DM Issues: Railroading

[Bedrockgames]

I am curious, how many hear have been in railroad campaigns they enjoyed? Generally I prefer games where the PCs can set their own goals, or at least react with the greatest amount of freedom possible to events, but I've been in some great campaigns that were basically railroads. The last starwars campaign I was in, the GM pretty much railroaded us, but I enjoyed it because I wanted something that felt like the starwars movies.

 

[pemerton]

Vespucci, thanks for the clear reply.

But how does 4e - or even aspects of 3E - fit into your old/new distinction?

In 3E, for example, Expedition to the Demonweb Pits is a clear example of new school - player optimisation of PC builds plus GM as storyteller - and I would go further than you have done and say that all it leaves up to the players is a bit of colour and a bit of tactical decision-making (heavily informed, of course, by the prior optimisation).

But some of the Penumbra d20 modules - like In the Belly of the Beast (Mike Mearls) or the Ebon Mirror (Keith Baker) - don't seem to fit this mould. They seem closer to the indie mould, insofar as they contemplate the players making genuinely free choices, of some thematic significance, via their PCs, which will determine how the story resolves and what the thematic import of that resolution is.

4e offers similar variety. While it has some railroady stuff that fits your notion of new school (eg a lot of the modules) it has other stuff that seems different both from this and from classic/old school D&D - for example, the guidelines on how to adjudicate skill challenges (both in the DMG and DMG2); or the discussion of journeying into deep myth in The Plane Above, which is basically HeroQuesting by another name. This clearly contemplates that the players will be genuinely free to make thematically signficant choices that determine the resolution of the scenario being played.

So even within the domain of D&D play, I find the old/new school distinction hard to apply.

 

[pemerton]

I am curious, how many hear have been in railroad campaigns they enjoyed?

Sort of, but only despite the railroad. I was in a 2nd ed game for about a year, which was a GM-storyline PCs-have-to-decipher-the-prophecy style game. But the group was quite large (7 players, I think) and the GM spent most of his time paying attention to the PC at the centre of the prophecy. So despite the railroad the rest of us were able to have quite a good time roleplaying among ourselves - building up relationships between our PCs, various loyalties and points of difference and the like, and also relating all of that to the various elements of the gameworld and of the prophecy.

Then the GM teleported us all 100 years into the future. This killed off all the intragroup stuff, which had depended upon us being comfortable with our PCs' relationships to one another within the context of the gameworld as we understood it. It put the focus firmly back on the GM's railroad. I don't know if the GM did it to deliberately have this effect, or because he'd become too confused by his own convoluted prophecy, or a bit of both, or for some other reason. In any event, I left the game a session or two after this, as it killed off everything that I enjoyed about the game.

 

[Hussar]

Mort, JamesonCourage and various others.

Yeah, I see where you're coming from now. That makes sense to differentiate between "Heavy Handed DM Pushing" and outright railroading, because they do result in a somewhat different perspective from the players, even if the end result is frequently the same.

I guess, for me, I just have some difficulty with there really being a large difference between the DM stripping choices from the players or simply making one choice so blatantly obvious that no other choice makes logical sense.

But, yeah, I largely agree with you all.

 

[the Jester]

But, if the dragon armies are advancing, the players cannot ignore it. They have no choice but to deal with it in some manner. Sure, they could fight, join the army, try to sneak through, whatever, but, what they don't have is the option to not deal with it.

Sure they do (as long as it isn't a railroad). They could go into a megadungeon for the duration of the war. They could just be civilians and hope the fighting misses them. They could treat the Dragonarmy troops pretty much like any other wandering monsters. They could go off to the unexplored wilderness. They could take ship in the direction opposite the encroaching Dragonarmies.

It is having the option to do these things removed that makes it a railroad.

The same holds true in a setting where society is under the sway of a monotheistic and intolerant religion, where all other gods are forbidden. The pcs have no choice to deal with it in some manner, it will come up in play all the time. They will see statues of this god in all the taverns. Once a week people will expect to see them in the temple. If they don't tithe, people cluck and tsk. But is that a railroad? I don't think so.

Is it a railroad if one of the pcs is a cleric of a different god and has to hide it? I don't think so.

What if not going to church means he draws significant suspicion from society at large? I don't think so.

What if it means there aren't npcs willing to heal him if he needs it? Still no.

What if they persecute his faith and if he's caught with his holy symbol they'll execute him? Still no.

