So what your saying is, the players are fine with certain choices not mattering (or mattering only as a minor story detail) as long as they get to where they ultimately want to go.
It is, in general, impossible to make literally absolutely every single choice be world-shatteringly important. As has been discussed to death in other threads, sometimes the player chooses to wear white instead of black and...that choice has no impact. Some choices are color and flavor, some are made equivalent by accident or dramatic irony (e.g. "We can't trust Bruce Wayne with this information...but we can totally trust
Batman with it!" A
seeming choice due to dramatic irony can be very good for future drama), some are initially superficial but can grow into being more important. The only way to know the difference for sure in ALL cases is sound judgment, and your judgment will never be perfect. That's okay. Making a mistake now and then is fine, I don't demand perfection. Usually it's pretty clear though.
Could you say the same thing about the 3 door scenario? As long as the players ultimately get to the treasure and beat up the monster, do they really care if the monster wasn't behind door number 1 until they chose it?
There are three reasons why this "choice" runs afoul, at least according to my own best judgement:
- It is presented as though the doors do in fact lead to truly different rooms, with different contents and (if applicable) different opponents.
- It's honestly just not a very interesting choice without any further information, because the players have no way of making an informed decision. It's effectively random, so it's fundamentally just not very interesting, and yet it's being presented as though it's worthy of making a choice about it (even though it isn't.)
- Unlike the above "should we take the safer scenic route," there is no possibility of unexpected (by the DM, to be clear) follow-on consequences. The only results of playing Illusionist Pick-A-Door are that you get to see the only room the DM will let you see. The consequences of taking the scenic safe route, however, could be much more interesting and wholly unplanned by the DM. Having such consequences shows respect for players making a decision, even if that decision did not initially have any impact, so long as the consequences do in fact follow reasonably from thr choice.
But really, the biggest and simplest issue is the first point. The scenic route vs quick route choice, the players know for sure (indeed, they specifically desire) that the two routes take them to the same place, that's their goal, it just so happens that the risk of danger they're presuming is not actually present (or is much lower, or is unaffected by which road they take, etc.)
Worth noting: in a context like this, I am very likely to just tell my players that it wouldn't make a difference which route they take. The hypothetical clearly indicates they've been paying attention to the roads and doing stuff to help keep things safer. If things are safe enough that it's not going to matter which road is taken, then there's a good chance I would just straight-up tell them, "You don't need to worry about bandits, your efforts have helped make most roads safer for the time being, so there's no need to take extra time unless you have some other reason to do so." This skips a lengthy and unnecessary debate and respects the players' agency by keeping them informed of things they should reasonably know about, eliminating (some) false choices.
As noted above though, dramatic irony can be a great thing in context. It should be used with care and only occasionally, a tasty spice rather than a main course, but it can be fun. A critical component though is that dramatic irony only works when the truth is eventually revealed to the players. If the gap between expectation and reality is kept eternally hidden, there is no benefit. For a tabletop game, if you as DM prevent the players from ever discovering that their choice was ironically not a choice at all, then functionally there might as well not be any irony in the first place, since your author fiat powers are preventing it from ever mattering.
If you have never had a group of players get into a long debate about an absolutely pointless decision, than no wonder you don't see the value in a soft railroad
I just don't see the point of encouraging pointless debate when the characters themselves should know better. And I don't, at all, see that as a "soft railroad." It follows from their referenced prior decisions (they did stuff to make an area safer.) Having safer roads is in fact respecting their decisions by having real, durable consequences for those decisions.
I'm not really concerned what label those are given, but would the set-up be viewed as giving false choices or stealing player agency? Or would it be viewed as not far from on the fly or color?
Since the woods are only finite in size, if the players continue investigating indefinitely, the only reasonable assumption is that they do not move in a single straight line, so the fact that they might find the witch's hovel eventually is not too weird. I might include a reference to something if they have been super insistent about only travelling one direction (e.g. "you come to what you assume is the edge of the forest, as the trees begin to thin and aren't as tall as before, so you veer a little west, back into the thicker parts of the wood...") Or they just get a little lost! Nothing weird about that. People get turned around all the time even when they know where they're going.
