D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[zarionofarabel]

As I've noted before, this would define the vast majority of superhero campaigns as having no significant stakes. Yeah, no.

This is the main reason why the supers genre is my least favorite, and one that I have invested very little time in. Most supers games (of which I consider 5e to be) include a lot of combat. Not just as a thing to do, but also as needing significant mechanics and time investment. If I'm going to invest significant time and effort into playing out a combat encounter, I want it to be tense and exciting. If my PC is immortal, I don't find the experience to be tense or exciting. It just becomes a "who can math better" game, where the outcome could just as easily be decided by a single roll.

I do enjoy games where the PCs are by default immortal, but those games don't often feature mechanically robust combat that takes a significant amount of time to adjudicate. They may include physical conflict, but it is not more mechanically robust or time consuming than any other form of conflict.

I'm not sure why folks are equating "I don't enjoy combat with immortal PCs" to "no PC death means game pointless" as that is not what I said anyway. What I did say was that, for me, a lengthy mechanically robust combat encounter in which my PC can't die is not an enjoyable experience. If I'm going to play out a blow by blow retelling of said combat encounter, I want one of the inherent stakes of the encounter to be my PC's life. Without that, the blow by blow part becomes a seriously boring affair, and a complete waste of a significant portion of the game session. I would rather use that time to play out other events that will actually more the narrative along.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think I did that. I think the issue here is something like "pornography", famously defined as "I know it when I see it".

I think the term "railroading" has a massive negative connotation. And think people's reasoning goes something like this:

a) I'm a good DM.
b) Good DMs don't railroad.
c) Therefore what I do isn't railroading.
d) But, I can see that sometimes it goes too far and that's bad.
e) That going too far is what "railroading" is.

Whereas, despite being a GM, I approach it almost purely from a player perspective.

I'm a player.
I want my choices to matter.
When my choices don't matter, I feel frustrated.
If I'm in a situation where it feels like I am bound to one and only one path, I will feel like my choices don't matter.
The word I use for situations where I have that experience is "railroading".

Like, your argument is analogous to a chef saying that "well I'm a good chef, so my food can't be overcooked" etc., to justify the idea that "overcooked" has a negative connotation it doesn't deserve. Sometimes, the point of a word is to be negative. That isn't a bad thing. It just means we need to apply it when it's appropriate. That's why I proposed (here or elsewhere, don't remember) various terms with different connotations:

• Neutral "on a fixed path": linear
• Positive "on a fixed path": rollercoaster
• Neutral "free to roam": open
• Negative "free to roam": wasteland

I didn't like a definition that depended on a subjective opinion about what went too far. People say things like, "Railroading is when you remove player agency" or "Railroading is when you remove player agency to achieve a result you desire", and the definition I'm giving is within some degree of nuance of that. But in reality this definition gets really congruent with the application of GM force and GM fiat. And yet, it's really hard to have a GM and also not have those things to some degree, and yet also games with GMs for a lot of reason tend to be more popular than ones without them.

I mean...yes? GM force being used is railroading. That's...what that is. Games exist that avoid the use of GM force or fiat for resolving things that players are interested in resolving. PbtA, for instance. It really isn't that hard to do this. PbtA ain't exactly unpopular, and we cannot use D&D as our lodestar because its dominance is not particularly related to its design. Unless you want to argue that actively instructing GMs to act passive-aggressively toward players was popular during the TSR years, which I doubt. D&D is popular for many many reasons and we simply cannot reason from "well D&D does it therefore it must be popular", that line of reasoning is invalid.

It seems to me that the better choice, rather than trying to reclaim "railroad", is to seek new terms without the baggage, as said above.

Because the universe that we play in is simulated in the head of a person, it's really not possible to have a theoretical "no railroading" game where the GM is only leaving the results up to player decisions, the pre-established rules, the dice, and a pre-established fiction that arose from those things. Everything else involves some amount of limiting player agency to achieve a certain result, some of it vastly more obviously than others.

You should check out Ironsworn. None of this is true of it. Because you can 100% play without a GM at all.

And a "time skip" or a "hand wave" is such a big obvious example of that in my essay it was like the first technique that came into my head. And I know from play experience, that playing something out and time skipping or hand waving don't produce equivalent results. You can't just assume that the player wouldn't make some important story changing choice in the "down time". Rather, you have to balance the opportunity for the player to have agency against the other goals that you are trying to achieve for everyone to have a good time.

