D&D General Why defend railroading?

[robus]

Or the exact location and personality of each City Watch patrol.
Or Rival adventuring companies
Or that stranger with the quest to give

I guess some DMs like to be the giant watchmaker in the sky. Set the sandbox in motion and let the chips fall where they may. The prep effort, though, just seems immense…

 

[TheSword]

Milestone levelling has no detrimental impact on player agency when those milestones are based on the characters objectives. If the players want their characters to go to the colosseum and win the champions belt, it doesn’t matter if that is a milestone.

The issue is when the DM sets the milestone as defeating the wizard who lives in his tower at the top of the mountain and the PCs have no intention of climbing the mountain.

This is best evidenced by Paizo adventure paths. If the first milestone is defending a trading post from bandits and the PCs are intentionally traveling to the trading post to offer support then there is no loss of agency by linking levelling up to this.

If the players instead decide to rob the trading post and join the bandits then the DM needs to change the milestone to match the party goals. This is not a difficult task.

 

[Maxperson]

The DM might not have planned anything. The point is, if the players didn’t choose to avoid an ogre, encountering an ogre doesn’t invalidate their choice.

Sure, and if they went off the path in order to avoid the ogres on the paths, it would invalidate that choice for them to encounter those ogres anyway. But that’s not something they would be capable of doing, given that they’re not aware of any ogres on the paths at all.

Which would not invalidate their choice to teleport 3000 miles away.

There’s nothing to avoid. They just choose where to go and happen to encounter an ogre there.

If all roads lead to ogre, no choice has any real meaning. A meaningless choice is an invalidated one.

 

[Cadence]

If all roads lead to ogre, no choice has any real meaning. A meaningless choice is an invalidated one.

See my above example about the right roads leading to a town, bandit, hermit, or leeches (please preplanned) with very different outcomes and choices to make when arriving... that just happen to all have that ogre on the way there. The choice still mattered a lot, didn't it because of what they were heading to and would get to?

 

[robus]

Eh. Levelling is part of the game, you don't need to tediously count some meaningless points for it to happen. Of course doing seriously dangerous things should count towards milestones.

I have done milestone leveling and grew unhappy with it because it did seem to be arbitrarily associated with the hoop the PCs had to jump through (especially when running published adventures!)

I think I’ll try something more finer grained in future. XP for accomplishments (major and minor), not directly tied to monster deaths.

In fact I could declare things like: if you can pull that off it’ll be a Major Accomplishment so the players know how much XP it’s worth…

 

[Maxperson]

The whole game is an illusion. An illusion that there is an expansive real fantasy world even though in reality it is just some vague ideas in people's heads.

The game being an idea in our heads does not equate to an illusion. An illusion is a deception and we do not play a deception every time we sit down to play. When the DM gives the illusion of choice by forcing all choices to lead to the ogre, he is deceiving the player into thinking that their choice has meaning, when it's really meaningless.

 

[TheSword]

The suggestion that random tables are somehow superior to well thought out and detailed but selected encounters is very peculiar. As if dice are pure but DMs are flawed…

No one has suggested such a ridiculous thing.

Think about it this way. The GM for some reason decides to roll a random encounter before the session. He rolls a 4. He doesn't even check what that encounter is. He just rights down a 4. It so happens that 4 means an Ogre. So long as the players go somewhere and trigger a random encounter they will meet an ogre.

There is no loss of agency. The random encounter table is a part of the game and it was rolled fairly.

The original post was mine. The bold is for emphasis. Yes I thought you had suggested that random tables were somehow superior to DM choice

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The game being an idea in our heads does not equate to an illusion. An illusion is a deception and we do not play a deception every time we sit down to play. When the DM gives the illusion of choice by forcing all choices to lead to the ogre, he is deceiving the player into thinking that their choice has meaning, when it's really meaningless.

Life is full of meaningless choices.

 

[TheSword]

The game being an idea in our heads does not equate to an illusion. An illusion is a deception and we do not play a deception every time we sit down to play. When the DM gives the illusion of choice by forcing all choices to lead to the ogre, he is deceiving the player into thinking that their choice has meaning, when it's really meaningless.

Not all illusions are deception. Films are an illusion but we watch them in the full knowledge of that for entertainment purposes. Just like a roleplaying game.

 

[TheSword]

If all roads lead to ogre, no choice has any real meaning. A meaningless choice is an invalidated one.

The road doesn’t lead to the ogre, the ogre is a speed bump along the way to whatever their real destination is.

It isn’t necessary to detail all the various multitudes of ogre-equivalent-encounter to ensure there is a different one for every possible permutation of path they take.

Sometimes you want the cloakwood to be famous for spiders and wyverns and the Peldvale for bandits. But every so often you want to stick an ogre in