D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[FrogReaver]

Look. I don't know why this concept is so difficult to grasp, but we use different words to mean different things. Railroading is to keeps the story going as bully is to assertive. It's not rocket surgery. If you describe a manager as bossy, it says something based on this little thing called connotation. It says something entirely different you describe him as driven.

Do I seriously need to give a Basics of Communication 101 lecture so that people understand that word choice matters and you can't blindly grab words from a thesaurus?

Seems like that’s a good reason to call railroading the force the GM applies that’s against the social contract and to call linear adventuring where force is applied but not against the social contract something else.

 

[Maxperson]

Seems like that’s a good reason to call railroading the force the GM applies that’s against the social contract and to call linear adventuring where force is applied but not against the social contract something else.

Linear doesn't really involve force, though. When I make a multi-level dungeon and the party walks down the stairs to the first level, it doesn't matter which way they go on that level, because there's only one set of stairs down to level 2. That's linear, even though they can meander all over the first level. One way in, one way out. I don't need to force them down a path. Same if I set up a multi-part adventure where once you get to the end of part 1, you learn how to get to part 2, and so on. It's an adventure in a line. Force is denying agency, which isn't happening in the linear adventures.

 

[FrogReaver]

Linear doesn't really involve force, though. When I make a multi-level dungeon and the party walks down the stairs to the first level, it doesn't matter which way they go on that level, because there's only one set of stairs down to level 2. That's linear, even though they can meander all over the first level. One way in, one way out. I don't need to force them down a path. Same if I set up a multi-part adventure where once you get to the end of part 1, you learn how to get to part 2, and so on. It's an adventure in a line. Force is denying agency, which isn't happening in the linear adventures.

By many definitions of force that is explicitly force.

 

[Maxperson]

By many definitions of force that is explicitly force.

What is being forced? Not the players. They have the agency to walk away from a linear adventure.

 

[FrogReaver]

What is being forced? Not the players. They have the agency to walk away from a linear adventure.

I would tend to agree, but I would also have agree that a linear adventure wasn’t a railroad to begin with. Maybe ask those that are advocating for calling a linear adventure a railroad what force is present in it?

 

[pemerton]

I would not be happy with the examples stated in your first point, at least not as presented. That is, it "just so happens" that a helpful NPC is right there every time we need them? No, that stretches my suspension of disbelief far too much. Sometimes it can be the case, sure. But if the DM has actually done a sufficient job of justifying the situation at hand, then no "manipulation" is required.

That's my sticking point here. I work, very hard, to create well-reasoned, well-justified explanations for things.

<snip>

I try my best to avoid manipulating my players. I want them to do things purely because they enjoy them, not because they think I want them to do some specific thing or other.

OK. Do you regard the stuff that I described, that you don't do, as railroading?

I put pieces down in anticipation of needing them at some nebulous potential future time. As an example, I had always intended that a certain NPC, Tenryu Shen, was a gold dragon in disguise. I left hints and subtle indications that something was Different about him, but it wasn't until the party had really proved themselves as heroes (and personally aided Shen with something) that he revealed his true nature and mission to them. We also established, early on, that Shen could heal physical, mental, and spiritual maladies that ordinary healing wouldn't affect, and this became very useful to the party later on. Would this count as "manipulating the backstory so that a pre-conceived series of events unfold[ed] in play"? As I said, I had always intended for him to be a gold dragon, one both aiding the party and requesting their aid in return.

Well, the only event described here is that he reveals himself. Was that fore-ordained, by you as GM, to happen in a certain way? Did you manage backstory and outcomes to ensure it didn;t happen in a different way?

I had planned for him to be useful to the party under the specific conditions of that adventure

<snip>

through his aid and requests, I was able to send the party to important locations, reveal other backstory elements they had not yet seen, and in other ways "show my work" as it were. Is that "manipulating" or is it just...telling a story?

The revelation of other backstory elements raises the same questions as the revelation of this NPC as a backstory element: Was that revelation fore-ordained, by you as GM, to happen in a certain way? Did you manage backstory and outcomes to ensure it didn't happen in a different way?

Sending the party to important locations seems a different thing. Those are actions declared by the players for their PCs (at least I think they are - I don't think you mean the PCs were teleported to those locations). For me. this raises questions about who, at the table, established those goals for the players (and thereby their PCs), and how did those locations become important in relation to them? I think there are contexts in which answers to those questions exhibit something like railroading, but maybe of a different form from what I've described above: the GM determines outcomes and resultant scene-framing not by mechanical fudging, and not by backstory manipulation, but by social/metagame pressure on the players to declare particular actions. @Campbell often posts about this phenomenon. It's the GM-side version of the railroading-by-players he's described: upthread he described players pressuring the GM to use their authority in a particular way; I'm now describing the GM pressuring the players to use their authority (ie over action declarations) a certain way.

I don't know, at your table, how those decisions about what's important and what actions the players declare for their PCs were made.

EDIT: I've just read @Ovinomancer's post about this upthread. If the assumptions he is making about what happened at your table are correct, then he's right that it would be different from what I prefer in RPGing.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

Seems like that’s a good reason to call railroading the force the GM applies that’s against the social contract and to call linear adventuring where force is applied but not against the social contract something else.

Literally addressed this in the original post: participationism.

 

[Maxperson]

I would tend to agree, but I would also have agree that a linear adventure wasn’t a railroad to begin with. Maybe ask those that are advocating for calling a linear adventure a railroad what force is present in it?

Linear is a line. The players have the agency to get off that line at any time, so it's not a railroad. If the DM applies force to keep the group in a line, that's when it becomes a railroad.

People who say that linear adventures involve the DM applying force are just wrong. Player agency has not been removed.

 

[Ovinomancer]

No sure what Scott is arguing for, but Plot Driven Games or whatever we call it are not the same as railroading for me.

Depending on the player tolerance, they absolutely can be. If I have low tolerance for Force, then any Plot Driven game will be railroading.

However, I don't necessarily disagree to the general point, here, and this argument is exactly what I was saying would happen.

The GM force is there to enforce what the players want and have agreed upon, and is usually done at the macro level.

I don't know that this is true. The players have at least agreed to Force, but that's not quite synonymous with want.

For various reasons (time saving for the GM, they find APs provide more interesting stories and drama than their open games, etc.) the group has prioritized being "on the rails".

That said, for me good Plot Driven GMs don't use much GM force at the micro level or short term level. You don't usually need to fudge dice or shut down player's clever plans or action declarations. You can usually let the PCs have their win and bring things back on the rails through macro force (another plot hook, another NPC drives the action forward vs. the one that was killed).

That macro force is sanctioned by the players and IS what they want to do, prioritized over everything else in many AP games.

Anyway, my argument for different terms. Using the perjorative "railroading" for DM force applied in servce to the main agreed upon group goal (we want to play through this AP), just seems to confuse things.

I'm not quite clear on the macro/micro levels. If the macro levels are pushing micro play, then it's extending down -- play is this because of that. The need to not corral individual attack rolls seems like a trivial distinction to what play is about.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What you mean is the player is creating their own track. Right?

No, I mean the player is trying to not follow the GM's tracks. Their ability to do so is still up to the GM. You're arguing that the only defense the GM has to this disruptive player (because you can't talk to them outside the game, apparently) is to employ railroading, but the player's disruption is only there because it's bucking the GM's railroading.

The very fact that to make your point you have to postulate a disruptive player should be telling you something -- a non-disruptive player would just be following the GM's tracks. The disruptive player requires the GM to exert more Force to keep things on the GM's tracks. But, we cannot notice the role of the GM's tracks here, because you want this to be about the disruptive player.