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

[Nagol]

<snip>

Sure, I will do that from time to time. However, by intervening in the situation in this way, you putting yourself on very slippery ground. Sure, you won't be "saying no", but you aren't as far away from railroading as you seem to think when you say to a player, "You don't want to do that." or "Your character wouldn't want to do that." In my case, explaining the situation to the player would have been functionally equivalent to saying, "If you do that, I will see to it that you die." I don't see that as being really different than saying, "No." Asking a character to make a choice under duress isn't giving them real freedom and real choices. It's saying, "See, you can either do what I want you to do and go along with my story, or else I can make things really hard on you, understand?" That's a railroad, and you'd recognize it as such if it was written into a module.

<snip>

So long as the player has the opportunity to understand the consequences of his choices as his character would, I agree with the above. If the player thought muscling a guy for his horse was only as bad a say stealing a bicycle in the modern world then not informing him of the obvious expected consequence robs meaning from his choice. In my mind, a meaningful choice is one with consequences where the consquence is plausible and can be understood by the person making the choice.

Armchair quarterbacking is easy and fun though so I'll add my two cents.

Asking for a Knowledge (Local) DC 5 check so that the player understands the ramifications of horse theft as well as other members of the society do would be reasonable in my mind especiaily if the player is new the the milieu and the character is not. Succes has the side benefit of informing others at the table about the expected risks in their companion's behaviour and they can decide their courses of action in the event the player continues his direction (like objecting and preventing the robery, turning him in, killing the rider, or getting of of Dodge before the law hears what happened).

Switching the result doesn't inform the player about the milieu and societal norms and bulids false expectations into the players because past experience doesn't track well with expected results. In this case, the false expectation (Intimidate doesn't work well) can be buried in the large set of unknowns that affect the victim's response so little harm was done.

 

[Barastrondo]

I do wish there was a non-pejorative term for a DM nudging the action along in a non-invasive (or at least non-intrusive) manner that is acceptable to everyone at the table. In other words a term for a non-degenerative form of railroading. Because it certainly exists. You can have plotsy games that don't piss off your players. The popularity of the Adventure Paths proves that.

In the MMO business, people contrast the sandbox with "theme park" play. The point of the experience is to go on the rides and see the featured attractions. WoW is a theme park MMO, for instance, and its opposite would be the sandbox that is EVE Online. You could make the argument that an Adventure Path is sort of a theme park: each adventure is a ride, and you're pretty much touring the park.

I think railroad's a useful (and not entirely perjorative) term, though, because it can be fairly objectively defined: can you leave the rails? Whether or not players want to determines whether the game is good or not. Some people won't ever want to play or run a railroad, but if you have a group that likes roller coasters, you might be fine.

IMO, a keyed dungeon map is a plot. It's a loose plot that will be add-libbed much of the time and events in that dungeon will certainly vary from one play group to the next, but it's still a plot. You enter Cave C, meet the goblins, fight your way through, meet the Goblin Chief and get the Big Treasure. Or, you die horribly in the first encounter. Or second or have to retreat, or whatever.

I tend to think of a keyed dungeon map as a situation, and the intended actions of a bunch of NPCs as a plot. So, for instance, the classic I6 Ravenloft has a situation in the form of a castle map; it assumes that this is the castle as the players arrive. But it also has a plot: what Strahd wants, what he's going to actively do to get it, and so on. The plot is in part crystallized when you use the card mechanic to select his goals. Then when you get into an adventure where you need Situation A to resolve in one specific way in order to get to Situation B, which also has to resolve in one specific way, I tend to think of that as scripted. It might be a loose script, like an Adventure Path, or it might be a tight script, which is a railroad.

 

[Celebrim]

So long as the player has the opportunity to understand the consequences of his choices as his character would, I agree with the above. If the player thought muscling a guy for his horse was only as bad a say stealing a bicycle in the modern world then not informing him of the obvious expected consequence robs meaning from his choice. In my mind, a meaningful choice is one with consequences where the consquence is plausible and can be understood by the person making the choice.