A railroad happens when the players cannot make a choice because the dm will not allow it. "No, you can't go east, there are Dragonarmies."

I will repeat the proposition that just because your choices suck doesn't make it a railroad.

Isn't the negation of options railroading by definition?

Yes. I'll even agree that there is a point where the pcs really do lose their ability to make choices because of the strength of the threat. I guess where we differ is on where that line is. It seems as though my tolerance for Devil's choices is far higher than most.

If you can get off the tracks, even if it sucks, you aren't on a railroad.

 

[the Jester]

Given that player conceptions of meaningfulness are paramount here, I think it matters very much how it feels. You don't deliver a good play experience by assuring your players that they had choices that you think they should have cared about. The players actually have to care about them. The choices must be meaningful for them.

We are not talking about delivering a good play experience. A good play experience can come via railroad; a poor play experience can come via sandbox. We are talking about the difference between the two.

Again, choices need not be meaningful to make a sandbox a sandbox. How meaningful of a choice is "We are lost in the woods, which direction full of trees should we go in?" to the players?

And yet in a sandbox that is an entirely valid choice for the players to find themselves facing.

In a railroad, you only get lost if the rails lead you there, and it doesn't matter which direction you choose- your next encounter is waiting at the next station along the tracks.

 

[Tamlyn]

I wanted to bring this up here before we brought it up with our DM so that we weren't just flying off the handle at him.

As a DM, ours is usually just fine. However, as of late (and especially in the session we played last night, which is why this is still fresh in my mind), it feels like, as a group, we're being heavily railroaded from point A to point B within the overarching plot without being given opportunities, in character, to agree with the decisions essentially being made for us; rather, we're just told (by Elminster at this point or whomever is "in charge" in whatever town we're in) to go find (insert antagonist-of-the-week) and kill him/her/it. As the group is a mercenary company currently finding itself in the middle of an all-out war between an evil mercenary company/the Zhentarim and an evil lich and his undead army, this is understandable plot development (that we'd be used to pick off minor antagonists one-by-one) but it doesn't feel like we're actually choosing to accept the contract--and mercs, if I understand correctly, don't have to accept every contract that is presented to them.

Short version: the plot is already written and we're being dragged along its path rather than letting our actions help write, drive, and direct the plot. Is there a polite way to bring this up with a DM without coming across as ungrateful and selfish? There are other things our characters would like to do (such as spend downtime to go over treasure acquired and create magic items that would be beneficial to our merc company and in the course of the overall war or retake one character's hometown) but the DM responds with lines like "well, you're in the middle of a war, so I don't know about spending downtime..." (even when real wars have campaign seasons so that groups can do things like this).

Any and all help/criticism is welcome. Thanks in advance for your time and responses.

So Isiolith, what did you wind up doing/plan on doing? Let us know how it goes.

 

[Starfox]

First, I think we are discussing different things. As someone said early on; Railroading <-> Sandbox is not an either or, it is a spectrum, a sliding scale. Things can be not railroady and still not be fully sandbox. In fact, I believe the best games avoid either extreme, but that is a personal opinion.

IMO, an extreme sandbox is unengaging, a locomotive going on its own track regardless of whether the players want to go there or not. The players are simply not significant enough to impact the timeline. Basically as bad as railroading, exchange "timeline" for "story" and you instead have a railroad. To be interesting, a campaign has to place the players at the center of the action and plot.

About my solution to the GDS syndrome - a flexible sandbox. Assuming I had made a storyline about a 2-years-in-the-future disaster with foreshadowing but my players focused elsewhere, I would let the focus of my players determine the focus of the story. The disaster would still loom, but the player's role in resolving it would be different - they would assume the parts normally given to bit players and these parts would be made the main roles. There is an episode of Babylon 5 that does this, as well as a movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which I have not seen but ought to). Basically, what was intended as the main action becomes the backdrop while the main action now revolves around what would ordinarily be bit players. For example, a would-be hero might get his moment of crisis when he decides to preserve the perfect beauty the gardener created, the great magus gets a realization into a crucial astral problem watching the ethereal moves of the dancer and so on. These "great" characters appear in the story as bit players having problems that the GDS main/PC characters can help them out with. This demands that I make NPC heroes to take on the roles the players didn't, but I am in no way stealing the player's limelight, because they are not acting on the same stage as these NPC heroes.

