Railroading, Yay or Nay?

[timASW]

A different thread has branched out into a sort of railroading versus non-railroading debate. You can see it here http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?336198-Can-the-GM-cheat . Several people have said that D&D players actually prefer to be railroaded and wander around confused and witless without some GM tracks to follow.

I'm not primarily a D&D player anymore but this isnt what I remember ever seeing or hearing from people who are actually players back when I was. So I'm curious, regardless of edition, do you as a player like having your possible solutions to problems to be restricted to a predetermined few which the DM finds the most entertaining?

 

[Mishihari Lord]

It depends. I like to have a mission and prepared encounters in front of me. I also don't like being forced into something. When I DM I always have an adventure prepared. If the players want to do something else, then I won't force them down the rail, but they understand that it may not be as fun as the prepared material. They usually choose to follow the prepped material. It's also helpful to ask the players what they want to do at the end of a session so you can prep material relevant to the direction they choose to go.

 

[JamesonCourage]

The "railroading" in that thread sounds more heavy-handed, to me. The situation is setup, but the resolution is more open. Admittedly, this isn't always the case ("um, no, your spell / barrels of gunpowder don't blow up the tower"). A lot of it was just "I want to the GM to hook me, and I don't like bad sandboxes" (the sandbox example was one where there was no one looking for things to be done).

But, my definition of "railroading" is "ending with the GM's desired outcome, no matter the actions that take place." I'm not usually a fan of this approach, no. As always, play what you like

 

[Ahnehnois]

Nay.

You can have plans, but if the players go outside of them, I'm a big believer that as a DM you have to let them, or their participation loses its meaning.

 

[Gomer212]

I always fancied my games to be halfway between "railroading" and "sandboxing"

I always present a clear quest line to my players. It is entirely up to them if they follow it or not, but I warn them that skipping it may make for a boring game session. (Walking randomly through the woods hoping for a grand adventure to land in your lap may get tedious.) Most (pretty much all) players will naturally embark on the quests presented them. That is what the characters were created for, after all.

From there, it's important to give them difficult choices. At various points, make them make decisions about the story. Place forks in the road, force them to think. Consider advantages and disadvantages of each choice (but the players may not necessarily know them.) And never say "no" when they inevitably come up with a choice you hadn't thought of. You'll have to think on the fly. This is the bread and butter of being a DM.

Make sure to include the option for side quests to pop up. Completing them provides bonus rewards, but perhaps there is a penalty too. Maybe during the time they spent saving that town from the werewolves, their adversary used to bolster his defenses at the next dungeon.

When I used to DM in face to face sessions, this game style was quite easy for me. If the players came up with something unexpected, I would run it on the fly, make stuff up as I went along. All we used for visuals were a few simple minis and a dry erase grid, so it was easy to shape the game any way I wanted.

Now that I DM online with VTTs like Maptools, this game has become much harder. I prepare maps for where I expect the PCs to go, but can't prepare for every option. I end up making maps that I never even use, and sometimes I end up without a map that I need and have to build something on the spot.

I guess the overall idea here is, I prefer to present the players with a main quest line, but I make sure they must make difficult decisions along the way. It's not easy, but you'll leave the gaming table with something memorable.

 

[timASW]

I always fancied my games to be halfway between "railroading" and "sandboxing"

I always present a clear quest line to my players. It is entirely up to them if they follow it or not, but I warn them that skipping it may make for a boring game session. (Walking randomly through the woods hoping for a grand adventure to land in your lap may get tedious.) Most (pretty much all) players will naturally embark on the quests presented them. That is what the characters were created for, after all.

From there, it's important to give them difficult choices. At various points, make them make decisions about the story. Place forks in the road, force them to think. Consider advantages and disadvantages of each choice (but the players may not necessarily know them.) And never say "no" when they inevitably come up with a choice you hadn't thought of. You'll have to think on the fly. This is the bread and butter of being a DM.

Make sure to include the option for side quests to pop up. Completing them provides bonus rewards, but perhaps there is a penalty too. Maybe during the time they spent saving that town from the werewolves, their adversary used to bolster his defenses at the next dungeon.

When I used to DM in face to face sessions, this game style was quite easy for me. If the players came up with something unexpected, I would run it on the fly, make stuff up as I went along. All we used for visuals were a few simple minis and a dry erase grid, so it was easy to shape the game any way I wanted.

