D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Maxperson]

Does that last sentence need some more explication? Is it using the dice if the DM has decided it's an auto-success or auto-failure?

No it's not using the dice if the DM decides. Nor is it bad or railroading if the DM decides.

And in some games the player with a good die roll can do things like find a secret door that's added to the fiction the DM was envisioning (or hadn't envisioned yet) if I understand @pemerton correctly.

This is true. Or even mechanics other than die rolls I believe.

In D&D on the other hand the maps are often drawn out and something like that wouldn't be added. On the other hand, some things in D&D are randomly added to the fiction (like seeing if a magic item is in stock only after a player asks about a particular one).

D&D can now do it, too. You just have to opt into those 5e rules.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In 5e it's not as big a deal - there's no real mechanics for gear breakage, and any damage you take is pretty much recovered overnight - but in grittier systems where gear isn't evergreen and hit points and-or healing are scarce resources, even the most banal of combats needs to be played out in full.

Out of curiosity, do you have an example of a game that actually pays attention to gear wear? I can think of just exactly one, and its not in the D&D sphere, but I also don't delve much into the OSR.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Now if you drop all this apparatus, so that the whole regime of random encounters really is opaque to the players, I agree that they become meaningless. I think this happened in a lot of D&D play around the mid-1980s and that, since then, random encounters linger on as a type of relic or fetish divorced from their original rationale. But there are other aspects of D&D - like the continued obsession with map-and-key resolution despite the widespread abandoning of dungeon crawl or hex crawl play - about which the same could easily be said!

It was also much more opaque once you got outside of dungeons. While some terrains had notably worse encounter tables than others (traditionally swamps come to mind), for the most part all you really had (when you had that) was settled/not settled (though the "if the monster's not near its lair, don't expect much treasure" thing stayed true).

 

[Committed Hero]

DMs usually get accused of railroading retroactively, after doing something a player dislikes, so there is an element of "it's not bad if it's fun" involved. And there are times a group of players doesn't take the initiative - or cedes it to the DM altogether. So DMs should be prepared to take the reins from time to time.

In my estimation, railroading involves the DM counteracting something a player sets out to do, as opposed to channeling group behavior ahead of time. So it's a more adversarial response than anything else.

 

[Thomas Shey]

What do you think happens?

What part of "I think I'm done with this" was unclear?

 

[pemerton]

No. The players decide what they are going to do. Dice often determine success or failure of their actions.

Outcomes are not decisions.

I'm having trouble following you.

I'll pull back a bit to "big picture": RPGing consists in the participants talking their way through a sequence of imagined events or situations. What happens next is one of the most important questions that has to be answered by a group playing a RPG - that is to say, having just finished collectively imagining such-and-such happening, what are we required to imagine now?

There are various ways to answer this question.

Here's one: the end of each sequence includes a description, by the players, of where their PCs are going. The GM has a map-and-key that is detailed enough - at least in respect of the stuff that matters to play - to provide a largely unique answer to the question what happens next. And so the GM provides that answer, the players declare new actions, and the cycle repeats. This is (in outline) how classic dungeoneering works.

Here's another: the beginning of each sequence involves the GM describing a situation which - given what matters to play - compels some sort of response from the players, by declaring actions for their PCs. Those declarations include (either expressly or by clear implication) intentions as to how they would like that starting situation to be resolved. If the checks triggered by those declarations succeed, then the players' intentions are realised; if they fail, then the GM gets to follow through on the threat/pressure that was present in the starting point and make that follow-through a part of the shared fiction. What happens next is determined by the GM picking up on elements of threat/pressure that haven't (yet) been fully resolved. Conversely, once all the threat/pressure is resolved then the game is done. This is (in outline) how Burning Wheel works and how 4e D&D works if played in the spirit suggested by the skill challenge guidelines in the two DMGs together with the advice to "cut to the fun".

Here's another: the beginning of each sequence involves the GM describing a situation that compels some sort of response from the players; but unlike the approach described in the previous paragraph, whether the players' declared action succeed or fail, what comes next is decided by the GM independent of player intentions. While player actions might affect the details of how a particular situation within the sequence is described, they don't affect the basic trajectory from event to event within the sequence. This is how the DL modules work. This is how the WotC modules Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, The Speaker in Dreams, and The Bastion of Broken Souls work (this last one even has a sidebar explaining to the GM how to make sure the pre-scripted sequence of events remains unperturbed should the PCs kill the main antagonist earlier than the module author anticipates). I imagine it is how many more recent WotC modules work too.

