D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Maxperson]

And this is a base assumption that I don't think everyone agrees upon. We do not all agree on whether "meaning" and "following event" are the same thing. And, if we don't all agree upon that, this discussion cannot resolve.

Agency is shown when you take an action intended to produce some effect or result. If you are not intending anything, you are not exercising your agency.

Agency is being exercised, though. The group is picking left over right, because they think it makes a difference. That left will be different from right. That left will be different than going off road and continuing straight into the forest. By tossing the quantum ogre onto every choice they make, the DM is denying that choice and their agency in being able to choose a course that makes a difference.

If you randomly generate a series of syllables and intone them, you have sounds, but those sounds have no meaning. They are just random sounds (one literal definition of "noise"), gibberish containing no semantic content. Even if a few syllables in a row sound like a word in some language, it isn't like you meant to intone that word. You did not have information in mind and attempt to communicate it.

We all live in a world in which things happen that have nothing to do with our own actions or intentions - events unrelated to us sometimes impinge upon our lives. It is not, so to speak, all about what we want. Does this count as a removal of your agency - are you railroaded into dealing with the thing?

Yes, it does impinge, and that impingement affects my choices. If I choose to get to work on time, somebody hitting their brakes a mile ahead of me and cause a chain reaction slowdown is negating that choice by making me late to work.

Let's say that I choose to arrive to work on time. I leave on time to get to work and enough braking happens to make me 15 minutes late. Now let's say that the universe really has it out for me, and if I leave 30 minutes early, enough braking will happen to slow me down by 45 minutes late, and if I leave an hour early enough braking will happen to slow me down by an hour and 15 minutes, such that no matter when I leave, I will always be 15 minutes late. My being unaware of that fact does not change that my choice is being negated by the universe.

If you don't feel those restrict your agency, then the quantum ogre - the monster who appears separate from your choices - does not either.

If you do feel those things restrict your real-world agency, well, then such removal of agency is part of life, and that means it should have some place in our games from time to time.

Feeling doesn't matter. Even if I never considered that the universe had it out for me and was making me 15 minutes late no matter what time I chose to leave, it's still negating my choice to arrive on time.

 

[Maxperson]

They have no choice over what encounter happen next. Why is that important?

The question isn't rhetorical. In classic dungeoncrawling generally players are expected to have some influence/control over scene-framing. But there are plenty of RPGs in which the GM is in charge of framing. 4e D&D is one. Most indie RPGs are like this too. It doesn't follow that they're railroads. In those games the players don't have the choice to avoid their PCs being challenged. The domain of choice is how they respond; and the action resolution procedures which flow from that impose strong constraints on what the GM can subsequently do with the fiction.

The difference is in choice. Those games like 4e ARE railroads. The players are on rails with no chance to avoid by choice, but they have chosen to get on that train with full knowledge that they will be railroaded.

 

[Maxperson]

You misread my post. I said that, whatever colour the player choose for their PC's cloak, in most FRPGs that makes no difference to anything that happens next. It's just for fun.

I didn't misread it. My point is that even with something so minor, the DM dictating what color their cloak has to be, removing their choice on something that makes no difference other than a bit of fun, is still railroading and the player will not like it.

 

[Maxperson]

What did the author miss about it? If I understand correctly, the players choice should meaningfully affect the outcome. And so, this DM apparently had a series of relatively quick encounters down one path (the quicker looking one) and very well had a few more.expansive encounters down the other path (the longer looking one) and a bunch of terrain issues and hazards and some populated hexes if they went off road. The players chose direct, so the DM starts giving them the few pretty quick encounters for flavor and likely some information that will be helpful if they communicate instead of fight. The player thinks they have telepathy and accuse the DM of railroading. No?

Because there was no reason for the accusation. The player wants to skip the encounter, because boring. He wants to retroactively have bought flying boots to get in, etc. It's about players being lazy and wanting it easy, not railroading. Or it's implying that a player wanting it easy is going to think a railroad is happening even when it's not. Both of which are wrong. There could be other wrong reasons as well, but it's not really about railroading or the quantum ogre. Those are just excuses for the massive Strawman that exchange was.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

This, by the way, was the only way to make some of the original OD&D random encounter tables not ridiculously lethal. If you got the dragon encounter, you didn't open with the dragon itself, but some sign of its presence and give people the chance to GTFO. Otherwise there were things on almost all those tables that would be pretty much impossible for a lower level party to deal with.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So, does EVERY choice the PCs make have to be "real"? <snip> If not every choice has to be real, why do we have such a long argument about it?

Because it is one thing for circumstances to accidentally result in choices that don't matter, and quite another for the DM to intentionally cause choices to not matter.

Plus? The point isn't making EVERY choice matter. The point is making choices that seem to matter actually matter. Sometimes, the player knows they're making choices that don't matter. What color their character's hair is, for example, is very likely to not matter very much. What color armor they wear or how they spell their name or a host of other aesthetic choices often don't matter at all. The player is given no illusion of these choices mattering when they truly don't.

I mean, let's turn this around for a sec. Wouldn't it be pretty bad to make a player believe that a choice they made genuinely didn't matter at all, only to turn around and have it actually matter a lot? I can certainly say I would be pretty upset if the DM permitted me to mistakenly think that playing a dragonborn would not matter, as opposed to it resulting in tons of racism and nasty comments thrown my way etc. (And yes, I have been directly told by at least one actual poster on this very forum that, if someone wanted to play a dragonborn in their game, the player would be told they totally could--and then that character would be summarily ignored by NPCs, who would only speak to the human members of the party.)

