TSR How Did I Survive AD&D? Fudging and Railroads, Apparently

[pemerton]

Just getting into the theoretical view of adventure design, I'd suggest that some of the most highly regarded adventures in the RPG hobby are highly scripted - perhaps "railroads" by some.
Every Call of Cthulhu adventure is basically a "paint by numbers" mystery - especially "Masks of Nyarlahotep."
WFRP's "The Enemy Within" - it's a railroad.
Those classic TSR adventures that are anything more than a "monster hotel" - they're basically railroads too.
Am I wrong?

No. The point of the typical module, since the mid-80s at least, is to provide a pre-planned story for the GM to lead the players through.

 

[pemerton]

I feel like often people are misusing the term railroad to describe anything that isn't a complete and total "let's make it up as we go along" style of play.

If the GM is the one who is deciding what is happening, and what's at stake, then I regard it as a railroad. The fact that the players might be making some decisions - eg to go west rather than east - won't change that, if it is still the GM who is deciding what is happening and what is at stake.

If the players can make meaningful choices about how to take risks and establish stakes - as in a certain sort of classic dungeon-crawling - then it's not railroading. But it's very hard to achieve this sort of play in a larger, non-dungeon framework.

I read Masks back in the day. It's basically a breadcumb trail of clues that take the party from one location to the next. As @Quickleaf says, linear, rather than a railroad. There is nothing to prevent the PCs giving up and going home, apart from the world will end some time later (and they don't know this).

The players can't have their PCs give up and go home if the GM won't present relevant opportunities and resolve such action declarations.

There are a lot of times that its possible to have linear adventures that you don't have to "railroad" the players to follow... if the players' most logical next set of actions take them in the direction the module expected them to go. A DM doesn't have to force their players down a specific path if the players just decide to follow that path on their own.

<snip>

if they didn't want to follow the breadcrumbs given in an established module, they should have told the DM beforehand that they wanted to just "walk around" and then get random encounters plopped in front of them.

"Follow the GM's breadcrumbs" and "walk around and get random encounters" are not the only two possibilities. The GM can follow the players' "breadcrumbs".

I think this is a really good point. The most common thing I've seen when people talk about railroading in an adventure, they're really saying they didn't want to engage with the premise of the adventure.

<snip>

But you're talking about Illusionism here. I guess I'll say that if all the choices I make made for a fun evening, how much does it matter that I was going to fight ogres no matter which way I turned? If the ogres were interesting, I'll take it. But I'll give a huge caveat: an adventure like this is akin to going to a magic show. You know magic is just sleight of hand, but you'll enjoy the show a lot more if you don't deconstruct each trick.

It's not illusionism if there is no illusion.

Who is in charge of establishing what scenes the PCs find themselves in - the players, or the GM? If everyone at the table knows the answer to this, then there's no illusion.

And what is the basis on which those scenes are framed? And what is at stake in those scenes? If everyone at the table knows the answers to these, there's no illusion. And if it is the players who exert significant or principal influence over the logic or the stakes of the scene-framing, or if those things are part of the agreed game (say in a knight errantry or martial arts schools game), then there is no railroading.

Conversely, when the GM keeps the basis of scene-framing and the stakes secret, and under their unilateral control, then there is railroading and possibly illusionism also.

Relating this to the "quantum ogre" - we can't say anything meaningful about the "quantum ogre", as far as illusionism and railroading are concerned, until we know how those decisions about framing and stakes are being made.

Just as one illustration of the point: If the GM is following the players' "breadcrumbs" - so placing the ogre is not the GM's imposition of their vision, but the GM responding to the players' vision - then there is no illusion (everyone knows why the ogre is being made a part of play) and no railroading (everyone knows why the ogre matters and what is at stake).

 

[TiQuinn]

If the GM is the one who is deciding what is happening, and what's at stake, then I regard it as a railroad. The fact that the players might be making some decisions - eg to go west rather than east - won't change that, if it is still the GM who is deciding what is happening and what is at stake.

If the players can make meaningful choices about how to take risks and establish stakes - as in a certain sort of classic dungeon-crawling - then it's not railroading. But it's very hard to achieve this sort of play in a larger, non-dungeon framework.

The fallout of this stance is that your definition of railroad is so very different from others definition that using the term simply becomes confusing. Most people would not consider that a railroad. Further, the game that you’ve been describing is so locked into a dungeon only paradigm that I rather doubt it would’ve survived 50 years up to today except in a very small community.

Conversely, when the GM keeps the basis of scene-framing and the stakes secret, and under their unilateral control, then there is railroading and possibly illusionism also.

The stakes set by the DM are not secret unless the DM is following a pattern that is not advised for creating a good adventure.

Relating this to the "quantum ogre" - we can't say anything meaningful about the "quantum ogre", as far as illusionism and railroading are concerned, until we know how those decisions about framing and stakes are being made.

Just as one illustration of the point: If the GM is following the players' "breadcrumbs" - so placing the ogre is not the GM's imposition of their vision, but the GM responding to the players' vision - then there is no illusion (everyone knows why the ogre is being made a part of play) and no railroading (everyone knows why the ogre matters and what is at stake).

That is not how the quantum ogre works. The quantum ogre is still there no matter what.

 

[Umbran]

No. The point of the typical module, since the mid-80s at least, is to provide a pre-planned story for the GM to lead the players through.