Now that I DM online with VTTs like Maptools, this game has become much harder. I prepare maps for where I expect the PCs to go, but can't prepare for every option. I end up making maps that I never even use, and sometimes I end up without a map that I need and have to build something on the spot.

I guess the overall idea here is, I prefer to present the players with a main quest line, but I make sure they must make difficult decisions along the way. It's not easy, but you'll leave the gaming table with something memorable.

I can definitely see how using a VTT would make ad libbing a lot harder. Its one of the things thats kept me from using them over the years even though I'm intrigued by a lot of the benefits I can see with them.

The specific example of railroading that hit me involved puzzles though, aka the old 2e "this door is unbreakable, the walls are totally unbreakable and its in an anti-magic field. So solve for X punks or sit and spin. And no, you cant make a skill check instead of playing it out. "

 

[Kinak]

I feel like "railroading" is largely defined by it's negative connotations, to the extent that it basically means "the DM providing more guidance than the players want."

So asking whether it's good or not is sort of a foregone conclusion.

That said, each group needs to find a level of GM guidance appropriate to it. What's "railroading" for one group might still leave a different group directionless.

For example, in my current Rise of the Runelords game, the players are actually really enjoying having giant glowing signs pointing them towards the next villain. It turns out my normal level of sandboxiness can get overwhelming, so it definitely cuts both ways.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Savage Wombat]

Someone in another thread recently described the opposite of railroading, which he called "rowboating". As in "your characters are in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, out of sight of land - what do you want to do?" Some players like a little railroading, like mine - they know I won't force them to do something, but they seem to prefer knowing "what they're supposed to be doing" instead of setting their own goals ex nihilo.

 

[the Jester]

No thank you to railroading, for me at least.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

A different thread has branched out into a sort of railroading versus non-railroading debate. You can see it here http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?336198-Can-the-GM-cheat . Several people have said that D&D players actually prefer to be railroaded and wander around confused and witless without some GM tracks to follow.

I'm not primarily a D&D player anymore but this isnt what I remember ever seeing or hearing from people who are actually players back when I was. So I'm curious, regardless of edition, do you as a player like having your possible solutions to problems to be restricted to a predetermined few which the DM finds the most entertaining?

I don't want absolute freedom. Sounds odd, right? Maybe I'm weird.

I've been in numerous sandbox campaigns that failed due to, well, a lack of DM direction. There's any number of reasons for that. IMO, the most important was lack of party unity/long-term goal. Often the PCs didn't know each other beforehand (met in a bar, all had the same power source, etc) and often realistically portray how you would interact with dangerous strangers... meaning distrust them or even stay away from them. I made that mistake in a d20 Modern game several years back (it wasn't sandbox) and from then on told the players their characters had to know each other. (FATE, a game that does sandboxing very well, probably better than D&D, puts character relations into the character generation rules. You pretty much cannot be a party of strangers in FATE.)

Sometimes you have players who aren't interested in the "main plot" (there may not be a main plot to interest them) and they'll go breed yaks or find ways of concentrating cocaine or what have you. (Yes, those are real examples I've been in.) Or the other extreme, where everyone is interested, but in completely different areas, so you have one campaign per player, and they're all competing for the DM's time.

If the DM has no real idea what's coming up, instead of exciting encounters (combat and non) we end up with "the troll dies horribly. Suddenly, you are ambushed by a ferocious umber hulk! Roll for initiative!" (That was an RPGA ad, and never actually happened to me. But it's not far off from things that did.)

I like the rowboating example. I also recall an example from a thread, probably a year or two back, where the railroad was "hidden". (Picture walking into a dungeon, but the rooms are "Schrodinger". However, the players never know what's in the room unless they interact with it in some way, such as opening the door, casting Clairvoyance, sneaking in ethereally, or what have you. That wasn't the example used, but it was kind of like that.) This way, you'll probably find the treasure your character "needs", probably won't run into the boss in the first room, and probably won't completely miss the boss or piece of info you're looking for too.

This means if the players do something surprising, the DM should have the power to arbitrarily alter the world (parts that the players don't know about or the PCs haven't interacted with) to make the game more fun. If the DM created a 12 level dungeon for 12 level PCs, but the PCs are curbstomping everything, I think it's fair for the DM to start adding extra monsters to later encounters. I don't think they have to stick to the 25 orcs (or whatever) that they initially assumed. However, some people would consider this cheating.