The problem I have with these discussions, is that, it presents, sandbox play, pre-generated sandboxes as the only way to legitimately play D&D, characterising all other play types as railroading and makes it tiresome and difficult to discus AP play or other "plot driven" play in a generic sense as to best practise because the discussion gets bogged down in the strange attractor of railroad.

I certainly did not intend to say that, since I've never run a sandbox and don't intend to. I have a fairly plot-centric world. It's just not railroaded. Events happen. Things do not simply manifest out of the aether, they're well-grounded in fiction--and since I don't do anything unless it is well-grounded, I'm not allowed to just invoke whatever I like whenever I like. The players can, and do, research and prepare and investigate.

We just had a session mostly focused on casing the joint (a cultist alternative philosophy compound), doing research on obscure topics, identifying plausible threats, collecting resources and ally-support, and preparing an infiltration plan. My players regularly avail themselves of these things, because they know that I will never pull fast ones on them--but that I will exploit their ignorance if they ignore the breadcrumb trails. They know the world won't change under their feet without justification, which they can then investigate and either prepare for, mitigate, or ideally turn to their own advantage.

There have been plenty of things my players have overlooked, some detrimental, others merely lost opportunities or situations allowed to become more complex (not necessarily more dangerous/difficult). I don't make them do much of anything, but I do dangle new hooks in front of them or have NPCs act in rationally-appropriate ways, both on and off camera. It's on them to capitalize on opportunities, prioritize threats, and accept that they can't be everywhere at once.

 

[Maxperson]

Which sort of invites a question:

"Shall we go to the beach today, or will we go to see Shakespeare in the park?"
...time passes...
"Oh, well, it rained. It turns out neither was a real choice for today."

It isn't like every choice we make in the real world turns out to have been real, in the sense used above. Our own ignorance, or unforseen changes in the situation, put the kibosh on what we want all the time. Heck, few who have lived through the past year f pandemic can cogently argue otherwise. So, does EVERY choice the PCs make have to be "real"?

That doesn't equate to the quantum ogre, though. The quantum ogre strikes no matter course what they choose. For the rain example to be the same, it would have to rain on us even indoors, movie theaters having the sprinklers malfunction, or a playhouse springing a thousand leaks during the rain storm.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

This isn't sandbox though. Lots of campaigns feature a choice between two, three, or four different things at a certain point. Sandbox play is about being able to freely explore the map as a whole. Even in the most linear of campaigns, if you give players a fork in the road, that creates the expectation of a choice that leads to two very different locations, outcome, events. The question we are trying to answer isn't whether this is okay or not, there may be situations where it is, but whether it is railroading to begin with that choice of A or B; but then make the choice lead to the same outcome: an encounter with an ogre. Now there may be exceptions, but exceptions don't break the rule. For example this could be a situation where there is an ogre hunting players and is waiting between the paths to strike no matter what direction they go. If it is an exceptional situation, or an exceptional type of game, fair enough maybe not a railroad. But if the GM keeps using that tactic it is seems a text book case of a railroad

The ogre as I read it is an encounter along the way not the destination.
I think that if players have agreed to an AP they should engage with it, if they want to go off and become pirates then they should tell the DM so and discuss the direction of the game.
I am not encouraging DM to punish players for not engaging with what is prepared but I am that before accusing a DM of railroading perhaps stop and discuss the game direction with the DM.

I am not sure that all instances where players might (according to this thread) accuse a DM of railroading were in fact railroading per se but a mismatch in expectations.

 

[TheSword]

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.

So you are making a massive assumption that the ogre is down one path and the town is down the other.

The reality is that paths don’t lead towards ogres they lead towards places.

What I’m talking about are encounters that aren’t keyed to specific places, they take place after a certain amount of time. (Two hours after you leave town or the afternoon on day 5). It doesn’t matter which path a PC takes because the ogre isn’t linked to location. There is no decision that takes them away from the ogre.

The players can’t avoid the encounter. However the players can still “avoid” the Ogre by taking reasonable precautions. If they are traveling stealthily or off road they may (depending on perception of them or the ogre) be undetected and hear the ogre singing or crashing though the underbrush.

An encounter starts the moment you become aware of the creature or they become aware of you. You can still use all the agency to avoid that ogre if you see it before it sees you.

 

[Maxperson]

So you are making a massive assumption that the ogre is down one path and the town is down the other.

No. No I'm not. I've been using that example for what I would do for many pages now as a way NOT to be railroading the players. What I am doing, though, is making the "massive"(I guess) assumption that there is a quantum ogre negating player agency and that all paths lead to the same event, because that's what you guys are saying.

The reality is that paths don’t lead towards ogres they lead towards places.

Incorrect. If both paths(and off road and teleporting, and...) lead the players to ogres, they lead to ogres. THEN they lead somewhere else, but not until AFTER they lead to ogres.

What I’m talking about are encounters that aren’t keyed to specific places, they take place after a certain amount of time. (Two hours after you leave town or the afternoon on day 5). It doesn’t matter which path a PC takes because the ogre isn’t linked to location. There is no decision that takes them away from the ogre.

Yes. All paths lead to ogres. I get it.