D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Fenris-77]

The context was (in part) not having random encounter tables segregated by level.

How does the low level party avoid a TPK when the DM randomly rolls adult red dragon, or 1d6 frost giants, or purple worm, or demon lord (or whatever else might challenge a high level party).

Well, the DM probably shouldn't be randomly dolling Red Dragons, should he? Not unless he wants to looks like a berk. That said, any party, should it be made of seasoned players, knows when to walk away, and when to run.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What is the biggest difference between having (a) and having a DM not an where the dungeons.fo.in advance and putting it in a he's the party is travelling through but allowing them to bypass it if desires.

Well you can railroad with rumors too. if I follow, the biggest difference is where they go actually matters. If you just put the dungeon down no matter where they go, their decision to go north instead of south didn’t matter in respect to that dungeon: coming across it is going to happen. They have to pass the dungeon. For some reason the Gm is moving it in heavy handed fashion before the party. So why do that. What’s the purpose of not to railroad them to the dungeon adventure? Giving them knowledge is just giving them more choice. But rumors and hooks can be railroads too. I just think the matter of knowledge about the dungeon is a big topic on its own

 

[Cadence]

By segregating them by location, making clear which locations are more dangerous and finally by not having an encounter necessarily mean a combat.

So the hexes could essentially be color coded by appropriate tier? And the predators who aren't open to negotiation (purple worms?) don't show up on the table as they wouldn't be interesting?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It feels like the size of the moment should matter. In regards to @EzekielRaiden 's post below, I wasn't picturing a haunted mansion that was a major adventure, but something more equivalent to the Ogre (an old farm house with one or two rooms with a few undead, not the Munsters or Adams Family). That feels more like a brief interlude than a railroad.

Yeah, I was imagining a Scooby Doo-style haunted house. That is, when I hear "haunted house," I think of something comparable to a haunted house attraction IRL. Such things are never as simple as an old farmhouse with three simple rooms, because that would be boring. If you meant something like "abandoned shack," then yeah, I'm fine with having abandoned shacks on an encounter table. Those feel reasonably natural as something you could just...find. Especially if they're rough-hewn with minimal foundation work--something a farmer or pioneer might have erected by hand.

The game I run is set in an arid-leaning or even desert region, so for me it might be something more like "burial mound that used to be covered by sand," but the principle is similar. I'd be fine with including "forgotten cairn" in an encounter table. In my campaign's context, I would call a "haunted house" the equivalent of (say) a "cursed pyramid," where it would be weird to see that just show up in the path the party happened to take, and to have something of similar magnitude show up more than once would be rather suspicious.

How are they telling you? What percent of paths between two interesting points have no encounters?

For my part, I do three things on this front:
1. If the journey itself is "meant" to be meaningful, I use the Undertake a Perilous Journey rules. I have expanded these rules slightly so that the party has more considerations now (getting to places without being seen is now of similar importance to getting there on time, for example, so I added stealth as a role to be filled). This explicitly signals to the players that Stuff May Happen on the journey, and usually does.
2. If the journey isn't "meant" to be meaningful, I try to read the room. If the party seems ambivalent, I'll add an encounter if I can impromptu make up something interesting. If they seem bored, I'll definitely try to throw something at them to spice things up. If they're really eager to get where they're going, or if I'm just low on inspiration that day, I may gloss over the journey. Overall...probably about half of the time they run into something, but it may not be a big deal.
3. I keep destinations within relatively easy reach. The party lives in a big city, so a lot of plot points are just a camel-ride away. Visiting the elemental otherworld is pricey, but doable. Heading up-river to the central city of the major religion of this region is at most a day trip. Etc. This way, the party can attend to important details relatively quickly without too much trouble, cutting down on any risk of "ugh, ANOTHER encounter? I just want to get where we're going..." stuff.

I was thinking smaller. Thank you for a very nice post.

My pleasure.

I agree that big things they're forced into feel different. A lot of fiction has that though (the Hobbits and the Barrow, old man Willow, a lot in Cugel's adventures, a lot in well...just about anything). So, you never use a haunted inn that the party doesn't have time to prepare for and think about?

Not exactly. More that I either do my best to establish it in the fiction (even if the players don't check up on it), or leave it as an un-tested hook, waiting for the players to bite, potentially "getting worse" if it makes sense for the situation to do so. As an example, the party has had it foreshadowed that there are secret, invisible temples belonging to the Raven-Shadow assassin-cult hidden in the desert. Divination magic allowed them to see someone visit one of them, a big one. As a result, the party is forewarned of the possibility that they might literally just "randomly" run into an invisible temple if they're out exploring the deep desert--or, if they take matters into their own hands, they may be able to target a search for one.

