D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Asisreo]

The XP really doesn't help you here. Sure, the fights have fixed XP rewards, but everything else really doesn't. So if the player want to focus something else than fighting, it is still completely up to the GM if and how much they get rewarded for that.

All this is way too mechanistic for me. The characters level up once they do a bunch of interesting stuff, the end. That's really all I need.

That's alright. I'm definitely not accusing you of railroading in your games.

I feel that it can be very easy for a different DM, however, to just so happen to feel like nothing the players do are interesting unless its following the set path.

Milestone leveling is a tool used in a railroading DM's arsenal.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Agreed. The last four pages have been a bit hard to follow.

Unless they are real-life mind readers, there is no way for the players to ever know if the DM is "railroading" them or not.

This...isn't as true as you'd think. Many GMs are not as good at playing the illusion here as you might imagine, adn its possible through experience to get a sense of what a GM will lay out if given his head and what will likely be there if the players have genuinely managed to run around it. In addition, some games have structural features that can make it pretty easy to guess how many encounters of how much difficulty were probably intended.

Which doesn't mean there's no truth to it, but I think people are more blase about this is warranted IME.

 

[Composer99]

In order for the players' choice of path to take to be invalidated by the Schrödinger's Ogre, the potential presence or absence of the ogre actually has to materially affect the meaningfulness and/or consequentiality of the players' decisions.

If the players' decision is based on factors that are orthogonal to the possible presence or absence of Schrödinger's Ogre, the ogre turning up does not materially affect the meaningfulness of that decision. As such, no invalidation (and hence no railroading) is happening.

If on the other hand the players are making decisions based on avoiding encounters generally or avoiding possible encounters with ogres specifically, and then you as DM willfully decide they are specifically going to have an encounter with an ogre anyway, that is invalidation and hence railroading (at least IMO). [*]

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[*] Exceptions made for the vagaries of the dice. For instance, if the players want to avoid random encounters generally and roll badly on the checks needed to accomplish that, and you roll up a random encounter that happens to be an ogre, or if they take a path that has a non-zero chance of an encounter with an ogre in order to avoid paths with a certainty of ogre encounters or a higher likelihood of same, and you roll up a random encounter that happens to be an ogre... then they encounter an ogre despite their best efforts. But at least you did not willfully and specifically decide for that encounter to happen.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not quite - see the original context above. It's closer to a random encounter with three different entries which the GM pretends to roll, but actually he picks the result he wants.

We're not using it in its original context, but just as an example of something that can happen in multiple choice points.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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…

Well, honestly, yeah. There's a reason most of the hobby is not built on the ADR model.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One of the biggest conductors for a railroaded campaign is not giving freeform exp. It isn't always railroading, but its almost always railroading.

Why? Because milestone exp removes player agency about how they become stronger. Completely removing exp means a player could go through an entire gladiator's Coliseum and never get better at combat nor stronger.

This only matters if you go through with the idea that, on the face of it, your actions will directly impact your advancement (outside the gear-acquisition component in genres and settings where that's relevant). Frankly, a lot of players don't really give a crap about that, or original RQ style advancement would be more popular than it is.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean you can just define milestones to be 'did something pretty challenging for couple of sessions' or something like that. Fighting in coliseum sounds challenging to me, regardless of whether I as GM had expected it to happen or not.

Yeah. I call that the "big chunky experience" method, where you're still tracking experience of a sort, its just not the fine detailing D&D has typically fiddled with.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Though honestly, I'm not sure APs are a good choice for people who are super-fussy about higher order choice anyway; its not a coincidence "path" is in their name. This is true of 99% of published adventures, to be really blunt.

 

[TheSword]

Though honestly, I'm not sure APs are a good choice for people who are super-fussy about higher order choice anyway; its not a coincidence "path" is in their name. This is true of 99% of published adventures, to be really blunt.

Absolutely, the need to write things down within a page count necessitates a balance between detail, and player options.

Its interesting. Since getting into WFRP with 4e I see them focusing on a great deal of detail. Very fleshed out characters, hooks etc. However the majority of their product range is the opposite of AP and designed include small encounters and modules that can be dropped wherever the DM needs them to be dropped. Some of the discussion in the last few pages would suggest the DM dropping a highwayman in front of the PCs is a railroad.

Far too much flummoxery is being devoted to discussing the challenges the DM puts in front of the party. When it is in the players trying to overcome these and the DMs unwillingness to allow this in ways of the players’ choosing that the railroad comes into effect.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah. I really can't help but think some Quantum Ogre type constructs are just meaningless when it comes to constraining choice; they may well be Force, but so is something as simple as deciding you're going to roll random encounters every hour (after all, the players aren't allowed to avoid those just by their choices as such).

That said, I think it might have been Ezekial that argued where it becomes relevant is whether the PCs could have avoided ogres completely farther back on the decision tree, which I think is legitimate, but if taken far enough comes down to "the PCs can avoid the whole campaign" which I don't think too many people are supporting as necessary for something to be not a railroad.

See, I don’t think whether or not it’s possible to make a decision that can avoid ogres has any bearing on the validity of the players’ decisions unless avoiding ogres is a factor in their decision-making process. Its one thing if they know the fastest route to their destination cuts through ogre country; then the presence or absence of ogres is directly relevant to their decision of which way to go, and if you decide they’re going to have to fight an ogre even if they take the longer, less ogre-dense route, that’s overriding their decision. But if they’re picking their route for reasons unrelated to ogres, and an ogre shows up no matter which way they go, no decision they’ve made has been actually been invalidated.