D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Crimson Longinus]

You know, it just occurred to me that the “quantum ogre” is poorly named. Quantum mechanics operate based on probability. A truly quantum ogre would be one that’s on a random encounter table. The ogre in the thought experiment isn’t in quantum superposition, it’s placed in one of two positions by a rational entity based on concrete criteria. It’s God’s Ogre, not Shrodinger’s.

It is a reference to its location not existing in definite sense until it is observed.

 

[Charlaquin]

It is a reference to its location not existing in definite sense until it is observed.

I get it, I just find it amusing that if you think about it, the ogre isn’t actually functioning like a quantum particle at all.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I get it, I just find it amusing that if you think about it, the ogre isn’t actually functioning like a quantum particle at all.

Nah, it just means that there are infinite number of parallel realities where the GM decides that the ogre is at different location.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I definitely disagree; it is unreasonable to expect the DM to prepare encounters for every possible choice the players make. I would say most DMs have a list of encounters and NPCs they plan for the PCs to meet, and rearrange them to meet the player's choices.

For example, if you watch Brennan Lee Mulligan DMing the first season of Fantasy High; the encounters are all planned out ahead of time (they have to be, in order to get the minis and maps prepared). At no point do I think that game is a railroad, as the players have so many choices between encounters to get from one to another. The encounter is always going to happen no matter what choices are made (although I'm sure things change on the margins, like what NPCs are present), but I would not say that it is a "Railroaded Campaign." It's certainly not a bad game.

But you are literally talking about changing the result of them going through door A or B so the encounter happens either way, that is railroading. I am not saying you have to plan every encounter in advance. You can throw ad hoc encounters in, you can roll on tables. But if player choices always lead to where you want, whether they go left or right, or whether they say yes or no to the NPC, then that is railroading. It is about not respecting the choices players make and just imposing what you want to happen

 

[Urriak Uruk]

But you are literally talking about changing the result of them going through door A or B so the encounter happens either way, that is railroading. I am not saying you have to plan every encounter in advance. You can throw ad hoc encounters in, you can roll on tables. But if player choices always lead to where you want, whether they go left or right, or whether they say yes or no to the NPC, then that is railroading. It is about not respecting the choices players make and just imposing what you want to happen

Yeah sorry, if that's what the definition of railroading is, then I'm firmly in the "Roailroading is not bad" camp. There's nothing wrong with having a set of encounters pre-planned and dropping them into different situations regardless of player choice. If that wasn't the case, it would be impossible to consistently deliver really clever well-designed encounters while also maintaining player choice. You would have to rely on things like random encounter tables which, while handy, are not going to be as fun as a specifically built encounter with a past enemy for example.

To be clear, I don't think that having pre-built encounters ready for any situation is railroading at all. But if it is, then railroading must be good.

 

[Don Durito]

Yeah sorry, if that's what the definition of railroading is, then I'm firmly in the "Roailroading is not bad" camp. There's nothing wrong with having a set of encounters pre-planned and dropping them into different situations regardless of player choice. If that wasn't the case, it would be impossible to consistently deliver really clever well-designed encounters while also maintaining player choice. You would have to rely on things like random encounter tables which, while handy, are not going to be as fun as a specifically built encounter with a past enemy for example.

To be clear, I don't think that having pre-built encounters ready for any situation is railroading at all. But if it is, then railroading must be good.

To be clear, people think this sort of thing is what the Quantum Ogre situation is about, but it's not.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

To be clear, people think this sort of thing is what the Quantum Ogre situation is about, but it's not.

I'd never actually heard of the quantum ogre before hitting this thread, but Googling it led be to this delightful read;

 

[pemerton]

It goes back to the quantum ogre discussion. It was the DM deciding your first encounter out of the town is with an ogre.

Whereas I see the DM putting encounters in your path just one part of balanced adventure writing.

<snip>

I don’t see how a balanced encounter (I.e. it overwhelming force) can ever be railroading. Not unless repeated ad nauseam.

Well, suppose that in scene A the PCs befriend NPC X (resolved via application of the social resolution mechanics) so as to achieve goal P, while killing NPC Y (resolved via application of the rules for resolution of violence) so as to achieve goal Q.

And now suppose in scene B the GM has X turn on the PCs and thwart their aspiration for P; and has NPC Z, a newly-authored NPC, turn up to try and stop the PCs achieving Q by fighting them about it.

