Is Railroading ever a good tactic?

[Peskara]

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."

That's why we never start without a basic premise to the game anymore. It can be really hard for a DM to tie all the PCs together without railroading if there isn't some group cohesion to begin. So instead of everybody making whatever characters they want and the DM trying to find a way to fit them together. Character creation is for us now a group effort based on the camaign premise, such as: you're all members of the post-war baby boom in a small border town, or you're all members of an oddly blessed generation of a desert tribe, or you're all members of the Wolf clan or its demihuman neighbors.

Sometimes that's still not enough to get compatible goals for an adventuring group. So we've instituted the rule that you must have ties to at least two other party members. These can be friendship, blood relationship, rivalry, mentor-student, betrothal, whatever.

If you start out with a random assortment of PCs with incompatible goals you probably need such "railroading" tools as the prophecy or the guy hiring adventurers, to get a coherent game. (Is this really railroading?)

For D&D anyway. For our pulp superheroes game, everybody is pretty much on the same page of, the GM presents an adventure and the heroes go do it, because they're heroes. Which makes me consider that maybe railroading is built into some genres like pulp and classic superheroes. You can have side plots and stuff (our heroes certainly do), but it's kind of genre convention that the main plot hooks are really obvious and the heroes don't have much choice in whether to pursue them or not.

As for the bad guy escaping on a ship scenario, I don't consider that railroading, and not just because the players agreed to go to Khavayin beforehand. The DM had been specific in having the Marshals of the country tell us to keep our mission quiet, so as not to alert the villains to how close we actually are to foiling their plans and to keep the general populace from knowing that it's anything more than a localized bandit problem so there won't be a general panic as rumors of war and the resurrection of long dead evil tyrants spread.

In our relatively low-magic campign world a giant winged magical beast (that's never been seen in the area before) and a person riding a flying arrow, both carrying people with them flying out to a ship and forcing it to return to port, is not exactly inconspicuous and would certainly alert our enemies to the fact that one of their ploys has failed. Plus we had no real proof that the bad guy on the ship had done anything wrong. So all the Marshals had to do to keep the PCs from doing the stupid thing was to refuse to give them an arrest warrant. I don't think that having government officials decide not to help the PCs in a hairbrained scheme is railroading, it's realistic.

 

[jasper]

Ok it is not railroading if bob, sara, brian, and dave agree to take out the temple of evil toymakers at the end of last session. And then come next game the dm does the opening scene and fingers, thorin, ravager, and crisom clone yawn and shoot the messenger.
IMC I have railroaded and will again. I ask the players what they want. If they don't get the clues then I give a hint.

Now I use to have a player who always want to be free and roam. In fact he got angry on the first night of gaming when I told everyone they awoke in a prison cell with handovers and knowing they busted up a bar. This goober want me to play out the combat against him and the town guard.

He then started trying things like oh their orcs down on Hwy 66. Guys we already got 100 gp from the town people lets go to Vegas on Hwy 40. I finally had to treat to an A or E session. Either you are a Adventurer (and will bite at one of plot hooks) or an Extra (and so sorry you first level and got in the middle of a tenth level bar fight, but the Tinker Bell, the old maid, and mayor warned you that Hogwallers was a bad bar to be going into)

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

We are running a round-robin (2*dms) adventure based on a peoples exodus from the enslaving armies of fallen angels. This campaign has the explicit rule that each session must be as self contained as possible and require minimal preparation time.

For this to occur each session must have the focus that only a railroad can provide. We don't want 4 hours of wandering aimlessly filled with random encounters. I personally can't stand such pointless freeform due to over-exposure.

The way to get around this is at the end of every session we decide broadly in which direction we'll strike and by what means we'll take. I started the campaign with a one session railroad express based around my first sentence above.

Essentially what I did was set the scene with a railroad session and from there the planning is directed by the players a week before the next session. In regards to subplots, we have only run 6-7 sessions and already there are loose ends and enemies gathering. So the options seem to be naturally occurring.

Ime railroading is an acceptable, even welcome tactic so long as it is used intelligently to improve your sessions. I believe that the perfect campaign has a central railroading plot and a multitude of crisscrossing sidetreks.

