Telling a story vs. railroading

[Quasqueton]

I bowed out of the discussion, yet rounser continues to evoke my name with snarky misrepresentations of my position and statements. That's rude and petty.

My position is pretty easily stated. It is not what you are claiming it is.

So far, everything Raven Crowking has posted is right in line with what I've previously posted, and with what I would post now.

Quasqueton

 

[Piratecat]

The thread's about an inch from closing, gang, if it doesn't head back on topic. Please cease all bickering as of this point, and put hurt feelings aside.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I bowed out of the discussion, yet rounser continues to evoke my name with snarky misrepresentations of my position and statements. That's rude and petty.

So far, everything Raven Crowking has posted is right in line with what I've previously posted, and with what I would post now.

Quasqueton

It's very weird having people agree with me....

Isn't that the first sign of the Apocalypse?

 

[Raven Crowking]

Rounser,

I do see where you are coming from, and I understand why you would call some things "railroading" that I would not. Or, at least, I think that I do. However, I would be far more certain of your position if you could give us a simple definition of what railroading means to you.

Mine is: Usurpation of player choice + linear play = railroading. That is a definition which can be used to examine a particular setup or campaign and determine whether or not railroading is present, and to what degree. A similar definition from you might be helpful.

I am assuming that "control over the course of the campaign in terms of which adventures occur" is your working definition.

Reading this, I see "control over the course of the campaign" as largely equal to "Usurpation of player control" and "in terms of which adventures occur" as being largely equal to "linear play".

The major difference between our definitions, IMHO, is that yours does not differentiate between legitimate authority and undue authority on the part of the DM. Usurpation is taking illegitimate authority, and it is the illegitimacy of the DM's action which is, to my mind, an important part of the definition.

I am, perhaps, somewhat further confused by your examples, which seem to differentiate legitimate DM control from illegitimate DM control, at least when you are speaking about your own game.

I opine that a useful definition is both clear and concise, and allows conclusions to be drawn from it in a reasonable manner. What you mean by "railroading" may meet these criteria to you, but I submit that others (myself included) are finding your definition somewhat less than clear. Regardless of whose fault it is, it is clear that a careful restatement of definition might be in order.

RC

 

[riprock]

The idea that a DM must come to each game session either with two dozen potential adventures, ready to run at the whim of the PCs, or with none at all, ready to make up everything at the whim of the PCs, is absurd.

You either burn out a DM quickly, or you don’t play much RPGs.

I suggest two resources for generating numerous plots: 1) Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and 2) Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering.

I find that if I can make a big, intricate flowchart with lots of possibilities, and some small if-then cases, I don't need to do a lot of other prep.

You don't need 20 different dungeons, you need 20 unique paths through the same set of encounters.

Suppose you have a Goddess of Fluffy Bunnies, a God of Greed, and Slavering Demon of Burnination. They're all struggling to control the Sacred Mushroom Forest. They're big and powerful, but they're just NPCs.

The players go into this, and they might avoid alliance with all the gods. They might make deals with every single god. They might negotiate badly so their first deal with one god prevents deals with other gods. They might play fair and negotiate only with the god of their alignment.

Throw in a few weird special items like a ring of Mushroom Control (very useful in this one setting, useless everywhere else) and you can have many different endings with very little prep.

Railroading also solves a design problem for D&D: What if the PCs go to the Valhingen Graveyard whilst they're too low level to handle it? Ruins of Adventure lets them get thumped until they die or retreat. With the advent of 3E, something like a lock that only a mid-level character could open might help keep lower level PCs out, but arguably this is a "choice killer" of it's own. It's an interesting topic to me, largely because the game seems to sidestep or handwave it.

D&D assumes that parties will be lucky enough to have no imbalanced factors, fairly survivable encounters, and a great deal of patience. These frequently don't happen in practice, but there are many work-arounds. No solution works for every group; it can be hard to communicate well and find a play style that everyone likes.


