D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, absolutely.



They are interchangeable to me. I am not describing anyone's games other than ones I've been in. If I'm playing an adventure path, it's not meaningfully different experience to me than a railroad. It's gonna be A followed by B which leads to C and then on to D and so on.

Now, I'm not using railroad as a pejorative because as has been pointed out several times now, it's not always one. There may be reasons to play that way. Some folks actually like it.



Maybe it's the people who describe a way of playing that others partake in and enjoy as objectively bad that are being the a-holes?



And are these examples of you "altering reality" or are you just doing what you need to do, and establishing elements as they are needed or become relevant in some way?



Yeah, obviously. And I'd like if D&D were a little more suited to my liking. That's why I don't tend to like the conservative mindset to keep everything as it is. The game can be improved.

I'm sure there are plenty of games out that are already more to your liking. Why should D&D change for you? I doubt you'd afford me the same courtesy.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But you don't care that there are people who happily play and run railroad type games and you're classifying their fun as offensive?

Don't you think that's worse? Don't you think that's a flawed way to look at it?

As for my use, I've explained how I use the term and I've explained some of my associated preferences. I've explained why I think it actually stinks to use it as a pejorative. Anyone who has been speaking with me about it is now free to understand and accept my take on it, or else continue to engage with me as if I'm saying something I'm not. That's their choice.

Putting your definition of a term over a more accepted one is certainly your right, but it's not great for communication.

 

[Lanefan]

I suppose that’s what makes it linear? But again, a linear game that a player cooperates with and plays along will essentially have the same experience that the railroad would provide. This is why I don’t see that huge a distinction.

It's a matter of intent and good faith vs bad, I think. Linear implies good faith and reasonable intention, railroad not so much.

Another reason is that I’ve experienced reasonable requests to “stick to the path” or to “engage with the material” that aren’t GMs being tyrannical, but rather them making a sincere request.

Sure, and for the short term - one adventure, or a short series - this is fine.

If it's forever, though, that just becomes too constraining on the players; or at least I find it so.

 

[Lanefan]

I get that. I have players like this as well. I actually put it to the players fairly recently, asking how much freedom they wanted. Did they want me to sort of hold up signs saying, "Adventure thisaways" or did they want to hunt on their own? And their response was mostly they wanted me to have a fairly obvious path for them to follow.

Sounds good.

For me as player, my own answer would be "Let it be a mix - there'll be times we want to hunt on our own and other times when we're at a loose end and need some hooks or direction. That work for you?"

For example, I'm running Out of the Abyss. The party has arrived in the duegar city of Gracklestagh. I was perfectly fine if they wanted to stay in the city and try to carve out something of a niche for themselves there. And, I kinda hinted that this was an option. The players weren't particularly interested though. They want to follow the main thrust of the campaign - escaping the Underdark. Which is perfectly fine with me, either way.

So, perhaps "trail of breadcrumbs" rather than railroad might be a more apt description. Within the context of each area, they have a great deal of freedom. But, overall? Yeah, it's a fairly linear campaign with the party traveling from area A to B to C to ... Z where they escape the Underdark and then the second half of the campaign begins.

"Trail of breadcrumbs" is a very good way of putting it. Probably the great majority of my DMing is some variant on this, except there's different trails which sometimes start and end and criss-cross.

As a DM, where I can get frustrated is with players who line up like baby birds, beaks open waiting for me to wheel up the plot wagon and shovel in the plot so they can gobble it down. Drives me bonkers. And it's not rare. My last group, or rather, the one I walked away from a few years back - had three players out of 4 that just refused to be any kind of proactive. They effectively wanted me to open up the Monster Manual at the Letter A, and say, "Aarocockra, fight". It was such an incredibly frustrating experience for me. I'm dropping hooks, trying to bring in lore about the setting, constantly dangling ideas and getting absolutely nothing back. I actually went out and created THREE treasure maps for them (it was a piratey, naval campaign using Ghosts of Saltmarsh as a base) and they took the maps, looked at them, shrugged and never mentioned them again.

Yeah, those were some pretty sorry examples of players. Frustration understood.

