D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[Celebrim]

No. It's not a railroad if there are no rails. Rails = cannot get off.

If I narrate that 3 days pass as you get closer to Monomonomp, the players can stop me and say, "I wanted to look for herbs as we pass through the Forest of Lots of Herbs. If I say, "Okay, and back things up to the forest," there is no railroad.

How does that follow? Do you still end up going to Monomonomp? You seem to have narrowly defined railroading to explicitly and openly declaring, "No." In other words, you think railroading is only railroading if it's done badly. If the DM has no clevernessness and no maturity and no self-control, only then is it railroading. And in your example, there is no sign that the DM who is running a railroad has any reason to say, "No." Essentially, I'd view this as a sort of shopping expedition where the player wants "herbs" without paying for them, so I'd be like, "Ok, roll your Craft(Herbalism) or Knowledge(Nature) whichever is better", and then give them like 1 c.p. worth of herbs for every point they beat a 10, and no deduct 1 s.p. per party member/level for expenses like food. And then I'd be like, "Ok, so how many hours/days do you want to spend gathering herbs?" And then I'd be like, "Ok, continuing on the road to Monomonomp." and not at all feel like the players have had any agency. They've done nothing to disrupt the plan. This is like them investigating a chair in the room where the door they have to get through is located. They haven't done anything to disrupt my plans so why would I need to use force? Instead, all I have to do is give them their herbs without it being obviously more productive than going to Monomonomp.

Where it gets to be railroading is if the Forest of Lots of Herbs is like the Old Forest in Fellowship of the Ring where anyone that tries to walk through it gets steered after hardships toward Monomonomp eventually, because by golly you are always going to get to Monomonomp.

If I narrate that and they don't stop me, but COULD have if they wanted, there are no rails even if they don't say anything. They were still able to go in any direction they liked, but opted not to. Rails simply do not exist in that situation.

If they are actually able to go in any direction they liked but opted not to, then there aren't rails. But in the situation you describe where I narrate that and they don't stop me, we haven't proved at all that there are no rails. Nor are we proving that there are no rails if they say, "I want to stop and get herbs." We only prove that if after trying to get away from Monomonomp through several means, the players find that not only can they get away from Monomonomp but that new stories that don't lead to Monomonomp appear as alternative things to do. Only then is it not a railroad.

Yes. Illusionism is a railroad, but that is also not what I'm describing. Hidden force is still force.

Ok, so now we have enough agreement that we can keep talking. If you agree that hidden force is still force, then the rails are still there even if you as a player can't see them. And I'm telling you that the hidden force is always there when certain techniques are applied, even when as a GM you aren't intending to use your force specifically to deprive the players of agency.

And in the discussion of the essay I talk about why this is, that no person is fully without bias and you completely know as a GM why you are doing something. And I also talk about how there are times when railroading techniques in the short term might lead to higher agency in the long term. Essentially you can railroad a group into having now more information and more options than they would have had otherwise and then they can start making informed choices, and only informed choices have real agency.

In the case of a hand wave or a time skip, ideally you are skipping over everything you know as a GM doesn't have a lot of meaning to it, but whether you are doing that or not, you are still conducting the players to a destination in such a way that their agency is now limited. And maybe yes, you let players retcon out of it and maybe you don't, and that isn't necessarily a railroading decision. That could be based on how quickly the players ask for a retcon and whether they do so before they take actions or receive information that effect the metagame. Like if they await until they get to Monononomp and see that there is a plague flag flying over the city, then I'm going to be hesitant to let them retcon. I might allow them to walk back to the forest of many herbs, but I won't necessarily let them then say, "Oh, I stopped to pick herbs on the way." (Unless they have a trait like Mastermind that lets them take retroactive actions.) That's GM force, but it's not necessarily railroading.

 

[kermit4karate]

How does that follow? Do you still end up going to Monomonomp? You seem to have narrowly defined railroading to explicitly and openly declaring, "No." In other words, you think railroading is only railroading if it's done badly. If the DM has no clevernessness and no maturity and no self-control, only then is it railroading. And in your example, there is no sign that the DM who is running a railroad has any reason to say, "No." Essentially, I'd view this as a sort of shopping expedition where the player wants "herbs" without paying for them, so I'd be like, "Ok, roll your Craft(Herbalism) or Knowledge(Nature) whichever is better, and then give them like 1 c.p. worth of herbs for every point they beat a 10, and no deduct 1 s.p. per party member/level for expenses like food." And then I'd be like, "Ok, so how many hours/days do you want to spend gathering herbs?" And then I'd be like, "Ok, continuing on the road to Monomonomp." and not at all feel like the players have had any agency. This is like them investigating a chair in the room where the door they have to get through is located. They haven't done anything to disrupt my plans so why would I need to use force? Instead, all I have to do is give them their herbs without it being obviously more productive than going to Monomonomp.

Where it gets to be railroading is if the Forest of Lots of Herbs is like the Old Forest in Fellowship of the Ring where anyone that tries to walk through it gets steered after hardships toward Monomonomp eventually, because by golly you are always going to get to Monomonomp.



If they are actually able to go in any direction they liked but opted not to, then there aren't rails. But in the situation you describe where I narrate that and they don't stop me, we haven't proved at all that there are no rails. Nor are we proving that there are no rails if they say, "I want to stop and get herbs." We only prove that if after trying to get Monomonomp through several means, the players find that not only can they get away from Monomonomp but new stories that don't lead to Monomonomp appear as alternative things to do. Only then is it not a railroad.



Ok, so now we have enough agreement that we can keep talking. If you agree that hidden force is still force, then the rails are still there even if you as a player can't see them. And I'm telling you that the hidden force is always there when certain techniques are applied, even when as a GM you aren't intending to use your force specifically to deprive the players of agency.