That looks to me like it could be railroading - the GM is not respecting the outcomes of resolution, and is manipulating the fiction so as to continue to press his/her conception of what it is going to look like regardless of what the players have their PCs do and regardless of success in action resolution.

I don't think the pattern of play I've described above is merely hypothetical, either. I've seen modules that encourage the GM to do both: modules that tell the GM to have a particular NPC betray the PCs without any regard to outcomes of social resolution processes; and modules that tell the GM to introduce a new oppositional NPC if the PCs kill the original one (Bastion of Broken Souls is an example of the second pattern that I remember especially well).

Question; let's say the PCs come to two doors. The DM's planned encounter is behind the left door.

The PCs take the right door... so the DM moves the encounter to behind the right door.

Is this railroading? I'd argue no, even though it is forcing a certain outcome to happen

In my mind, this depends on details that are missing.

Is the choice to open the left rather than the right door supposed to matter? In that case, it seems railroad-y to me that the same thing happens whichever door is opened.

But if the choice is merely colour - like a player choosing the shape of a PC's belt-buckle - then it doesn't seem railroad-y.

A complicating consideration is that, for purely historical reasons, D&D play obsesses over architecture and geography whereas it largely neglects belt-buckles (contrast, here, The Dying Earth RPG), and so there is a weight of convention to at least pretend that choosing the door matters in a way that choosing one's clothing doesn't. Breaking free of that convention can take a bit of an effort of will!

But you are literally talking about changing the result of them going through door A or B so the encounter happens either way, that is railroading. I am not saying you have to plan every encounter in advance. You can throw ad hoc encounters in, you can roll on tables. But if player choices always lead to where you want, whether they go left or right, or whether they say yes or no to the NPC, then that is railroading. It is about not respecting the choices players make and just imposing what you want to happen

You are assuming here that the choice of door should matter. But maybe it's just flavour! In which case there's no railroad.

When my group plays Prince Valiant I'll often pull out the map of Britain in the front of my Pendragon hardback and we'll work out together where they're going on the map. But those decisions have ZERO implications for what encounters I frame. It's just to help me narrate "woods" or "swamp" in a consistent way, and to help maintain at least a rough consistency of which town or castle is near to or far from which other town or castle. This isn't railroading; it's just a different focus to play from a Cook/Marsh expert hexcrawl: the action of play isn't about which hex the PCs are in, but rather what happens when they meet the Huns? (As it turns out, they beat the Huns with their warband and then converted the bulk of them (who had survived the skirmish) to Christianity and added them to their warband as light skirmishers.)

Going through the left vs the right door may be significant in a map-and-key exploration game (eg Keep on the Borderlands/Caves of Chaos as presented by its author). But in a different sort of game it may just be colour. Hence why - as @iserith has said - there can be no de-contextualised answer to @Urriak Uruk's question.

Is the dungeon a space to be explored (with the possibility of the PCs not finding everything) or is it a tool for pacing a linear adventure? If the latter, why even bother placing the encounter. You could keep the content--monsters, treasure--of a dungeon separate from the map, and then just choose what the PCs encounter when they enter a given room.

Treated as rhetorical, I feel the force of your question. Treated as literal, see my remarks about the inheritance of convention earlier in this post.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yeah sorry, if that's what the definition of railroading is, then I'm firmly in the "Roailroading is not bad" camp. There's nothing wrong with having a set of encounters pre-planned and dropping them into different situations regardless of player choice. If that wasn't the case, it would be impossible to consistently deliver really clever well-designed encounters while also maintaining player choice. You would have to rely on things like random encounter tables which, while handy, are not going to be as fun as a specifically built encounter with a past enemy for example.

To be clear, I don't think that having pre-built encounters ready for any situation is railroading at all. But if it is, then railroading must be good.

Pre-planned encounters aren't railroad. The railroad is door one not having an encounter, door 2 having one, and you deciding an encounter happens no matter which door the players go through. They effectively have no real choice in that scenario. Railroading is also forcing them to engage an adventure they have no desire to engage. So its fine if you have a set of encounters planned. That is linear, but not a railroad. It becomes a railroad if they try to go off that path, and you keep pushing the encounter and the scenario on them no matter what they do

 

[Mistwell]

I recently started to teach my 10 year old daughter to play D&D.

She needs railroading for the game to function well. At this stage, giving her too many open ended choices doesn't work well. She needs a more limited set of choices to enjoy the game.

As she gets older and figures out how things work with the game and her character better, I am sure we will be able to open up the game to a more sandbox level of play. But right now? She needs to be on that railroad.