As referenced above though, having gotten feedback from players on this overall topic, I have decided to actually pre-roll multiple possible maps and only determine which map is the actual thing just before the players enter the space, that way it's still a surprise even to me but the consequences of choosing to go west vs. north are real and not fictive. A player specifically pointed out that such "it's not really there until we choose to go that way" stuff was not to his liking and, although he had fun, he would prefer not to have that sort of thing again. (To be clear, I specifically request feedback after any major adventure and the player discussed it with me privately, never making any kind of issue about it during play. So I very specifically asked for feedback and was given it in a specifically positive and non-judgemental way.)
DM 3: When well executed - which takes a lot more than just planning - a well planned game will give your players answers to all of their questions and pull them in deeper into the game. Quality preparation can make sure that every moment at the table matters. It can make sure that you don't end up with pointless side quests where the players end up confused why they're doing them. It can give you a chance to develop storylines that engage players more than the encounters.
I've played for over 40 years. Consistently, when DMs put in the effort, it shows. I have enjoyed games run by DMs that do not prepare much ... but I've seen some of those DMs really improve when they added the pregame effort.
It seems to me that there is a HUGE HUGE HUGE gap between your
Type II Demon DM 2 and DM 3. That is, the first and second DMs are very similar, one does no planning at all ever for any reason, the other does a small bit of planning and nothing more, and the third does HARDCORE TOLKIENESQUE EVERYTHING IS PLANNED FROM MINUTE ONE stuff. One of these things is not like the others.
I have plot elements in my game. I have a world with rules, with secrets waiting to be revealed, with forces dark and light clashing. Some things I prepare for a lot, like that murder mystery I mentioned. However, as noted, I have a tendency to plan....a lot. Every little detail. That is not good for the game because it will make me inflexible and unable to respond to situations where my beautiful plan ceases to apply. Hence, I have forced myself to improvise. Usually, I'll do the planning but keep it restricted to events and participants, leaving the exact process or layout of places open and flexible. I do prepare maps some of the time, but try to do so only as necessary.
I have thought quite a lot about the cosmology and contents of the world, and continually work to improve it, factoring in player contributions and on-the-fly improvisation. And yet, despite all that, I certainly don't think I meet the bar you've set for your DM 3 here. It seems incredibly and, frankly, unrealistically high.
So it really comes down to "do the players have the option to refuse the plot hook and if so, does that end the campaign.
I ran a pirate campaign and, at a certain point, had a long series of adventures where a magical storm shipwrecked them on the Isle of Dread*. At a certain point, the storm pops up and a ship gets wrecked. The PCs have zero say in this matter unless they opt to never go on their boat and instead stay in port for the rest of the campaign.
On the one hand, it's a railroad; no matter what the PCs would do, the storm was unavoidable. On the other hand, no player would willingly say "hey, let's go sail into that magic storm and lose our ship and be stuck on a dangerous dinosaur-covered island!" I guess I could say "If the players set sail for X location at Y time, they will run into the magical storm and crash." but then I'm designing an adventure on the off-chance the PCs end up fulfilling the conditions. And if they don't the whole adventure idea is wasted**.
* It wasn't really, but that invokes the feel I was going for and is good enough for this scenario.
** Assuming, of course, the repeatedly reusing the same plot-hook over and over until the PCs opt to go on the adventure isn't a railroad of a sort itself. I mean, if the DM is gonna threaten every boat the PCs ever own from here to eternity, might as well get it over with.
There will always be SOME amount of having to agree to accept story events. The players cannot possibly be the only active, dynamic participants in the world, and if they aren't the only ones, there will be events they didn't cause that will affect them and the possible choices they can make. That doesn't make this move a railroad, because (again...) the players have consented to playing a pirate adventure and "a storm at sea" is an event that is extremely plausible from both a naturalistic-reasoning standpoint (sailing is dangerous and shipwrecks are a common result from dangerous storms) and from a genre-conventions standpoint (many great stories begin with a shipwreck, e.g. every voyage of Sinbad the Sailor,
20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest, Tarzan, etc.)