My current experience with running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and recently playing Rime of the Frostmaiden kind of makes me want to look back at the adventure releases of 5e, and look at how true that really has been lately.

In those two, at least, while there are a couple of points you can expect the characters to go through to resolve the situations they are faced with, the story of how they do so is not set by the module. They are very sandboxy.

 

[Bedrockgames]

@pemerton I think you have some very good ideas about how to run interesting sessions, but this is a very old debate on the forum and I think your definition of railroad is so broad it makes the term almost meaningless (at the very least it isn't how people in this thread are using that term at all)

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

On the one hand, I get it. Bringing Strahd back time and again fits with the vampire movie fiction. How many times did Christopher Lee die in the end of a Dracula movie only to come back in another one? Seven? Eight times?

You can really tell he wasn't feeling it:

Dark Lords could be killed. I agree Ravenlloft was less about character agency and more about having their sense of power, even reality taken away, but killing a dark lord was hard. It wasn't like just killing a normal vampire. However it was still possible to do. Could the dark powers resurrect them? Sure, but the standard was more to have either the domain disappear or a new dark lord take their place

Ravenloft took the heroic fantasy of D&D and upended it (something they did in a bunch of the 2e settings, really). Any victories the PCs might have were temporary. Evil could never be truly defeated in Ravenloft.

 

[Retreater]

My current experience with running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and recently playing Rime of the Frostmaiden kind of makes me want to look back at the adventure releases of 5e, and look at how true that really has been lately.

In those two, at least, while there are a couple of points you can expect the characters to go through to resolve the situations they are faced with, the story of how they do so is not set by the module. They are very sandboxy.

I haven't run Witchlight, but my experience running Frostmaiden was that it was very "sandboxy." The individual chapters had little to do with one another or an overall plot. The last half of the adventure seemed "tagged on" with no hints in the rest of the adventure - nothing to do with a Rime or Frostmaiden.
Each chapter is essentially its own mystery/situation. Which can be good or bad.

 

[GrimCo]

Ravenloft took the heroic fantasy of D&D and upended it (something they did in a bunch of the 2e settings, really). Any victories the PCs might have were temporary. Evil could never be truly defeated in Ravenloft.

That's kind of point of setting imho. Land itself is evil. Darklords could be killed like normal creatures ( roll initiative, drop them to 0 hp, they die, same as any other monster) but they would rise again, or someone else would take their place. They could be defeated ( special ways unique to most darklords), but at best, domain closes down, fog comes in and everyone finds themselves in another domain. Escaping the mists (dark powers) is exercise in futility. That was true horror of Ravenloft. No matter how big hero you are, no matter how many monsters you defeat, no matter what moral choices you make, Evil still rules over land. To tell that kind of stories, players need to buy into it. They need to give away some of their agency and trust DM.

 

[SteveC]

Just as one illustration of the point: If the GM is following the players' "breadcrumbs" - so placing the ogre is not the GM's imposition of their vision, but the GM responding to the players' vision - then there is no illusion (everyone knows why the ogre is being made a part of play) and no railroading (everyone knows why the ogre matters and what is at stake).

What you're talking about here is a popular way to run games outside of D&D, the PbtA or FitD way (that's Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark, sometimes I hate it when people use these terms that I've never heard of). The idea is that those games have virtually no GM prep and just riff off of what the players do. They also require a very good GM who's good at improv. Sadly, not everyone can do that.

If people want a takeaway for some different ways to run a game, I would really suggest finding one of those games (PbtA and FitD are the engine that powers many different games) and reading the GM parts. Read Dungeon World (even though it is not regarded as a very good game, it has good GM advice) and take what you can from it.

It's been my experience that running these games where you "play to find out what happens," requires both a good GM and good players, so once again it can be difficult to get there.

For me, if I'm gaming in person, I take a middle ground. I have an idea and encounters prepped for the game, but I'm ready to change things up if the players attack the problem differently. And I make sure that the "problem" the game is about is something that interests my players. Unfortunately, I run via VTT these days, and that makes it more difficult for me to do improv. But I'm grabbing maps and keeping them ready for if the group wants to strike out in a different direction.

 

[TiQuinn]

That's kind of point of setting imho. Land itself is evil. Darklords could be killed like normal creatures ( roll initiative, drop them to 0 hp, they die, same as any other monster) but they would rise again, or someone else would take their place. They could be defeated ( special ways unique to most darklords), but at best, domain closes down, fog comes in and everyone finds themselves in another domain. Escaping the mists (dark powers) is exercise in futility. That was true horror of Ravenloft. No matter how big hero you are, no matter how many monsters you defeat, no matter what moral choices you make, Evil still rules over land. To tell that kind of stories, players need to buy into it. They need to give away some of their agency and trust DM.

It really struck me yesterday listening to a podcast, but Ravenloft's default setting is one where evil is the dominant force, and so the heroes are fighting an uphill battle, but in reality, none of the official D&D settings ever evolve in such a way that demonstrates the impact of player agency.

Ravenloft may consistently reset itself, but so does Forgotten Realms. So does Greyhawk, whose default state is to perpetually be on the brink of war. So does Eberron. In fact, we want these things set in these unmoving states and when designers have tried to advanced timelines and materially change the tone of the setting, they generally are not well received as in the case of the Greyhawk Wars, or the various catastrophes that hit Forgotten Realms and are eventually undone.