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

[AlViking]

Well for me it is negative but I assumed some people like it. So it was "neutral" in the broader world but it was a negative to me. I mean Paizo sells a lot of adventure paths. I don't mind though the change of terms if railroad has become too toxic but then why is linear good? Won't it soon become toxic because it means the group will keep going from point A to point B to point C without deviation?

Railroad has always been a negative. Linear acknowledges that there are defined points, which happens in all sorts of games.

 

[FrozenNorth]

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.

It seems that a lot of people agree with @hawkeyefan because the game is changing in ways he prefers, if probably too slowly for his taste. Fail forward was in the 2014 and 2024 DMG, the 2024 emphasizes collaboration between DM and players rather than DM Fiat, and the DMG sections are no longer titled “Master of the World”, “Master of the Campaign” and “Master of the Rules”.

Frankly, I don’t think @pemerton and @hawkeyefan ‘s posts would get as much pushback if the techniques they are arguing for weren’t becoming pretty standard in D&D.

 

[AlViking]

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.

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.

---- Edit to add ---

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.

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.

It's a bit of a circle I think. Players get trained by DM's who are very controlling of the game. Or, conversely, DM's get trained by players who will contribute nothing to game. Players who can be replaced by dice bots and no one will notice. And around and around it goes. Then these players and DM's run into games where they're expected to be the driving force in the game or are supposed to allow the players the freedom to be the driving force, and everything turns into a train wreck - to mangle the metaphor.

The way I handle it is to give the players a list of 3 or 4 options and tell them to choose one or add one of their own. Sometimes, especially at critical campaign direction changing moments I'll even do a survey.

But I think a lot of GMs feel your pain. I get where a player can get frustrated if they have no way of knowing what any direction will lead to. If you're lost in the jungles of Chult, one direction is as good as any other, and it's not really a choice. Roll a die and go that way.

So that's why I summarize rumors, opportunities, conversations into a list and make them choose if its not already clear. But I remember pitching several ideas for starting the next campaign and just getting blank "Whatever you want."

I swear sometimes, if players were horses and you led them to two sources of water they'd die of thirst before choosing which one to drink from.

 

[Emerikol]

It seems that a lot of people agree with @hawkeyefan because the game is changing in ways he prefers, if probably too slowly for his taste. Fail forward was in the 2014 and 2024 DMG, the 2024 emphasizes collaboration between DM and players rather than DM Fiat, and the DMG sections are no longer titled “Master of the World”, “Master of the Campaign” and “Master of the Rules”.

Frankly, I don’t think @pemerton and @hawkeyefan ‘s posts would get as much pushback if the techniques they are arguing for weren’t becoming pretty standard in D&D.

This community is a tiny sliver of highly devoted fans. I am not sure I'd draw any conclusions from it one way or the other. And many of WOTC decisions are being challenged because it seems like they've forgotten anyone plays the game outside their bubble.

 

[Morrus]

There are two people in this thread arguing at length with each other about who is being the most insulting. While this is comedy gold for the rest of us, and is a rather insightful parody of ‘the internet’, it’s rather derailing the thread. Both of you knock it off. You know who you are.

 

[hawkeyefan]

No one is saying the playstyle is offensive. It's the language that is. Especially for people who don't consider themselves a part of that group, while others repeatedly and purposely use that term to describe them.

This really isn't an RPG thing. It's a "how to treat people with respect" thing in any aspect of life.

You’ve missed my point.

You’re asserting that railroading is bad. Always and objectively bad. Yet there are people who play that way and enjoy it just fine.

You’re insisting that a word that can be used to describe their game must be negative, and that insistence has implications… namely that their game is negative.

So yeah… I don’t think my neutral use of the word is anywhere near as disrespectful as yours.

 

[Hussar]

Maybe someone should tell us what the difference between a linear campaign and a railroad campaign is? Other than a name change I don't know. Maybe use a table and bullet points.

Ok, I'll take a stab at this.
Railroad:

1. The DM has a pre-determined outcome
2. The DM will force this pre-determined outcome regardless of any action the players take.
3. The DM can force this pre-determined outcome in a number of ways, including straight up cheating/changing numbers/ignoring rules, massaging the situation in such an obvious way (for example, endlessly rolling checks until the party fails in order to trigger an event that the DM wants to have happen), among many other techniques.
4. The players at no point have any say in this outcome.

