D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

pemerton said:

Not all manipulation is coercion. In the absence of a threat, I don't see how there can be coercion.

And if you don't realise there's a threat, then you won't change your behaviour and hence won't be coerced. (This happened to me once in a rather charged interaction with police that I had in a community legal education forum - the community lawyer who was with me recognised that one of the police officers was trying to intimidate me, but I ploughed blithely on. I wasn't coerced!)

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Is the threat not implicit? The railroading GM, sooner or later, applies the threat of being ejected from the game.

Paul Farquhar said:

The Ikiwisi*.


*I know it when I see it

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I strongly suspect you're taking the piss, but just so we're clear, that's pretty much the definition of a qualitative standard.

EzekielRaiden said:

I strongly suspect you're taking the piss

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Usually a safe bet with me.

I agree with you, how much/how little meaningful freedom the players have must be a qualitive assessment. Is it too much or too little for me?

EzekielRaiden said:

Is the threat not implicit? The railroading GM, sooner or later, applies the threat of being ejected from the game.

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Do they? or do they just manipulate events, player responses, etc? I've played in railroading games where there was no coercion, but plenty of manipulation.

pemerton said:

Do they? or do they just manipulate events, player responses, etc? I've played in railroading games where there was no coercion, but plenty of manipulation.

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And if those manipulations were seen or called out?

EzekielRaiden said:

And if those manipulations were seen or called out?

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Then they're called out. That doesn't make them, per se, coercion.

For instance, and to choose a simple example: suppose that I discover the GM is fudging, I might call it out. This doesn't mean that the GM is, or has been, coercing me.

Celebrim said:

"Railroad" is a metaphor. In a game, the tracks never go everywhere, and the tracks can very much mostly go somewhere. Truly facilitating the tracks going everywhere may not be possible.

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'railroading' is not primarily used as a metaphor, it's used as terminology, but in the metaphor that represents the terminology, the tracks only go to one location, through one pre-established route, with no deviations or branching paths allowed for the players on the train, saying things like 'the players can choose to take the railroad many places' is a bit of an oxymoronic statement as the railroad doesn't have many destinations or routes, it has one: where the GM decides it goes.

What @Celebrim is doing is something like this:

"What it really means "to punch" someone? It is to apply force with one's hand to someone else's body. But people do this all the time! Every time we touch someone, we apply some amount of force to their body, however minuscule. So I may have "punched" the so called victim, but like I have logically shown, people "punch" each other all the time, by hugging, gently patting on the shoulder, shaking hands and numerous other ways, and they are not punished! So your honour, in the name of justice, I demand the charges to be dropped!"

CreamCloud0 said:

'railroading' is not primarily used as a metaphor, it's used as terminology, but in the metaphor that represents the terminology, the tracks only go to one location, through one pre-established route, with no deviations or branching paths allowed for the players on the train, saying 'the players can choose to take the railroad many places' is a bit of an oxymoronic statement as the railroad doesn't have many destinations or routes, it has one: where the GM decides it goes.

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Exactly.

If @Celebrim would prefer it, think of "railroad" as meaning an on-rail public transit system, such as Chicago's "L" trains.

Passengers do not get a choice about:

• when trains arrive. They appear when they appear.
• where a given train goes. It follows a planned route.
• where they disembark. Stations are fixed places.
• how frequently trains arrive. The number of cars is set.

That is what "railroad" is referring to. This, then, in contrast to driving, biking, or walking, where--up to the limit of safety and legality, which are pre-existing obligations and thus not impinging on any freedoms, assuming the laws are reasonable--the driver/cyclist/pedestrian has full control over all of the above. You decide when to depart, where you go, where you disembark, and how frequently you travel.

That is what railroading communicates. You are on rails. You do not get to go anywhere other than where the train is going. If, by sheer coincidence, you only ever want to go to train stations, then awesome! But it is exceedingly unlikely that ALL you ever want to do is visit (say) London underground stations. It is much more likely that you want to visit places that you can reach from said stations. And, therefore, it's also much more likely that there can be friction because you'd prefer a stop closer to where you want to go.

GMs desiring to have fun and to run a campaign they're interested in running are not railroading solely for those reasons. That, in fact, is one of the biggest benefits of a "session 0"; it helps you tell your players what you want to do, so they can make an informed decision about participating. I, for example, was up-front with my players that I'm not into grimdark $#!+, I think that's the most tedious garbage ever committed to the page--but I do include dark things in the world. It is a bright world threatened by darkness...and heroes can be (part of) what prevents or permits that threat to come true.

kermit4karate said:

Interesting comment.

In my case, I have deep, core belief aversions to cowardice and hypocrisy. I have zero problem admitting that I railroad and that I use illusionism, or "DM magic," or whatever we call it, to keep a good game going. I'm not going to pretend I don't use them, and I have no shame about it either.

I take my job as Dungeon Master seriously, and I don't care how someone else defines the job or the role. I only care about how I define it. My role as DM is to make sure the people who play with me come away from each game feeling good, maybe even better about life than they felt before. I'm Dr. Feelgood.

I don't owe anything to gaming or Gary Gygax or the game designers, literature or the "larger RPG community." I don't owe poo niblets to anyone other than the people who play with me, so if they're happy, I'm happy with myself.

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I commend you on the use of "poo niblets". I have to warn you though, someone somewhere may define it differently than you do and that could derail many a conversation.

See what i did there....derail...in a thread about.....well my mom thinks i'm funny and that's all that matters!!!

EzekielRaiden said:

What is the unit of measurement for quantity of railroading? For freedom possessed or denied?

Because I was given to understand that unless you have a measurable unit, it isn't quantitative. Is that not the case?

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No, that's not the case. It just may be the case that we can't easily measure it. Typically you see this in sociological issues where people realizing that something is a spectrum come up with some formula that takes different inputs that they are think are relevant and then attempt to use this formula to get a rough measurement of the thing they are interested in. For example, they may be concerned with how free citizens of a country are, how transparent the government is, how corrupt the voting process or the judiciary system is, or how happy people are in the nation. They'll take surveys and attempt to use them as a basis of comparison.

Pick what you like. If you can say some thing is "more" than something else, even if you don't have an objective way to measure it, that thing can be quantitative. Have you ever felt more happy than some other time you were happy, or more sad than at some other time you were sad? Can you come up with a measurable unit for happy or sad? Possibly, by examining brain chemistry if you really knew how those emotions were created. But absence of full understanding of the thing doesn't mean that it isn't quantitative.

Anyone who has been a player in a sufficiently large number of games knows that player agency comes in a spectrum. That's hardly a novel or revolutionary claim. What I am saying is that people arbitrarily assign to games that lack agency to a certain degree (or in certain ways that they are familiar with) the term "railroad", as in "Everything with less agency than I'm used to is a railroad". And they treat that as a qualitative assignment even though everyone is assigning it to a different level.

I get around that by saying what's important is the techniques that you use at the table. Those techniques need to either be lightly employed or mitigated - such as for example as you do to be careful to get consent before hand waving or time skipping and by being careful not to hand wave or time skip away important decision points or by allowing a certain amount of retconning if the party immediately decides that the handwave went against their interests. That minimizes the loss of agency created by a time skip, and is all good things and indicates to me that you at some level are aware of the potential problem.