What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?

[FrogReaver]

The idea that anything with a single solution is a railroad.

what do you consider a single solution?

 

[Reynard]

what do you consider a single solution?

Almost all riddles or puzzles.

 

[Tigris]

This would make every puzzle ever a "railroad" which does not sound right.

If the puzzle is necessary to proceed, then its railroading yes.

Almost all riddles or puzzles.

Even puzzles and ridles can have several solutions.

Putting mandatory "puzzles" on players, like having to guess how they can get out of the current situation, definitly is railroading.

As long as players can just skip puzzles its fine. Especially since its gard to make good puzzles, and they are rarely as clever as the people who create them think.


In some sense riddles and puzzles make not much sense in D&D, since you are roleplaying characters, so they would need to solve the puzzles, so it should be just a skill check / skill challenge.


In a way they are also just a relic of the past coming from a time where people did read the hobbit and thought these riddles there where clever, and when it was in generally rare to find (good) puzzles/riddles, so seing a homemade riddle was a fun change.


Today, however, where its so easy to find good versions of any kind of puzzle it makes not much sense if a hobby designer tries to create a puzzle and add it in an RPG. If people want puzzles they can buy exit games or other professional puzzles with good ratings.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This would make every puzzle ever a "railroad" which does not sound right.

I am also not sure I would call that a railroad, but I really don't like pure puzzles and riddles, either. They always involve guessing what the person creating the puzzle or riddle was thinking.

"What has 4 legs in the morning, two during the day, and 3 in the evening" is a nice riddle, but there is absolutely no guarantee anyone gets the idea that someone would phrase times of the day as ages, and also factually, not all old people need walking canes. And there is only one valid answer, even if someone were to find a different solution (using different similes).

Also, it doesn't really have much to do with my character. I can play a Int 20 Wizard, but I am not that smart or versed in puzzles and riddles as he'd probably be. The Int 6 Half-Orc Barbarian player however might love this kind of stuff. And it's nice if that player is having fun and we can pretend that his solution is actually my Wizards, but it doesn't really feel like I get to play my role.

I guess I like murder mysteries, though, but because they tend to have amore systematic approach to solving them. Search for clues everywhere, talk with all the witnesses and suspects.

[/tangent]

 

[Gradine]

The presence of tracks, whether visible or invisible, does not a railroad make. Neither does adding one-off bottlenecks (like a "puzzle"). This is the thing I think that most people get wrong about "railroading" as a concept; railroading is exclusively a GM practice, not a design flaw. An adventure cannot be a railroad. It can be linear. It can even fail to account for any alternative solutions to any of its bottleneck moments. That can be frustrating, but an adventure cannot have infinite space to cover all possible player actions. There will always be an upper limit.

The trick is understanding that in a TTRPG, there's no such thing as an actual bottleneck. The classic example is the locked door. Right away, you've got two possible solutions for the lock: you find the key, or you pick the lock. But here's the thing; the lock isn't the obstacle, the door is. So that adds more options: you can kick the door down, you can hack at it with an axe, Jack Torrance-style. If we're talking D&D, you've got magic added to the mix. The obvious magical option is Knock. But it's not the only one. Maybe a divination spell helps you find the key. Maybe you cast a spell to teleport to the other side, or walk through the walls. Or hell, just launch a Fire Bolt at the door to try to blow it up/burn it down. And those are just the kinds of solutions that actually work in Baldur's Gate 3, a video game without a human GM, who can respond to the infinite range of ideas the players can come up with, no matter how outlandish and/or stupid they are (and we are talking about players here, so you know it's going to be extremely outlandish and stupid).

Here is what is railroading: the GM insisting on a single path forward. That's it. There can be tracks, but a TTRPG will always provide infinite options for players to hop off those tracks. If the GM says "No, you can't do that.", that's railroading. Plain and simple.

One caveat that sometimes comes up that has nothing to do with railroading: a TTRPG involves a social contract, whether explicit or implicit, to fully participate in the game that the GM is running. If your attempt to "hop the tracks" involves directly avoiding any content the GM has brought to the table (whether a pre-written adventure or something homebrew), that's breaking the social contract. I personally always make sure to make "buy-in" an explicit part of any session zero, as in "you are not allowed to create a character who would not buy-in to the adventure/campaign we're planning on running" because why are you even here otherwise? To ruin everyone else's fun?

An example of this was the common complaint of the beginning of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. For those unaware, this is an adventure that starts with the party heading towards a town when they see that town being attacked by, among other things, a dragon. "What if my character would not run towards a town being attacked by a dragon to help out?" My answer to that problem is easy: then leave the table and come back with a new character that will. That's not railroading, that's an expectation of buy-in.

