Recent content by Celebrim

The Dragonlance adventure path was the first time I remember this becoming a big debate, precisely because by the text the adventures had a lot of very heavy handed railroading advice. Railroads had occurred before in D&D, but not campaign length ones and not with just heavy handed devices for...

That's true of a linear game because you can generally expect where the next session is going to be. But in a true sandbox you are unlikely to guess what is going to happen. Generally speaking, I'd only expect to be able to prep for only the next session in a sandbox campaign if and only if it...

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...

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...

I think that is a grotesquely simplified version of not only RPG history but the dynamics of play. My reading of the very first RPG campaign as conducted by Dave Arneson is he very much wanted to run an open world sandbox with lots of player agency and player driven goals but that his players...

So, interesting experiment. I have thoughts about it but I don't want to give spoilers.

Sandboxing isn't the opposite of railroading. Sandboxing or "open world" is the opposite of a linear adventure or "adventure path". But it is appropriate to think of sandboxing as "off-roading" anyway I think. The defining trait of a sandbox is that you prepare far more content than you...

This is clumsy implementation of the Tiny World railroading technique often by a GM who self-deludes themselves into believing that they run sand boxes (often by GMs who do little prep). Typically such GMs are effusively dismissive of GMs that railroad. As a result, they remove from the Tiny...

I think there is a very compelling argument that a game becomes a railroad when the GMs track laying and railroading techniques are so artless and clumsy that they become obvious and grating to the players.

Sure but this can verge on the GM saying, "Your character wouldn't do that." Indeed, having a game system that encourages the players to take beliefs, bonds, goals ect. and then encourages the GM to invent scenarios specifically to "challenge" those beliefs, bonds, or goals is a pretty hard...

The problem with this is that either you have to accept a dungeon map is an example of railroading, or else accept that railroading is so ubiquitous and essential to RPGs that the term has no meaning. In real world, people don't have unlimited agency. You and I are rather constrained in what...

This is called a "Rowboat World". You can go anywhere but you have to put in all the effort and the vast majority of what you find will be just empty, meaningless and featureless. It's an example of a dysfunctional sandbox the way a railroad is an example of a dysfunctional adventure path.

Well, we seem to be on the same page. A good starting point for what I think is this thread: https://www.enworld.org/threads/techniques-for-railroading.298368/ The reason for this is that people treat "railroading" as a qualitative thing like, "Are you railroading or not?" It's actually a...

1) Skill system doesn't cover all the tasks someone can purpose to do, leading to squinting as to what skill should cover what. 2) Skill system conversely doesn't cleanly divide tasks so that there is lots of overlap, leading to either arguments over the skill to use or some skills being much...

I kind of come at the problem in the opposite direction. It's probably reasonable to assume that 75% of goblins are vicious cannibals who only want to kill, enslave, and eat everything that isn't a goblin. But the PC's are very unlikely to encounter that "representative goblin" as their first...