D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Maxperson]

When I ran Curse of Strahd, my players beat Strahd. They defeated him. They were victorious.

They won.

The PCs won the fight, yes. That victory did not end D&D, though, so it wasn't a D&D win condition. You could have just kept on going with a different story. What ended the game was the decision by you all to stop.

For that campaign the PCs won. Yay! And the players won the non-tradition victory of enjoyment(I hope) of the game.

 

[Maxperson]

Going to have to disagree here. If player agency is real, then they are the ones creating the tracks.

That's the whole point of a railroad, though. It takes away player agency. Players do not create railroad tracks. They choose their paths through the game. DMs are the only ones that can create rails(remove player agency) and force the PCs onto them.

 

[Krachek]

Oh, well. I guess if your players are ever happy about anything in the game, and feel a sense of accomplishment, that we should all just immediately remind them that they, the players, did nothing, it was their PCs.

I need to go apologize to the shoe from Monopoly for all the stolen glory.

In Monopoly you deserve your win! But in DnD the game is designed to have the PCs or the players if you like, win and run the show.
A fight is almost never fair.
Players can be happy of their smart moves, optimizations, or clever plans, but if they question too much the reality of the challenge they gonna be disappointed.

 

[FrogReaver]

That's the whole point of a railroad, though. It takes away player agency. Players do not create railroad tracks. They choose their paths through the game. DMs are the only ones that can create rails(remove player agency) and force the PCs onto them.

Other players could as well. Often you see this when one player wants to talk to NPCs and another initiates a combat .

 

[EzekielRaiden]

All I'm saying is that the thing we refer to as railroading....the feeling of having no choice as a player....can be caused by another player.

Except..."railroading" as the term is usually used is not about feeling like you have no choice.

It's about literally not having choices. About any time you attempt to make a choice, within the game (as opposed to the out-of-game choice to leave, which I certainly hope is always present), someone makes it so that choice either is nonexistent, or doesn't actually produce different results.

And a player cannot do that latter thing. A player is not capable of saying, "Oh, you want to go to the docks? Well...um...the docks are being repaired! A ship came off the moorings and caused damage, so the docks won't be accessible for several days." D&D, and games like D&D, only give players such power in controlled bursts, if they give it at all. (I, personally, like giving my players that power, but that's because I trust them to use it wisely.)

A player can bully other players, but bullying isn't part of "railroading," even though it ends up in a similar place. A player may interrupt or jump in front, thus preventing other players from getting the chance to participate in the first place, but again, "railroading" does not mean "not being allowed to participate in the game or decision-making" any more than it means "feeling like you have no choice as a player." Railroading means there just aren't choices.

You very easily could have a heavily railroaded game where no player, ever, feels like they have no choices, because the DM knows the players well (or is incredibly good at predicting them, or really, really lucky). All that even though they were always on a railroad track from point A all the way to point Z, stopping at every letter on the way, in alphabetical order. Doesn't mean it's any less "railroaded" than the game where the players get fed up and leave due to constantly having their off-rail choices nixed. One might even argue it's more so, because the train never gets derailed.

Similarly, you could have a game that truly is wide-open, but players could feel like they have no choices. As an example, I have a player who is very shy about roleplaying. He doesn't want to roleplay "wrong." Even though we all know, there really isn't a "wrong" way per se--there's certainly impolite things you can do, but he's a perfectly polite player (albeit cracking a lot of jokes) so that's not a concern as far as I can tell. If you had a game full of players like him, worried they were going to "play wrong," they could easily feel like they have no choices at all, despite the DM actively avoiding railroading as much as humanly possible.

Other players could as well. Often you see this when one player wants to talk to NPCs and another initiates a combat .

Is that actually a loss of agency though? Like...yes, it's a conflict between players, but if the DM is running things competently, such actions should not automatically win consistently in one direction or another. If the problem is happening a lot, the group needs to sit down and have a talk about what things the players want from the game and whether they're actually enjoying the stuff on offer. (This has been a problem for me; I started off running mostly combat and minimal intrigue, and then it flipped to mostly intrigue and minimal combat, so I'm trying to balance out the two things.)

Yes, two players can butt heads, and when that happens, you need to use some kind of resolution method to fix it...but if that truly meant a removal of agency, then all games ever played have been railroads, because you get exactly the same problem with something like "I want to attack the bad guy" and the DM saying "roll to attack...oh, sorry, that doesn't hit its AC." That is literally exactly as "agency" removing as
P1: "I want to negotiate with the NPC."
P2: "No! We have to attack NOW!"
P1: "Absolutely not, these aren't bad guys, we just need to talk to them!"
DM: "Not budging P2? Alright. P1, give me a Diplomacy roll, P2, gimme Intimidate. Whoever rolls higher wins. If it's a tie, whoever has the higher total skill bonus wins. [roll] Oh, sorry P2, P1 beat you by three points, looks like we're negotiating this one. Don't worry, there'll be fights later, I promise."

 

[Campbell]

The whole giving the win to characters and not the players bit removes all meaningful sense of accomplishment from the game from my perspective. The way I see it players get the wins for their characters. If that's not the case I have little interest in playing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In kinda the same way, I think there's a difference between a player stepping up to keep the game moving, or roleplaying something of a leader-type, and a player running roughshod over someone else's ideas and input and intentions, to make the game all about them and/or their character.

In other words, one player calling the shots isn't necessarily bad, and it isn't necessarily railroading, IMO and IME--that depends on ... the social people-interacting stuff.

Yup. You can have people who don't actively mean to run roughshod over others but are simply assertive and a little oblivious, and end up doing so because of that and some other players being non-confrontational.

 

[Campbell]

From my perspective linear storytelling or railroading is all about ignoring fictional positioning and/or the rules in order to drive play in the direction you want it to go. In most versions of D&D players have an unlimited authority to decide what their character does, feels, and thinks. A player can use their authority over their character in ways that are similar to what we call railroading when a GM applies it to the things they have authority over (rules adjudication, scenario design, playing the world). It tends to have less of an impact, but is still a pretty big deal to me.

Does that like make any sense?

 

[Campbell]

Yup. You can have people who don't actively mean to run roughshod over others but are simply assertive and a little oblivious, and end up doing so because of that and some other players being non-confrontational.

I think this ability to run roughshod over other players is often made much worse when the GM addresses the group rather than individual players. If you make it clear that the player who is called is the one who gets to call the shots for what their character does this can be alleviated.

The obvious downside is that you are on then putting pressure on that player to make a decision when they might not be comfortable doing so. Life is about tradeoffs I guess.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't think it should be controversial that RPGs don't have clear win conditions in the same way than say, chess or monopoly do. Perhaps the players would indeed see beating Strahd a win. But perhaps they would also see marrying him a win? Or just escaping Barovia? Setting up criminal network that controls smuggling of illegal good in and out of Barovia? These are nebulous and subjective; whatever you want to call it, is not the same than in games where the win conditions are clearly defined. Does anyone actually disagree with this? Is the discussion only about whether word 'win' is appropriate? Seem terribly pointless to me...