D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[EzekielRaiden]

So you want your players to not play smart? To make bad decisions based on the information they have in hand? Or is it you just don't want there to be a throughline to your adventures and you want your players to just move randomly around (because to do otherwise is 'railroady')?

If that's how you prefer to play and your players prefer to play, that's cool. But hopefully that's just because you like that style and not because you have a need to 'not be railroady' first and foremost.

I don't think you've taken @Crimson Longinus at their word.

Notice the operative bit you left out, bolded for emphasis: "Some situations are like that, but I think it is poor adventure building if every situation has one correct and obvious answer, and yeah, to me that is rather railroady."

That's a sentiment I can agree with. Many situations simply do not have a single correct answer, especially if we are focused so purely on story-creation rather than on nuts-and-bolts gameplay. Yes, it is often the case that there are better answers and worse answers! But that doesn't mean there is literally every single time ALWAYS one, and ONLY one, correct and valid answer to every single situation.

Indeed, if that were the case, I should think it would produce a pretty boring story. You can't have a person making judgment calls if there's always one obviously correct answer, unless your characters are stupid.

 

[RealAlHazred]

And great module authors have set scenes up in a certain way that results in players who do what they think is the smartest response to a scene... and that just happens to be the one the author has prepped for the DM ahead of time.

Sure, but there are a lot of module authors who then decide to prevent any but the "smartest" choice. And that's railroading. "If the PCs try talking to the NPC, the DC is 10; if, instead, they want to pick the lock to continue, the DC is 45" in a module for 1st through 4th level PCs, for instance. "Oh, but it's still possible" falls flat when it's mathematically impossible. How many high-level modules have walls "impervious to teleportation" for instance? You have a player who has invested character resources into developing a certain ability and then module authors who decide it's too difficult to figure out a way to allow for that ability so they just make it unusable.

Every player is a different person. Every PC is a different character. What may be the smartest response for an elf wizard is probably not the smartest response for a dwarf fighter. And even the greatest authors who can accomplish what I quoted, are designing their modules for the playing field that exists when they write it -- if the game later adds a race or a class that has some special ability, it can absolutely foil the most subtle attempts at manipulation.

Read the best of the Old School modules. The best of them do not even attempt subtle manipulations; they come up with a solid premise with logical hurdles and problems. Those are my preference. Let the players who spent resources shine. Let the final scene play out organically. If the villain has been given a well-developed personality and appropriate abilities it will probably be a dramatic ending no matter how it plays out. But deciding on a conclusion first and then trying to figure out how to get to that conclusion is not how I run games.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Conversely:

TTRPGs are the only place where we can have the two parts of that actually, truly, interact dynamically. Video games cannot be flexible enough to adapt like that. And pure freeform roleplay is all about not having rules.

It's only in the TTRPG space that you can get things where you play the game by roleplaying, and you roleplay by playing the game. Where the two are in sync with each other and actually reinforcing one another, rather than one being a vestigial organ barely clinging to existence next to the full and complete development of the other one.

That's why I want both things. I want good story development AND good gameplay development. Because this is the one and only place I can actually find that.

Both things are necessary yes... but I personally just happen to believe that while gameplay isn't a vestigial organ to story, gameplay is still quite a bit secondary to it. They are not equal in my eyes. I can still happily roleplay even if the gameplay kinda sucks. Whereas a product with great gameplay but bad roleplay might as well not even have roleplay at all as far as I'm concerned. I'll just play the game as a game and not bother trying to roleplay within it at all.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Both things are necessary yes... but I personally just happen to believe that while gameplay isn't a vestigial organ to story, gameplay is still quite a bit secondary to it. They are not equal in my eyes. I can still happily roleplay even if the gameplay kinda sucks. Whereas a product with great gameplay but bad roleplay might as well not even have roleplay at all as far as I'm concerned. I'll just play the game as a game and not bother trying to roleplay within it at all.

Just curious, but what do you mean by a game having bad roleplay?

 

[Desdichado]

Notice the operative bit you left out, bolded for emphasis: "Some situations are like that, but I think it is poor adventure building if every situation has one correct and obvious answer, and yeah, to me that is rather railroady."