 

[Desdichado]

(double post)

 

[Desdichado]

In my experience, most experienced roleplayers recognize obvious hooks and take to them gladly, thus making railroading unnecessary. Mostly.

My style is to give some hooks, the players usually react to them in terms of at least doing what I want them to to progress whatever adventure I had in mind, but how they do so is completely up to them, and I have no idea what specific things the PCs will be doing.

So I tend to be extremely light on details for preparation, and wing large sections of play. As long as I know who the NPCs are, what they're going to be up to, and what the setting itself is doing as an interactive environment, then no railroading is necessary or desirable. In fact, I quite like seeing what my players would do that I didn't anticipate.

One of the biggest culprits of railroading is overplanning. If you plan too many details, you'll be almost certain to railroad, because otherwise your plans may not come into play.

Peskara's also hit on a strategy that I actually quite like; I think using part of the first session as a chargen session, where everyone sits down together to generate their characters and make something that works out.

For instance, in my last game, I asked everyone to make sure they were out-of-towners, so it didn't matter where they were from necessarily, but that they were all travelling to the same place to "seek their fortunes" so to speak, and that they all had to actually be reasonably good people who actually cared about stuff that might happen around them.

So, railroading can be minimized even with the "wrong" gamers by a little up front work.

But I have met gamers who literally wanted to be railroaded. They didn't play to think too hard, they played to just hang around and kick some butt now and again.

 

[Simplicity]

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.

Oh sure...

Gandalf: "This is the One Ring. It must be destroyed or Sauron will exert his will over the world, and the line of men will be forever extinguished from the earth."

Frodo: "Nah. Sounds too hard. What else you got?"

Gandalf: "I hear the Prancing Pony has a rat problem."

Frodo: "Awwww yeah..."

 

[Sir Whiskers]

I have to agree with the consensus that "railroading" in the form of plot hooks and such isn't a problem. In fact, I've found that my latest group is very uncomfortable in a situation in which they aren't railroaded to a degree.

When railroading becomes too much (IMO) is when the GM determines not only the path of the adventure, but the results. A villain who must escape. A clue which must be found. An action which must be taken by a party member (even worse, by a specific party member). In this situation, the GM's already written the story and the players are just actors in his/her little drama. That's railroading to an extreme.

OTOH, if one or more players are deliberately avoiding plot hooks, doing the opposite of what the GM planned (based on what the group decided the previous session), and basically being contrary just for the sake of it, it's time to sit everyone down and have a discussion about the game. It only works if everyone cooperates in the fun.

 

[Eosin the Red]

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.

I guess since the name is professor I will just have to agree that your defintion is somehow superior to mine and that I must be wrong in believing that many of us have many different definitions of Railroading. The Professor has the gospel from on high so his opinion must be correct.

It is good to also note that there is no such thing as good railroading. Here many of us have played in games or run games that were good because we were railroaded. All of those stupid Slave Lords modules suck. The whole silly issue of them being classics and us enjoying them.....yep. It is all a lie. No one really like those modules. Railroading all the way and we know that there is no good railroading.

Nice to know we have such an authority figure as yourself Professor. I might have believed my own personal experiences had you not come along and shown me how wrong I have been all of these years. Thanks.

:\

 

[Thanee]

The way I define railroading, it's never a good thing.

It's forcing the players into a decision, altho they should have more options by the virtue of the scenario normally.

It's like reading a book, player actions are irrelevant, so why even state them. It all happens the way it is laid out anyways.

That's not what an RPG is about for me.

Note, that sometimes a scenario can very well only leave one possible choice, but that's something different. Shouldn't happen too often, tho.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Peskara]

We've found one situation always requires railroading: having the PCs get captured. It's come up in two different games under two very different and normally very good DMs. It seems the PCs will always rather die trying to fight their way out than allow themselves to be captured.

I think this may be because the players feel that if the DM presents them with that situation, they must also have intended for them to either fight or clever their way out of it before they get captured.

So in our games at least, the only way to have the PCs get captured is to start the session off in the prison cell, assuming they were captured between last session and the current one.