Is Railroading ever a good tactic?

[MerricB]

There's been some great discussion here - thanks a lot, people!

DL1-14 have been held up as great examples of railroading, but I wonder how many people have actually read the modules, rather than just hearing about them?

I don't think the railroading applies to all of the modules.

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Consider the Lord of the Rings. If you were playing that as an adventure, would you consider it a railroad? Consider the following:

Goal of the Adventure: To stop Sauron.
Primary method of achieving Goal: Destroy the Ring in the Cracks of Doom.
Starting Conditions: PC has the Ring; Sauron has discovered where the PC is and has sent the Nazgul to find the Ring.

Now, is there a secondary method of achieving the goal? Not without falling to evil, so assuming you have a group of Good-Aligned PCs (as you do in the books), there's only one actual goal.

However, the path to that goal can be extremely varied. You have to reach Mount Doom, but how you get there is up to you.

Is that a railroad?

Cheers!

 

[Professor Phobos]

We can obviously demonstrate that we have quite different definitions of Railroading. To limit player choice is my definition - and I view some degrees of it as essential to a good campaign.

Horse patooey.

Railroading is the arbitrary imposition of a single or select few choices onto player actions. Unlimited choice is completely unworkable in any game and I'd find it analytically useless to have "good" and "bad" railroading. There is no such thing as "good" railroading.

 

[kamosa]

###

Consider the Lord of the Rings. If you were playing that as an adventure, would you consider it a railroad? Consider the following:

Goal of the Adventure: To stop Sauron.
Primary method of achieving Goal: Destroy the Ring in the Cracks of Doom.
Starting Conditions: PC has the Ring; Sauron has discovered where the PC is and has sent the Nazgul to find the Ring.

Now, is there a secondary method of achieving the goal? Not without falling to evil, so assuming you have a group of Good-Aligned PCs (as you do in the books), there's only one actual goal.

However, the path to that goal can be extremely varied. You have to reach Mount Doom, but how you get there is up to you.

Is that a railroad?

Cheers!

I think LOTR has the perfect Diamond shape of adventure. Strong hook pointing to a narrow goal, but no real control over how you get there. Lots of branching and twists in the middle as the players find their way from start to end of the adventure.

As a GM and as a player I've always found the hook part of the game to be the most tedious. We know the GM has prepared a game, and if we don't go on the game, it will be a lame night. So, rather than spend hours wondering around trying to figure out the night goal, I prefer if the hook is up front and strong. Save the village, find the item, destory the foes. Got it, now we can start to show how our characters react and interact with the situation.

Some games seem to spend hours looking for the adventure start and it just gets really boring. In LOTR terms I'd compare it to role playing the years between Bilbo's birthday and when Frodo leaves the Shire. You know something bad is going to happen, but you have to slog thru until you get to the action.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Not that I disagree that railroading can't be good/necessary, but Frodo wasn't railroaded into taking the ring to Mount Doom. All of the "if you don't find a way, no-one will" stuff came after he had set out on the quest. Nobody asked Frodo to take the Ring to Mount Doom at the council. Frodo volunteered himself. Had Frodo kept silent, he would have had the task of giving up the ring--a great challenge in itself.

It's unlikely that any other would have succeeded where he did either. His success was due to his weakness--the fact that Gollum could, at the end, overcome him and take the ring--as much as it was due to his strength. Still, Frodo was permitted to make his own decision to go to Mordor. It might have been his destiny. (Readers of the story can confidently assert that it was, upon reading how it all turned out). But, Frodo wasn't railroaded.

No "But Frodo you are the only one who can carry the Ring" stories

 

[kamosa]

Not that I disagree that railroading can't be good/necessary, but Frodo wasn't railroaded into taking the ring to Mount Doom. All of the "if you don't find a way, no-one will" stuff came after he had set out on the quest. Nobody asked Frodo to take the Ring to Mount Doom at the council. Frodo volunteered himself. Had Frodo kept silent, he would have had the task of giving up the ring--a great challenge in itself.

It's unlikely that any other would have succeeded where he did either. His success was due to his weakness--the fact that Gollum could, at the end, overcome him and take the ring--as much as it was due to his strength. Still, Frodo was permitted to make his own decision to go to Mordor. It might have been his destiny. (Readers of the story can confidently assert that it was, upon reading how it all turned out). But, Frodo wasn't railroaded.

{sticking tongue firmly in cheek}

Oh come on. First the GM, via high level NPC mage, tells Frodo to take the ring to Brie. Then he forces a high level fighter on him that basically dictates how and when he will travel. Then after the council of Elrond the GM forces 5 high level characters on Frodo.

Don't get me started on that whole have to go through the mines powerplay the GM pulled out.

Then in the fires of mount Doom, Gullum, or should I say the evil boxed text, took the ring from Frodo and threw himself into the fires, obviously against Frodo's wishes.