 

[overgeeked]

The presence of tracks, whether visible or invisible, does not a railroad make. Neither does adding one-off bottlenecks (like a "puzzle"). This is the thing I think that most people get wrong about "railroading" as a concept; railroading is exclusively a GM practice, not a design flaw. An adventure cannot be a railroad. It can be linear. It can even fail to account for any alternative solutions to any of its bottleneck moments. That can be frustrating, but an adventure cannot have infinite space to cover all possible player actions. There will always be an upper limit.

The trick is understanding that in a TTRPG, there's no such thing as an actual bottleneck. The classic example is the locked door. Right away, you've got two possible solutions for the lock: you find the key, or you pick the lock. But here's the thing; the lock isn't the obstacle, the door is. So that adds more options: you can kick the door down, you can hack at it with an axe, Jack Torrance-style. If we're talking D&D, you've got magic added to the mix. The obvious magical option is Knock. But it's not the only one. Maybe a divination spell helps you find the key. Maybe you cast a spell to teleport to the other side, or walk through the walls. Or hell, just launch a Fire Bolt at the door to try to blow it up/burn it down. And those are just the kinds of solutions that actually work in Baldur's Gate 3, a video game without a human GM, who can respond to the infinite range of ideas the players can come up with, no matter how outlandish and/or stupid they are (and we are talking about players here, so you know it's going to be extremely outlandish and stupid).

Here is what is railroading: the GM insisting on a single path forward. That's it. There can be tracks, but a TTRPG will always provide infinite options for players to hop off those tracks. If the GM says "No, you can't do that.", that's railroading. Plain and simple.

I agree with all that. Well said.

One caveat that sometimes comes up that has nothing to do with railroading: a TTRPG involves a social contract, whether explicit or implicit, to fully participate in the game that the GM is running. If your attempt to "hop the tracks" involves directly avoiding any content the GM has brought to the table (whether a pre-written adventure or something homebrew), that's breaking the social contract. I personally always make sure to make "buy-in" an explicit part of any session zero, as in "you are not allowed to create a character who would not buy-in to the adventure/campaign we're planning on running" because why are you even here otherwise? To ruin everyone else's fun?

An example of this was the common complaint of the beginning of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. For those unaware, this is an adventure that starts with the party heading towards a town when they see that town being attacked by, among other things, a dragon. "What if my character would not run towards a town being attacked by a dragon to help out?" My answer to that problem is easy: then leave the table and come back with a new character that will. That's not railroading, that's an expectation of buy-in.

I disagree with that in the sense that, to me, the referee is there to react to the PCs and their choices. Not impose those kinds of restrictions. This is why I run open-world sandboxes instead of modules. I think it is a violation of the social contract on the part of the referee to tell the player to make a new character in that moment. The literal heart and soul of an RPG is the players making choices, which includes the ability to choose to engage with or skip any given content the referee presents. The referee can and should set boundaries, of course. Make an adventurer, make a character that will work with the group, this setting includes/excludes these character options, etc. But it crosses the line when the referee dictates what content the players must engage with and how.

If this is clearly spelled out in session zero, "I want to run this module" and the players agree, then it might be a player problem. If you as the referee assume the PCs must charge into a town being attacked by a dragon, i.e. charging into certain death depending on level, then that's 1) a very badly designed start to a module, and; 2) a railroad because the referee is dictating which choices the PCs are allowed to make. The PCs could decide to simply wait for the attack to end. They could decide to sneak in. They could decide to...etc. Here's the situation and here's how you must engage with it is basically the definition of railroading.

 

[Gradine]

I disagree with that in the sense that, to me, the referee is there to react to the PCs and their choices. Not impose those kinds of restrictions. This is why I run open-world sandboxes instead of modules. I think it is a violation of the social contract on the part of the referee to tell the player to make a new character in that moment. The literal heart and soul of an RPG is the players making choices, which includes the ability to choose to engage with or skip any given content the referee presents. The referee can and should set boundaries, of course. Make an adventurer, make a character that will work with the group, this setting includes/excludes these character options, etc. But it crosses the line when the referee dictates what content the players must engage with and how.

I mean, of course there are sandboxes where this is not really a problem at all, but there is a broad spectrum between sandbox and railroad; it is not a binary.

If this is clearly spelled out in session zero, "I want to run this module" and the players agree, then it might be a player problem. If you as the referee assume the PCs must charge into a town being attacked by a dragon, i.e. charging into certain death depending on level, then that's 1) a very badly designed start to a module, and; 2) a railroad because the referee is dictating which choices the PCs are allowed to make. The PCs could decide to simply wait for the attack to end. They could decide to sneak in. They could decide to...etc. Here's the situation and here's how you must engage with it is basically the definition of railroading.

