"Railroading" is just a pejorative term for...

[Ariosto]

But eventually, they get there. It is just a question of what it costs them and what happens to the world in the meantime.

That is one way to set up an interesting game even if the "destination" in one sense is preordained. That factor is simply not an outcome that is actually at stake -- but there are stakes at risk, and better and worse strategies.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Murder mysteries are "special" cases to me, in that they often are hard to GM such that the players fully understand the clues and have a valid chance to solve them. The result is, a majority of murder mysteries would be unsolved if the GM didn't apply some lubricant to make the players as effective as their fictional counterparts.

The Three Clue Rule changed my life.

 

[Janx]

Reread my post. That's not what I said. (In fact, I explicitly said exactly the opposite.)

Actually, that's exactly what you said:
"but what I was thinking of was specifically JITP where each scene only has one exit:"

And here you're making the definition of "linear" so loose that you could accurately describe the West Marches sandbox as linear:

The PCs are going to explore.
The PCs are going to find something interesting.
The PCs are going to explore it until they go back to town or die.

Also not useful, IMO.

And I also said that. At the Macro level, most PC activities are linear. And that as such, it wasn't useful to discern where flexibility needs to be added.

On my definition of railroading, remember, I only define it in the narrowest zone, wherein 90% of all DMs consider it bad behavior. What Celebrim defines as stuff that CAN be railroading, I consider to be valid tools unless abused.


But anyway, thanks for defining a linear adventure example. Except for what I consider a travel adventure (basically time filling/rat killing for low levels as they get to their destination), I don't tend to write my material that way that it is hard-coded (if they don't go to location 2, they'll never know how to get to location 3).

 

[Celebrim]

On my definition of railroading, remember, I only define it in the narrowest zone, wherein 90% of all DMs consider it bad behavior. What Celebrim defines as stuff that CAN be railroading, I consider to be valid tools unless abused.

We'll be on the same page when you realize that I consider railroading a valid tool unless abused/over used/done artlessly/whatever. Granted, if anything, I consider it overused and less than artfully done in many published examples of play (granting, most of those were intended for a tournament environment having limited time and limited goals), but not without also noting that many people nonetheless enjoyed those scenarios.

All that being said, I still disagree with the claim cited by the OP. "Railroading" in the usual pejorative sense is indeed a DM crime. While not everything that is called 'railroading' actually is railroading, when the DM is actually called out on railroading when he's actually railroading it is time IMO to immediately stop the train and mea culpa. Railroading is likewise not required to 'tell a good story' or 'insure that the PCs have something to do' though railroading may be the only option of you have nothing prepared and does in many cases (those not involving DM narciscism) at least beat sitting in a rowboat.

 

[Janx]

I'm down with what Celebrims saying.

I prefer to keep the label for just outright bad Dm behavior.

Otherwise, because of the negative connotation the term has to many gamers, the only non-railroad way is to sandbox.

And I reject that notion based on my experience of not sandboxing and not railroading

 

[Celebrim]

Otherwise, because of the negative connotation the term has to many gamers, the only non-railroad way is to sandbox.

And I reject that notion based on my experience of not sandboxing and not railroading

I reject the notion that the opposite of sandboxing is railroading. The two terms aren't directly comparable. The opposite of railroading is what I call rowboating. The opposite of a sandbox is what is usually called now an adventure path. For example, GDQ is not a sandbox but rather a recognizable adventure path, but for the most part fans of 'classic play' do not claim that it is a railroad either.

As I said, not everything that is called a railroad is actually a railroad. Sometimes players with strong sandbox preferences (or what they think are sandbox preferences) will call a game a railroad if it isn't sufficiently sandbox-y for them. Sometimes players will perjure a game as a 'railroad' in an effort to take narrative authority from the GM. For example, I've seen players who would try to brow beat a DM by narrating not what he did but its intended outcome, and who would then call 'railroad' if the outcome of his propositions wasn't what he'd imagined it would be (that, or he'd call for a retcon, claiming his character would have done something different had he understood the situation better).

The comic Knights of the Dinner Table is marked by the fact that the players consider pretty much everything the DM does to be a 'railroad', whether it is or not. That BA attempts to control their dysfunctional behavior by actually railroading them tends to only, and comicly (or tragicly), make it worse.

All that being said, I think that either you have an adventure path, or you have a sandbox, or you have some complex mix of the two ('narrow-broad-narrow' or 'Theme Parks' or whatever). I don't agree that just because you can plot a game on a separate axis of player empowerment or narrative authority (whatever you want to call it), that such games lose their 'linear coordinates'. What is true is that on a graph of 'linearity' vs. 'player empowerment', games that feature alot of railroading tend to cluster in the corner marked by high linearity and low player empowerment. High player empowerment is definately a way to avoid a railroad, but it isn't necessarily a way to avoid linearity. If you want to use a 'railroad' analogy, it's something like the railroad in China Miéville's 'Iron Council' - yes, you are on a train, but the players have some authority to decide where to lay the rails (or more accurately, they have some authority to do the landscaping around the train).

