D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[pemerton]

Honest question: How can you tell? Is it the specific scenario or the overall order of scenarios or is the specific action you are talking about? Sorry, I am just a little confused as to your answer. As always, thanks for responding.

As I've posted upthread,

Here's my tentative attempt to say what I think makes for railroading: If the GM is more-or-less unilaterally deciding the significant content of the presented scenes, and/or what is at stake, and/or what follows next, I will describe that as railroading. And so, conversely, non-railroad play (as I think of it) means that the players exercise real influence over the significant content of the presented scenes, and their stakes, and what follows next.

So how can I tell if this is happening? Because the GM decides, without regard to player concerns, the significant content of the presented scenes; the GM decides what is at stakes in those scenes; and the GM decides what happens next, without a meaningful degree of regard to player concerns.

Typical examples include:

*The GM using a "quest-giver" or similar sort of hook to tell the players what the scenario is and what the goal for their PCs is;

*The GM ignoring or eliding action resolution outcomes to make sure that events in the fiction unfold as the GM wants (eg if the players, in playing their PCs, miss a clue here, the GM inserts the clue i]there[/i]; or, if the PCs defeat the villain "early", the GM introduces a lieutenant or whatever to keep things moving as planned);

*The GM determining outcomes or consequences by extensive reference to backstory considerations that the players aren't aware of, which means that the players didn't know what was really at stake in their action declarations (the quest-giver who betrays the PCs, or who is really a baddie though having been presented to the players as a goodie, seems to be a very popular example of this, but it's extremely common in all sorts of ways).​

If a person's orientation towards the RPG play is to (i) have the GM slowly reveal "the plot" to them, or (ii) to have the GM gradually reveal "the world" to them, then the things I've described won't bother them: they are, in fact, the standard tools a GM uses to reveal their plot or their world.

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.

Right!

do I believe that DMs are important in D&D and drive much of the plot and the overall gameplay in a session? Absolutely.

OK so we seem to be in agreement. The sort of gameplay you describe here is too railroad-y for me.

Luckily for me, it's not the only possible approach to RPGing, and not the only possible approach to the play of D&D.

 

[pemerton]

D&D is flexible enough to handle both story-path and open-world styles.

A lot of "open world" play remains very GM-driven: it is the GM who decides the significant content of the presented scenes, and the stakes, and the outcomes - the lattermost often by reference to backstory considerations known only to the GM.

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.

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".

Right again.

 

[pemerton]

Is it really so hard to imagine? I'm not sure you want to see what I'm talking about.

Player (a rogue): "Instead of fighting the duke's guards, I'll try to impersonate his missing advisor. My disguise kit is ready. Can I bluff my way into the palace?"

DM: grins, flips through notes "Alright, I hadn't planned for that, but let's roll. Make a Charisma check against CR 12. If you succeed, the duke might reveal secrets you weren't supposed to hear until later." DM mentally gets ready to improvise.

That isn't 'changing an encounter'! That's responding to an encounter in an unexpected way.

I mean, that's just bog-standard play to me. If you can't even flip a combat scenario to non-combat through use of the resolution system, then that game has serious agency problems above and beyond issues with pre-plotting.

Agreed. It's a baseline of playing a RPG that the players get to declare actions for their PCs. This doesn't tell us how the scene was framed, what is at stake, or how outcomes are determined.

 

[pemerton]

Doing even a little "gming" changes the game and you can't play in a game your a co-gm of at all.

And yet I've done it! (A bit like refuting Zeno, by walking across the room.)

 

[soviet]

"Colleague" and "partner" far more accurately reflect the GM-player relationship in a good game, IMO, which applies to most D&D games.

Ah yes, I definitely consider myself a colleague and partner of someone when they decide the entire premise of what we do and have a complete veto over all my declarations and even whether the rules we have nominally agreed to remain in force at any given moment. Very collegial.

 

[soviet]

Come on. Extrapolate that out to changing a preplanned encounter.

Player (the same rogue): "Instead of fighting through the dukes guards, I'm sneaking into the palace kitchen, bribing a servant and planting forged papers to frame the duke's advisor. I want to trigger a power struggle and get the guards called away."

DM: grins, flips through notes. "Alright, bit complicated, and I had a big battle prepped...but it looks like we're going full intrigue so we'll pivot. Roll Stealth and Persuasion against CR 12. If you succeed on both, the guards disperse." DM makes political fallout the new focus.

So when you said changing an encounter you meant changing a future encounter? The GM had planned a big battle, but you subverted it by taking a different approach? I would suggest that if future encounters are planned out to the extent that taking a different route changes the game, then a lot of your game is if not on a railroad then at least a bus route.

Is this what you meant by changing bosses, areas, and treasures? You went to location B rather than location A and so the GM's prep of what you would find there shifted?

 

[kermit4karate]

As I've posted upthread,

​

So how can I tell if this is happening? Because the GM decides, without regard to player concerns, the significant content of the presented scenes; the GM decides what is at stakes in those scenes; and the GM decides what happens next, without a meaningful degree of regard to player concerns.

Typical examples include:

*The GM using a "quest-giver" or similar sort of hook to tell the players what the scenario is and what the goal for their PCs is;​

​

*The GM ignoring or eliding action resolution outcomes to make sure that events in the fiction unfold as the GM wants (eg if the players, in playing their PCs, miss a clue here, the GM inserts the clue i]there[/i]; or, if the PCs defeat the villain "early", the GM introduces a lieutenant or whatever to keep things moving as planned);​

​

*The GM determining outcomes or consequences by extensive reference to backstory considerations that the players aren't aware of, which means that the players didn't know what was really at stake in their action declarations (the quest-giver who betrays the PCs, or who is really a baddie though having been presented to the players as a goodie, seems to be a very popular example of this, but it's extremely common in all sorts of ways).​

If a person's orientation towards the RPG play is to (i) have the GM slowly reveal "the plot" to them, or (ii) to have the GM gradually reveal "the world" to them, then the things I've described won't bother them: they are, in fact, the standard tools a GM uses to reveal their plot or their world.

Right!

OK so we seem to be in agreement. The sort of gameplay you describe here is too railroad-y for me.

Luckily for me, it's not the only possible approach to RPGing, and not the only possible approach to the play of D&D.

Fair enough. I get it now. Matthew Mercer's D&D games in Critical Role are too railroady for you. Understood.

 

[kermit4karate]

Ah yes, I definitely consider myself a colleague and partner of someone when they decide the entire premise of what we do and have a complete veto over all my declarations and even whether the rules we have nominally agreed to remain in force at any given moment. Very collegial.

Straw man. You're taking a reasonable claim (DMs and players are partners) and spinning it in an exaggerated, hostile way.

 

[soviet]

Fair enough. I get it now. Matthew Mercer's D&D games in Critical Role are too railroady for you. Understood.

Straw man. You're taking a reasonable claim (DMs and players are partners) and spinning it in an exaggerated, hostile way.

You would never do that!

 

[kermit4karate]

So when you said changing an encounter you meant changing a future encounter? The GM had planned a big battle, but you subverted it by taking a different approach? I would suggest that if future encounters are planned out to the extent that taking a different route changes the game, then a lot of your game is if not on a railroad then at least a bus route.

Is this what you meant by changing bosses, areas, and treasures? You went to location B rather than location A and so the GM's prep of what you would find there shifted?

Do you promise you're being 100% sincere right now? Swear on your favorite person's eternal soul? Because I suspect that if you truly don't get what I meant, then you don't want to. But if you promise you're being sincere, let me know and I'll respond in kind.