If you're very skillful, you can adjust encounters to avoid killing off the party, but that requires skill. Players sometimes complain that the DM fudges too much -- I certainly would rather just die and roll up a new character. I personally think PC death is a lot more fun than dragging out a boring sequence of wandering through a maze as walking wounded, running away from random encounters, until you can heal up. It's okay for me to die and bounce back immediately with a new character: it's boredom that kills campaigns.

Another strategy is to warn off the players with a trustworthy NPC -- a cleric of their patron deity, perhaps -- who tells them it's certain death. And when they go and die, that same cleric might show up, drag out the bodies, and resurrect them. Players also complain about this -- if they have a DMPC to bail them out, they're not risking much.

Unfortunately, what frequently happens is the Monty Haul bailout. I was introduced to the game by a Monty Haul DM. No party member was ever in real danger. This is a very easy way for beginning DMs to take the challenge out of D&D while everyone is still learning. However, IMHO it isn't nearly as fun as risking a quick a bloody death.

 

[buzz]

Not much of a game without a DM, though...and as in many ways the DM sets the parameters of the game by choices such as setting, preferences (e.g. low or high magic, little or lots of combat, etc.), and even as basic as what system or edition to use, then in large part it *is* the DM's game. It then becomes, of course, up to said DM to within reason make said game fun for the players, and to take in (as far as possible) only players who will help to make it fun. Never as easy as it sounds...

Well, of course you need a DM!

However, I would be hesitant to play in a campaign where all of the decisions you list above are ones in which I, as a player, had no input. Otherwise, what you're saying is that, if I'm not interested or comfortable with any of those decisions, I have to either stop gaming with that DM, or else play along and hope that, in a couple of years when that campaign ends, maybe that DM or another will run something I actually want to play.

And on the DM's side of things, all of that prep and decision-making is being done in the dark. If I'm not getting any player input at that point, how do I know that anything I'm doing is going to result in fun? I.e., will make my players want to show up, keep their characters updated, actively participate, etc?

On top of this, "to take in (as far as possible) only players who will help to make it fun" is a pretty tall order. Wouldn't it be far easier to simply ask the existing players what they're interested in first?

Vigilance is absolutely correct when he mentions meeting people half way. I'm not saying that the DM has to do only what the players want. I'm saying that everyone at the table needs to make an effort help each other get what they want.

First example:
One of my groups is currently doing the AoW adventure path. It's not railroading for the DM assume that, yes, we are going to play AoW and not suddenly demand to leave that campaign arc and play Shackled City. We all agreed that AoW is what we're playing.

Second example:
The same group was discussing some future campaign ideas I had. I posed the concept of running a D&D game in Ars Magica's Mythic Europe. Everyone liked the idea, but two players had qualms about the existence of real-world faiths in the setting. They're both devout Christians and felt having their religion in a D&D game was inappropriate. "You can keep everything the same, but just call Christianity something else and use a different deity."

So, naturally I... put the kibosh on the whole idea.

For me, making even that small change blew the whole "medieval paradigm" of Mythic Europe, which is the main selling point for me. But I didn't want to offend my Christian players; it's their faith and I respect that. I laid this all out for the group, and they understood my position.

See? I'm not saying the DM never gets to say no. They have a right to fun, too, and what the two players requested messed with the DM's (my) fun. So, I just moved on to the next idea.

Imagine what a total disaster this would have been if I had waited for the "big reveal" of my massively-prepped Mythic Europe campaign on game night. Feelings would have been hurt and no fun would have resulted.

So far, in the couple of years that I have been playing with this group, I've seen that the more communication we have beforehand, and the more we don't pretend metagame issues don't exist, the more fun we have.

Ergo, to get back to the OP... "railroading" has a lot to do with communication. Lay out the parameters for play in advance, and it becomes easier to avoid overstepping them (thereby damaging the fun) during play.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

Well, of course you need a DM!

However, I would be hesitant to play in a campaign where all of the decisions you list above are ones in which I, as a player, had no input. Otherwise, what you're saying is that, if I'm not interested or comfortable with any of those decisions, I have to either stop gaming with that DM, or else play along and hope that, in a couple of years when that campaign ends, maybe that DM or another will run something I actually want to play.

