D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[pemerton]

Sandbox is empty! Sandbox is meandering and incoherent! Sandbox can't contain suprises or narrative twists! Sandbox has no, or ultimately unsatisfying, endgame! Sandbox is random meaningless nonsense! Sandbox lacks story arc!

95% of this is "sandboxes are bad because they aren't pre-plotted linear adventures", which means the complainer is being either foolish or jerkish, take your pick.

There are ways to get surprises, twists, endgames, meaning and story in RPGing, without pre-plotting. Maybe the person complaining about the sandbox is yearning for that possibility!

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I just think the length of the game is generally a good proxy for the amount of overall decision space and branching that the system allows. For a game with a relatively low amount of branching (like in a short game), the impact of knowing the destination is lessened because we started play with a lot of assumptions about where we'd end up.

As for the wide-open middle game; assuming the "wide-open" decision space in the middle is legit, I think the ending agreed upon at the start is more like a de facto epilogue scene than something where the game is steered to always end up in that direction. The actual "consequential" finale is the penultimate scene before the agreed-upon ending.

Yeah, I'm pretty wary of any steering; it would seem to have some of the same dangers as genre emulation in narrativist gaming. When I think of the fixed ending/wide-open middle, I'm mostly thinking of games with a strong situation where the point is the wide-open middle. Although I've not played it, My Life with Master comes to mind. We know going in that there's going to be an ultimate confrontation with the Master; how we get there is pretty important. And probably I'm betraying a lot of my own preferences with regards to both fiction and gaming in my thoughts here.

I can see what you have in mind with your last scene point. I think, though, that the same sort of reasoning can create counter-examples to your replaceable PCs point. For instance, a given group of players might play through (say) White Plume Mountain pretty much the same regardless of party composition. But that wouldn't show that their play was a railroad. It would just show that, in classic dungeon play like WPM, character doesn't really matter (and there aren't really protagonists - the PCs are basically pawns).

This did occur to me, and I agree that my construction is pretty much useless for classic dungeon play. But that sort of play seems to have more in common with sports than it does with fiction to me. Every scoreless draw in football isn't the same, but there are large similarities between a lot of them.

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. One way that can play out is via the sort of character/protagonist importance you talk about. Another is via the sort of puzzle-solving and skilled play needed for WPM: the players' influence over scene and stakes is (obviously) not at the level of drawing the map and writing the key (the GM/module author does that) but rather in deciding which scenes to "activate" and shaping the stakes of those scenes (by "exploring", and then acting on the outcomes of that exploration).

My sense is that, for a fixed last scene game to not be a railroad, the players must be exercising influence in the lead-up that establishes what is at stake in that scene, and probably also when it actually gets framed, at the table.

This all makes sense to me. And I think it would be a requirement for what I suggested to @TwoSix about the middle being wide-open. If we know where we're going, then when we get there is a really consequential decision space.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I actually really like the "wasteland" moniker! Not only does it describe the emptiness, but also implies that the game will be a waste of time.

Glad to have been of help, then.

Now I can't help wondering what things shake out if someone tries to mix styles but bungles one of the two.

Like if you try to inject a narrative arc into a well-done sandbox game, I imagine that wouldn't push things into "wasteland" territory--but it might feel like a railroad running through otherwise lovely terrain. Conversely, if someone with lots of experience with sandbox-y games but little with linear games tried to merge the two, I could see it ending up like a wasteland, as they overcompensate for their experience with sandbox with too much emphasis in the other direction. Seems more likely though that it would be the former. Really rich and varied world that the group isn't actually permitted to interact with because Plot Says Otherwise.

Conversely, I think a wasteland is very likely for a GM used to linear-heavy games if she tries to do a sandbox or mix sandbox into her otherwise very linear game. I'm reminded of an issue that a LOT of failed attempts at MMOs have, where they proudly state that they "don't hold your hand" and have a "wide-open world" where you "make your own fun": they end up feeling like dead, empty worlds, because having tons of locations one can visit...with nothing to actually do there other than see them and maybe do some resource-gathering, isn't actually that interesting or compelling. So the "rails" will seem like the only path that goes anywhere interesting, and the linear GM may come away feeling frustrated and lost because they don't see what they actually need to do to make a sandbox environment stimulating and engaging.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There are ways to get surprises, twists, endgames, meaning and story in RPGing, without pre-plotting. Maybe the person complaining about the sandbox is yearning for that possibility!

Well sure, but I did address that separately. "3: The first part is just false, sandboxes can surprise anyone. 'Narrative twist' requires an established narrative, so that's, again, 'Who likes dogs? They only bark, they never meow.' "

If it were simply a desire for novelty and surprise, then that's entirely reasonable, but is really just a request for better quality. That is, a well-constructed sandbox should not be "empty". The clear implication from the statement was that it should be a "narrative twist", which requires a narrative, much like the other complaints (e.g. about an unsatisfying "endgame").