I can see why some DM's start getting really railroady. If you've had groups like this. Where the players just expect the DM to constantly drive the campaign while you passively consume whatever it is the DM is providing, the DM's get trained to lockstep the action of the game. After all, in a group like that, if you don't force the action, then you wind up sitting around staring at each other for four hours and no one wants that.

Which can be fine to a point, but if and only if the DM has enough plot-adventure-etc. ideas to drive the campaign. But when the DM runs out of ideas - which is inevitable, believe me! - then what?

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, obviously. And I'd like if D&D were a little more suited to my liking. That's why I don't tend to like the conservative mindset to keep everything as it is. The game can be improved.

Indeed it can, but then arises the question of what does improvement look like that would even satisfy just the both of us, never mind the considerably larger overall audience the D&D designers have to consider.

 

[Hussar]

They are interchangeable to me. I am not describing anyone's games other than ones I've been in. If I'm playing an adventure path, it's not meaningfully different experience to me than a railroad. It's gonna be A followed by B which leads to C and then on to D and so on.

Now, I'm not using railroad as a pejorative because as has been pointed out several times now, it's not always one. There may be reasons to play that way. Some folks actually like it.

I am going to disagree with you here. Linear =/= Railroad. Like, at all. Railroad specifically talks about a degenerate form of play where the restrictions being placed on the game are unreasonable and are being done in order to promote a specific outcome dictated by the DM.

Linear is perfectly fine, plausible and often completely understandable.

An adventure path is linear. It is not a railroad.

 

[clearstream]

At a minimum character backstory is authoring that players do. So I can’t really disagree with the statement, but it could easily be interpreted much more broadly and I would have some issues with some of those more broad interpretations.

I was wondering if these issues wouldn't be essentially gamist? That is, a worry that players might use authorship to the advantage of their character seems to be a worry about gaining unfair advantages.

If right, one could then wonder to what ends, in play without definite win conditions? Perhaps it is feared there will be a spiral of effects (and reciprocally, obstacles) with increasingly weighty impacts or distortions upon the fiction; change that would eventually become unsustainable (impossible to exercise control over saying what follows, as anything could follow!)

Is it something like that?

 

[clearstream]

Yep. Like I said in an earlier post, there's nothing wrong with a railroad if the players simply want to relax and enjoy the ride.

One could equally propose that there's nothing wrong with a railroad if the players simply want a series of technical or dramatic challenges. EDIT I see upthread that the label remains pejorative, so I will use it going forward only where it properly applies.

EDIT I was thinking of an RQ heroquest as an example... but it is a linear path and not a railroad.

 

[Hussar]

Which can be fine to a point, but if and only if the DM has enough plot-adventure-etc. ideas to drive the campaign. But when the DM runs out of ideas - which is inevitable, believe me! - then what?

Yes, but, remember, most commonly, a campaign only has a half life of about 18-24 months, tops. After that campaign taps out, you simply pull out a new campaign and start again. The idea of "running out of ideas" gets a lot less of a problem when you constantly start new campaigns.

I mean, I've played or run over a dozen campaigns just in 5e. As in, we started at level 1, played through the campaign to its inevitable conclusion, then started again. Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Storm King's Thunder, Phandelver, 2 or 3 homebrew campaigns, Candlekeep Mysteries, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Decent Into Avernus, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a couple. It's not that hard to start racking up campaigns when they only last about 18 months at a time and you can play twice a week.

 

[clearstream]

I'm arguing that there are plenty of play styles where giving the players a large amount of plot freedom isn't desirable, and that while those games are still railroads (because the game is starting with the end point already decided), that isn't a negative. The negative aspect is using illusionism to disguise a railroad game as actually being open-ended.

Aside from an intuitive dislike of deceptions, why does it matter? Is the worry that players having enjoyed the illusion will later learn that it was an illusion, undoing their enjoyment? If so, isn't the error really that of confessing?

I'm not here advocating for it. Just that so far I'd read arguments that illusionism is bad because illusionism is bad. And started wondering if there were any non-tautologucal explanations for that?