I agree to a large extent, and so much of the time when you read about player horror stories its because the DM has inadvertantly or deliberately taken to the Nitro Miller school of DMing - don't provide sufficient information about the game world to the player's to allow them to make informed choices because you think the game plays better when you spring suprises on the players.

Asking for a Knowledge (Local) DC 5 check so that the player understands the ramifications of horse theft as well as other members of the society do would be reasonable in my mind especiaily if the player is new the the milieu and the character is not...Switching the result doesn't inform the player about the milieu and societal norms and bulids false expectations into the players because past experience doesn't track well with expected results. In this case, the false expectation (Intimidate doesn't work well) can be buried in the large set of unknowns that affect the victim's response so little harm was done.

This is one of the reasons I took care to talk to the player after the event. From that discussion, I don't think that the fundamental problem was anything you mention here. The fundamental problem was not that the player didn't understand that stealing horses was felonious behavior, but rather that the player didn't understand that the consequences of his action could extend beyond the current scene that he was in. The idea that - when playing a game - that the in game actors would have 'memories' and take actions when they weren't 'on stage' with his character, and that they would utilize resources, and indeed that the consequences of actions in one scene could carry over into another scene wasn't something that he had really grasped. The player was reasoning, in essense, "At the end of the scene, the NPC and his horse will essentially disappear unless I take the horse with me. This character is no physical threat to me, so my logical course of action at this time is to try to take his stuff before he goes away and I lose access to them."

The player is a first time PnP gamer, with extensive video game experience. Problems of this sort have cropped up repeatedly. He's repeatedly engaged in actions that seem utterly irrational to me, but which become understandable if you start to view them with cRPG logic. For example, he has a tendency to see any scene color as providing a 'minigame' that he can play, with the expectation that whatever said mini-game is will have a better than 50% chance of success and will be profitable to him. Of course, this is a problem because I'm often not offering a 'minigame' here at all, but for me what is merely local color. He's extremely good at spotting 'Chekov's Gun', which in some cases means he sees my plots before I plan on having them revealed, but means that he also spots 2 or 3 plots for every one I intend because he's used to a world where adding features to it is expensive and time consuming labor and so you don't add alot of things that aren't absolutely essential to the story and intended to be used at some point. I have to be really careful about my throwaway lines because they have a tendency to become red herrings at an alarming rate. He's learning, but its mostly by the school of putting your hand in the fire and finding out its hot. I just hope I don't kill his creativity along the way.

 

[pawsplay]

I think the term for this is... Railroading. Only not in a bad way.

No, a railroad is neither non-invasive nor non-intrusive.

 

[pawsplay]

I tend to think of a keyed dungeon map as a situation, and the intended actions of a bunch of NPCs as a plot. So, for instance, the classic I6 Ravenloft has a situation in the form of a castle map; it assumes that this is the castle as the players arrive. But it also has a plot: what Strahd wants, what he's going to actively do to get it, and so on. The plot is in part crystallized when you use the card mechanic to select his goals. Then when you get into an adventure where you need Situation A to resolve in one specific way in order to get to Situation B, which also has to resolve in one specific way, I tend to think of that as scripted. It might be a loose script, like an Adventure Path, or it might be a tight script, which is a railroad.

The problem with even saying "plot" is the connotaton that you can say, "In scene 3, when the PCs confront Strahd," or whatever. Which you just cannot do in an RPG without infringing on reasonable player choice.

 

[pawsplay]

Sure, I will do that from time to time. However, by intervening in the situation in this way, you putting yourself on very slippery ground. Sure, you won't be "saying no", but you aren't as far away from railroading as you seem to think when you say to a player, "You don't want to do that." or "Your character wouldn't want to do that." In my case, explaining the situation to the player would have been functionally equivalent to saying, "If you do that, I will see to it that you die." I don't see that as being really different than saying, "No." Asking a character to make a choice under duress isn't giving them real freedom and real choices. It's saying, "See, you can either do what I want you to do and go along with my story, or else I can make things really hard on you, understand?" That's a railroad, and you'd recognize it as such if it was written into a module.

