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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5405536" data-attributes="member: 4937">Railroading refers to a variety of techniques use to limit player freedom of choice.  Some distinction should be made in my opinion between the act of limiting player choice (“railroading”) and a game which has limited or no player choice as its most salient feature (a “railroad”).   Virtually all games depend on some amount of railroading, and at least miniscule amounts of railroading is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that no simulation is perfect (and probably wouldn’t be much fun if it was) and no referee can be without bias, and many forms of minor railroading are accepted unconsciously by pretty much everyone who plays RPGs.   In small doses, they can be useful techniques which will produce results enjoyed by the players, and at times players will willingly consent to boarding a train to achieve a certain result.   Player tolerance for this varies by personality and past experience.  However, generally speaking, care should be taken as a GM to ensure that player freedom of choice is real and arrives at suitably frequent intervals.   You know you’ve overused a railroad when the players start trying to get off, and you know that things have really fallen apart when you can tell the players are trying to get off and you are unwilling to let them do so.  If that happens, it’s time for some serious soul searching and reflection.Because there has been a lot of argument lately about what a railroad is and isn't, I thought I’d list some of the techniques for railroading that come immediately into my head when I hear the term.  The list probably isn’t inclusive, and some argument can probably be made that the organization and particular list I’ve given isn’t the best.   Some things that seem really important to some might have been left off or passed over quickly.  Some entries may well seem redundant and the edges of the two may blur in ways that make it difficult to draw clear distinctions between them.  That isn’t surprising, since I believe all the techniques are merely special cases of the same harder to define general thing.  The intended purpose of the list is that after reading it, you should have a pretty good ‘railroad’ detector even if you can’t come up with a easy to remember and all-encompassing definition.1)    The Hand Wave: The hand wave is one of the more common railroading techniques.  It’s also one of the most blatant and therefore one of the ones most likely to cause conflict if you use it.  However, like hand waves in general, used subtly and at times when the player’s want (or think that they want) to hand wave the action, you can get away with it.   The most common use of hand waving generally is to use the railroad to move quickly past action that the group doesn’t feel would be especially exciting and doesn’t involve a lot of meaningful choices or risk – shopping, long distance travel, etc.   The GM who wishes to railroad the players uses the hand wave to move past particularly exciting events, involving meaningful choices and lots of risk, because such events are particularly difficult to orchestrate in such a way that they have a predictable outcome.   For example, the GM may decide that he wishes the players to be captured or to survive a shipwreck and be cast away on a lonely island somewhere.   The typical device for doing this is to simply have the characters wake up in the desired situation and either to not explain how they got there, or to explain events retroactively.   There are actually examples of this in published modules, including some that are well liked.   For example, A4 begins with a railroad that delivers the players to prison.   The hook for the adventure at the beginning of I3 involves a railroad in which the players wake up from a hangover to discover that they badly offended a lord at a party who has now banished them to the desert.   This shows that the hand wave can work and be accepted by at least some groups, but usually only if it is a onetime rail near the beginning of the story.   Even the most forgiving group is going to balk if this technique is used repeatedly and especially in the middle of the story.2)    Literary Narration: This is probably the most famous form of railroading, but some skilled GM’s are so fond of this technique that their players don’t even realize how much on rails that they are.  Done cleverly, many players won’t even notice, especially if they aren’t used to GM’s that give them more freedom.   The idea in a literary narration is similar to the hand wave, but it involves less of an abrupt disconnect.   The first thing to note is that in the usual proposition, fortune, and outcome cycles the GM is expected to relay back to them what they actually did based on the proposition that they made.   This is especially true with novice players who won’t take the initiative to play out the outcome of a fortune themselves.   For example, if a player trips, the GM might say, “You sway and flail wildly before tumbling down the stairs your robe flying up to your waist as you go heels over head, take 4 non-lethal damage.”   This is generally seen by players as acceptable resolution narration, especially those not used to narrating their own resolutions once basic fortunes are known.   Many minor events involving little risk seldom seem worth dealing with in terms of formal proposition, fortune and outcome cycles.   Players often expect and reasonably need a certain amount of scene setting text being read or invented by the DM, and will willingly sit through a certain amount of narration so as to understand what is going on.  And players can consequently become used to the GM describing minor events that they are taking part in as if the scene setting is part of the normal proposition, fortune, and outcome cycle.   Therefore the DM wishing to railroad can hijack this process by narrating the resolutions to actions that the player hasn’t actually proposed and by narrating very lengthy ‘resolutions’ that actually involve many assumptions about player action, effectively telling the player what he has done and making the choices for the player.   So long as the choices seem minor and the outcomes don’t involve immediate negative consequences, many players won’t catch this especially if the GM is a good writer and or/story teller.   Other players are so sensitive to having been abused in this manner that they automatically object whenever the DM reads anything from his notes.  