D&D General Why defend railroading?

[jgsugden]

We often speak of railroading and sandboxing as if they were binary options - you can railroad or sandbox. However, I look at their interrelation differently. Railroading is a sliding scale, with complete sandbox at one end and complete railroad at the other.

Here is a campaign design I've run several times in the past. The PCs begin their adventures in a kingdom. Then, a war breaks out and that kingdom is overrun. The PCs have multiple story hooks that relate to a ruined kingdom elsewhere. The leaders of the overrun nation relocate their people to that ruined kingdom. That relocation happens roughly where the PCs reach level 5. Then, around the time level 17 should be occurring for the PCs, something put into motion before the PCs were ever born comes to fruition in that formerly ruined kingdom where the refugees relocated.

Levels 1 to 4 and 17+ lean towards a railroad, but levels 5 to 16 are entirely a sandbox.

From levels 1 to 4, the PCs have a pressure to achieve certain goals before the invading army overruns their position. This gives a timer to their adventures, encouraging limited resting. However, they can decide to flee from the invading armies and make it to the boats that are leaving from the shoreline capital, hide and let the invading army pass them up (staying in the first kingdom longer, or adventuring in the lands the invading army left behind), or delve into the Underdark to escape the army. I expect, however, given their connection to NPCs that are fleeing (via backstory), that they will go with the fleeing refugees. While they can do anything they want during this period, there are going to be mounting pressures that will point them towards that ruined kingdom. The core of the campaign expects they'll reach it, so the pressure keeps mounting.

I consider that to be a soft railroad with increasing tendency towards a total railroad.

From levels 5 to 16, it is a very sandboxy situation. They have an area to explore in front of them, but they can decide how to do it. The exploration is designed to be a hex crawl from levels 5 to ~11. After that, there are hooks that take them interplanar. However, they might take on political adventures in the refugee nation that is restoring itself, they might dungeon delve in ruins, they might engage with neighboring forces, or they might leave the area entirely and adventure elsewhere in the world - but I use their relationships, backgrounds, bonds, and ideals to keep them tied to that ruined kingdom. During these levels, I have a number of things I expose them to, in one fashion or another, that provides them with insight they'll need for the climax of the campaign.

This is as sandbox as I go. It is not a complete sandbox as I tie them to certain elements, but it is a world of adventure for them. If they learn of a lich living in a tower north along the coast, they could go there at level 5 or level 16, and the adventure would be different based upon their power levels and their goals at the time. They're not likely to successfully fight the lich at level 5, but they might negotiate with it for information or resources.

At level 17, their is a call to action that starts the PCs down a path that goals to a goal. There are literally dozens of ways to move the story forward and they get to choose what they do. However, there is a timer that they will understand and they have to pick and choose what they wish to try to accomplish before that timer runs out. They'll have multiple paths to success and get to decide how to proceed, with some paths requiring brute force, others requiring negotiation, others requiring Macguffins, etc... They'll have to balance this with their own storylines for their PCs. They have people that depend upon them at this point, perhaps. Or they'll have personal goals they may not have accomplished. In the end, they have the climatic battle for all the marbles - and whether they succeed or fail will have real impacts on the campaign setting when the next group of PCs starts to adventure sometime in the next few decades.

 

[DEFCON 1]

As a story-based DM... I don't have to railroad anyone. The players will railroad each other.

I can just make statements and points of fact about what is happening out in the world... and the players will choose which ones are important to their characters and go after them. And they will coerce each other to continue down the tracks of those stories that their characters care about until they feel as though the job is done and the story is complete. I never need to force them, because they WANT to follow these stories to their conclusions to see where they go.

Whether or not you need to "railroad" as a DM I suspect really comes down to what your players are expecting to do when they play D&D, and what you as a DM want to do playing D&D. And if they are not in alignment... because you are the "narrator" it is a lot easier for you to influence and push the game (and thus the players) in the direction you want to go.

But the easiest way to avoid a railroad is just cultivate a player-base that wants to play D&D the same way you want to. Then you never need to push.

 

[Charlaquin]

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

Yeah, that wasn’t as clever as I thought it was. You win some, you lose some.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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?

Degenerate simply means no longer desirable. And there's a reason I say that railroading is the degenerate form of linear play -- it's to distinguish that there's quite a lot of good space for linear play, and it only becomes railroading when it goes wrong. The issue I see here, though, is that this line is not fixed. You see posters like @Yora claiming that all linear play is railroading. That's fine -- linear play is clearly not for them, but I don't think it's useful to attach a pejorative term to play you just don't prefer. So, I point out that you really only hit "railroading" when the table feels you do -- ie, play has become degenerate at that table.

So, to me, many of the calls of railroading are misplaced, and defense of railroading is similarly misplaced. The focus should be, as @Campbell notes above, on what tools for play are being used, and linear story is very much a useful tool, especially in a high prep requirement game like D&D.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

Have you, perhaps, considered that they just might like to play a different way than you do, and that your "better" is not theirs?

