D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[Crimson Longinus]

Trad hasn't cracked the code because it's impossible. You can't simultaneously experience a fantasy novel AND simultaneously have full agency to explore the setting.

Players who want to experience a story have to abandon some agency. Players who want full agency over exploration have to abandon the idea of an experienced plot structure.

Whilst I would not put it quite so starkly, you're definitely onto something here. I think the "story" that the latter approach produces is more like an historical account. It does not necessarily follow proper dramatic structure like a novel would. And I think to a lot of people that unpredictability is a feature; in this game we genuinely do not know whether the super spy will manage to stop the terrible plan of the mad villain, as this is not a film that needs to have the predictably triumphant ending. Then again, I think some editing and seeding the world with (somewhat implausible amount of) interesting elements and situations is needed to avoid the game becoming boring. Real history certainly is full of interesting events, but the history books tend to focus on them and skip the boring parts.

 

[payn]

Trad hasn't cracked the code because it's impossible. You can't simultaneously experience a fantasy novel AND simultaneously have full agency to explore the setting.

Players who want to experience a story have to abandon some agency. Players who want full agency over exploration have to abandon the idea of an experienced plot structure.

Neither ever fully happens. Everything is a rail road its just linear is a big one, and sandbox is a lot of little ones.

 

[Desdichado]

Trad hasn't cracked the code because it's impossible. You can't simultaneously experience a fantasy novel AND simultaneously have full agency to explore the setting.

Players who want to experience a story have to abandon some agency. Players who want full agency over exploration have to abandon the idea of an experienced plot structure.

You may be right, but the problem is that your interpretation lacks nuance and is taking the end points as the only points on the spectrum. Trad players don't want to experience a fantasy novel AND have full agency. They want an experience that is MORE LIKE a fantasy novel but WITH agency. Site-based adventuring tends to focus on the agency but feels little like a fantasy novel, and provides little of what the typical trad player sees as the promise of the medium in the first place. Hence the abandonment of site-based published modules (mostly) in the early/mid 80s and the ascendancy of trad; because trad was largely the mainstream and presumably the most common style amongst gamers. In today's fractured market, all kinds of other styles can be adequately supplied, although the prevalence of WotC style campaigns and Paizo style adventure paths suggests to me that trad is still the biggest elephant in the room.

EDIT: With the caveat that even most trad style adventures that I've read have some site-based elements integrated. Again, the spectrum isn't two endpoints.

But the problem is that I'm not sure how you write a trad adventure that doesn't come across like a railroad. I know how to run one, and I know how to create notes for one that are useful for me, but I don't know how to do so in a way that is useful for anyone else. I'm not convinced that there isn't some method for doing so, but people haven't, as I say, cracked that code.

And I think that there are interesting incentives for why they don't. Many more adventures get read than ran, I suspect, so making an adventure product that's interesting to read will drive both sales and enthusiasm with customers. But it also encourages a bad spiral where DMs will be less likely to want to deviate from it.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No. Because if the GM frames events in such way, that there is always only the one sensible thing to do, it is still a railroad, just more elegantly done than one where the GM uses force to block outcomes. To avoid this the situations should be more open ended, without one obvious outcome. Basically if you can run it with several different groups of players and they all end up making the roughly same choices leading to the same outcomes it is probably a railroad.

I didn't say 'railroad', I said 'linear adventure'. They are two different things.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I didn't say 'railroad', I said 'linear adventure'. They are two different things.

Are they though?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Again this may be true but not useful in establishing a taxonomy.

No one is actually establishing a taxonomy, because everyone refuses to change their own definitions to follow a single one.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Are they though?

Yes. As many other people have made plain.

If you don't want to see (or can't see) a difference... that's fine. But other people do.

 

[DEFCON 1]

But that completely misses the point. A railroad isn't a railroad until the DM tries to force the players back on to the track when they're doing something else.

That's why I said 'linear adventure' and not 'railroad'.

 

[TwoSix]

You may be right, but the problem is that your interpretation lacks nuance and is taking the end points as the only points on the spectrum. Trad players don't want to experience a fantasy novel AND have full agency. They want an experience that is MORE LIKE a fantasy novel but WITH agency. Site-based adventuring tends to focus on the agency but feels little like a fantasy novel, and provides little of what the typical trad player sees as the promise of the medium in the first place. Hence the abandonment of site-based published modules (mostly) in the early/mid 80s and the ascendancy of trad; because trad was largely the mainstream and presumably the most common style amongst gamers. In today's fractured market, all kinds of other styles can be adequately supplied, although the prevalence of WotC style campaigns and Paizo style adventure paths suggests to me that trad is still the biggest elephant in the room.

But the problem is that I'm not sure how you write a trad adventure that doesn't come across like a railroad. I know how to run one, and I know how to create notes for one that are useful for me, but I don't know how to do so in a way that is useful for anyone else. I'm not convinced that there isn't some method for doing so, but people haven't, as I say, cracked that code.

And I think that there are interesting incentives for why they don't. Many more adventures get read than ran, I suspect, so making an adventure product that's interesting to read will drive both sales and enthusiasm with customers. But it also encourages a bad spiral where DMs will be less likely to want to deviate from it.

I wouldn't know. I don't run modules or adventures.

But the core problem is that a novel is plotted. You can't have a plot AND have agency to break the plot. You can maybe have side adventures that are unrelated to the plot, or maybe you can encounter aspects of the plot in a differing order.

At best, you can set up an adventure like a touring vacation or a cruise; you have a couple of stops where you have the day to explore and see the sites, and then you get back on the vehicle to get to the next site.

 

[payn]

You may be right, but the problem is that your interpretation lacks nuance and is taking the end points as the only points on the spectrum. Trad players don't want to experience a fantasy novel AND have full agency. They want an experience that is MORE LIKE a fantasy novel but WITH agency. Site-based adventuring tends to focus on the agency but feels little like a fantasy novel, and provides little of what the typical trad player sees as the promise of the medium in the first place. Hence the abandonment of site-based published modules (mostly) in the early/mid 80s and the ascendancy of trad; because trad was largely the mainstream and presumably the most common style amongst gamers. In today's fractured market, all kinds of other styles can be adequately supplied, although the prevalence of WotC style campaigns and Paizo style adventure paths suggests to me that trad is still the biggest elephant in the room.

But the problem is that I'm not sure how you write a trad adventure that doesn't come across like a railroad. I know how to run one, and I know how to create notes for one that are useful for me, but I don't know how to do so in a way that is useful for anyone else. I'm not convinced that there isn't some method for doing so, but people haven't, as I say, cracked that code.

I've seen it cracked. Its in the presentation. A well written adventure path is going to be a like a recipe kit. It gives you all the info in how to make something, but ultimately the execution is up to the GM. It is less about writing a story and more in giving out characters, motivations, and interesting places for a GM to bring it to life themselves.

And I think that there are interesting incentives for why they don't. Many more adventures get read than ran, I suspect, so making an adventure product that's interesting to read will drive both sales and enthusiasm with customers. But it also encourages a bad spiral where DMs will be less likely to want to deviate from it.

Sort of. A published adventure has the wrong reputation. That is, something where all the work is done for the GM. Its anything but that. If folks would view them more as a recipe as I noted above and understand they have to cook the meal and their proficiency in kitchen is going to have an impact on the overall result.