That's a sentiment I can agree with. Many situations simply do not have a single correct answer, especially if we are focused so purely on story-creation rather than on nuts-and-bolts gameplay. Yes, it is often the case that there are better answers and worse answers! But that doesn't mean there is literally every single time ALWAYS one, and ONLY one, correct and valid answer to every single situation.

The existence of exceptions, outliers and many data points that are all over the place does not invalidate the existence of patterns in the data. Not to speak for DEFCON 1, but he doesn't have to be right all of the time about this to still identify it as a useful pattern to talk about.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't think you've taken @Crimson Longinus at their word.

Notice the operative bit you left out, bolded for emphasis: "Some situations are like that, but I think it is poor adventure building if every situation has one correct and obvious answer, and yeah, to me that is rather railroady."

That's a sentiment I can agree with. Many situations simply do not have a single correct answer, especially if we are focused so purely on story-creation rather than on nuts-and-bolts gameplay. Yes, it is often the case that there are better answers and worse answers! But that doesn't mean there is literally every single time ALWAYS one, and ONLY one, correct and valid answer to every single situation.

Indeed, if that were the case, I should think it would produce a pretty boring story. You can't have a person making judgment calls if there's always one obviously correct answer, unless your characters are stupid.

I'm happy to adapt my statement away from "most obvious" answer to "most likely" answer. Because that has nothing to do with obviousness or what is most "correct". Rather... every situation is going to have one choice that gets selected more often than any other. The scenario gets played 100 times... one decision that any of the various tables can make will almost always win out and be chosen most often. Because again... players like playing smart. And thus even more open-ended scenarios with many different routes still have smarter and more logical decisions than others, and more often than not that one or two most logical choices will win out more often than not. And I maintain that most authors and DMs can still predict that fairly well and thus can plan for those choices beforehand. We know what the most logical or most likely choices would be, even without them being "obvious". So having those more likely choices written or prepped for beforehand-- a more "linear" path-- is not a waste of time. More often than not, that linear path is going to find its use.

 

[SkidAce]

Was this thread a railroad because we knew where the arguments would end up, or is it a sandbox since we were free to say as we wish?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Just curious, but what do you mean by a game having bad roleplay?

For the most part... any games that aren't actually roleplaying games but which you could roleplay as you played it if you wanted to. Games where you are "playing a character" in a story as part of the game. For instance, Dungeon!, Betrayal At The House On The Hill, Clue, Twilight Imperium, Secret Hitler etc. They aren't "roleplaying games" but they do have you playing characters and potentially acting "in-character" if you really wanted to get into it. So roleplaying is an option but is not the reason for the game's existence. For those sorts of games, since the actual focus of the game is the game and trying to win the game, the need to roleplay "in-character" is not necessary and in many ways can just be a detriment.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I believe it's because they don't think you are "roleplaying" when you do that sort of thing. They would construe it either as "rollplaying", e.g. simply executing rules in a dry/robotic way, or as lacking the taking-on-of-a-role, and instead being merely a slightly improvised take on being an actor in a stage play. So like, if you have Hamlet but the actors are permitted to ad-lib their lines, sort of thing.

I obviously disagree quite strenuously with this perspective, even though I am also pretty opposed to railroading (as I define it).

Except the breadth they take it to is--startling. For example, if you're running a game where the PCs are part of a military unit, the first time a player decides his character is going to go AWOL and head over the hills, you're apparently supposed to continue running the game for him in addition to the rest, even though his sudden change of what the game is supposed to be about has nothing to do with its premise.

In other words, you're not supposed to be able to have a premise at all narrower than "everything you want to do that's physically possible."

As I said, it would exclude about 95% or more of the hobby.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't quite understand what the definition of "a linear game" is. Because if it is literally linear, from A to B to C etc, no room for deviation or change of the player actions to affect the outcome, I really do not see how it is not a railroad, albeit possibly one the players willingly follow. Or is that the difference? Railroading is defined as the GM using force to prevent the players from deviating from the path, but if on the linear adventure the players never try to deviate from the path then technically such force is not needed?

That's certainly a big one, but there's also the issue of how the PCs get from points A to B to C to D, which can, even if the overall experience is similar, make the details feel quite different.