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

Crimson Longinus · 2026-03-04T19:24:20+0000

hawkeyefan said:
You’re mixing things up again. No one uses skills for NPCs to influence PCs as you’re stating. I don’t believe anyone has advocated for that in this thread. I believe there was some “well why not” types of posts, but I don’t think anyone has said that this is how D&D plays or should play,

@Micah Sweet has said that NPCs in D6D should be able to affect PCs with social skills the same way than the PCs can affect them.

hawkeyefan said:
But part of what makes that agency meaningful is that it is constrained in some way, or has the risk of being lost or restrained. For example, character death is the ultimate removal of agency for the player (with that character, at least). But that risk is often cited as necessary for meaningful play.

I don’t think it needs to be character death specifically, but there needs to be some kind of stakes… some kind of loss state.

Sure, no one is disagreeing with that. And there can be a lot of those that are not telling the player how their PC should react.

Because like I said in my previous post, once the mechanics start to tell the players what their characters want, you are eroding the very core of the agency.

hawkeyefan said:
But it’s not about the player not being trusted to play the character “correctly”. It’s about there being risks in play related to who the character is.

Again, this isn’t a concept that we should examine by imagining how it would fit into an existing system that doesn’t already include it. Instead, we should look at games where this is already present. When we do that, I think you’ll see that like @Maxperson ’s concern… it simply doesn’t apply.

I’m not aware of any game or table that includes any kind of social consequence for PCs that slides down a slippery slope inti every thing they do being determined by a roll.

Not everything, but there certainly are games where the NPCs can influence the characters in ways that reshape their wants and goals and there are games where the characters traits force certain sort of behaviour. Various White Wolf games (Exalted 2e being the worst,) Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc. It is not a strawman.

Micah Sweet · 2026-03-04T19:24:31+0000

Crimson Longinus said:
Explain the process to me then.

@Thomas Shey explained the difference above better than I can. And keep in mind we are talking about social mechanics.

Micah Sweet · 2026-03-04T19:26:20+0000

Crimson Longinus said:
I see it, and that sort of approach is certainly way better than one where the mechanics dictate actions. I'm still not a fan though. Also, how do you apply it to things like persuasion or deception? Like I can see attack penalties for fear, but a lot of situations are not so straightforward.

I would very much like explore what those mechanics would look like. I'm not convinced it can't be done.

Micah Sweet · 2026-03-04T19:31:40+0000

Crimson Longinus said:
The thing is, in RPGs the player's say what their chracters want to do, then the mechnics and the GM determine how well that succeeds. But when the mechnis or the GM start to tell the players what their chracter wants, then you short circuit this whole process.

There are plenty of RPGs where it isn't that simple, even as it largely remains the case. And those ideas can be adapted to other games if desired. I for example want to explore that idea.

Micah Sweet · 2026-03-04T19:34:01+0000

Crimson Longinus said:
@Micah Sweet has said that NPCs in D6D should be able to affect PCs with social skills the same way than the PCs can affect them.

Sure, no one is disagreeing with that. And there can be a lot of those that are not telling the player how their PC should react.

Because like I said in my previous post, once the mechanics start to tell the players what their characters want, you are eroding the very core of the agency.

Not everything, but there certainly are games where the NPCs can influence the characters in ways that reshape their wants and goals and there are games where the characters traits force certain sort of behaviour. Various White Wolf games (Exalted 2e being the worst,) Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc. It is not a strawman.

I have developed nuance on that option long since, and explained that in many posts. Turns out people do occasionally have their opinion influenced on the internet!

Bill Zebub · 2026-03-04T19:36:37+0000

Micah Sweet said:
I have developed nuance on that option long since, and explained that in many posts. Turns out people do occasionally have their opinion influenced on the internet!

Really? So I should keep posting sarcastic screeds in the comment sections of foxnews.com?

Bill Zebub · 2026-03-04T19:39:35+0000

I'll add that one poster in this thread, who I have on /ignore, has apparently completely reversed their position from a few years ago.

TwoSix · 2026-03-04T19:45:28+0000

Bill Zebub said:
That's pretty harsh. They may not be interested in anything else. And that's ok, too.

It's not harsh, it's observational. And I'm not calling them degenerates!

A degenerate use case just means a simpler model where the normal modeling rules don't actually apply.

Bill Zebub · 2026-03-04T20:04:52+0000

TwoSix said:
It's not harsh, it's observational. And I'm not calling them degenerates!

Lol!

TwoSix said:
A degenerate use case just means a simpler model where the normal modeling rules don't actually apply.

I took it in the sense of it a being a more simplistic, i.e. less sophisticated, model. Which I would interpret the other way: that leaving decisions to RNG ("because you can't play a character") is a simpler way to resolve things. But I can also see how, if by the "model" one means specifically the mechanics of the game, leaving out some aspects of play (e.g. social interaction) is the simpler form.

hawkeyefan · 2026-03-04T20:41:31+0000

Crimson Longinus said:
@Micah Sweet has said that NPCs in D6D should be able to affect PCs with social skills the same way than the PCs can affect them.

I don’t believe that’s exactly correct… though it is possible I’ve missed some posts.

Mostly, I think people advocating for any kind of rules that dictate character behavior in some way are talking about something more nuanced than reversing D&D’s PC to NPC dynamic RE social skills.

Crimson Longinus said:
Sure, no one is disagreeing with that. And there can be a lot of those that are not telling the player how their PC should react.

Because like I said in my previous post, once the mechanics start to tell the players what their characters want, you are eroding the very core of the agency.

I think that all depends on how a given game handles it.

Crimson Longinus said:
Not everything, but there certainly are games where the NPCs can influence the characters in ways that reshape their wants and goals and there are games where the characters traits force certain sort of behaviour. Various White Wolf games (Exalted 2e being the worst,) Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc. It is not a strawman.

Well, the slippery slope element is absolutely a strawman. No games descend into that. You’re citing games that involve changes to the character in some way. But none of them do what you’re fearing. You should criticize those games based on what they do, not your imagined inevitable descent into nothing but dice rolls to determine everything.

For example, in Tales From The Loop, PCs cannot die. It’s just not a consequence of play. An individual person can like that or not, depending on preferences. But however one feels about it, They should limit that view to how they feel about Tales From The Loop, not other RPGs.

If I said that because Tales From The Loop lacks the ultimate consequence, it’s only a matter of time until there are no consequences at all, I’d be pretty far off.

Likewise if I criticize D&D for allowing the complete loss of agency via character death because that’s not a necessity for RPGs to function, I’d be pretty far off again.

Every game will have constraints on player agency. Hopefully, what those are is understood and appreciated by the participants before play begins. Like, if I play D&D, I should know and appreciate that my PC might get killed by a monster or a trap. If I play Vampire, I may lose control of my bloodlust. And so on.

Describing these things as loss of agency ignores that they are intentional parts of play. No one is overstepping the game and “taking” agency away. These are simply the stakes of play.

It’s no different with rules related to character personality or beliefs and so on.