put this challenge together. At least, that's how D&D works, where the GM is the only source of this kind of fiction. Other systems may get there a different way, and avoid this issue.

So, your argument is that some kinds of GM limiting of choice is okay, because, well, it's okay, but other kinds, "meaningful" kinds, aren't. And the way to tell them apart is....

Railroading, OTOH, removes meaningful player choice. As in choices that the players can plausible make in the scenario are being constrained, not because of the facts of the scenario, but because the DM/GM has determined a specific outcome that cannot occur if the choice is allowed.

Mostly agree, but this isn't a special form of play, it's a degenerate form of the exact same thing you posted above -- above, though, the constraints on player choice have been sold to the players and are accepted. The difference, really, between your above limitations and ones that result in railroading are going to be specific to a table because they're exactly the same things, just in different places/strengths.

I'm 100% good with railroading being a degenerate play, but it degenerates from linear play; it's not some different animal.

That's the difference between linear and railroad. In a linear adventure, the PC's could still fail. They could, for whatever reason, miss their flight and fail the mission. The scenario does not have a fixed ending, despite the facts of the scenario limiting choices that the player might make. A railroad will have a fixed result, regardless of any decision the players try to make and any action the players take that conflicts with this DM determined outcome (not scenario determined) will be blocked by the DM.

Does that make better sense?

I'm not sure why failure is somehow special here -- you can have a railroad and still fail. There's nothing about a railroad that prevents failure, in fact, many horror stories featuring railroads result in TPKs and total failure because the GM forces that outcome. This isn't an argument that does anything.

Railroading is just a degenerate form of linear play. It's where you do linear play wrong -- you put the wrong constraints on or you constrain to heavily or you don't get player buy-in to the constraints. One of my my memorable 3.x games as a player was pitched as a railroad -- it was a linear story and we were told that if we buy into the premise and follow it, the promise was that it would be an exciting ride. We did, and it was, and I wouldn't quite call it a railroad (even if the GM pitched it that way). It was no more of a railroad than any WotC AP for 5e, at least.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I feel a huge reason why railroading has become such a common occurence is because new DM's don't know how to write adventures.

The DMG has decent advice and guidelines but it never really teaches you what you're supposed to squiggle on a paper, if you even need to write down your adventure at all. If a player wants to homebrew an adventure, they must either turn to the formats of official adventures or just make a guess.

A natural consequence is that DM's will have a cause-and-effect approach to adventure design similar to writing novels, which have far more guidance even online. This approach, however, needs to be done tediously or else it falls apart and most newer DM's don't want to put in that effort.

If the DMG taught players less about the content of their adventure and more about the structure and presented this information in a digestible manner, I'm confident most DMs won't feel the urge to create a game where players must follow their set guides to properly keep their games afloat.

If this is true, then the professionals making official products need help, too. The DMG's lack of strong guidance is intentional -- it's so that the game is yours and not WotC's. This was a key design goal for 5e, alongside rulings not rules -- they undercooked the rules/advice so you can more easily drift it to your desires. Of course, this makes it a bit harder to learn, because you have to know what you want to do to do that, and why the hobby is still mostly taught via received wisdom (although a lot of that has moved online and out of the LGS).

 

[Thomas Shey]

What I don’t understand is why people expect DMs to be stellar from session 1. DMing is a hard skill to learn and takes a lot of practice. Getting to a point where you feel comfortable enough to just roll with the players whims takes time.

Beginner DMs need simple linear adventures to get started. I remember the “deer in the headlights“ feeling when my players did something unexpected! Having a path is like DMing with a safety-net.

There are other approaches, but whether they're an improvement is in the eye of the beholder. The traditional is the simple extended dungeon; place a bunch of monsters, treasure and traps, and let the players deal with the first and third getting to the second. Its not a very sophisticated approach to an RPG, but I can promise you've seen a lot of it over the years...

 

[Flamestrike]

Every adventure ever written ever is a rail road. A series of planned encounters leading their way to the showdown with the BBEG.

This includes sandbox adventure paths like those from Pazio and WOTC.

Within that railroad, there are different tracks (turn left at the dungeon hallway instead of right, or go to the temple now, and deal with the bandit camp later etc) but effectively all roads lead to Rome (the showdown with the BBEG).

Choices made by the players matter to the outcome, and they have freedom to explore the story and adventure with relative freedom. Unconventional solutions to problems are sometimes effective, and you all wind up telling a communal story. The railroading disappears.

Thats different from a DM forcing players down a series of encounters with no way to avoid them or resolve them any differently than a preordained outcome, and where nothing the players do matters. It's in the latter area where the problem lies. Effectively this DM is just narrating a story to the PCs, who lack any agency to affect the story, and where their decisions dont matter.

You know you're in the latter (bad) kind of railroading when no amount of investigating or lateral thinking works, clever solutions are met with a 'nope' or shifting goalposts (or even more heavy handed techniques like AMFs popping up, DMNPCs stepping in to 'guide' the PCs along the path, absurdly high DCs that even if hit, do nothing etc), the only solution to any problem is the one the DM thought of himself, and your PCs are best served just sitting around waiting for the next encounter to trigger, and any attempt to do something innovative, or go 'off script' is met with some dues ex machina dragging you back to the story and outcome as planned.

As a DM you want some structure to your story, but to also allow the PCs to go off script, resolve your encounters in unexpected ways, and have freedom to contribute and narrate the story as they go, rather than forcing them to adhere to an inflexible preordained path.

 

[Asisreo]

What I don’t understand is why people expect DMs to be stellar from session 1. DMing is a hard skill to learn and takes a lot of practice. Getting to a point where you feel comfortable enough to just roll with the players whims takes time.

Beginner DMs need simple linear adventures to get started. I remember the “deer in the headlights“ feeling when my players did something unexpected! Having a path is like DMing with a safety-net.

If I misread your reply, apologizes. I'm definitely not expecting DM's to be great out-the-box. Quite the opposite. I expect them to be inexperienced and fumble quite a bit.

The issue is that there is nothing telling a new DM how they'd go about making either a linear or sandbox-type game. They're expected to make an adventure, but they're never properly taught.

 

[Greg Benage]

My group wanted to go on adventures and they were happy to go chasing the plot hooks I dangled in front of them. Does that mean I railroaded them? Probably, according to some here, but instead I think I provided the fun they wanted.

I don't think that's railroading according to anyone's definition here. If you dangle plot hooks and your players chase them, that seems definitionally not railroading.

If they don't chase and you force them onto the hook, that's railroading.

I think railroading fundamentally breaks RPGs. If the GM describes the world and I tell the GM what my character is doing, we're playing an RPG. If I can't meaningfully decide what my character is doing, we're not.

 

[Shiroiken]

I define Railroading as a linear path, where player decisions have no impact on the direction of the campaign/adventure. Most APs are this way, since it assumes you will go through each chapter in order to reach the conclusion. This annoys a lot of players, as it makes their long term decisions pointless, and is IME what people usually mean by "railroading," The only defense of this type of DMing I can think of is a newish DM running an AP, since they don't have the experience to nudge the players back on track if they derail.