D&D General Why defend railroading?

[ReshiIRE]

Honestly, I think the Alexandrian's article on the 'Railroading Manifesto' and subsequent articles should cover everything about railroading vs linear design, how to avoid railroading and why it's best to do so, etc.

It's worth a full read, but there's a lot of juicy quotes:

Linear scenarios are built around a predetermined sequence of events and/or outcomes.


Consider a simple mystery:

Scene 1: The PCs come home and discover that their house has been broken into and an arcane relic stolen from their safe. They need to figure out who did it, which they can do by analyzing fingerprints, looking at their neighbor’s surveillance camera, asking questions around town to see who took the job, or casting a divination spell.
Scene 2: Having discovered that Jimmy “Fast-Fingers” Hall was responsible for the break-in, the PCs track him down. They need to figure out who hired him, which they can do by interrogating him, following him, analyzing his bank statements to figure out who paid him, or hacking his e-mail.
Scene 3: Having discovered that Bobby Churchill, a local mob boss, was the guy who hired Jimmy, the PCs need to get their relic back. They can do that by beating Bobby up, agreeing to do a job for him, or staging a covert heist to get it out of his vault.

That’s a fairly linear scenario: House to Jimmy to Bobby. But because we used the Three Clue Rule to provide a multitude of paths from one event to the next, it’s very unlikely that a GM running this scenario will need to railroad his players. The sequence of events is predetermined, but the outcome of each scene is not.

Non-linear scenarios do not require specific outcomes or events, allowing freedom of player choice.


Linear scenario design and non-linear scenario design exist on a spectrum. Generally speaking, requiring specific events (“you meet an ogre in the woods”) is less restrictive than requiring specific outcomes (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him”). And the more specific the outcome required, the more likely it is that the GM will have to railroad the players to make it happen (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him and the killing blow has to be delivered by the Rose Spear of Vallundria so that the ogre’s ghost can come back and serve the PC at the Black Gates of Goblin Doom”).


With that being said, it’s often quite trivial for an experienced GM to safely assume that a specific event or outcome is going to happen. For example, if a typical group of heroic PCs are riding along a road and they see a young boy being chased by goblins it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they’ll take action to rescue the boy. The more likely a particular outcome is, the more secure you are in simply assuming that it will happen. That doesn’t mean your scenario is railroaded, it just means you’re engaging in smart prep.


My point here is that you can’t let fear of a potential railroad make you throw away your common sense when it comes to prioritizing your prep. This, by the way, leads to one of the most potent tools in the GM’s arsenal:


What are you planning to do next session?


It’s a simple question, but the answer obviously gives you certainty. It lets you focus your prep with extreme accuracy because you can make very specific predictions about what your players are going to do and those predictions will also be incredibly likely to happen.

The rest also has some fantastic advice.

Note: I haven't actually ran anything yet, but I keep these articles in mind when I do design stuff and when watching or playing in campaigns.

 

[Dragonsbane]

Geeez. Does everyone play 100% player-driven games? Sounds kind of boring (no offense players).

We do a 50/50 split. Players can totally decide what they do and when, and at my table we use Character Arcs, so they all have a personal plotline that I weave into the main campaign plot. That said, there is always an overarching plot that the players agree to follow, including deciding OOC to work together in a teamwork-style fashion IC. Over the years, I have spent too much time preparing a series of stories to have the players ignore all the work and just do something totally different. This is fine as long as the DM knows they aren't following any specific story, but if a DM preps something the players should engage with it. Communication is key.

I don't believe in railroading, but the total opposite is also terrible IMHO, at least for me and my grognard crew.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Railroading is a social construct.

I mean, the whole game is by definition a social construct, so...yes?

 

[Don Durito]

Geeez. Does everyone play 100% player-driven games? Sounds kind of boring (no offense players).

We do a 50/50 split. Players can totally decide what they do and when, and at my table we use Character Arcs, so they all have a personal plotline that I weave into the main campaign plot. That said, there is always an overarching plot that the players agree to follow, including deciding OOC to work together in a teamwork-style fashion IC.

I don't believe in railroading, but the total opposite is also terrible IMHO, at least for me and my grognard crew.