 

[Thomas Shey]

You can't easily write a satisfying and interesting adventure without at least some assumptions of what the PCs are going to do. I mean, even a completely site-based dungeon-crawl assumes that the PCs aren't going to say, "screw it!" and head to town to set up a thieves' guild or something else that completely ignores the dungeon. How an adventure is written and how it is run are two different things. Adventures are written "like" railroads because there isn't really any other way to write them, but if they actually become railroads or not is up to the person running it.

My point was in some cases the information to lead you further along in the AP is contained within one of the nodes a lot of time, and if you ignore or disrupt that node without getting it, you've effectively wandered away from the rest of the AP completely; its hard to see any other actions on the PCs part is going to reconnect with it.

Now, might be that just using the start of the AP as a launch point for entirely different adventures is fine. I'm just noting people writing full length adventure paths are going to rarely supply other routes to continue them, and in some cases the whole premise of the AP makes finding another route from some parts to the others seem unlikely or even illogical. I'm kind of wondering how many people are willing to do the degree of rewrite to get around that--and thinking its not that many for people investing in a full length adventure path in the first place.

 

[payn]

My point was in some cases the information to lead you further along in the AP is contained within one of the nodes a lot of time, and if you ignore or disrupt that node without getting it, you've effectively wandered away from the rest of the AP completely; its hard to see any other actions on the PCs part is going to reconnect with it.

Now, might be that just using the start of the AP as a launch point for entirely different adventures is fine. I'm just noting people writing full length adventure paths are going to rarely supply other routes to continue them, and in some cases the whole premise of the AP makes finding another route from some parts to the others seem unlikely or even illogical. I'm kind of wondering how many people are willing to do the degree of rewrite to get around that--and thinking its not that many for people investing in a full length adventure path in the first place.

A surprising amount of PF AP chapters can be plucked out and ran like an old times module. Not all of them, but many are ready to go for this purpose. Lotta folks probably don’t think/know that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You're right, anything but west marches is a railroad is a better definition.

I've seen people pretty actually claim that anything but a complete open sandbox wasn't even an RPG. Unsurprisingly, they were awfully old-school in other ways, too.

 

[payn]

I've seen people pretty actually claim that anything but a complete open sandbox wasn't even an RPG. Unsurprisingly, they were awfully old-school in other ways, too.

Yeap, I know the type.

 

[Thomas Shey]

A surprising amount of PF AP chapters can be plucked out and ran like an old times module. Not all of them, but many are ready to go for this purpose. Lotta folks probably don’t think/know that.

Oh, sure. Though I think the later in the AP it is, the harder this is as its likely to be based on earlier events.

 

[pemerton]

When I think of the fixed ending/wide-open middle, I'm mostly thinking of games with a strong situation where the point is the wide-open middle. Although I've not played it, My Life with Master comes to mind. We know going in that there's going to be an ultimate confrontation with the Master; how we get there is pretty important.

Apart from anything else, it will shape the ratings that then factor into the endgame. From pp 37-38:

Endgame
Endgame is a climactic series of scenes that culminates with the dramatic death of the Master at the hands of a minion. It is triggered when a minion successfully resists a command from the Master, and the sum total of the minion’s Love is greater than Fear plus his own Weariness.

LOVE > FEAR plus WEARINESS​

From that point forward the Master’s fate is sealed; the triggering minion and the Master are locked in a violent conflict that will likely comprise several scenes, intercut with the struggles of the other minions, before producing the death of the Master. It is the only situation in which violence perpetrated upon the Master has a tangible effect.

So, when the above-described triggering occurs, the GM dramatically suspends the conflict with the Master and cuts to each of the other players in sequence, aggressively framing them into dangerous and threatening scenes of their own . . .

One round of scenes that way, and the action returns to the minion locked in conflict with the Master, with the minion’s player testing for death of the Master by rolling Love minus Weariness against the Master rolling Fear plus the minion’s Self-loathing.

minion (LOVE minus WEARINESS) vs. Master (FEAR plus SELF-LOATHING)​

If the minion wins, the Master is killed, and the game proceeds to Epilogues. If the minion does not win the roll, another round of scenes is had with the other characters . . . And then another test for the death of the Master. Each time the Master wins the roll against the minion, the minion gains a point of Weariness, and the GM and player negotiate the events of that scene. . . . Presumably it could take a few cycles of this before the Master is dead, all the while the players are sorting out the final trait values that will inform their individual Epilogues . . .​

This isn't a railroad. It's not the GM making more-or-less unilateral decisions about scenes and stakes and what happens next. (I've elided the text that talks about how players and GM get input into the various scenes the endgame calls for - but the text is there!) Everyone can read the rulebook and see how the game works.