Other players fearing that they’ll be loaded on boxcars will automatically attempt to disrupt a scene whenever the DM tries to set one, which can make for a game every bit as dysfunctional as one on rails (see Knights of the Dinner Table).3)    Omnipotent NPC’s:  Another famous railroading technique which is nonetheless probably used to a certain extent by every GM who has ever gamed.   The most blatant and most dysfunctional form of this is Schrodinger’s Stat block (see #6 below), where the NPC has and gains whatever abilities it needs to accomplish the GM’s goals for the scene or story regardless of what resources the PC’s might have.  Alternately, the NPC simply exists in a separate world where the rules of the game don’t apply or are temporarily suspended as needed.   But the effect can generally be accomplished more subtly by having NPC’s who are sufficiently powerful under the rules that they can control the party.  The most blatant way to do this is with NPC’s who have access to powerful enchantment magic – charm, dominate, geas, etc. – and who are so powerful the party has little hope of saving vs. their attacks.   The omnipotent NPC can be rolled out whenever the DM needs to achieve a particular result.  Common uses are a reoccurring villain that survives all attempts to defeat them, a quest giver/mentor who  gives orders the PC’s simply can’t refuse (see #4 below), or a Deus Ex Machina that shows up to rescue the PC’s from whatever hopeless situation the players find themselves in.   This would be a good time to mention that not all GM railroading has sadistic or obviously narcissistic motives.   Many GMs that put their players on rails believe that they are acting in the players best interests, either by saving the PC’s from some bad outcome or by supposedly helping the players to achieve their own goals.  This probably works ok so long as the player never realizes that he’s been helped along, but if discovered has all the sweetness of finding out that the reason you’ve been winning at chess is that the other person has been deliberately throwing games to bolster your self-esteem. 4)    The False Choice: The false choice depends on appearing to give the players a choice, but setting up the situation such that the player is fully informed of the consequences of his choice and has no real choice but the one you wish him to take.  The essence of this form of railroading is, “You can either save the kingdom, rescue the princess, and become fabulously wealthy and powerful… or you can DIE.  The choice is yours.”  The player has no real choice here except the first, because the choice to die is usually the same as the choice of quitting the game.   False choices are particularly common transit points in adventure paths.   Of course, in practice, the false choice is presented in a much more subtle manner than simply do this or die.  Because players are used to making choices between good outcomes and bad outcomes, they may not immediately perceive the false choice for what it is and will instead classify it as just another decision point.  But the false choice differs from the usual decision points a player has in that the he isn’t making one of several doubtful and open ended choices.  The choices before the player are usually quite explicit and have immediate consequences.  The GM isn’t really presenting the player with several possible choices; he’s presenting the player with several possible ends.  Moreover, the ends that are being presented are binary in nature.  Even if there are multiple choices there is only one that ‘works’.  And the punishment for not ‘biting the hook’ can be much more subtle than death as well.  One of the more common ways of railroading the players is to simply have nothing happen if the players choose not to bite your hook and then wait for boredom and curiosity to set in.   This brings us to the next way to railroad the players.5)    The Tiny World: The Tiny World is a special form false choice that is particularly good at hiding the fact that it is a railroad.  The Tiny World looks at first like it might be a sandbox and there seems to be a reasonable amount of player freedom.   The Tiny World is also usually well stocked with things that attract player’s attention – reports of obvious treasure to be found and dungeons to explore will occur almost immediately.    There will practically be a huge freaking neon sign on every corner saying ‘treasure found here’.  But like the world through the door in Coraline, things aren’t actually as they first appear.   The Tiny World depends on the players only wanting to do what is obvious (to the GM).  As soon as the players step foot in the wrong direction, they go off the page and walls appear either figuratively or literally to herd them back in the proper direction.  The Tiny World has actually been used in some of the most popular published modules ever written, including I6 Ravenloft and DL1 Dragons of Despair, and for that we can’t be too critical because being published works they had to fit to a particular page count.  Decently skilled sandbox DMs are capable of taking a published tiny world and expanding it as necessary or setting it within an existing setting to resolve some of the issues.   And simply being in a tiny world isn’t necessarily not conducive to fun.  Many groups may never even find the wall holding them in as they are content to go along with the ride, and the whole concept of a ‘dungeon’ is essentially of a tiny controllable world where player freedom is constrained enough that the propositions are predictable enough to prepare for.   However, just because the technique can be used successfully doesn’t mean it’s any less confining than any other sort of railroad.  Tiny Worlds get to be a problem when the constraints start to seem too artificial and the ride stops being fun and the players decide to get off.  There can be reasonable reasons why a GM wouldn’t want their players to leave a tiny world , creating material is expensive for any GM, but all too often the Tiny World is used as an excuse to make the players do exactly what the GM wants them to do.6)    Schrödinger’s Map: This is by far the easiest way to get away with running a railroad, and any would be GM conductor should learn this technique because it will let them get exactly what they want and 90% of the time if they are clever the players will be none the wiser.   Moreover, it’s not a technique that is particularly well known through published modules, and the technique is extremely simple to implement.  The idea is to abuse the fact that the players have very limited information about the layout of the world and so rarely know exactly what the consequence of their choices will be.   Discovery is after all an important and enjoyable aspect of the game.  