D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Maxperson]

No. Because if done at all railroading zeros out table enjoyment.

That doesn't track. It can only zero out table enjoyment IF they find out about it and IF it upsets them. The first is a very big if as a lot of groups won't ever find out. The second is a much larger if, which is why I won't take the chance personally.

 

[Hex08]

Choo-choo trains are great!

 

[MerricB]

I wonder if part of the problem is that you're arbitrarily defining it as a "collaborative storytelling game" when in fact the only universally-accepted word in there is "game".

And not even game is universally accepted!

Consider Candy Land and Snakes & Ladders.

Cheers!

 

[Cadence]

I'm sure players do. But choices, even small choices, should in general have merit. Now, maybe you have a reasonably well-established reason why SOME ogre will show up whichever path the players take, because this is ogre country. In that case, it's not that the players' choices don't matter, it's that some previous choice(s)* mattered for determining whether they might encounter ogres, e.g. "we decided to adventure in the Wood of the Western Wyld instead of the Southern Sirensong Sea." Or maybe it really is the same singular ogre, but the choice the players make affects when or how they encounter this ogre--because he's tailing them (again, presumptively due to past choices*), or both the left and right routes go through places "in his territory," but he starts on one side before going to the other, meaning the choice might mean starting off on more positive footing (meeting him outside one of "his places") vs more negative footing (running into him AFTER looting one of "his places.")

The specific example I put up was:

"A party gathers information and knows about the existence of a settlement on road A that has a bridge, a road B with a bridge, bandits roam the area, and there's a ford at point C. The DM has a village planned out on road A, bandits planned by the bridge on road B, stream ford C between them has an old hermit planned, and the deep water D has planned giant leeches." It happens that an ogre will show up no matters no matter which way they go.

It was then noted by others that it would be different if the party were trying to avoid places with ogres and one would show up anyway, for example. Putting in the Ogre no matter how they tried to avoid it feels bad to me - like a mini-version of having the princess die no matter what.

In the quoted example I give here, the party still has plenty of choices to make, and their choices still matter in all kinds of big ways.

 

[ECMO3]

I’d really like to know. I keep seeing arguments about player choice and agency and railroading. And for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone would defend railroading. Any advocates of railroading willing to explain why it’s good to do?

As a player I often like the idea of having a grand quest or a specific world-saving goal. Often that means a railroad.

If you really want to take this to the extreme - the DM spends days building a grand quest to save the kidnapped princess. he fleshes out the bandits hideout, develops a few new monsters. It is expect to be about 50 hours of play.

The players show up to the town the king begs them to save his daughter and the players decide meh ... let's go to the city down the road and open a trading coster. Instead of adventuring we are going to take downtime and try to make money as a trader.

 

[Don Durito]

And not even game is universally accepted!

Consider Candy Land and Snakes & Ladders.

Cheers!

What did Wittgenstein say about what ‘a game’ is?​

“There is no characteristic that is common to everything that we call games; but we cannot on the other hand say that ‘game’ has several independent meanings like ‘bank’. It is a family-likeness term (pg 75, 118). Think of ball-games alone: some, like tennis, have a complicated system of rules; but there is a game which consists just in throwing the ball as high as one can, or the game which children play of throwing a ball and running after it. Some games are competitive, others not (pg 68). This thought was developed in a famous passage of the Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein denied that there was any feature — such as entertainment, competitiveness, rule-guidedness, skill — which formed a common element in all games; instead we find a complicated network of similarities and relationships overlapping and criss-crossing. The concept of ‘game’ is extended as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. ‘What ties the ship to the wharf is a rope, and the rope consists of fibres, but it does not get its strength from any fibre which runs through it from one end to the other, but from the fact that there is a vast number of fibres overlapping’ (pi, i, 65–7; bb 87).

 

[Don Durito]

Delete

 

[Steampunkette]

What did Wittgenstein say about what ‘a game’ is?

Wittgenstein was a WORD NERD. But also one of the cooler ones.

 

[Ovinomancer]

1) If no one is being fooled, how can you call it an illusion then?
2) Being "made up by the GM" is absolutely not the same as "constantly and secretly changing whenever the DM feels like it." With illusionism, you must be committed to denying the players the chance to see that the world is being made up on the spot. If you're open about that (which I am, in the exceedingly rare cases where "re-frame things to be where they need to be" is absolutely necessary), then it's not illusionism, because you're actually informing the players about what's going on.

I mean, come on man. You know that arbitrary ad-hoc modification of a world is not absolutely identical in all ways to ANY form of inventing an imaginary thing. You're a smart and well-read person, from what I can tell; you've interacted with media enough to be familiar with things like "canon" and the like, which explicitly fork apart arbitrary change to the world from well-grounded change to it. One of these things is okay. The other is not. Don't pretend that illusionism is precisely the same as invention. The former is explicitly, specifically, intentionally hidden from discovery. The latter, in general, is very much intended to be discovered.