This leads me to a more general solution to the problem of story vs. sandbox - focus where the character's focus. Say there are ten possible enemies the 1st level characters could focus on. They pick one, with 2-3 others as minor enemies and more or less ignoring the rest. Rather than making them feel inadequate because they ignored the one the GM decided to be the main villain, MAKE the one they focused on the main villain. Make whatever plot the players investigated the main plot.

I realize this is not a "true" sandbox, in that reality changes in response to the PC's actions, but it is very far from a railroad. It does empower the PCs and makes the plot revolve around them.

 

[the Jester]

I am curious, how many hear have been in railroad campaigns they enjoyed?

I have run two games that were either railroads or close to them.

The first was a disaster and the only time I've had my players lose interest in a game. This was in the late 80s/early 90s and I'd kind of written an Ultima IV style epic quest. Ugh. I learned a lot from that.

Then a couple of years ago I talked to my group about running a low magic setting with more plot than usual. A big feature of it was that the elves were gone- nobody knew what had happened to them- and "elfbloods" (mechanically half-elves) were anywhere from about 1/3 to 1/16 elf. It ran in two arcs, the first of which was fairly sandboxy with a good amount of political intrigue and treachery and lots of hints about the overall plot line. The last session I set up so that it would be just shy of a railroad- I needed to break one of the main rules of good dming to pull it off ("never count on capturing the party") and one of the pcs got away, but I managed to integrate in my planned "last minute npc arrives, reveals she is an elf and helps save the pcs from death while the bad guy gets away through the mysterious portal that his ritual has created" scene.

It went off GREAT. I think a lot of it was because, rather than forcing the pcs to jump on the rails, I had spent many games setting things up to encourage them to want to get to that station. Instead of being prescriptive, I tried to be predictive, and because I know my players really well it went perfectly. Another big element that helped was the fact that only the very end was like this.

Then, when we came back to it for the second arc, the pcs were on a much stronger railroad. Ultimately, not following the bad guy would lead them into the middle of the apocalypse that made the setting low-magic. There was a living epic spell called the Elf-Slayer of Vardoth that was CR 157 and was committing genocide in one direction, a demonflame zone in another, etc. The pcs could have wandered off into these areas and likely died, but they might have found a way to stay alive. Who knows... but they all were hot to chase the bad guy anyway, even if the surrounding areas weren't lethal.

The second arc of the campaign had an area detailed that covered the zone the enemy would travel to his destination. It was predetermined that the pcs wouldn't catch up to him until the end; there were several planned encounters along the way that would happen wherever they went. There were sandbox elements, though; some choices about the route they were taking could lead to their choice of messed up mid-apocalyptic zone.

Though I'd predetermined where the pcs would catch up with their arch-nemesis, I had not decided what the outcome would be. That was for the dice. So the train took them to the station, but once there it was up to them what to do.

That campaign was very satisfying for all of us. Again, being predictive let me preserve the players' sense of autonomy while keeping them on the tracks.

There are so many bits of that that are totally against my normal dming philosophy that it's ridiculous. But like I said, it worked, everyone loved it and we had a blast.

 

[Janx]

DM: "On your journey between towns, on a wilderness road, with no one around, you find a huge pile of gold."

Is this a railroad because 99 out of 100 times players will take it (after being suitably paranoid about it being trapped/cursed/bait/etc)?



As far as the whole negative versus positive argument, I strongly disagree that it matters if the consequences are good or bad. In the above example, the bad consequence is not taking it. The good consequence is taking it. Failing to reap rewards is a negative consequence, it is a matter of perception that tells us otherwise.

with the money on the road, I am in no worse state regardless of what I do with the money (ignore it or take it). I'm ignoring another choice of "add money to the pile" which would obviously hurt the PC, and could qualify as unexpected or unlikely.

With the big looming threat of dragon armies, some choices will leave you in a worse state than others.

And some of you point out, the PCs could join with the enemy. It illustrates that the very nature of the PCs has relevance on what will be a threat to the PCs (as some children like spanking). I have a house and a spouse. I am not going to quit my job and live in my car for 3 years. Not without some seriously good reason. A good aligned party will naturally be more inclined to help fight evil than a non-good party.

I use DM initiated events all the time. Stuff that has nothing to do with what the PCs did, but happens to intersect the PCs path, so they have to take action.

Emphasis on the have to take action. We're playing D&D. When the Tsunami comes, your chosen character class is one that will take action. Because Ostrich Necked Beet Farmer is an NPC class.