D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Cadence]

Again - why do you think the presence of two doors out of one room implies that they go to different places, and failure to have them do so is "lying"? Did the GM assert at session zero that there's no such thing as a redundant path in their game world, or something?

It feels like "Doors A and B both go room X" is very different than "Whichever of A and B you open first go to room X and whichever you open second goes to room Y"...

I'm in the camp that says the later is only bad if the players have an expectation that it's all a laid out map and the DM isn't switching things on them like that.

 

[Mort]

I tend to think that if the outcomes (i) matter - ie something that a player cares about is at stake - and (ii) are prescripted, then it's a railroad.

This is one reason why I don't regard The Alexandrian's "node-based design" as an alternative to railroading.

Others may not agree. As I think the OP recognised, railroading has a normative element to it, and these normative judgements aren't universally shared.

I think "unavoidable" works better here than "pre-scripted?"

Otherwise anytime you pen even a likely outcome to a scenario - that's a railroad?

And that's why I quibbled with Choose-Your-Own adventures as a railroad. It's been many years, but from what I remember, not ALL choices led to to the same conclusion and certain choices ended the book VERY prematurely. The ending (the "you won" ending) was certainly pre-scripted, but it was not unavoidable.

 

[Ovinomancer]

It feels like "Doors A and B both go room X" is very different than "Whichever of A and B you open first go to room X and whichever you open second goes to room Y"...

I'm in the camp that says the later is only bad if the players have an expectation that it's all a laid out map and the DM isn't switching things on them like that.

The reason this is called Illusionism is because it's hidden from the players -- whatever they expect doesn't matter, because they will not know the difference. It's the offering of a choice that isn't and obscuring the isn't part that makes it Illusionism.

 

[prabe]

The reason this is called Illusionism is because it's hidden from the players -- whatever they expect doesn't matter, because they will not know the difference. It's the offering of a choice that isn't and obscuring the isn't part that makes it Illusionism.

Yes, this.

The fiction of the game isn't real--and can be considered an illusion--but using fiction-making techniques as a GM isn't the same thing as Illusionism. I think there's been some confusion, and some blurring around the edges.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

I will almost always take and play through a fantastic DM's personalized and virtually unchangeable, linear, railroady story over a DM who just doesn't do a good job, has bad stories and boring reactions but allows me to make whatever choices I want. There's a reason why 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure' books are not seen as the highest level of literary quality, and it's not because you get to choose the direction of the story.

I would agree with this. A talented GM produces a better quality game regardless of how that game is conducted. I loathe railroading, but I know that when I'm playing a convention game or an adventure path, I'm stepping into participationist waters. That means I am voluntarily rescinding my character's agency as a condition of playing the game. It's akin to signing a waiver before doing something dangerous (yet stupidly fun) like skydiving.

 

[Umbran]

It feels like "Doors A and B both go room X" is very different than "Whichever of A and B you open first go to room X and whichever you open second goes to room Y"...

But, why is the GM giving the player absolute truth information about the adventure that the characters have not established? Who does that?

The simple solution to this "lying" is to not give the players information they have no reason to have.

 

[Maxperson]

So... the GM gives the players objective information about the world that the PCs don't know, out of game, and the players use that in-game?

How many of you who object to this lying also object to metagaming - because this is metagaming.

It's not metagaming as we are not using that information in game. In the fiction our PCs are still selecting one door not knowing what's on the other side. The DM has lied to the players about it. I've been in games where the DMs sometimes give out of character information like that for whatever reason.

Again - why do you think the presence of two doors out of one room implies that they go to different places, and failure to have them do so is "lying"? Did the GM assert at session zero that there's no such thing as a redundant path in their game world, or something?

Your incorrect inference does not constitute a lie on the GM's part.

I accounted for the yard scenario from your other post with, "(assuming the passages don't physically reconnect prior to reaching the ogre)" I'm not talking about when the DM has information that we don't and the physical world wraps in multiple ways to one spot.

What I'm talking about is the illusion of choice. That doesn't require communication from the DM. If the DM has two doors and no matter which door I pick, that door is going to have the ogre and the other door won't have an ogre, that's the DM lying to me by giving me the illusion of choice when the choice really doesn't matter. He might as well have just given me one door with an ogre behind it. That would at least be honest. That's what I meant by covertly lying to the players. We don't know that he's lying to us, but he is lying to us by presenting the illusion that our choices matter.