Linear:

1. The situation in the campaign is contextually linear. (sorry for repeating the word) For example, the party is traveling from A to B. That's going to be a linear scenario.
2. The over arching organization of the campaign might be set up in such a way that the story will progress in a specific order. For example, a Fetch Quest style campaign where you need to retrieve parts of a Macguffin, with each part of the Macguffin leading to the next part.
3. The players are not forced to proceed in this manner because the DM is pre-determining outcomes, but rather because of the contextual nature of the scenario.

A simple example of a linear scenario might be a dungeon where you have a series of caves A-B-C-D. There is only one passage between each cave. You are going to resolve this scenario in order. This isn't railroad because the ouline isn't being forced onto the players by the DM. I mean, there are a lot of perfectly plausible, logical, understandable scenarios that are linear. How you choose to resolve these four caverns is up to the players. And, if the players figure out a way to bypass one of the chambers somehow, that's also perfectly fine.

Does that make it clearer?

 

[Hussar]

I swear sometimes, if players were horses and you led them to two sources of water they'd die of thirst before choosing which one to drink from.

LOL.

While we might disagree on some stuff, we're very much in the same boat here.

I'm really happy with my current crop of players who are much more interested in faffing around and poking into stuff. Out of the Abyss, for example, is pretty linear as written. It doesn't have to be, but, certainly the easiest way to do it is A-B-C-D... and so on. I'm adding in a few little side bits and whatnot, but, for the most part, it's stayed pretty much linear.

Although, I have to say, for anyone who has the module, the Whorlstone caverns dungeon is one of the absolute best, hands down, dungeon crawls I've ever run. Man that's a fan-freaking-tastic dungeon.

 

[clearstream]

Maybe someone should tell us what the difference between a linear campaign and a railroad campaign is? Other than a name change I don't know. Maybe use a table and bullet points.

Folk have explicitly connected qualities like "illusionism" and "GM-force" with "railroading".

A linear path may be played without illusionism or GM-force. Therefore the label "railroading" is non-identical with the label "linear".

One example I put forward were RuneQuest station-to-station heroquests, which are often linear or branchingly linear, without that inevitably making them railroads.

 

[Emerikol]

Ok, I'll take a stab at this.
Railroad:

1. The DM has a pre-determined outcome
2. The DM will force this pre-determined outcome regardless of any action the players take.
3. The DM can force this pre-determined outcome in a number of ways, including straight up cheating/changing numbers/ignoring rules, massaging the situation in such an obvious way (for example, endlessly rolling checks until the party fails in order to trigger an event that the DM wants to have happen), among many other techniques.
4. The players at no point have any say in this outcome.

Linear:

1. The situation in the campaign is contextually linear. (sorry for repeating the word) For example, the party is traveling from A to B. That's going to be a linear scenario.
2. The over arching organization of the campaign might be set up in such a way that the story will progress in a specific order. For example, a Fetch Quest style campaign where you need to retrieve parts of a Macguffin, with each part of the Macguffin leading to the next part.
3. The players are not forced to proceed in this manner because the DM is pre-determining outcomes, but rather because of the contextual nature of the scenario.

A simple example of a linear scenario might be a dungeon where you have a series of caves A-B-C-D. There is only one passage between each cave. You are going to resolve this scenario in order. This isn't railroad because the ouline isn't being forced onto the players by the DM. I mean, there are a lot of perfectly plausible, logical, understandable scenarios that are linear. How you choose to resolve these four caverns is up to the players. And, if the players figure out a way to bypass one of the chambers somehow, that's also perfectly fine.

Does that make it clearer?

Very much so and I am fine with settling on these definitions. I don't think a lot of people though think that is the definition. For example, a lot of people think Adventure paths from Paizo or even numbered series of adventures are railroad. But in fairness, the first definition and the second often get conflated so separating them out is a good idea. My examples would then be linear and not necessarily railroad depending on the DM of course.