D&D General Why defend railroading?

[robus]

Well, that's always the illusionism argument, but as I've noted before, I think people are far more casual about thinking they can make that work consistently than is reality, and it doesn't take many times for the player to spot the man behind the curtain before it poisons all his expectations from that GM. This is why if you're going to make serious use of illusionism, I think its a good idea to make sure no one cares (and really, a lot of people don't) before you get into it.

I certainly don’t care!

 

[TheSword]

I think there's alot of assumptions that players can't tell if things are getting shuffled around, but its adding extra work ensuring that they can't tell.

If you have a bunch of generic encounters everywhere, sure, shuffling stuff around can be easy. But if you have your encounters married to your worldbuilding, its much harder.

If the cultists are looking for the ancient sword and they know its location, why are they in The City of Brass when the sword is not? And then you'll have to improvise. Having great improv skills are a talent but most players can tell the difference between things on-the-fly and things pre-written because of quality. Your descriptions falter or you give details you need to take back.

Rather, having a well-known merchant living in the City of Brass sell a map to the sword's location both gives players a hook and could possibly direct them back to the cultists, who are in their proper locations.

Interestingly you made and encounter linked to place again by specifying the location of the sword. I don’t believe an encounter unconnected to place has to be ‘generic’ it can be very specific. It can also be tied to world building just as much as a location linked encounter is.

For instance the encounter could feature a cultist of a well known world organisation that hails from the town the PCs are in and has found and stolen the magic sword the PCs seek, disguising it as another item. The cultist who has returned home and is being pursued by loyalists, wants the PCs to defeat these enemies when they arrive and seeks the PCs out to explain this. The cultist knows the city very well and can provide advice to the PCs particularly as the pursuers are just as clueless as the PCs are.

This encounter (and the follow up) can absolutely be pre-selected at a time of the DMs choosing and shuffled to wherever required yet gives multiple options for resolution. It contributes to the understanding of the world. It can end in a number of different ways.

I would say this isn’t a railroad. Players have tons of choice… just not whether the PCs are approached from the outset. It’s an encounter rooted in time not in place.

 

[robus]

Yes. That's why it's an illusion of choice. The players don't know any better, but they still had no choice in the matter and were railroaded into ogres.

This is not true. The ogres were forced on them no matter what route they chose. Their ignorance of the matter doesn't change that. Nor does an expectation of encountering dangerous creatures. While the players do have an expectation of encountering dangerous monsters, players also have an expectation that avoiding an encounter is also possible. When a specific encounter is forced upon them no matter what they do, the DM is undermining that expectation.

I guess as a DM I’m always forcing things on my players, my job is to get in the way of their goals to provide a challenging game.

I guess I really don’t understand why the source of the challenge matters, I’m just playing my part.

I absolutely agree that if I insist on an encounter the players are explicitly trying to avoid through choices they make then that would be unfair. But this is not that.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Also, let's consider another super common form of 'illusionism' that most GMs do and do not really consider it as such though it is basically the same thing than the quantum ogre, except the thing illusionised is not the location it is the time. The interesting thing happens when the PCs are around, regardless of when exactly that is. I'm pretty sure almost every GM does this.

 

[Lanefan]

If there's an ogre down both paths, then the choice is irrelevant. An irrelevant choice is an invalidated one.

Here's a what-if for you: what if the pre-written module says there in fact is an ogre down each path? That is to say, if the party go down one path and then the other they will meet two ogres, one at a time.

Is the choice of path thus invalidated? Is it invaliated if local rumours tell of an ogre down the south path but the locals don't (yet) know about the one on the north path, and the party use those rumours to inform their choice of path?

 

[Malmuria]

Yeah, that's a great example. And we don't even need to think it as the location of the item being changed. It really didn't exist until the players found it. The item will simply be found in the next reasonable location the characters will look and in which it can reasonably be found. And in a D&D campaign such opportunity is practically guaranteed to occur, so the item is guaranteed to be found. I really see no value in insisting that the item that was completely made up in the first place must exist in one specific predefined fictional location, and if the characters for one reason or another never happen to go there the item will never be found.

The value (for some) is if the PCs know that that magic item exists somewhere in that location, and they really want to risk finding it, they will keep exploring until they do, balancing risk and reward. This is basically the logic of gold for xp in classic play, where the PCs can spend precious time searching for secret doors or venture further into the dungeon in the hopes of finding something valuable, but at the risk of encountering more dangerous monsters and not making it out alive. In this way exploration is incentivized and rewarded. Or maybe there's a timer: a rival group is also in this location looking for the same item. In that case it's more meaningful, imo, if failing to get the item on time is a realistic possibility.

I don't think decoupling the magic item or macguffin from a location is necessarily railroading, but if I was doing that I wouldn't put it in a location to begin with. But again that puts me in the mindset of orienting prep towards curating an experience for the players, rather than just creating a dynamic scenario and seeing what the players do with it.

 

[Lanefan]

Look. Here's the quantom ogre rephrased in slightly different terms.

At the end of a last corridor in the dungeon there are three doors. Behind one of the doors in the macguffin. The players don't know which door and all the doors are identical so there is no way to know. If they find the macguffin it's likely they won't need to open any remaining doors.

The DM has prepared an encounter behind each door. The players know that the macguffin is behind one of them and they have been led to believe there is a chance that they could open the right door on their first attempt.

However, whether because the DM doesn't want to waste prep or because he believes it will heighten the drama, the DM has determined that the door with the Macguffin will be the last one the PCs open no matter which door they choose. They are always going to have to go through all the encounters.

This is the illusionism! I leave it to the reader to decide if this is a railroad.

May or may not define this as a railroad but I would certainly define it as poor DMing. In a situation like this IMO the DM has to commit (to herself) as to which room the McGuffin is in and then hold to that commitment even if the PCs guess right on the first try.

 

[Asisreo]

Interestingly you made and encounter linked to place again by specifying the location of the sword. I don’t believe an encounter unconnected to place has to be ‘generic’ it can be very specific. It can also be tied to world building just as much as a location linked encounter is.

My campaign worlds, and adventures, are like webs. When I write them, the world, location, events, and time are all connected together. Pulling on one means that others will be affected, mostly on-the-fly.

For example, if I were to flesh out the cultist example a little, in my adventure, the sword is located where it is because that location has sufficient magic to preserve its effects over eons. That location is near The Great Conflgration pbecause the original owner was a Djinni and they placed it there as it was the place it was most comfortable. Its also 20 miles from the City of Brass because he had a premonition that warriors worthy of its power would come from the city and didn't want it to be too much of a struggle for them. The cultist is run by an ancestor of this Djinni and was passed down the knowledge through inheritance.

All of this is before I even know which players are going to be in the adventure. Why do all this? Because a player might unexpectedly choose Legend Lore as a spell or have some ability even I couldn't predict and writing the entire adventure over again in lower quality isn't going to be fun on my end.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The value (for some) is if the PCs know that that magic item exists somewhere in that location

But they don't. This is not that sort of a thing. The item is not a quest objective here. It is more likely a beginning of a story rather than an end.
Like the characters seemingly randomly obtaining a mysterious powerful item, perhaps not even quite knowing what it is. And then they might need to seek information about it, or some other people might want it or something like that.

 

[Lanefan]

What I'm not going to do is just decide to drop an ogre onto the group.

Why ever not?

Drop it from high enough - a few thousand feet should do - and you can splatter everyone with goo.