Now, did they directly and explicitly consent to this specific event in advance? No. But that isn't required to avoid railroading.
Let me turn this example around. If a player had become legitimately upset, as in "why are you doing this, this isn't what I signed up for," how would you respond to that? Because it seems to me that you would respectfully have a conversation about it with them. I suspect you would even invoke much of the reasoning I used above, that the game being offered is consistent with these events.
Now, part of the problem here is that you're inserting a module (the Isle of Dread) into an otherwise (AIUI) non-module game. That's always going to be tricky because modules are inherently a bit railroad-y, but that's usually not a problem because the game is presented as being module-based. Unfortunately, in order to insert the module, you have to properly "trigger" it, and you are choosing to use a method that requires a fairly strong degree of DM force in order to guarantee it. Personally, I would have approached it differently, as follows:
1. Next time the players are looking for information or exposed to appropriate sources of gossip (essentially guaranteed in most games), they overhear rumors about the Isle of Dread or something relating to it (rumors of treasure, for instance). Make mention of the stormy seas of late as well.
2. If the players follow up on those rumors, awesome, the plot is on and you can have a nasty storm hit them. If they don't, then perhaps a wealthy client seeks them out to ask for help finding this island, or some other adventure hook finds its way to them.
3. At this point, if the players still avoid or ignore the hook, they clearly don't
want to go to the Isle right now. Keep it in your back pocket, perhaps as a negative consequence of a bad sequence of rolls or the like, but allow the issue to rest. It's okay for the players to decide that they aren't interested in something you think would be cool.
4. If the conditions become right for the Isle story to happen, awesome, you have a fun thing to do, and you will have respected the players' agency. If it doesn't happen, oh well. That's life. The road not taken, as Frost put it.
True. But it is like saying a bunch of cooks can just create a great meal with whatever stuff they bring to the kitchen. It COULD happen. Though it would happen every time when the master chief tells the cooks what to bring and has a plan for the meal.
This is a false dichotomy. There are more options than "literally thrown together from whatever is on hand" and "deceiving the guests into thinking they freely ordered the only dish you were ever going to serve."
Same reason magic does it. If the magician turned the table around, so you saw the box with the rabbit in the table, you would not be amazed when the magician set their hat on the table, reached down to the rabbit and held it up. Then the magician is not making a rabbit "appear from nowhere", they are just picking up a rabbit.
Except there is, again, a key difference here.
The magician MUST do these things in order to perform the so-called "magic." Because magic doesn't exist in our world (as far as we know, anyway, and I'm 100% sure if it did Facebook or some other soulless corporate machine would be exploiting it for profit!)
The DM, on the other hand, does NOT have to do this. The "trick" is completely unnecessary. You can achieve the exact same end with some careful, improv-supporting preparation, forethought, communication with your players, and keeping good notes. The "trick," far from being required, is in fact a huge and unnecessary risk.
Also the same way most people do not look plot synopsis, spoiler reviews or final game scores before they watch a movie or a "big game".
Except those things are fundamentally different because they
already exist. There is no decision to be made, just the information. People choose not to look those things up because they want suspense, not because they want to make meaningful choices. There is no deception involved, and the audience already knows that the events are fixed and cannot even in principle respond to the choices they make.
It's not hiding, it's trickery and deception and fooling them. Again, many are clueless. But even the ones that know it is happening might not always see it.
.... I'm sorry, what? How is that NOT hiding???
I don't say Superior in a bad adversarial way. Many DMs do have Superior skill, story crafting, writing, planning, game mastery, rules mastery and other such things. Really, this is one of the basics of being a DM.
I don't see how it is possible for this to not be adversarial (it's literally deceiving people!), and referring to it as being "superior" would honestly sound like a parody if I didn't know you were totally serious. Being perfectly frank, if you see yourself as Simply Better than your players, that belief is a significantly greater problem than railroading. That belief, that one is
simply better than other people, is a serious problem in human society.