Come on it was railroad city

{removes tongue from cheek}

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Interesting contrast:

Me: As DM, I like to create a dynamic setting and let the players run around in it and get into trouble. I figure out roughly what the bad guys want/plan to do, insert the player characters, and stir.

I tried this as a DM in a campaign that ran for several years. Without a steady hand at the helm, the game drifted aimlessly as the players wondered what was going on and stumbled through the world around them without ever connecting the dots that could have informed them of the bad guys' plans. It was an instructive experience.

Now, perhaps the explanation is that I gave the players too few dots to connect and put in too many red herrings. Perhaps the explanation is that my players were beer and pretzels gamers who simply wanted to "find the adventure" so they could "play it." Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. However, regardless of all that, it illustrates one thing: there are a variety of things you can role-play but the story is key to whether or not it's an enjoyable experience. If you are role-playing the story of a bunch of adventurers who wear swords and go tavern hopping until they get bored and then get jumped by thugs in the alley when the game gets boring and then try to leave the city and get ambushed by skeletons, the story is not a good one. It lacks theme, it lacks unity, and it lacks movement. The players need to have a sense of what story they are in and the DM needs to give that to them--except in a few rare cases, they can't create it on their own.

As a player, I like a lot of autonomy, I love to interact with NPCs for hours on end, and want to carve out my own destiny. I create characters with an agenda (avenge my father, conquer a kingdom, whatever) and a plan for growth. If the DM's proposed adventures don't include opportunities for my character to pursue their agenda, I quickly get annoyed.

I've done this too. It works OK as long as there are only a few personal agendas and they aren't too different from other members' of the party and aren't too earth-shattering. If one player wants to conquer the kingdom of Cimmeria, another player wants his character to join the assassin's guild and avenge his father's murder, another player wants to dethrone Orcus and take his place, and another player wants to become a great hero so that the bards sing tales of his praise and his beloved's father will consider him worthy to court his beloved, the campaign is destined to be incoherent and short-lived. If all (or even a significant number of) the PCs have different personal goals that are primary for them then the group won't share the common perspective necessary to act in concert. Rather than create one story, you will create four or six separate stories and give the DM a headache in the process. Players who have individual secondary goals for their characters are an asset to the campaign. More than a couple characters with individual primary goals for their characters, however, will derail a campaign. In that sense, their functionality in most games is contingent upon having a majority of players who just want to "play the adventure."

 

[pogre]

Railroading gets a bad name from folks like us, because we're uber-serious about D&D and, frankly, are somewhat elitist.

However, there are tons of "beer & pretzels" gamers that literally demand to be railroaded. You present them with all kinds of subtle clues, hooks and whatnot and they get all confused and finally turn to you out of character and say "just tell me what the adventure is so I can get to it."

So railroading isn't bad by default, it's just a style that is extremely frustrating to a certain subset of gamers. Myself included.

Exactly. My players sometimes want railroading - although it is less and less frequent.

 

[S'mon]

LOTR - yes, lots of railroading there; not in the start conditions but in the way Tolkien forces a lot of encounters on the PCs - Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil, the Barrowight & to a lesser extent the Mines of Moria are good examples where PC choice was arbitraily nerfed to run the encounters the GM wanted. The later books suffer from this less I think.

 

[pogre]

Consider the Lord of the Rings. If you were playing that as an adventure, would you consider it a railroad? Consider the following:

Goal of the Adventure: To stop Sauron.
Primary method of achieving Goal: Destroy the Ring in the Cracks of Doom.
Starting Conditions: PC has the Ring; Sauron has discovered where the PC is and has sent the Nazgul to find the Ring.

Now, is there a secondary method of achieving the goal? Not without falling to evil, so assuming you have a group of Good-Aligned PCs (as you do in the books), there's only one actual goal.

However, the path to that goal can be extremely varied. You have to reach Mount Doom, but how you get there is up to you.

Is that a railroad?

Cheers!

Certainly not by my definition. A multitude of paths is the key. The story is about the journey more than anything, and that story is mostly in the hands of the PCs.

 

[Joe123]

Originally posted by MerricB

Now, is there a secondary method of achieving the goal? Not without falling to evil, so assuming you have a group of Good-Aligned PCs (as you do in the books), there's only one actual goal.

However, the path to that goal can be extremely varied. You have to reach Mount Doom, but how you get there is up to you.

Is that a railroad?

If the players choose not to pursue the goal, but the DM tries urging/coercing them to follow that goal, then it is railroading. (They may pursue the goal many ways, but if you push them to pursue the goal [when they're interested in an entirely different thing altogether], it's railroading).

However, if the players voluntarily want to pursue the goal, it it is not railroading at all. Of course, the DM should permit varied and different ways for PCs to attain that goal, all of which he cannot possibly predict. Thus, the element of spontaneity comes into play, when players choose a course of action, the DM did not expect. I think good DMs let their players try their original and unaccounted for idea, rather than forcing them into the way the DM thought the players should approach things. (Not fun at all for players).

I believe excessive railroading is one of the biggest reasons players may not enjoy a particular game.