Actually, it is worlds apart. Making decisions under duress is making decisions, and indeed, is participating in the struggle the character would be experiencing. That is essentially what most RPGs are: a series of decisions made under duress.

 

[The Shaman]

The irony in that statement is so sharp that it makes me want to wince rather than make fun of you.

Celebrim already had a chain of stuff planned for this guy. Who happened to be on the road, and happened to be the ONE guy the PCs chose to rob, without knowing who he is.

Most of the npcs the adventurers are likely to meet in my game are involved in a complex web of relationships and intrigues, and if interaction with the adventurers result in an npc dying, then the stuff the npc is involved in changes as a result of the adventurers' actions. It's not that big a freaking deal.

But in the present, that can't happen unless your adventure notes say it does. In which case, if the PCs are about to throw off your adventure unintentionally, shift some stuff around. Because to THEM they don't know or care about this stranger on a horse. The relationship of the stranger to future events doesn't exist.

In my game, that relationship certainly does exist.

I know who the friends of the chevalier de Didonne are. I know the intrigues in which he's involved. Those relationships may now come into play because of the meeting between the chevalier and the musketeer-adventurer; this would be no less true had the adventurer killed the chevalier instead.

I set up my encounters specifically so that whatever actions the adventurers take may - indeed, are likely to - foster future events. At the same time, I don't have a specific take on what those events will be, because while I know a lot about the npcs, I don't presume to know what the adventurers will do in any given encounter. Perhaps more importantly, I'm not invested in any particular outcome, because whatever happens may produce a cascade of consequences.

This is why illusionism is an anathema to me; saying that nothing exists until the adventurers come into contact with it - and in your example, maybe not even then - and should be freely mutated to conform to the referee's story takes away from one of the main reasons I enjoy roleplaying games, the synergy of imagination taking place around the table producing a unique outcome.

Being unwilling to decouple this stranger from being the same man who gets murdered for the sake of keeping things going the way the PCs want is akin to a DM refusing to accept alternative decisions by the PCs to get out of a problem (a prime example of railroading).

Letting the consequences of the adventurers' actions stand is not the same thing as taking away the players' choices - quite the opposite, actually.

Steadfast adherance to your notes is a GM-crime that generally leads to railroading.

"Generally?" No, I don't believe that to be true it all.

Railroading comes from demanding a specific outcome from an event or series of events which may produce a range of outcomes if played straight.

While I don't consider it railroading to do as Shaman says and keep the stranger as the same person, I do consider it an inflexibility to adapt to keep the players going in the direction they want to go. Which is presumably not to get caught or TPK.

While I agree that most players don't want their characters caught or killed, it is infexibility on the part of the referee to prevent either of those consequences by changing the events of the game in actual play. In my experience, it's a referee most concerned with 'telling a story' who starts filling in encounters with safety rails, orange cones, and warning signs - or going so far as a becoming a traffic cop with a whistle and a stop sign outright directing traffic.

 

[Barastrondo]

The problem with even saying "plot" is the connotaton that you can say, "In scene 3, when the PCs confront Strahd," or whatever. Which you just cannot do in an RPG without infringing on reasonable player choice.

It's a problem, but I think the connotation itself is problematic. I've seen people use "plot" to describe what are fully scripted adventures, with only one way in and one way out -- or worse, to describe their expectations that whenever someone else uses the term "plot", that a tight script is what the speaker means. That's why I'd personally like to see "script" used when we're talking about something that isn't improv.

Really, it's a similar problem to what Hussar describes when he wishes for a non-perjorative term for "railroad" -- and goes on to say "one that doesn't imply that the players are having fun." Railroading shouldn't imply that the players aren't having fun -- assuming that because it's a railroad, the players aren't enjoying themselves, is basically projection. Now, it's a technique that has a high chance of creating sessions that players don't enjoy. But it doesn't guarantee it. I feel there's a similar level of projection that has made the word "plot" a nastier four-letter word than it deserves.