Now, if what you really mean is stuff like "glossing over the 17 branches off the road they could have taken, because they're heading for the Fire Swamp and thus don't really care that they could potentially go elsewhere," okay, that's fair. I just...wouldn't call that "illusionism" anymore, you're just glossing over unimportant details and false starts so that the party can focus on the things they've already chosen to do. As far as I'm concerned, you're defending people presenting each and every one of those 17 branch points as an Actual Serious Choice that the party must think about....only for literally none of them to matter one bit, despite spending table time on making them.


Alright. Why is it different? I have my reasons for seeing it as equivalent to fudging die rolls, but even setting those aside, I don't see how that isn't the same as the princess dying anyway or always having the right choice be the last choice, particularly the latter, since that's about player choices specifically. If the ogre shows up literally no matter what you do, literally no matter where you go, literally regardless of choices or circumstances, isn't that the same as having "the way forward" (the right choice) definitely never happen on the first two tries? Because both of those things are "event X happens, literally no matter how you choose to behave," just "event X" is "you fail twice and then succeed" vs. "an ogre appears."


I'm sure players do. But choices, even small choices, should in general have merit. Now, maybe you have a reasonably well-established reason why SOME ogre will show up whichever path the players take, because this is ogre country. In that case, it's not that the players' choices don't matter, it's that some previous choice(s)* mattered for determining whether they might encounter ogres, e.g. "we decided to adventure in the Wood of the Western Wyld instead of the Southern Sirensong Sea." Or maybe it really is the same singular ogre, but the choice the players make affects when or how they encounter this ogre--because he's tailing them (again, presumptively due to past choices*), or both the left and right routes go through places "in his territory," but he starts on one side before going to the other, meaning the choice might mean starting off on more positive footing (meeting him outside one of "his places") vs more negative footing (running into him AFTER looting one of "his places.")

So...yeah. I'm sure players expect encounters. But unless there's a good reason for ogres to be generically about (an easy thing to establish, mind!), or some other difference occurs as a result of the players choosing path A over path B, I do think it's in the same wheelhouse as the non-fudging examples you described. Same as changing midway through a murder mystery who the real murderer was, or deciding that the party would definitely encounter the Countess ten minutes after starting down either the left or right path. If the choice isn't really a choice, just gloss over it; don't create fictitious choices that appear to have value but are literally irrelevant.

*It's worth noting here, there does need to be a LITTLE bit of pseudo-non-choice, in that even for a hardcore no-prep DM, worldbuilding and a campaign premise had to happen to some extent. This implies a TON of invisible pre-game choices made by a given character, but the players are still presumptively choosing to go with this by agreeing to participate in the game. Thus, as noted, I consider this following from player choices, though the DM bears a significant burden to make that campaign premise exceptionally clear well in advance.

I disagree with your opening position -- that there is a significant difference between fiction made up at time A and fiction made up at time B. You've confused this construct with assigning intentionality and consideration to time A, and none of this (and a suggestion of bad faith) to time B, but this doesn't follow -- there's nothing about time A that engenders these, nor anything about time B that prevents them. Ultimately, in the situation where the GM is responsible for detailing this fiction, when it is created makes little difference. Instead, these things that you've assigned arbitrarily to specific times do -- intentionality, coherence, consideration, etc. These are not restricted to time of invention.

In other words, there's nothing about prep that makes it better than ad hoc in the moment creation of fiction. The only test is the fiction created. I can prep Illusionism, I can prep railroads, I most certainly can prep moments of Force, and I can similarly create these ad hoc in the moment. There's no magic to prep.

I mean, you can take other games, which require generation of fiction in the moment -- prep is, at best, extremely loose and unfixed thinking about the situation so you may have some useful structures to hang in the moment fiction creation on. But, the nature of these games is such that play rapidly moves away from any prep, and forcing prep is both obvious and against the rules of play. And yet, these games create very vibrant and intentional fiction that can easily be on par with prepped play. They just function differently. So, yeah, with experience I can say that there's nothing about when you imagine a thing that makes that imagining better in any way.

 

[Charlaquin]

The question is, does it matter if the presence of the ogre is not the relevant part of the choice? I believe one example used earlier was the destination you'd end up on--but you'd run into an ogre either way.

Its really hard for me to see that's meaningfully different than "there's an ogre along each path".

This. If the presence or absence of an ogre had no bearing on the players’ decision making process, then the presence of an ogre on the path they chose doesn’t invalidate their choice. They didn’t choose to go the way that doesn’t have an ogre, they just chose to go left. Had they chosen to go left because they knew there was an ogre to the right, and ended up having to fight the ogre anyway, that’s invalidating their choice.