Critical issue: they may not produce equivalent results. Again, the issue of sleep, or using the bathroom, or eating an uneventful meal, or walking to a different location in a small town, or (etc.): these are thugs where the possibility of an event cropping up are low and generally outside the players' agency regardless, and where the characters are not really doing anything which offers much opportunity for agency.

What agency is lost by not "playing out" sleeping for eight uneventful hours?

And that is a very important concept to understand and accept and recognize that clears up so much of these arguments in the way steps A through E above just doesn't. What I figured out is powerfully clarifying and illuminating and not obfuscating.

Personally, I think trying to rehabilitate "railroad" is obfuscating, because it takes a word that is meant for being negative and says "well I mean it could be positive..."

 

[zarionofarabel]

Whereas I find that character death makes players entirely check out of the game.

"Oh, my character can just die randomly despite my full effort? Okay, no point investing, I'm going to lose it, so I should never get attached." They'll act out, goof off, and otherwise be disruptive or misbehave, because they know nothing matters and their characters WILL die anyway, so may as well get a laugh out of it before the guillotine inevitably drops.

I have never experienced this phenomenon myself, so I am not sure what to say other than...our personal experiences within the hobby are obviously very different.

Your conclusion only follows if (a) all players are always risk-tolerant or even risk-seeking, (b) the campaign offers nothing else that players are drawn toward, so they must be pushed away from things instead, and (c) players are inherently shallow and fickle.

Well I would hope that the players are at least risk-tolerant as they willfully and routinely engage in risky activities! Then again I guess deathless combat poses no real risk, so there is that. I can also assure you that my players are neither shallow nor fickle, and my games include all kinds of things the players are drawn to outside of combat. I mean, in my games, combat is something to be avoided as much as possible because it carries the risk of PC death. If the players can achieve objectives without having to resort to combat, they are happy to not have to risk their PC's lives.

 

[Mort]

This is the main reason why the supers genre is my least favorite, and one that I have invested very little time in. Most supers games (of which I consider 5e to be) include a lot of combat. Not just as a thing to do, but also as needing significant mechanics and time investment. If I'm going to invest significant time and effort into playing out a combat encounter, I want it to be tense and exciting. If my PC is immortal, I don't find the experience to be tense or exciting. It just becomes a "who can math better" game, where the outcome could just as easily be decided by a single roll.

I do enjoy games where the PCs are by default immortal, but those games don't often feature mechanically robust combat that takes a significant amount of time to adjudicate. They may include physical conflict, but it is not more mechanically robust or time consuming than any other form of conflict.

I'm not sure why folks are equating "I don't enjoy combat with immortal PCs" to "no PC death means game pointless" as that is not what I said anyway. What I did say was that, for me, a lengthy mechanically robust combat encounter in which my PC can't die is not an enjoyable experience. If I'm going to play out a blow by blow retelling of said combat encounter, I want one of the inherent stakes of the encounter to be my PC's life. Without that, the blow by blow part becomes a seriously boring affair, and a complete waste of a significant portion of the game session. I would rather use that time to play out other events that will actually more the narrative along.

I certainly agree that 5e combat can become boring or a slog to just "get through."

The trick, for me, is to introduce stakes and conditions that don't involve just getting the other side to zero.


- Rescue hostages while holding off, or navigating through, baddies.

- escape sequence, sadly surprisingly tricky/difficult to pull off well in 5e.

- fulfill a specific condition during combat (hit a target, grab an item etc.) that doesn't depend on downing the guards.

Stuff looks that. Failure to keep things fresh can absolutely lead to boredom or disengagement.

 

[bloodtide]

This is a common sentiment when this topic comes up, but what it really reveals is the shallowness of the campaign in question, or the (ironically) replaceable nature of the characters within it. One of the things I aim for in my campaigns is to give player characters a stake in the setting (a relationship, a cause, a community, etc) so that the player does think the events of play matter outside of their character's simple survival.

Except the idea that something might happen in the fiction does not equal character death.

I find that as the campaign goes up in level, this becomes more and more important. One because it's great for PCs to have motivations that truly drive them and also because there are then many things that can motivate them other than just (their own) survival.