The game would be less fun if you knew what was going to be behind the door before you ever opened it.  The devious practitioner of Schrödinger’s Map therefore does not decide where anything is to be found until after the player’s have made their choice.  Therefore, the players will only find exactly what the GM wants them to find at that time.  It becomes impossible to get off the script because all paths lead exactly where you want them to go.  The simplest example of this, and the one most likely to give the game away, is the party comes to a fork in the road with a road sign which has been knocked over.   One road leads to the “Fabulous Kingdom of Oz” and the other leads to “The Lair of the Dragon”.   But whether the party picks left or right, they’ll always end up facing the Dragon because the map is flexible.   This idea can be extended out to every level of detail.  For example, the DM might create a dungeon which consists of a Labyrinth with a dozen rooms scattered within it.  The players may feel as if they have many choices.   But rather than keying the room descriptions to particular rooms on the map, the rooms are keyed according to the order they are visited in.   The first room the players find always has the description of room #1 and so forth.  This technique allows the GM to always ensure that the clue is found before the trap, the villain is always found after the minions, and the treasure is never recovered until the villain is defeated regardless of what the players do.  And because any adventure can be conceptually treated as a series of rooms linked by corridors, the clever GM can make any adventure whatsoever no matter how free the players may feel actually be a linear railroad.Applied to something other than the map, this is technique known generally as ‘fudging’.  For example, I’ve seen villains whose hit points should have been measured in rounds rather than any other concrete measurement or which ran out of hit points only exactly when the party was truly threatened with a player death.I almost hated to describe this technique, because it’s so dastardly and so difficult to detect especially for inexperienced players.   The only reason I did – other than pugnacious honesty and an orderly desire for completeness - is I’ve seen so many GMs using this technique claiming that they ran a sand box which annoys the heck out of me.   The other reason I describe this technique is to provide the counter to it.  There are two big clues to the fact you are on Schrodinger’s Map.   The first is that the GM’s plans always work a little too well.   This is most obvious if you are another GM and have a lot of experience running games.    Just as you can tell someone cheated flipping 100 coins when you look at the results and see no runs of 5 or more sequential heads or tails, so you can tell when the GM is cheating by the fact that the predictable story tropes always seem to work out.   But an even bigger counter to this technique is Divination magic.  You can almost always tell whether or not you are on a real concrete map by how your divination magic works, and railroading DMs of this sort get really frustrated with divination often to the point of rendering it useless.  Another way to handle this is with backtracking out of the hand waves rather than letting them whisk you along to the destinations.Because it’s so difficult to detect, Schrödinger’s Map is a technique that you can use profitably on occasion to achieve some story effect, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend you come to rely heavily on this technique.  Not only is it lazy GMing when overused, but the more you use it the more likely the players are to detect it.  The best way to get away with railroading is be known as the sort of DM who doesn’t railroad his players.   Also, there is a big difference between occasionally railroading the players and forcing the players to never leave the train.7)    Endurium Walls: The Endurium Walls concept is that getting off the path is impossible because if you try, all your efforts will be futile.  You can’t bypass the riddling door because it’s indestructible, nor can you tunnel through the walls for similar reasons.  This may actually be written into the notes, and often is in published works.    In practice though, this doesn’t require that you use any such crude absolutes.  You simply have to make the means to get off the rails be above those currently available to the players.  The walls don’t have to be unbreakable; they just need a hardness of 20+character level and a ton of hit points.   The force field doesn’t have to be undispellable, simply have a caster level more than 20 above the character level.   The door isn’t unlockable; it just has a DC so high that even taking 20 doesn’t help.  And the obstacles don’t have to be limited to physical ones.  They can include things like NPC’s that can’t be persuaded by diplomacy, or foes which never surrender regardless of the circumstances.   The idea is to ensure that there is only one possible way through and one possible outcome by making all other techniques too hard to have a chance of succeeding.  Much of the time when a DM fudges or cheats, it's to create spontaneous Endurium Walls in a location that he hadn't realized he'd need them.8)    Metagame Director: This is probably the most blatant form of railroading and the one you are least likely to get away with.  The idea behind being a meta-game director is that you treat the players like actors in your employ, and you tell them what they are supposed to feel and do in a scene.   This can take a lot of forms.  In D&D one of the most common is telling a player that because they are of a certain alignment, their character doesn’t want to do that or even more invasively does want to do exactly something and nothing else; however, it can extend to using GM force on pretty much any aspect of the character’s personality or character where the GM feels the action don’t fit with the described character.  This can be especially problematic when the character was created by the GM.  Such is the stuff of various session horror stories.   However, it’s possible to disguise the Metagame Director technique behind a veneer of trying to be helpful to the player.  For example, having the player make knowledge or intuition or sense motive checks and then, if the roll is successful, telling the player how important choosing a particular course of action is.  While this technique can be preferable to surprising the player with the consequences of actions when the player lacks critical information that the character has, over reliance on it is nothing less than pure railroading.</blockquote>

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