D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Cadence]

I'm not sure how random encounters/wandering monsters came up or how it applies to railroading. In a game that has them, whether baked into the design of the game as with older versions of D&D or set up by the DM for a given adventure location or campaign, the players will either know or be able to ascertain the frequency (e.g. every 4 hours or during every rest) and triggers (e.g. when you make a lot of noise) and plan accordingly. It's just a fact of the game world which with the players have to contend, in addition to creating urgency and tension, establishing atmosphere, and reinforcing themes.

I think it came up in terms of whether an Ogre down every path today at the time the party was first leaving was equivalent to a degenerate random encounter table.... and then since a new term was brought into the conversation we had to debate it.

 

[Ovinomancer]

No, it requires me to consider it significantly more likely to work well for them compared to a random member of the group. Which as I've indicated, with most groups I do.

So, a person selected because of the role in a game is more likely to be successful at safely controlling a social group than a randomly selected member of that group? I mean, aside from the fact that you're still assigning authority and duty to a single person and just switching the method, I fail to see how this actually improves things. For this to be true, you have to assert that GMs are naturally better at social conflict resolution than randomly selected players. Is this what you are asserting? Because, if so, that's exactly part of why I've been characterizing your positions as saying players need to be treated as children and supervised by the GM. You're asserting that GMs are naturally better suited and players are largely worse and need the supervision.

For the record, I think that GMs are likely worse at conflict management, because they get blinded to conflicts that arise from themselves.

"Need" is a strong word, but if you're willing to use "Benefit from", it absolutely is my position. Where I disagree with you is your assessment this makes gamers infantile. What I think it does is make them people.

No, it expressly says that people need supervision because they are incapable of doing the job for themselves. This is infantilization. Supervision to improve efficiency, such as at work, or direct work is not infantilization, it's organization, but we're dealing with a small social unit, not a work unit, so there is no efficiency to achieve at the social contract level. Your argument, therefore, hinges on incapability and the need to be parented.

Absolutely not. My solution is to have the person who is already operating on a different tier of relationship to do so. They're not trying to resolve every conflict, but they are trying to keep the game going smoothly, and they're already given the power to do that in other areas, so they might as well do it here.

Goodness. GMs are on a different tier of relationship? As in, they're higher than the others (clearly you don't mean lower)? Yeah, this is getting healthier all the time. "I assert that the GM is more important in thing A, so should be more important in thing B." Even given I have issues with the GM being more important rather than willingly accepting more responsibility, this statement just doesn't follow regardless.

While you might well get the situation where the less assertive are being intimidated by the GM, that's already likely a problem if its true, because they're having to deal with them on other conflicts relating to resolution and things like how they're handling initiative order and such anyway, and that's going to be much more frequent than "Could you find a way to play your character that doesn't make it hard for Eric's Champion to stay in the group?"

Not if the entire group is on equal footing and empowerment with regards to the social contract. Then, players are empowered to tell the GM to can it, and the group can decide on a game format that aligns with the group -- or dissolve and find groups that do align. Placing authority in the hands of the GM and stripping it from the others with the assumption that the GM is the arbiter of social issues at the table doesn't solve any problems and enables many. I say it doesn't solve any issues because doing this is a crap shoot, and any good results are due to luck rather than the structure. If you get a GM that can handle social issues and is aware of their own impacts you can have a great result of them being in charge. If you don't, though, then your choice to elevate the GM is part of the problem.

I'm not even going to argue against that. I'm just going to argue that the other options are worse. You clearly disagree.

It's worse to empower everyone at the table and place the duty on all of them to call out issues when they arise? Interesting -- clearly you feel that people must be placed under others for society to function, even in the smallest units. Yeah, we disagree about that. We seem to share the same dim view of people, but you think rolling the dice and putting someone in charge is the best option whereas I think enabling the individuals and charging them with protecting the collective makes more sense.

And if I had the faintest hint that in most groups that would work with any reliability, I'd be all for it. I don't. And its not because gaming groups are special negative snowflakes, its because people in general aren't typically good at making that work.

It works great -- been shown to in lots of organizations. Empowering your people to own their own space is very good. Your argument has to be that RPGs are special if the general case, shown often, doesn't apply because reasons.

Those reasons, in my opinion, are largely because there's a long tradition of treating GMs as authority figures outside of the game, and making it bad to question them. This establishes a hierarchy were gatekeeping and abuse can easily flourish. The very argument that players cannot be trusted to deal with problems at the table and need the strong hand of the GM to handle things is right up this alley. I find it more interested in defending a position of privilege and power than interested in solving the problem.

The problem is, Paul and Angela are also likely to think its not their business, and Bob will too, even if they don't. So when that cooks up, Betty is likely to feel even worse about it than if nothing had been done.