I agree. But character death adds so many more levels. When you have players who care about the game fiction, it makes for a great game. Death only adds to that. Knowing that your PC might fail and not just die, but also fail to do the story plot.

The statement that the only thing that matters in an an RPG is whether or not you die is a very foreign one to me. For me, the core of a successful RPG campaign is all about how characters evolve over time -- mechanically and/or narratively. I can easily conceive of a fun RPG campaign with character change but without character death, but the reverse seems at best a tactical board game. Might be fun, but it's not an RPG.

Most D&D games mid-high level don't have permanent character death. Certainly if my level Pathfinder society character died, it's my decision if that actually is true or not. I can negate it with petty cash. And yet, I still find myself seriously invested in playing adventures and "winning" encounters. I do not feel that "nothing really matters".

This is the more Storytelling and Cinematic way to play. Comic Book characters might be the best example: They "grow" and "change" and occasionally "reset", but they can never die. And even when they do "die" for a bit...they amazingly always come back. And it is a comforting story when the main character can never die or loose or even have anything negative happen to them.

But for games like D&D, there is something lost when the game with immortal PCs. I often ask such players, why even use the AC, HP, and combat rules if there will be no character death. If your hit points are infinity, why even keep track of them? If the PC can never die, why even use the HP rules? Or any of the combat rules?

Whereas I find that character death makes players entirely check out of the game.

"Oh, my character can just die randomly despite my full effort? Okay, no point investing, I'm going to lose it, so I should never get attached." They'll act out, goof off, and otherwise be disruptive or misbehave, because they know nothing matters and their characters WILL die anyway, so may as well get a laugh out of it before the guillotine inevitably drops.

This is very true and common.

Your conclusion only follows if (a) all players are always risk-tolerant or even risk-seeking, (b) the campaign offers nothing else that players are drawn toward, so they must be pushed away from things instead, and (c) players are inherently shallow and fickle.

Odd you miss the positive ones: (a) all players intently pay attention during the game play at all times (b) the campaign offers a myriad of wonderful things and the player does not want to loose all of that and (c) the players are deep and immersive.

None of these is true overall, and I find most of them usually wrong. Your arguments depend on players being jerks almost all of the time. It's patently ridiculous. Even I, at my most skeptical of GM behavior, have never been as dismissive or insulting as you have been to players-in-general.

Not at all. The jerk players are the ones that walk away as soon as their character dies. And it is nearly always 100% the players fault. More average players, once they shake off the "way everyone else does it" can quickly learn to have a healthy respect for stakes, danger, suspense and character death.

This is an empirical conjecture. My experience doesn't bear it out.

I see it often. Though my game is harsh, ruthless, "life is war" hard fun.

 

[Celebrim]

Whereas, despite being a GM, I approach it almost purely from a player perspective.

I'm a player.
I want my choices to matter.
When my choices don't matter, I feel frustrated.
If I'm in a situation where it feels like I am bound to one and only one path, I will feel like my choices don't matter.
The word I use for situations where I have that experience is "railroading".

That sounds reasonable except for that part "feels like". So something either is or isn't, regardless of whether you feel it or not. If you as a player don't realize you are on one path because you never try to get off, then you'll probably have a blast and might even think you are being clever and creative, but that doesn't mean you actually had real agency. That's high illusionism, where the player thinks that they have agency but really the GM is just fudging so well that no matter what they do, the GM tells them the story that the GM thinks they will enjoy. Conversely, if a player feels like they have no agency and they are on rails, but there are no rails and the problem is the player is terrible at thinking outside the box, doesn't try to negotiate or parley, doesn't try to run away, or whatever and is just approaching all problems head on, that might be the GMs fault but the problem probably isn't that it is a railroad if there are legitimately many possible solutions the GM would allow to win.

Like, your argument is analogous to a chef saying that "well I'm a good chef, so my food can't be overcooked" etc., to justify the idea that "overcooked" has a negative connotation it doesn't deserve.

So you think my analogy is bad so you are going to make an analogy about my analogy that is worse to prove that, is that how we are going to approach this? Your analogy misses the point. But if I must make do with it, while I do agree that it's objectively worse to cook a steak to well done, that doesn't mean rare is the best way to cook a steak and everyone will agree with it. But here is the problem, 'cooked' is a purely objective thing. I can judge doneness by internal temperature. So you aren't really making a good analogy anyway.