Here's the thing... those are all actual options in the adventure in question. The adventure doesn't say that the players cannot do any of those things. It is the GM that decides to prevent any particular player choice. I may set expectations in advance regarding how heroic the characters I expect the players to make, but that does not preclude approaching the situation more carefully. It does preclude creating a character who would not act heroically in the situation. and "refusing to help" is not acting heroically. Again, this is an issue of buy-in, and it does not have anything to do with actual railroading.

To think of another example, say I pitch a one-shot heist adventure. If a player brings in a character that refuses to break the law and tries to turn the rest of the party into the authorities, am I railroading to tell them to knock it off? Or am I merely enforcing the buy-in we've all agreed to on the basis of the conceit of the adventure in the first place? Or is me even suggesting that the adventure is going to be a heist in first place railroading, because it's requiring the players to play a group of thieves, thus restricting their choices?

To call setting such expectations railroading is to insist that any TTRPG that isn't a sandbox is a railroad. Which I think renders the entire point of the term patently useless for any kind of serious discussion.

 

[overgeeked]

I may set expectations in advance regarding how heroic the characters I expect the players to make, but that does not preclude approaching the situation more carefully. It does preclude creating a character who would not act heroically in the situation. and "refusing to help" is not acting heroically. Again, this is an issue of buy-in, and it does not have anything to do with actual railroading.

This comes up a lot in superhero RPGs. How heroic? Is killing an option? That's why you define your terms up front, as you say. But look at how hard it is to get any two people to agree on the definition of "RPG" or "agency" or "railroad." Then apply that to something like "heroic." You must play a character who acts and reacts within this incredibly tiny, narrow band. Whether you want to accept that as railroading or not is irrelevant, that it's wildly restrictive in a genre of games that's literally all about making choices does kinda suck. I mean I get it. I've no interest in running a villains game, but as a player I always chafe when told how I'm supposed to play my character.

To call setting such expectations railroading is to insist that any TTRPG that isn't a sandbox is a railroad. Which I think renders the entire point of the term patently useless for any kind of serious discussion.

That's the internet for you. Useless for any kind of serious discussion. We can't agree on what RPGs even are, much less definitions for agency, railroading, etc.

 

[Gradine]

This comes up a lot in superhero RPGs. How heroic? Is killing an option? That's why you define your terms up front, as you say. But look at how hard it is to get any two people to agree on the definition of "RPG" or "agency" or "railroad." Then apply that to something like "heroic." You must play a character who acts and reacts within this incredibly tiny, narrow band. Whether you want to accept that as railroading or not is irrelevant, that it's wildly restrictive in a genre of games that's literally all about making choices does kinda suck. I mean I get it. I've no interest in running a villains game, but as a player I always chafe when told how I'm supposed to play my character.

You can dislike a thing personally without lumping it in with a whole actual in-game agency-denying behaviors. I understand not liking anything except for a pure sandbox as a player and/or a referee, but that doesn't mean you get to declare a whole universe of different styles of TTRPG gaming as "railroading".

That's the internet for you. Useless for any kind of serious discussion. We can't agree on what RPGs even are, much less definitions for agency, railroading, etc.

I would respectfully suggest that you yourself are adopting a definition of railroading that is so broad that it makes such discussion functionally meaningless, and that you do not actually have to do that, when I am presenting a much more useful definition that does not write off all but a single style of roleplaying games.

 

[overgeeked]

You can dislike a thing personally without lumping it in with a whole actual in-game agency-denying behaviors. I understand not liking anything except for a pure sandbox as a player and/or a referee, but that doesn't mean you get to declare a whole universe of different styles of TTRPG gaming as "railroading".

Railroading is when the referee denies player choice. I don't see how denying this choice is less railroading than denying that choice. If you're saying denying player choice outside of the session is separate and distinct, sure. We'll just need a new name for that particular kind of railroading. Light railroading. Pre-game railroading. Etc.

I would respectfully suggest that you yourself are adopting a definition of railroading that is so broad that it makes such discussion functionally meaningless, and that you do not actually have to do that, when I am presenting a much more useful definition that does not write off all but a single style of roleplaying games.

It speaks to a broader problem with the community as a whole. As a group, we cannot agree on the definitions of basically any core concepts of RPGs. Hell, we can't agree on what RPGs even are as a thing.

ETA: The flip side of that is referees who railroad always argue for carving out exception after exception to the definition so that it's so narrow as to be meaningless. I'm not saying that's what you're doing, it's just so common it should have its own page on TVTropes.