If the Army of Militaristic Dwarves is invading the Orcish kingdom where the players live then they're going to deal with it. That's what the campaign is about because that's what you agreed in session 0.

This doesn't mean there has to be a pre-determned plot. The players just react to what's happening in the world and NPCs pursue their own agenda or respond to the players and then the players act or react etc etc.

If the rest of the world just sits around waiting for the players to come along and interact with it the game would indeed be boring (and weird).

 

[TheSword]

Player choice within boundaries is the way most people play I suspect.

If the party want to continue the campaign they’re gonna need to check out what’s happening at Fort Drannick. Maybe they delay and things get a bit worse there, or maybe they are real quick and it gets a bit easier but either way they need to go to Fort Drannick. There are multiple hooks and reasons they might go and what they do when they get there is up to them. How they get there is up to them. But that’s where they’re heading.

By itself it’s a linear structure but I wouldn’t call it a railroad.

 

[Marc_C]

What you are talking about are roller coasters. It linear, it twists and turns, goes up slowly but goes down at neck breaking pace, giving the participants an exhilarating experience. Participants are trapped, they make no decisions and yet they love it. They keep coming back for better and bigger roller coasters!

 

[Yora]

Because they don't know any better.

Scipted adventures have been the unquestioned standard for over 35 years, and most people don't know there's anything else.

 

[Cadence]

What do people mean by this? "Degenerate" is an odd descriptor for a particular playstyle, and one to my ear sounds extremely harsh. Is there some technical meaning that I'm not picking up on?

In math I think degenerate is when you have an example that is technically the kind of thing you're studying, but where all of the complications have fallen away and you're left with something that feels different or where the standard methods of working with it don't apply anymore. Are two slices of bread put together a degenerate sandwich? When you say train, does someone picture all kinds of cars, so just the engine might be a degenerate train.

 

[hopeless]

This is only a problem if the person running that game nor their players can't adjust the game to fit their idea of fun.
Now if even a little alteration is problematic with that adventure then you'd be right.
Fortunately we have a lot of other adventures some going way back to the original red box that can help resolve that problem with a little thought and tinkering.
My recent problem has been more with the dm jumping the railroad, when they had a perfectly good campaign already established but they can't help changing things and think it will improve things when it really doesn't!

Spoiler

Sorry had a dm run a game in a setting inspired by Dragonlance.
He wanted to restart it and asked me to convert a ranger into a cleric, unfortunately he can't adapt at all resulting in me running a game in Exandria to explain how my character ended up in his after he messed up his introductory adventure by misusing my character's back story when that introduction plays no part in his setting.
He then decided he liked Exandria that he wanted his setting located there forgetting one of the PCs was banished from that world making that impossible.
As i said he jumped the railroad and thought he was being funny, once I realised he was serious I quit as what was the point in playing when he can't even keep his own setting straight?

 

[GuyBoy]

Railroads are actually pretty handy if you’re travelling by train; you won’t get far without them.

Please excuse the trite excuse for witticism above, but the point is that railroading is an emotive phrase in D&D, usually seen as pejorative, and we actually need to be careful with it.
Gaming is definitely a social contract, and part of the player’s responsibility to the DM is to recognise the DM’s ability to invest only so much time in preparation and their entitlement to a “job well done” feeling as their campaign progresses. It follows that the players should pick up on the plot hooks and follow them, not act like *****s by refusing to do so in the name of “not being railroaded.”

Two current exemplars: in The Sword’s “Odyssey of the Dragonlords” campaign, we came upon local farmers terrified of the attacks from a demonic wild boar from local hills. So we went after the monster and thereby engaged in the flow of the campaign.
In my own Saltmarsh campaign, the dead body floating into the town, with locals knowing the tides, prompted the players to head off to explore the rumoured haunted house along the coast.

In both cases, the players could have “refused to be railroaded” Why? What could that achieve except frustration in the name of some meaningless cause?

PS I’m not excusing my one-time Dragonlance purist DM, who when we attempted to leave town the “wrong way” for the plot, stated that there were 40 Minotaurs on the south road who say they will kill anyone who goes that way!