Sometimes, the point of a word is to be negative. That isn't a bad thing. It just means we need to apply it when it's appropriate. That's why I proposed (here or elsewhere, don't remember) various terms with different connotations:

Yeah I get all that, but the problem is that (almost) no one does apply 'railroading' in an appropriate way because they think that they can distinguish between good GM fiat and bad GM railroading as if there is a hard and sharp objective line in that which will work for everyone, or as if they are not themselves actually applying railroading techniques to limit player agency at all.

• Neutral "on a fixed path": linear
• Positive "on a fixed path": rollercoaster
• Neutral "free to roam": open
• Negative "free to roam": wasteland

I tend to use linear, railroad, sandbox, rowboat world but yeah, I've been making that distinction like 18 years or so.

I mean...yes? GM force being used is railroading.

Except now you are redefining what railroading is from your first player centric definition where it was about experience. Now you've offered me two different definitions. What do you really mean?

It seems to me that the better choice, rather than trying to reclaim "railroad", is to seek new terms without the baggage, as said above.

No. Because if you actually try to say, "Well, how does someone railroad (verb) the players?", you quickly realize that what they are doing is not qualitatively different than good GMing (or what most people would experience as good GM) but quantitatively different. What matters to whether something is a railroad/roller coaster (noun) is how much railroading actually went on and from a player experience perspective, how much they noticed or cared.

You should check out Ironsworn. None of this is true of it. Because you can 100% play without a GM at all.

Well, yes, and I have but already started this conversation by saying that railroading only applies in the context of a game with a GM. If you have some way to play without one then you have other issues like there is no secret keeper and the experience is more like writing a book than reading one, which is fun, but perhaps not for everyone or as fun for more people. But yes, no GM makes it really hard to railroad.

Critical issue: they may not produce equivalent results. Again, the issue of sleep, or using the bathroom, or eating an uneventful meal, or walking to a different location in a small town, or (etc.): these are thugs where the possibility of an event cropping up are low and generally outside the players' agency regardless, and where the characters are not really doing anything which offers much opportunity for agency.

What agency is lost by not "playing out" sleeping for eight uneventful hours?

As I tried to explain earlier, the hand wave isn't "You slept for eight hours." The handwave is "Do you agree to be asleep?" That is to say, "Do you agree to let me have you in this particular and situation during those eight hours?"

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is the main reason why the supers genre is my least favorite, and one that I have invested very little time in. Most supers games (of which I consider 5e to be) include a lot of combat. Not just as a thing to do, but also as needing significant mechanics and time investment. If I'm going to invest significant time and effort into playing out a combat encounter, I want it to be tense and exciting. If my PC is immortal, I don't find the experience to be tense or exciting. It just becomes a "who can math better" game, where the outcome could just as easily be decided by a single roll.

Its only not exciting if you don't care about the other consequences of failure. You know, the place you're protecting getting destroyed, bad guys stealing technology they'll use to do harm, little things like that.

It may not get your character killed, but them going down can lead to failure (either by not winning the fight--something people aren't afraid to do in superhero games because its usually not a campaign ender--or by not having the chracter up that needs to interfere with something at the right time). That's plenty tense, thanks.

I'm not sure why folks are equating "I don't enjoy combat with immortal PCs" to "no PC death means game pointless" as that is not what I said anyway. What I did say was that, for me, a lengthy mechanically robust combat encounter in which my PC can't die is not an enjoyable experience. If I'm going to play out a blow by blow retelling of said combat encounter, I want one of the inherent stakes of the encounter to be my PC's life. Without that, the blow by blow part becomes a seriously boring affair, and a complete waste of a significant portion of the game session. I would rather use that time to play out other events that will actually more the narrative along.

We're reacting to it because it sets the only stakes that make combat as tense and exciting as ones involving death, and that seems a big reach. You feel the way you feel, but bluntly, it seems a narrow view of what the stakes of combat are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, a lot of the superhero genre overall certainly feels that way.

Only because in most media they're not going to let a real failure happen. That doesn't have anything to do with what the actual stakes are.