 

[pemerton]

This kind of gets into the balance between preparation and improvisation. A GM has to have some minimum amount of material planned in advance based on likely player action (A, B, and C), but when the players pick option X instead, out go the notes! Different games, and different GMs, support or prefer different balances of prep & improv.

True. But "node-based" design is a particular approach to prep: the players will go through all (or at least most) of the nodes (from memory, the suggestion is to use the "3-clue rule" to help ensure this); and the upshot of that will be some pretty particular resolution.

I think this is pretty different from (say) preparing an island for Agon - which is a bit like preparing a town for DitV - where you have "stuff" but none of the shaping of paths and outcomes that the Alexandrian argues for.

*******************************

I wrote this island for Agon - my first - for @chaochou's Not the Iron DM:

Kassos
A steep-sloped island of handicrafters and traders

Signs of the Gods
Demeter (Goddess of Law): Her sign is the seal - promises made and obligations kept.

Hephaistos (God of Crafting): His sign is a star-shaped brooch wrought out of tin, the imposition of form onto the chaos of the natural world.

Zeus (Lord of the Sky): A storm rages and torrential rain is falling as your sailors dock your vessel.

Arrival
Water flows through the streets of the town, sweeping away the market stalls and hand carts.

A crowd gathers at the edge of a cliff that overlooks the port - led by Dares, the priest of Zeus, they are going to throw a young man, Pythios, over the edge as a sacrifice.

A middle-aged woman, bedraggled in the downpour, recognises you as heroes and looks at you imploringly. She is Chryse, mother of Pythios.

You must choose swiftly: will you listen to Chryse (Arts & Oration to stop the crowd performing the sacrifice), or comfort her (Resolve & Spirit: if she wins, she hurls herself into the sea after her son), or join the crowd on the cliff (Resolve & Spirit: if the heroes win, the Strife Level is lowered by one)?

Trials
To learn the truth about Dares choice of sacrifice: he is in debt to Chryse (Craft & Reason in the temple records; Arts & Oration vs Dares).

To repair the drains and sewers (Craft & Reason; Arts & Oration my ad an advantage from willing townsfolk).

To offer a different sacrifice to Zeus to end the storm (Resolve & Spirit; if the storm continues, raise the strife level and repairing the drains and sewers becomes Perilous).

Battle
Will the heroes confront the wild cultists who dance in the under temple, praying for the sky and earth to swallow up the town and restore Kassos to its primeval state? Threats: the cultists kill Dares; more rain falls.

Or will the heroes topple Dares from his position of influence? Threats: Dares destroys the records in the temple; violence breaks out among the townsfolk as old debts are called in and new ones established in the struggle for power.

Characters
Dares, Priest of Zeus (d8). Cunning (d6). Pious (d8, and Sacred in his temple).
Chryse, Townswoman (d6). Devoted to her son (d8). Honest (d6).
Townsfolk (d6). Industrious (d6). Cooperative: Advantage on any endeavour where they work together.
Thesela, cult leader (d8). Zealous (d6). Hidden knife (d8 Perilous). Accompanied by her cultists, she is Epic.

Places
The buildings in the town have copper downpipes; the sewers and drains made of brick and clay pipe, into which these flow, are in disrepair.

The temple of Zeus contains records of all debts and promises.

The under temple, lit by torches, has brick walls but an earthen floor.

Special Rewards
Trade goods to fill the hold of your vessel.

Mysteries
Why does Zeus send rain? Is it at the supplication of the cultists? To punish Dares for allowing the temple to fall into debt?

Who are the cultists? Are they townsfolk who despise urban life? Are they descendants of the farmers and hunters who once ruled on Kassos? And do they have some hold over Dares such that he dare not drive them from the under temple?

As you can see, the opening framing presents a need to choose - but then the situation unfolds in accordance with the players' action declarations.

When I ran this a few weeks ago, the PCs did clear the drains and sewers but via Blood and Valour (ie they forced their way through, clearing the blockages and rubble); they learned about Dares debt via speaking with the townsfolk; they tried to save Chryse when she threw herself into the waves after her sacrificed son, but failed; and they ended up saving Dares and saving the records.

