D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[Snarf Zagyg]

I would join this thread ....

but I know where it is going.

I guess that it makes it the most aptly named thread ever!

 

[payn]

I would join this thread ....

but I know where it is going.

I guess that it makes it the most aptly named thread ever!

 

[RealAlHazred]

I remember the original Dragonlance books being published, and some of my gamer friends were really excited to play the modules they published shortly thereafter. But later, they expressed disappointment; I was given to understand that you could really only follow the published story in the modules. They wanted to go off-script. It's maybe not really a Railroad; it's a "scripted adventure" which is I'm sure what the authors assumed the players wanted.

 

[Charlaquin]

Sandboxing is really hard and requires tremendous effort on the part of the GM. It's basically only possible if you are spending as much effort on the game as a full time job, which is why I haven't been in one since college and have never really tried to run one.

I disagree. A lot of that work can be offloaded to the dice. Make a lot of robust random tables, and you don’t necessarily have to do the work of preparing a bunch of encounters, for example. You can also do rolling prep - yes, a good sandbox requires more prepared content than the players will actually see. But you don’t have to prepare more than enough content for a campaign. You only need to prepare more than enough content for the next session. And, the content that goes unused in the next session can often be repurposed to be possible content in the session after that, etc.

 

[Charlaquin]

interesting, not a term i believe i've come across before.

I could be mistaken, but I think it’s a Forge term. One of many they came up with for various solutions to what Ron Edwards called “the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast” - the inherently self-contradictory notion we nonetheless take for granted about RPGs, that the GM has complete control over the story, and the players have complete control over their characters, who are the main characters of the story.

The way he viewed it, these things can’t both be true simultaneously, and there are a lot of different techniques that have been employed, usually unconsciously, to try to resolve this by limiting either the GM’s control over the story, or the players’ control over their characters, or both, in a way that will be tolerable to everyone in the group.

 

[Remathilis]

I feel this thread is going to go only one way...

 

[Desdichado]

Railroading >>>no-roading

Had a game where we spent all our time searching for quests and things to do. No over-arching anything. I bet 90% of combats were random encounters while trying to long rest while traveling trying to find a town where something might be happening.

I tend to agree. I understand the concept of the pure sandbox, but my experience is that few players actually want to play that way. It's a Platonic ideal, not a realistic one.

That said, everyone pretty much knows what railroading is. A few ornery voices online misusing the term doesn't mean that the term is useless, just that it's hard to have substantive conversations with people online because all it takes is one dysfunctional personality to derail a discussion.

No pun intended.

 

[Charlaquin]

I tend to agree. I understand the concept of the pure sandbox, but my experience is that few players actually want to play that way. It's a Platonic ideal, not a realistic one.

That said, everyone pretty much knows what railroading is. A few ornery voices online misusing the term doesn't mean that the term is useless, just that it's hard to have substantive conversations with people online because all it takes is one dysfunctional personality to derail a discussion.

No pun intended.

It depends how you’re defining a “true sandbox.” Does the existence of adventure hooks or other signposts pointing out where to go to find interesting and challenging things to do disqualify something as a “true sandbox?” If so, yeah, most players probably won’t like that. But, in my experience players do like having multiple leads to follow or avenues to explore at any given time. One might argue that this is more of a branching structure than a “true sandbox”, but I think in such a model that a “true sandbox”
would be a dysfunctional branching structure, in the same way that a “railroad” is a dysfunctional linear structure.

 

[Celebrim]

I think you may be reading more into my comment than was there. I didn’t claim styles were chosen “arbitrarily,” or that GM authority is only about ego. What I said was that early RPG texts and discourse did codify a GM-centric model, and that framing has had lasting influence on how we still talk about agency and “railroading.” Whether that authority was exercised as adversarial control, as a gracious host, or as secret-keeper isn’t the issue—it’s that the structure itself was assumed and reinforced.

If we accept this description, then there would have been no discussion about railroads while there existed an assumed and reinforced discourse about the GM-centric model. But of course, railroads occur and were discussed and examples of techniques for creating one occur from a very early period. There is just no connection between these supposed expectations about shared narrative authority (in the modern sense) and people feeling like they are on a railroad. People can fully concede the full authority of the GM to create the setting and interpret the rules and fully concede Rule Zero and actually prefer that sort of game and yet still feel with good reason and cause that they have a right to complain about being "railroaded".

To the extent that there is an expectation that is violated by "Railroading" it is the expectation that no matter how much authority the GM has you still have a right to play your character and make choices for that character. You can fully concede the GM's authority over the rest of the setting, but the GM was never expected to have authority over the player character under the traditional model.

And so I just don't a correlation between the idea that players have an expectation of contributing to the setting and having a more collaborative rather than GM centric dynamic and the notion of railroading. This discussion was going on back in the 1980s and early 1990s. It's not a new discussion.

 

[Celebrim]

Even if the referee is the most graceful and masterful at hiding the rails, they are still present. And that is the problem. That the rails exist is what makes it railroading.

IF I'm using a Schrodinger's Map then objectively I'm still railroading you even if you don't know it, don't catch me, and enjoyed the adventure.

The question is though, "Is that a problem?"

In my opinion it can be depending on the player's aesthetics of play. If a player is primarily playing for Challenge, then if I'm railroading them to victory I'm undermining their actual fun even if they don't catch it right away. But if the player is primarily playing for Narrative, then even if they learn that I'm using Schrodinger's Map they probably won't care. They probably will think, "Oh that's a clever way to achieve a tight compelling narrative structure."

Railroading is closely related to the topic of Illusionism, and may actually be a subset of Illusionism. Where by Illusionism I'm referring to tricking the player into believing that they are playing one game when in fact they are playing another. Clever as opposed to clumsy railroading is usually also skilled Illusionism.