 

[Celebrim]

It's a problem, but I think the connotation itself is problematic. I've seen people use "plot" to describe what are fully scripted adventures, with only one way in and one way out -- or worse, to describe their expectations that whenever someone else uses the term "plot", that a tight script is what the speaker means. That's why I'd personally like to see "script" used when we're talking about something that isn't improv.

I use "plot" to mean, "Those actions which have been taken by the NPC's in the past, together with the goals and schemes that they have for the future." "Plot" to me refers to that first section of my prep - what has happened or has been happening before the PC's began interacting with these NPC's. It's a description of past events, ultimate goals, and steps that they are most likely to take from here. To me its almost synonymous with "Background", and its the part of my preperation that most distinguishes a story based adventure from a location based adventure. When prepping a location like a wilderness or a cavern complex, I'll probably pay very little attention to the current inhabitants recent history. When prepping a story based adventure I'll probably spend a couple of pages outlining the story thus far and into which the PC's will be inserted by 'chance events'.

To me, in an RPG, the term 'plot' even more greatly emphasises its primary sense of "a secret plan or scheme to accomplish some purpose, esp. a hostile, unlawful, or evil purpose: a plot to overthrow the government." alongside that of its secondary literary sense of, "the plan, scheme, or main story of a literary or dramatic work, as a play, novel, or short story." so that the word has a particularly attractive double meaning.

From the plot I can get some vague idea of how future events will unfold, but I generally don't script out alot of future events and certainly not more than a session in advance. Too much can occur in a session that invalidates any far off event. However, I can generally plan "plots" out retrospectively based on what the PC's have been doing, and what the NPC must have been doing (in my estimation of course) based on what the NPC could have known, accomplished, and intends to do. So each week I might arrive with a new "plot" that summarizes what else has been going on in the world 'offstage' as it were, and how these events are likely to impact or eventually come to the attention of the PC's.

The summation of these plots and the events that occur in the game is the campaign's story.

"Railroading" refers to the practice of using illusionism to achieve particularly desirable plot, for example, insuring the success of the players when failure would not be deemed desirable or in insuring the failure of the players (and hense the success of 'the plot' in both senses of the word) when failure is not deemed dramatically desirable or insuring that a series of events occurs in what is deemed a dramaticly desirable order or simply for more pragmatic reasons such as insuring that the majority of the time the players stay somewhere in the area the DM has had time to sufficiently prepare and detail. Some DMs are of course better at it than others, some need to rely on it less than others by virtue of better prep, and others use a lighter hand than others. But I've yet to see the DM that doesn't use some techniques that amount to railroading.

 

[pawsplay]

It's a problem, but I think the connotation itself is problematic. I've seen people use "plot" to describe what are fully scripted adventures, with only one way in and one way out -- or worse, to describe their expectations that whenever someone else uses the term "plot", that a tight script is what the speaker means. That's why I'd personally like to see "script" used when we're talking about something that isn't improv.

Really, it's a similar problem to what Hussar describes when he wishes for a non-perjorative term for "railroad" -- and goes on to say "one that doesn't imply that the players are having fun." Railroading shouldn't imply that the players aren't having fun -- assuming that because it's a railroad, the players aren't enjoying themselves, is basically projection. Now, it's a technique that has a high chance of creating sessions that players don't enjoy. But it doesn't guarantee it. I feel there's a similar level of projection that has made the word "plot" a nastier four-letter word than it deserves.

Simply because the players allow themselves to be entertained doesn't let the GM off the hook. Certainly, i would not say railroading guarantees no one has fun, and I said so in a previous post. But it is a dysfunctional process.

Some of the talk seems to refer to railroading as a technique, which I don't think fits the parameters of discussion. Railroading is a style, which includes techniques such as abandoning illusionism, narrative fiat, withholding in-game knowledge, removing meanginful choices, and so forth. I don't think a "little bit" of railroading is ever good, though it may not be bad. I think if you want to run a successful game, artful illusionism, narrative flexibility, imaginative play, and meanginful choices are good things.

If you don't think "railroading" is a four-letter word, maybe you haven't really seen it.