D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[Maxperson]

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.

Sure you can. A plot is like a battle strategy. It only lasts intact until contact with the enemy. Breaking the plot doesn't mean abandoning it completely. It just means the DM has to flow with the agency displayed by the player and adapt the adventure to react to player decisions, not force the plot to remain as the DM wrote down

 

[Maxperson]

It's from the player's perspective, not the DMs. If they players feel they have no choices to make, then they are being railroaded. If the players feel they do have choices and it just so happens by complete coincidence that the authors of the adventure correctly predicted their choices and wrote further adventures for the DM to use, then it is linear. "Railroads" are about player feelings, which is why the word has a "negative connotation".

Take out the world "feel." It doesn't matter what the players feel. It matters what is. If they players feel like they only have the one thing to do, but there are several other things that they don't think of, it doesn't become a railroad just because they feel that way.

There have been times where my group has been stymied or don't necessarily want to do what they perceive the obvious thing to do is. Sometimes after the game they'll bring up a moment like that and I'll rattle off 3 or 4 things that they didn't consider(a non-exhaustive list) before they made their decision.

To be a railroad the DM needs to force them down the one option no matter what else the players want to do.

 

[Maxperson]

I literally not was sure what people meant by "linear." Now as it seems that they do not mean linear by "linear" I better understand why people think that "linear" adventures ae different thing than railroading! But yeah, it is a terrible word choice that is bound to lead to confusion, so on those grounds I certainly object it!

Linear refers to the adventure, not the characters. When the DM sets up a linear adventure, the way he writes down to get from A to Z is a line. That doesn't mean that is the only way to reach the end, or that the end even has to be reached. The characters might find or forge a different route.

The prepared portion of the adventure is a line, but the characters are not forced to walk it.

 

[AnotherGuy]

@Maxperson audited the thread and it was found wanting.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There can be deviation. The plot is set up in a line, but there are other ways for you to go. You can create your own lines if you think of things the DM didn't(quite common). You can walk away from the line completely. You can push the plot in directions the DM didn't consider. You can completely overrun the plot and create a new one.

I rather feel that at this point it stops being linear!

Linear refers to the adventure, not the characters. When the DM sets up a linear adventure, the way he writes down to get from A to Z is a line. That doesn't mean that is the only way to reach the end, or that the end even has to be reached. The characters might find or forge a different route.

The prepared portion of the adventure is a line, but the characters are not forced to walk it.

OK. So linearity is in the prepped material but not necessarily at the game as it happens? This makes sense, I guess. I just think that preparing stuff this way easily leads to railroading, or at least some privileging of the prepared material, as the GM has an incentive to steer the game towards their prep, as that's all they have planned. But it is not given of course, and skilled GMs can certainly easily avoid this. I think it is common pitfall especially for inexperienced GMs who are handed an AP with linear prep though.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But gaming isn't or shouldn't be like that. If the party suffers a TPK/near TPK most groups just have everyone make new characters and continue. Sandbox, linear, the game goes on. Often the demise/defeat of the prior group can be incorporated into the fiction (the extent depending on what the prior group has actually done) and the new group goes forward.

Do they?

I've literally never seen that. A true TPK is a death sentence for a campaign. I've seen that several times personally, and too many times to count secondhand. Never once seen the thing you describe--except, secondhand, in sandbox play. TPKs are a massive downer and put a terrible black cloud over the game for every group I've ever interacted with that has had one.

I've certainly never been in a group (player or DM) where it was "well you guys royally messed that up, Greyhawk's done for. Guess we're moving on to an Eberron campaign now!" Though, thinking about it, that might actually be a fun rug to pull with the right group (mine might fit).

Well. See above. That's exactly what has happened in multiple games I've been in. We got 6-8 weeks in, DM thought we were invincible and threw stupidly brokenly awful combats at us, we TPK'd, group disbanded. Didn't matter if it was longtime friends or random strangers or a mix of the two. TPKs kill campaigns, consistently, in my personal experience.

(And, as a note? 6-8 weeks is an optimistic number. Some didn't make it past five weeks.)

 

[pemerton]

Well, in a campaign with a save-the-world premise, that's pretty much the campaign premise out the gate; its an initial-state situation and part of the premise. That's true in any campaign in the world that isn't a sandbox.

If the campaign has a "save the world" premise, and the PCs all die, then it seems to me that the world hasn't been saved!

Bringing in the second string, in the way that was being talked about, suggests that the whole thing doesn't relate to the PCs in any particular fashion. It's the GM's story, not the players'.

 

[pemerton]

A true TPK is a death sentence for a campaign.

<snip>

TPKs are a massive downer and put a terrible black cloud over the game for every group I've ever interacted with that has had one.

I'm not sure what you mean by "true TPK". If the PCs are all defeated in battle, that doesn't have to mean the end of the campaign. For instance, they might all be taken prisoner.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm not sure what you mean by "true TPK". If the PCs are all defeated in battle, that doesn't have to mean the end of the campaign. For instance, they might all be taken prisoner.

True TPK = Characters are all straight-up Just Dead, never coming back.

I've had this happen, at this point, five separate times playing 5e. Two of those times were with GMs I actually knew personally.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

True TPK = Characters are all straight-up Just Dead, never coming back.

I've had this happen, at this point, five separate times playing 5e. Two of those times were with GMs I actually knew personally.

In my decades of playing RPGs, this has happened once, (aside some horror style scenarios where “everyone dies horribly in the end” is the point,) and it was at the very end of the campaign at the final confrontation where one PC decided to join the enemy. It might have happened in some games we played as kids and I just don’t remember. But it definitely is not common and your experience seems utterly bizarre to me.