There are quite a lot of upsides to linear stories:
1) The GM can much better control pacing at the table
2) The GM can ensure that the content is exciting and memorable
3) There is less prep than in your preferred sandbox approach (from other threads, I believe you're a fan of highly detailed settings), and less prep going unused
4) The GM can ensure a consistent level of challenge

There are definitely cons as well, but the above pros are very attractive and people can prefer them to other approaches. Your preferences are only better for you. I like to analyze how play works, and do so bluntly and without trying to lionize any particular approach, because I'm very keen about how we play games and understanding that. However, what is best is not at all something I can possibly tell others -- I can only say what's best for me.

 

[Steampunkette]

Honestly the premise of this thread was not in good faith to begin with. It immediately starts out with positive phrases for one form of gameplay and a hilariously negative phrase for any other kind of gameplay.

And everyone else has to immediately defend their particular way of playing, whether it's storylines or linear gameplay or whatever other term you like, because of the deep hole that you are automatically put in by the phrasing of the OP.

No one can defend railroading because nobody can define railroading. But that's not really the point here. The point is to get people to waste their time trying to present positive arguments for something that part of the community will never accept.

Meanwhile other posters like will use it as an excuse to make broad and sweeping attacks on other people's experiences and ideas.

Put simply, not everyone wants to play in a frigging sandbox. Especially when it means 2 hours of listening to one or two people faff about without any direction or intent while everyone else just kind of follows along aimlessly.

Some people want to be a part of a story. Some people want to create their own story. And some people just want to stab the bad guys. None of these are bad ways to play the game.

 

[FrozenNorth]

To answer the OP, the reason that some people defend railroads is that the term railroad means different things to different people. As a continuum, from most restrictive of player agency to least restrictive of player agency:

1. The adventure is a module. There are no meaningful choices along the way, and the DM actively prevents both sequence-breaking and non-standard ways of overcoming obstacles.

2. The adventure is a module. The DM allows the players to use unorthodox methods to address the challenges or even sequence break (though they may do some rewriting in the background to ensure the characters don’t end up in a no-win scenario).

3. The module serves as a backbone for the adventure. It is exactly as pressing as it would be in the fiction. The players are free to follow anything they find interesting, and encounters can be bypassed through clever play.

4. Sandbox play. DM offers hooks, which players may or may not follow.

Also worth noting that over a campaign, the amount of player agency may fluctuate. A campaign may generally run at level 3, but have individual moments where the players have to act in a certain way for the campaign to continue. Someone provided a good example of a level 4, where various adventure hooks were proposed, but the hooks themselves were tightly scripted.

I have seen all of the above (except 4) be referred as railroading. I doubt there are many people defending 1, but there are quite a few defenders of 2 or 3.

 

[Ovinomancer]

To answer the OP, the reason that some people defend railroads is that the term railroad means different things to different people. As a continuum, from most restrictive of player agency to least restrictive of player agency:

1. The adventure is a module. There are no meaningful choices along the way, and the DM actively prevents both sequence-breaking and non-standard ways of overcoming obstacles.

2. The adventure is a module. The DM allows the players to use unorthodox methods to address the challenges or even sequence break (though they may do some rewriting in the background to ensure the characters don’t end up in a no-win scenario).

3. The module serves as a backbone for the adventure. It is exactly as pressing as it would be in the fiction. The players are free to follow anything they find interesting, and encounters can be bypassed through clever play.

4. Sandbox play. DM offers hooks, which players may or may not follow.

Also worth noting that over a campaign, the amount of player agency may fluctuate. A campaign may generally run at level 3, but have individual moments where the players have to act in a certain way for the campaign to continue. Someone provided a good example of a level 4, where various adventure hooks were proposed, but the hooks themselves were tightly scripted.

I have seen all of the above (except 4) be referred as railroading. I doubt there are many people defending 1, but there are quite a few defenders of 2 or 3.

I'm not sure of your spectrum. There are sandboxes that are very restrictive of player agency -- sure, you can choose where to go, but the setting is locked down so tight that whatever you do is largely meaningless. To me, "sandbox" does not automatically equal "more agency." I've seen a few descriptions of sandboxes on these boards that seem to be more setting tourism "look at my cool setting" than engaged in giving players agency. Not all, for sure, or even most, but it's there, too.

 

[loverdrive]

I honestly don't see any reason to railroad. It's, like, 3x more work than just come up with a couple of threats that want something bad for PCs, preferably make it so the PC probably wouldn't be able to fend off them all.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I honestly don't see any reason to railroad. It's, like, 3x more work than just come up with a couple of threats that want something bad for PCs, preferably make it so the PC probably wouldn't be able to fend off them all.

I mean, I see it -- you have a cool story point, or a nifty set of prepped encounters, and you just want to share them. I'm pretty sure, though, that these points don't apply at all to how you approach gaming (and I agree with you for my preferences as well), but there's quite a lot of this out there. Also, it's hard to sell product that isn't a linear plotline adventure, so the industry is pretty aligned with maintaining this approach to play.

I mean, how many adventure products have you sold for your games (and, by the by, I truly adore your recent post on adapting Mujik is Dead to Cthulu -- brilliant!)?