They pleased Zeus, Hephaestus, Ares and Demeter, but angered Athena, Hera and Poseidon (this is worked out by consensus once the PCs leave the island). Different choices would have produced different outcomes, not just different sequences of the same events.

Where I'm heading with this rambling post is that we need to talk about backstory which is often prepped, and situation and how that builds on prep and/or backstory, and resolution processes and consequences, before we can begin to see who gets to make what sorts of meaningful choices, and how those ramify through.

Choose-your-own adventure has pre-scripted backstory, and situation, and outcomes. The player gets to choose which bits of this become part of the fiction, by proceeding down a menu. That's a pretty low degree of player authorship! I think most RPGing can probably aspire to more than this.

 

[Umbran]

What I'm talking about is the illusion of choice. That doesn't require communication from the DM. If the DM has two doors and no matter which door I pick, that door is going to have the ogre and the other door won't have an ogre, that's the DM lying to me by giving me the illusion of choice when the choice really doesn't matter.

Again, when you INFER that they lead to different locations, that's not a lie on the GM's part. The mere existence of multiple doors is not sufficient to be a promise.

In D&D, the GM should not be telling you, out of game, where (or to what) doors lead, if the characters having that information has not been established. Exploration is based on not telling you until you do something to find it out in game. And obviously, they can't lie to you if they haven't told you.

I'd submit that a player setting their expectations based on information the characters don't have is a form of metagaming.

 

[Xetheral]

Don't we need more information to answer the question?

For instance, let's say this is a game of B/X D&D with PCs of (say) 5th level. The doors are in a dungeon they are exploring. The goal of dungeon exploration is to earn XP, mostly by finding treasure and taking it out of the dungeon. Some treasure is guarded, but not all of it. Fighting monsters is also worth XP, but generally it's more efficient - if perhaps also a bit more boring - to circumvent monsters and/or find unguarded treasures.

The game includes resources that reflect this set-up: Detect Magic and ESP spells that work at dungeon-useful ranges; potions of treasure finding and wands of metal and mineral detection; etc.

In this sort of game, the GM should have notes on what is behind each door: ogre, treasure, ogre + treasure, something else, nothing at all, etc. The players are expected to use their wits, their resources and their luck to find out what is where and do their best in accruing XP. This includes using ESP to find ogres, using detect magic to find good treasures, etc. So in this sort of game, changing what's behind the doors seems to me like bad GMing, whether or not the players are in fact making an informed choice, because they could be.

But of course there are other approaches to play, particularly ones which emphasise GM authority over situation/scene-framing, where what you say would be quite right: ie the decision as to which door to open is mere colour, and it doesn't matter where the GM puts the ogre.

The purpose of my question and hypothetical was to increase my understanding of how @Maxperson defines the term "railroad" in practice. Based on what I understand of their views on railroading so far, I don't think their answer to my question is going to be variable based on campaign style. Accordingly, I don't think the question required more information to be useful for its intended purpose.

That said, I'm happy to discuss my question in the more general context in which you've framed it. I entirely agree that if one is playing at a table where there is an expectation that room contents be fixed in advance, it is problematic to either not have the room contents fixed in advance (as my question supposed) or to re-arrange room contents on the fly, as the GM would be violating the social contract in either case.

The focus of my question, however, is on how a GM might fix the problem of incomplete notes that don't unambiguously assign contents to the two rooms. For example, a module might list:

Area 19. Two identical 15x15 rooms originally intended for storage. One contains assorted bags, chest, barrels, and shelves full of long-decayed perishables. The other has been cleaned out and repurposed as a bunkroom for an Ogre, who is sitting at a small table eating a meal.​

Suppose the DM doesn't discover that the module fails to indicate which room is which until after the PCs have declared that they open the left-hand door. My interest is in learning from those with more-absolute definitions of railroading what techniques can be used at this point (if any) to avoid the GM railroading the players as they try to fix the oversight in the prep.

And for specificity, my interest in asking the question at all is because I personally view GM motivation as important to determining whether or not something is railroading, and I want to better understand the position of those who think that GM motivation is not relevant to what is and is not railroading.