 

[Ariosto]

All that being said, I still disagree with the claim cited by the OP. "Railroading" in the usual pejorative sense is indeed a DM crime.

I think the cited quip was -- intentionally or not -- a telling comment on the class of play with which the wag was acquainted. Able players get things done without needing a "Black Sox" scandal every game!

Otherwise, because of the negative connotation the term has to many gamers, the only non-railroad way is to sandbox.

You've got that backwards! The games simply were what they were, as described in the rules-books. Nowadays, what used to be called a "campaign" gets called a "sandbox". That's not the only way to use the D&D rules, but it is the way the rules specify for setting up a campaign.

While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed.

Likewise, we can play smaller scenarios of Rise and Decline of the Third Reich -- but the multiplayer campaign game is what it is.

"Railroading" is an offense regardless of whether we are playing a campaign or a limited scenario. It is just the case that they are two significantly different things.

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The scope of the campaign game is ever so much greater! We can use a subset of the Checkers board and pieces to play Tic Tac Toe, and that may be fun. To get confined to a 3x3 area of the board while trying to play Checkers would be infuriating!
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The only way to play the game is to play the game. Breaking the rules is something else. When it's a violation of the letter of the rules, we call it "cheating". When it's a breach of faith with the spirit of the game and the trust of the players, but the rules applicable are not so cut and dried, some other term may seem meet.

People in another place (and perhaps another era) might have said, "That's just not cricket."

Now, baseball literally is not cricket -- but it's not called cricket, either. We don't expect them to be the same game. We don't get upset over "violations" of rules that simply do not apply.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Actually, that's exactly what you said:
"but what I was thinking of was specifically JITP where each scene only has one exit:"

What I wrote in my original post: "(You could use "just in time prep" to create non-linear structures, of course.)"

I'm unclear on how you failed to comprehend that sentence.

And I also said that. At the Macro level, most PC activities are linear.

What you're describing is not linearity; it's vagueness coupled with a fuzzy, 20-20 hindsight.

Saying, "I woke up. Later I will go to sleep." And concluding that, therefore, life is linear and without meaningful choice is, at best, sophomoric.

 

[Ariosto]

For example, GDQ is not a sandbox but rather a recognizable adventure path, but for the most part fans of 'classic play' do not claim that it is a railroad either.

I'll call it a railroad if, when we try to high-tail it somewhere other than the hill giants' settlement, it's like trying to get out of Hobb's End (In the Mouth of Madness) -- but not due to any such supernatural feature of the world with which we can actually deal.

I'll call it a railroad if we are likewise arbitrarily barred from joining the giants rather than massacring them, or if we have no choice but to go all the way down the line to "the finale" with Lolth. I call it a railroad when there is such a thing as "the line" to have "the finale" in the first place!

However, this is all relative to a campaign. If those "rails" are presented as the Origins '78 Tournament, or simply as "playing through these modules", then there's no imposture in constraints that are necessary assumptions of the scenario.

That's entirely separate from a campaign.

To deal with one common aspect: If one considers the GDQ modules as "an adventure" in the sense of a dramatic series of events conforming to a script in the text (which is actually not how they are written, except in cursory framing equally applicable -- or disposable! -- if any one were used singly, as I recall***) then considerable "railroading" may be necessary to get full use of them. If that's how one sees them, and one does not want to "waste money" already invested in purchasing them, then there is strong incentive to rig the game.

It would be unsporting to bring a character back into a campaign after going through a process rigged to ensure its survival to the end, with experience points and magic nonetheless accruing -- unless the other players got the same deal. It would be like playing a video game in the home version with a cracked and trained copy, then claiming that high score in the arcade.

*** At any rate, I never met anyone who felt it necessary to run them as an "adventure path" (which jargon had yet to be invented). The implication that an adventure path is not a railroad to "fans of classic play" may be an inference from a false premise.

 

[Ariosto]

Riffing on the computer-game analogy:

The Dungeon Master is in great part a game designer.

That it was (in early releases) impossible to finish Jet Set Willy was what we call a "bug" -- an inadvertent flaw in the coding, rather than an intentional part of the design. It was not supposed to be a scam when the publisher offered a case of champagne and a helicopter ride to the first player to win the game!

Designers also sometimes intentionally impose or prohibit things in ways that players reckon "unfair". There are no formal, written rules whatsoever as to what kinds of situations are permitted. We are perfectly free to design games that players don't want to play.

"Unfair" or "railroad" is a more specific term than "bad", suggesting a certain kind of badness.