That last one is what I would normally call a "railroad", as a RPGing experience in which it is the GM who has overwhelming authority over what happens next. Whether or not it is degenerate (to use @FrozenNorth's term from upthread) would depend upon whether it fits with, or contradicts, the participant's expectations. Given the popularity of WotC modules and Critical Role-type play it seems that for many participants it satisfies their expectations!

 

[Committed Hero]

There is also a question of where player choice gets defined. If the DM is just offering a series of fights with little or nothing connecting them, players are still controlling their characters in combat - and as that's a great deal of what D&D has to offer, it's hard to say that the players are being deprived of meaningful choices, especially if they are getting enjoyment out of the game.

 

[pemerton]

It was also much more opaque once you got outside of dungeons. While some terrains had notably worse encounter tables than others (traditionally swamps come to mind), for the most part all you really had (when you had that) was settled/not settled (though the "if the monster's not near its lair, don't expect much treasure" thing stayed true).

I agree. This is why I agreed with Luke Crane when he contrasted (I'll use quote marks but they're actually paraphrase as I never downloaded his blog and the site has since evaporated) the "poorly thought out ideas" of Marsh/Cook Expert with the genius of Moldvay.

As well as the opacity of the encounter tables, the whole idea of a mappable and "solvable" maze becomes lost. Play becomes far more subject to the "run-time" decisions of the GM about what is "realistic" in respect of the setting and its inhabitants.

I generally praise Classic Traveller but its on-world exploration rules suffer from much the same problem - which I discovered, hard, in the second session of my current Traveller campaign: the PCs left the domed city in their ATV to make their way to the NPC outpost, and I looked at the rules to find out what I should do, and I had throws for encounters per day, and daily throws for determining if the vehicle breaks down, but no process for determining if/when the PCs arrive at the outpost other than the GM makes it up. It's no coincidence that in the ensuing 18 sessions there has been no more on-world exploration: when the PCs have needed to get from A to B on a planet they've just flown there in their starship, followed perhaps by some short distance travel in ATV or air/raft.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There is also a question of where player choice gets defined. If the DM is just offering a series of fights with little or nothing connecting them, players are still controlling their characters in combat - and as that's a great deal of what D&D has to offer, it's hard to say that the players are being deprived of meaningful choices, especially if they are getting enjoyment out of the game.

Though depending on the stripe of D&D, those choices can be either so constrained or so meaningless as to be pointless, too. This was notoriously true of OD&D fighters (in fact, it was one of the things that chased me away from it relatively early). As a fighter you had (outside the kind of mother-may-I of whether the GM would let some descriptive process actually have any impact since it was entirely outside the mechanics) two useful choices: what weapon you used (when it wasn't self-evident) and what target you chose (when there was any practical choice). The net effect was that I thought then, and still think, that after you got over the novelty of RPGs in general running a fighter was dull as dishwater.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I agree. This is why I agreed with Luke Crane when he contrasted (I'll use quote marks but they're actually paraphrase as I never downloaded his blog and the site has since evaporated) the "poorly thought out ideas" of Marsh/Cook Expert with the genius of Moldvay.

As well as the opacity of the encounter tables, the whole idea of a mappable and "solvable" maze becomes lost. Play becomes far more subject to the "run-time" decisions of the GM about what is "realistic" in respect of the setting and its inhabitants.

I generally praise Classic Traveller but its on-world exploration rules suffer from much the same problem - which I discovered, hard, in the second session of my current Traveller campaign: the PCs left the domed city in their ATV to make their way to the NPC outpost, and I looked at the rules to find out what I should do, and I had throws for encounters per day, and daily throws for determining if the vehicle breaks down, but no process for determining if/when the PCs arrive at the outpost other than the GM makes it up. It's no coincidence that in the ensuing 18 sessions there has been no more on-world exploration: when the PCs have needed to get from A to B on a planet they've just flown there in their starship, followed perhaps by some short distance travel in ATV or air/raft.

Well, with the old style pseudo-simulationist games, that was always based on the assumption the GM knew how far away it was and the speed of the vehicle per day, and voila (if, instead, you're saying OT didn't have speed-per-day listed for vehicles, I'm a little startled; skipping things like that is something I find pretty common in modern games (even ones where it might be relevant like post-apocalypse games), but I'm not used to it with games of that era).

The oddity of the OD&D and near outdoor encounter tables was that relatively early on you have the whole hexcrawl idea, but it was actually pretty hard to run one for a new GM, unlike dungeons, because the warning rules (that is to say, things that would tell you when you were potentially about to get into an encounter you really, really didn't want to be in) ranged from sketchy to nonexistent, and with the lack of power-tiering with outdoor encounters, that's pretty critical, which a fresh-off-the-turnip-truck GM could learn the hard way.