Paul's the GM, so I guess your model fails as well. Or was it Angela? Or maybe it was Betty, or Bob? I mean, one of them is the GM, and things have failed, so... you've defeated your own arguments in the rush to defeat mine.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Every new player thinks they need to dress up for D&D. Every new player gets disappointed that it isn't a requirement.

Neither applied to me or most of the people I've played with. It does apply to some, though, at least the disappointment part.

 

[TheSword]

Not only is it impossible to agree on Railroading, anything that Railroading comes into contact with is similarly infected with disagreement.

If we don’t cut the rot out now, we could lose the whole system!

 

[Cadence]

Not only is it impossible to agree on Railroading, anything that Railroading comes into contact with is similarly infected with disagreement.

If we don’t cut the rot out now, we could lose the whole system!

So, now we get to argue about which part the rot is? I'm horrifed someone will think it's Random Ogre Tables!!!!

 

[FrozenNorth]

What's the point in making a decision if what happens subsequently is not a consequence of that decision?

Exactly. I just wanted to highlight that the players themselves can assume railroading even in circumstances that there is none (according to any definition).

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think the notion of X as consequence of Y is quite compatible with railroading. Whether or not it is may depend heavily on (i) whether the players have the capacity, in playing the game, to learn of the relationship between X and Y, and (ii) whether its realistic to expect them to do so, given how the game is set up and the various conventions that surround play.

I think you are giving too much weight to a rather abstract example.

Do players sometimes see railroading where there isn’t any? Absolutely. That includes situations where the extremely loud sounds of battle in one room (including spells noted for being loud) mean that the inhabitants of subsequent rooms intervene or are on their guard.

 

[pemerton]

Do players sometimes see railroading where there isn’t any? Absolutely. That includes situations where the extremely loud sounds of battle in one room (including spells noted for being loud) mean that the inhabitants of subsequent rooms intervene or are on their guard.

I think that the situation you describe can very easily be railroading. Of course it depends a bit on the details.

But if you read Gygax's advice on dungeoneering in his PHB - especially his advice about having a plan which is based on scouting out the dungeon so as to identify objectives (eg the troll with the large horde in such-and-such a room on the 4th level) - you will see that it depends upon a premise that the dungeon is relatively static between expeditions. Without that premise holding, the sort of scouting and planning that he suggests becomes impossible.

If you then read Gygax's advice to GMs in his DMG - written later - you can see he talks about "living, breathing" dungeons which are not static between expeditions. It seems fairly obvious that this advice is driven by concerns for verisimilitude, and perhaps also as a veneer of realism to overlay "restocking" between expeditions; but he doesn't give any advice on how that sort of approach is to be reconciled with his advice to players.

I don't hold the contradiction in his two rulebooks against him - D&D play was developing very quickly in that late 70s period - but the contradiction drives home how easily principles of "reasonable" or "realistic" extrapolation of the fiction by the GM can collide with principles of player agency.

There are games that reconcile Gygax's contradiction, but they're mostly non-D&D games (eg Burning Wheel, PbtA) and 4e D&D approached a certain way (ignoring the advice on adventure design; following the advice on player-authored quests and on skill challenge resolution).

But a game where the GM has overwhelming control over what happens next, based on extrapolation by him/her about fiction that only s/he is aware of or able to invent, whether or not a railroad in the strictest sense, is going to be GM-driven in most cases, I think.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Does the player even know when and where the DM has put random encounter percents? Is it safer in the Inn a few miles from the dungeon, the woods in between town and the dungeon, right outside the dungeon, or in the dungeon? All could have something planned for them the PCs may or may not know about depending on how their earlier investigations went and how subtle the monsters were. (Thieves running the Inn randomly pick a room? Chance of encounter outside the town - low chance but stronger encounter? Chance of encounter near the dungeon - higher chance but weaker encounter usually? In the dungeon - maybe safest maybe most dangerous?

It would be lovely if most GMs put that much thought into random encounter rolls, but even I didn't back in the day; I set up tables that seemed to generally make sense given the terrain involved, and might have a slot for "current event significant encounter" but that was about as far as it went, and I'm not sure I wasn't already doing more thinking about it than most people.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And this would be incorrect. The difference isn't in that we disagree how poorly people resolve social things, but rather that the GM shouldn't be put in a position to be the arbiter because they offered to run a game. Rather, the participants should be equally empowered, and should all share the duty to deal with problems as they arise. Not everyone for themselves, but everyone for everyone. This avoids the problem of the GM not saying anything or dealing with a problem (and why should they be better than random person?) resulting in the player feeling even further disempowered.

All right, let me rephrase it "A disagreement about whether the cost to benefit risk of having the GM handle these problems is better than trying to see if you can get the player group as a whole to do it." You and I see that very differently, because I have absolutely no faith in most groups doing even a half-decent job of it if left to themselves.