The Railroad is a near perfect fix, so why change it?
Because it isn't. It is in fact an incredibly risky fix that requires eternal and flawless vigilance to maintain. The moment the players realize they've actually been on rails when they believed they had not, the trust between them and the DM disappears, and all their decisions are revealed to have been false and hollow. That will sour not only the past, but the future as well, leaving that eternal seed of doubt: "Is the DM deceiving me again?" I hate even the thought of having that Sword if Damocles hanging over my head. And I can 100% say that it would upset me greatly if I found out that a DM used these techniques on me.
Further, it only takes
one slip up. One mistake. Oh and in top of that, the players outnumber you. Even if you are "superior" (good Lord, what a smug way to put it!) to them
individually, they are essentially guaranteed to be "superior" to you
collectively. They can, as a group, remember more, observe more, and reason both more and faster; they are literally more capable than you alone can be.
Let's say you only have a 1 in 10000 chance, any given session, of slipping up and revealing your railroading to a single player. If that were your chance per session in general, you could in fact be pretty confident it would never happen (as in, even with perfect weekly sessions every week for 60 years, the odds of anyone, at all, ever discovering it are only ~26.8%.) But you must deceive five people (or whatever, I'm going with five.) Suddenly, the odds go from being low to being very high; you have a (very nearly) 79% chance of being discovered. And that's with some very favorable unrealistic assumptions, namely that past sessions can never be reevaluated and discovered, and that the chance is always fixed super low, rather than varying from one session to the next.
Again: why not just play with your cards face up? It really isn't difficult. I've been doing it for years and, as I said earlier, I am not nearly so prideful as to think that I am somehow special or gifted as a DM. It would be more work to cover up the railroad than to just run an honest game!
I’ve had to resort to invisible railroading on occasion and it’s never been a problem for me or my players. If you’re having fun in a game and realize during the game that your on an invisible railroad and become crappy about it, that’s on you. You are ruining the fun you were having by holding onto your idealized version of D&D. How about just enjoy the fun while your having it?
How about just don't deceive people? That seems like a pretty good rule to live by.
Well, to add in the railroad bit.
Lets say I made a meal, but did not tell you what it is, and you can't figure out what it is...but you know it's not Official Store Bought Meat. You eat it and find the meal great.
Then I tell you it's rat, or possum or squirrel or crawfish. You knew it was unknown meat to you, but still it tasted great. If I handed you a breaded crawfish nugget you would act out on how grouse it was and how you would never, ever eat it. But when you eat it unknowingly, it tastes just fine. So the over reaction to how bad it was, before you even tried it, was just silly.
My parents drilled into me not to judge food I have never tried before unless I have extremely good evidence for doing so. E.g., I won't eat fugu fish sashimi, despite having no idea what it tastes like. This has nothing to do with its flavor, and everything to do with the fact that fugu, if prepared incorrectly, is lethally toxic. If someone offered me "sushi" that was in fact fugu sashimi and then told me what it was after I ate it, I would feel fully justified in being very upset; even if that person were absolutely certain the food is safe, it's not acceptable to conceal the potential risk from me until after I've eaten it.
More pertinently, yes, I would still feel deceived if someone fed me rat or possum or squirrel without saying what it was, even if they said it was meat that wasn't bought at a store. I would not be happy with them, even if I legitimately actually liked the meat, because that kind of omission is a breach of trust in my book. I would recognize that the flavor was good, but I would still be angry at the person gave it to me because I want to make informed decisions. (I've personally, knowingly eaten crayfish, they're okay but not really my preference, so that example doesn't really apply to me.)
Realistically, if they refused to identify the meat, I would refuse to eat it unless I was starving, so the example is already flawed from the outset. And yes, I DO actually ask what is in my food before I eat it. I read the nutrition information panels and do my research. I don't have a health or philosophical reason, I just want to know what I'm eating, and give others the same courtesy when I cook for them. I see DMing in exactly the same way. I would never serve someone food if I wasn't willing to tell someone what was in it. Even if I believed that might make them not want to eat it. It is a matter of respect and honesty.