I would very much shy away from "it's a scorching sandstorm, and there's an abandoned caravanserai, you need to take shelter." But I might offer it as an option during a Perilous Journey where the Trailblazer (person charting the path) has rolled poorly (aka gotten a "bad" result), e.g. "you're running low on supplies, particularly water--you could press on, which will put you at a disadvantage when you arrive at your destination. However, [player] on scout duty has found what looks like an abandoned caravanserai, where you could rest and possibly recover some supplies, depending on what's left there." That (1) turns the "abandoned inn" idea into an explicit (and real) choice; (2) gives the players the opportunity to investigate the "abandoned inn" before committing to it, albeit on a short time schedule; and (3) only triggered because things went wrong without my intervention. It also helps that, because of the Scout role for Undertake a Perilous Journey, I as DM am specifically empowered to leverage that role to provide (hopefully!) interesting options and possibilities in terms of "what did you see, what were you looking for" stuff.

I also have a question about random encounter tables. If you use them, do they change by party level?

I generally do not use them myself (though perhaps I should). I would make them semi-dependent on party level, but only to invoke a sense of scale and development. That is, three kobolds in a trenchcoat might be dangerous at level 1, but either boring or merely funny at very high level. Back six or seven levels ago, my players found a pack of basilisks genuinely dangerous for a bit; these days, they'd steamroll them. Since I don't consider it interesting to include curbstomp fights (whether it be the party doing the stomping or being stomped upon), I would probably design tables with level ranges in mind. E.g. a level 1-5 table, a level 6-10 table, etc. Some places, if you outlevel them, there just wouldn't be random encounters at all anymore, because there's nothing in them that would present enough of a threat to count. Others, different threats appear because the party has different concerns and interests now. Like how I added "be stealthy" to the Perilous Journey rules (alongside "get there on time," "don't run out of food/resources on the way," and "don't get surprised by something nasty")--a change of perspective due to the party's new abilities and interests, not simply "oh, they're level 7 now, only level 7 encounters need apply."

A hut in the woods with some ghostly things attached to it is a huge and different thing requiring intent so much more than a fairy grove? Either I have way more extensive fairy groves (which isn't untrue) or you have rather high bars for a hut in the woods.

To me, though, even a mansion with grounds that moves is cool and evocative stuff that really brings out the fantasy. YMMV.

I just don't think "a hut in the woods with a ghost" is what is meant by "a haunted house." While a person may live in a hut, I don't think of "hut" when I think of "house," and "haunted house" specifically evokes a reasonably-large, at least two-story home with several ghosts and some kind of reason why it's haunted.

If all you meant was "a ramshackle shed with a ghosty boi inside," okay, sure. But "haunted house" emphatically did not communicate that...as I made pretty clear with my comparisons.

 

[Don Durito]

So the hexes could essentially be color coded by appropriate tier? And the predators who aren't open to negotiation (purple worms?) don't show up on the table as they wouldn't be interesting?

Largely. Although there's other possibilties with the purple worm. For example, the players might not encounter the worm itself but merely signs of it's passage. This would allow them to track it back to it's lair should they choose to.

Same with the red dragon. It doesn't mean the pcs fight a red dragon. It might mean they come across a village destroyed by a red dragon. The PCs now know that a dragon is somewhere around this hex, and you might build an encounter around helping out the surviving villages who fled into the forest.

 

[Fenris-77]

Otherwise known as try not to be a crap DM. Just saying...

 

[Maxperson]

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. People wouldn’t complain if the first encounter out of town was a farmer heading to town to sell produce bearing news of the countryside. So I see little problem the first encounter being with an ogre.

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

This issue isn't with the DM deciding the encounter or putting an encounter in their path. The issue is with the players inability to possibly avoid the ogre. If there's a fork in the path and I decide an ogre is down one path and a town is down the other, their choice has meaning even if they are unaware of what that meaning is. If I decide that no matter what they choose there is an ogre that they will encounter, I've removed the meaning from their choice, even if there is some other meaning farther down the road. In the short term, they had no agency and their choice was meaningless. They got railroaded into that encounter.

 

[pemerton]

I was just going by what he said, which was one door had an encounter and one door didn't, but the encounter would shift if the players picked the door with no encounter behind it. It is just color, I suppose it doesn't matter. I would need to see what he meant. But since he described it as an encounter, I think it is a safe bet this is a meaningful thing he is thrusting on the players.

I'm not saying that the encounter is colour. I'm saying that where it happens is just colour. That going left or right is no different from walking through the woods with hats on or off.

 

[Maxperson]

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

That was entertaining, but not written by someone who understands what the railroading argument is about.

 

[Maxperson]

And that's not railroading unless the players actually took some actions to intentionally avoid the haunted house. If they just blindly chose a direction and had no any idea of any haunted houses then their agency was not affected as it was not a meaningful choice to begin with.

Choices have meaning, even if the players are unaware of what that meaning is.