NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="awesomeocalypse" data-source="post: 5169112" data-attributes="member: 85641">Note: Since I know thread about ill-defined gamingterminology can easily devolve into semantic argument, for my own purposes and the purposes of this thread I'm going to define "railroading" as :"A process in which the gamemaster of a tabletop RPG has a predefined story for a session, adventure or campaign, and either makes minimal allowance for significant deviation, or makes significant efforts to ensure the players follow the story as planned." If "railroading" means something completely different to you, and therefore you hate it, great. But we're not talking about what it means to you, we're talking about the process identified in the definition above, which I am choosing to call railroading. With that out of the way... I know railroading is something of a dirty word in a lot of circles. It tends to go hand it hand with quasi-pejoratives like "video gamey" and discussions of control-freak GM "auteurs" who hold the players hostage to their artistic delusions. Which is interesting to me, because maybe I've just had good luck with decent DMs (since I mostly play D&D) who I happened to be on the same page with, but I would say that a fairly high percentage (at least half) of the campaigns I've ever played in have met the railroad definition I posted above (predefined story with an expectation that the players would more or less stick to it), and while a few have been bad experiences, many more were great ones. There have been campaigns I've been "railroaded" through that rank among my favorite gaming experiences ever. Moreover, while I've also played in and enjoyed more sandboxy or improvisational campaigns, I would not say my experiences with sandboxes have been universally or even mostly more enjoyable than my experience with railroads. What is lost in freedom is often gained in terms of awesome elaborate set piece encounters and locations and a sense of real narrative cohesion such that I feel like a character in the fantasy fiction that tends to inspire our games. Basically, when I'm in a railroad campaign, it tends not to be that big of a deal to a.) Talk with the DM at character creation so I can give my character a personality type and motivation that will be more or less in line with the goals of the adventure or campaign, such that I can simultaneously stay in character and follow the story without issue and/or b.) maintain a general willingness to take hooks as they're presented and be willing to see where the plot takes us, aka simply NOT being the guy who, when told the princess has been kidnapped, declares "who cares, the princess is a bitch, lets try to take over the underworld of the city instead." Now, maybe some people find this onerous or so overly restrictive that it destroys their fun, but I never have. And I've found that, by and large when I stick to those two principles, most railroads are fun. The ones that haven't been have generally been run by DMs who were simply bad, and who I'd not want to play in a sandbox with either. I dunno, maybe I'm alone in this, but given that most of the people I've played with seem to have had little trouble going along with railroads, and have also tended to have enjoyable experiences, I have to wonder how rare my mindset is. So I ask you enworld, do railroads get a bad rap? Does they deserve all the hate slathered onto them, or is an entirerly legitimate playstyle being unfairly forced to bear the stigma of sandbox fetishism and a few famously bad modules (at least half of which were probably 2nd edition Ravenloft modules)? Are there any other players out there who actually don't really mind a railraod?</blockquote>

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