And on the DM's side of things, all of that prep and decision-making is being done in the dark. If I'm not getting any player input at that point, how do I know that anything I'm doing is going to result in fun? I.e., will make my players want to show up, keep their characters updated, actively participate, etc?

On top of this, "to take in (as far as possible) only players who will help to make it fun" is a pretty tall order. Wouldn't it be far easier to simply ask the existing players what they're interested in first?

Vigilance is absolutely correct when he mentions meeting people half way. I'm not saying that the DM has to do only what the players want. I'm saying that everyone at the table needs to make an effort help each other get what they want.

First example:
One of my groups is currently doing the AoW adventure path. It's not railroading for the DM assume that, yes, we are going to play AoW and not suddenly demand to leave that campaign arc and play Shackled City. We all agreed that AoW is what we're playing.

Second example:
The same group was discussing some future campaign ideas I had. I posed the concept of running a D&D game in Ars Magica's Mythic Europe. Everyone liked the idea, but two players had qualms about the existence of real-world faiths in the setting. They're both devout Christians and felt having their religion in a D&D game was inappropriate. "You can keep everything the same, but just call Christianity something else and use a different deity."

So, naturally I... put the kibosh on the whole idea.

For me, making even that small change blew the whole "medieval paradigm" of Mythic Europe, which is the main selling point for me. But I didn't want to offend my Christian players; it's their faith and I respect that. I laid this all out for the group, and they understood my position.

See? I'm not saying the DM never gets to say no. They have a right to fun, too, and what the two players requested messed with the DM's (my) fun. So, I just moved on to the next idea.

Imagine what a total disaster this would have been if I had waited for the "big reveal" of my massively-prepped Mythic Europe campaign on game night. Feelings would have been hurt and no fun would have resulted.

So far, in the couple of years that I have been playing with this group, I've seen that the more communication we have beforehand, and the more we don't pretend metagame issues don't exist, the more fun we have.

Ergo, to get back to the OP... "railroading" has a lot to do with communication. Lay out the parameters for play in advance, and it becomes easier to avoid overstepping them (thereby damaging the fun) during play.

Yeah I gotta say that this is one of the most rational posts on this topic yet and I for the most part agree with what Buzz is saying. It's just that my experience is a little different in that when I usually ask for input I dont get enough in the way that allows the players to shape the direction of the game. Basically theyre entrusting me with thier fun, which I'm Okay with. I usually let them know right off the bat if I'm going to be running a published adventure or one that I've scraped together. Either way theyre usually fine with it.

 

[Raven Crowking]

One of my groups is currently doing the AoW adventure path. It's not railroading for the DM assume that, yes, we are going to play AoW and not suddenly demand to leave that campaign arc and play Shackled City. We all agreed that AoW is what we're playing.

The DM saying "I am going to run Age of Worms for those interested in playing it" is not railroading. The players have a choice going into it; they know what they're getting, and they have tacitly agreed to it by playing.

It seems to be a very strange thing, being in complete agreement with you, buzz. Very, very soon now the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man is going to come around the corner.....

 

[Lanefan]

May I attempt to beat this whole discussion down to one word:

Trust.

That's what it all comes down to, in the end. The players have to trust that the DM has a playable game lined up, and that the DM is willing and able to divert from plan if the players take a left turn. (another player's explorer PC in a game I was once in had as his personal slogan "Where the map is blank, I'll go", and he did; he forced the DM to design huge areas of his world that the game would never otherwise have seen). And the DM has to trust that the players will either a) at least vaguely follow the story s/he has in mind, or b) use the game and setting to write their own story.

Many of the various examples, counter-examples, etc. we've seen have had a lack of trust, one way or ther other, lurking behind them...either the DM doesn't trust the players so s/he forces them into a story, or the players don't trust the DM and do whatever they can to avoid anything that even might lead to something preprared ahead of time.

Lanefan

 

[buzz]

May I attempt to beat this whole discussion down to one word:

Trust.

Okay, now you've won the thread.