D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[Maxperson]

First, my comment wasn't directed at you. It was directed at @pemerton. You interrupted.

Second, you're feigning outrage because someone asked you to substantiate your hypothesis with data. You and @pemerton have already left dozens of comments on this thread insinuating widespread railroading in D&D, and then when someone asks you to back it up with data, you're pretending to be the victim.

I have as much right to continue in this thread as you do, and I'm not being disingenuous. Asking someone to substantiate a disputed claim after they've repeated it dozens of times isn't unreasonable.

With @pemerton, it's because he has one of those funky personal definitions of railroading. He defines it as any sort of traditional play. If you pick up a D&D book and play D&D according to the rules, it doesn't matter what you do, you are railroading. That funky definition is why he asserts that railroading is so widespread.

 

[Maxperson]

There you go again, @Maxperson, making too much sense for this debate. You better stop that!

Aww, shucks! I'm sorry. I'll try and do better(worse?) next time.

 

[TwoSix]

I don't doubt some players prefer a very loosely DM-led story, but calling it a "sizable percentage" implies you've either got actual numbers, or we're in the realm of subjective debate. Do you have a survey or data to back that claim? Without it, it's hard to even hint at or imply that railroading is systemic, or even what that could imply.

Stating that something happens is one thing; stating it happens to a sizable percentage without data is another.

The relative success of WotC and Paizo selling story path modules, and the number of DMs who run games that either use those modules directly or mimic their structure, is a pretty strong clue that the style is widespread.

If the point of play is to experience the story of a module (or the DMs module-like homebrew), it is, definitionally, putting the characters and their goals as a secondary concern. The PCs are observers and participants in the GMs story, not the focus of the story.

 

[Maxperson]

All I can say, then, is that it is self-evident that (a) this is a practice, and (b) this practice is fairly widespread, even if it is not universal. Further, I think it's blatant rhetorical trickery to insert things like the concept of a "crisis" or "gaming is facing a problem" or the like. That's 100% your invention and has nothing, whatsoever, to do with anything I've said, nor what @pemerton has said.

I guess it's widespread if you view it across the geographical locations where D&D is played, but it still rarely happens.

I won't discuss along those parameters, because they're patently ridiculous. Railroading happens. It is a widespread practice. One does not need to look hard to find evidence thereof.

One doesn't need to look hard find evidence of flat earthers or people who believe aliens kidnap humans on a nearly daily basis. The internet makes it easy to find such things, and makes it deceptively easy to think that these occurrences are happening much more often than they actually are.

On this very forum we have had multiple threads, and railroading has absolutely had its diehard defenders. Some even balking at the very notion that the term should be allowed to be a negative, and should instead be reclaimed as an entirely neutral word.

Sure. But very, very few of them compared the the number of posters on the site.

 

[Maxperson]

A sizable percentage of players want the DM to tell the story and for their role to be sit back and occasionally participate.

The fact that people want that doesn’t change what the game is.

Where are all of these people? I've played with dozens of DMs and hundreds of players, and I've never seen a table run like this or played by people who want it. There have been a very few(I can count them on one hand and not use any finger twice) individuals that I've played with who are like this, but that few out of hundreds is hardly a sizable percentage.

 

[kermit4karate]

The relative success of WotC and Paizo selling story path modules, and the number of DMs who run games that either use those modules directly or mimic their structure, is a pretty strong clue that the style is widespread.

If the point of play is to experience the story of a module (or the DMs module-like homebrew), it is, definitionally, putting the characters and their goals as a secondary concern. The PCs are observers and participants in the GMs story, not the focus of the story.

OK, modules and adventure paths are very popular and they do provide a strong structure, but that popularity shows demand for that style, not that it's a flaw for something else.

D&D is flexible enough to handle both story-path and open-world styles. Even in modules, player agency can vary widely depending on the DM and the group, so it's not automatically "PCs as observers." That's a stretch.

Additionally, we do realize, right, that Paizo's success (or DH's success, or anything else's success, for that matter), doesn't mean that good old-fashioned D&D is any less popular? Multiple things can be popular at the same time.

 

[Maxperson]

The relative success of WotC and Paizo selling story path modules, and the number of DMs who run games that either use those modules directly or mimic their structure, is a pretty strong clue that the style is widespread.

If the point of play is to experience the story of a module (or the DMs module-like homebrew), it is, definitionally, putting the characters and their goals as a secondary concern. The PCs are observers and participants in the GMs story, not the focus of the story.

You're making rather large assumptions. It's really easy to weave these adventures into an existing game such that the adventure is not the only thing going on. It's also really easy to have characters with goals that are aligned or unaligned with the adventure, and in which those goals are also of import and a center of play.

I suppose that you CAN run an adventure path where the players don't really do anything but occasionally give a bit of input, but that's not a given or even necessarily anything but rare.

 

[TwoSix]

OK, modules and adventure paths are very popular and they do provide a strong structure, but that popularity shows demand for that style, not that it's a flaw for something else.

And I'm saying that adventure paths are popular, which shows that style of play is popular. I'm not talking about anything else.

D&D is flexible enough to handle both story-path and open-world styles. Even in modules, player agency can vary widely depending on the DM and the group, so it's not automatically "PCs as observers." That's a stretch.

If you're playing a module, then the GM knows what the end-boss/endgame of the module is before characters have even been made. To me, that's PCs as "observers/passengers".

 

[Thomas Shey]

If you're playing a module, then the GM knows what the end-boss/endgame of the module is before characters have even been made. To me, that's PCs as "observers/passengers".

I think there can be a bit of a middle ground here.

They're bus drivers. They still have a route they need to follow (to various extent) to get where the AP is going, but they're key to getting it there; they're active particpants, not just observers. They don't have a lot of broad agency, but they do have a fair bit of constrained agency, which I think is a bit of a broader case than "passengers" suggests.

 

[Celebrim]

If the point of play is to experience the story of a module (or the DMs module-like homebrew), it is, definitionally, putting the characters and their goals as a secondary concern. The PCs are observers and participants in the GMs story, not the focus of the story.

I'd put it differently, though largely agreeing with you. The PCs are the protagonists of the GMs story, but they have shared goals to solve whatever problem that the GM has poised for them - often as a conceit of the campaign. "So you are all pirates..." or "So you all have a reason to hate necromancers..." or "So you are all in some way intimate companions and confidents of the younger son of the King." or whatever.

However, I think the biggest reason why most campaigns don't revolve around individual player character goals is that that style of play is dysfunctional once you get up to over three players or so. You can still tip the hat to it in larger groups from time to time, but you can't really make it the primary focus of the campaign.