And in the discussion of the essay I talk about why this is, that no person is fully without bias and you completely know as a GM why you are doing something. And I also talk about how there are times when railroading techniques in the short term might lead to higher agency in the long term. Essentially you can railroad a group into having now more information and more options than they would have had otherwise and then they can start making informed choices, and only informed choices have real agency.

In the case of a hand wave or a time skip, ideally you are skipping over everything you know as a GM doesn't have a lot of meaning to it, but whether you are doing that or not, you are still conducting the players to a destination in such a way that their agency is now limited. And maybe yes, you let players retcon out of it and maybe you don't, and that isn't necessarily a railroading decision. That could be based on how quickly the players ask for a retcon and whether they do so before they take actions or receive information that effect the metagame. Like if they await until they get to Monononomp and see that there is a plague flag flying over the city, then I'm going to be hesitant to let them retcon. I might allow them to walk back to the forest of many herbs, but I won't necessarily let them then say, "Oh, I stopped to pick herbs on the way." (Unless they have a trait like Mastermind that lets them take retroactive actions.) That's GM force, but it's not necessarily railroading.

I'm very confused by this thread. If an adventure called The Catacombs of Lusmanora places the catacombs beneath Monomonomp, and the plot revolves around the party's exploration of the catacombs, should we feel bad about trying to guide (a.k.a. railroad) the party to hurry up and get their behinds to Monomonomp?

 

[kermit4karate]

nvm

 

[Celebrim]

I'm very confused by this thread. If an adventure called The Catacombs of Lusmanora places the catacombs beneath Monomonomp, and the plot revolves around the party's exploration of the catacombs, should we feel bad about trying to guide (a.k.a. railroad) the party to hurry up and get their behinds to Monomonomp?

No, not necessarily. But if the adventure revolves around the party's exploration of the catacombs and you guide the party to hurry up and get their behinds Monomonomp then you have railroaded them. And maybe they understand "this is the adventure so I might as well go along with it" and they consent to ride the rails, but then you've still railroaded them. That's just "All aboard to the choo choo."

Again, "railroading" is not defined as "Something I don't do, but what bad GMs do." In fact, to certain extent it's not even bad provided it doesn't become the defining character of your campaign. There are times when playing conductor and ensuring something fun happens is a good thing, even if it means the players (generally unknowingly) lose a little bit of agency, just so long as they find themselves in a place of agency and fun where they more or less believe they got their by choice.

 

[Maxperson]

How does that follow? Do you still end up going to Monomonomp?

That's not relevant. It's not the end point that important. It's whether they can stop or go somewhere else while on the way. If yes, no railroad is possible. If no, there's a railroad. In my game the answer is always yes, so even if they don't choose to go somewhere else or stop, the fact that they could means no rails are there. Nothing is forcing them to go anywhere.

You seem to have narrowly defined railroading to explicitly and openly declaring, "No." In other words, you think railroading is only railroading if it's done badly.

No. I think railroading is only railroading if it's actually railroading. Railroading require force, either obvious("no you can't do that") or illusion(they end up where I want even if they think they are choosing). Absent force making the group go where I want, there can be no railroad.

Your extremely overly broad personal definition doesn't apply anywhere else. The definition I'm using is the one most people use when referring to RPGs.

And in your example, there is no sign that the DM who is running a railroad has any reason to say, "No." Essentially, I'd view this as a sort of shopping expedition where the player wants "herbs" without paying for them, so I'd be like, "Ok, roll your Craft(Herbalism) or Knowledge(Nature) whichever is better, and then give them like 1 c.p. worth of herbs for every point they beat a 10, and no deduct 1 s.p. per party member/level for expenses like food." And then I'd be like, "Ok, so how many hours/days do you want to spend gathering herbs?" And then I'd be like, "Ok, continuing on the road to Monomonomp." and not at all feel like the players have had any agency. This is like them investigating a chair in the room where the door they have to get through is located. They haven't done anything to disrupt my plans so why would I need to use force? Instead, all I have to do is give them their herbs without it being obviously more productive than going to Monomonomp.

This is not relevant. There doesn't need to be any sign of a reason to say no. The DM either says yes(no railroad) or no(yes railroad). The reason for a no can be obvious or completely unfathomable to the players.

If they are actually able to go in any direction they liked but opted not to, then there aren't rails. But in the situation you describe where I narrate that and they don't stop me, we haven't proved at all that there are no rails.

I don't need to prove it. I am telling you that I have no rails, whether I time skip or not, because the players are free to interrupt a time skip to do something they want to do, even if it's to go a completely new direction and not go to Monomonomp at all.

That's all I need to say or do for there to be no railroading going on in my game. A DM who doesn't railroad doesn't need to prove the negative.

Ok, so now we have enough agreement that we can keep talking. If you agree that hidden force is still force, then the rails are still there even if you as a player can't see them. And I'm telling you that the hidden force is always there when certain techniques are applied, even when as a GM you aren't intending to use your force specifically to deprive the players of agency.

Only if the rails were there in the first place. If there are no rails there, the player still can't see them because they don't exist. Your assertion that time skips always involve force and are therefore all railroads is provably wrong. I've proved it in several posts and again in this one. If the players can interrupt to stop the time skip and alter what is happening or going to happen, it's not a railroad even if they don't bother to interrupt.

And in the discussion of the essay I talk about why this is, that no person is fully without bias and you completely know as a GM why you are doing something. And I also talk about how there are times when railroading techniques in the short term might lead to higher agency in the long term. Essentially you can railroad a group into having now more information and more options than they would have had otherwise and then they can start making informed choices, and only informed choices have real agency.

That's not true, either. You have agency as long as you have choices. The more information you have the greater that agency, but you don't need information to have agency.

If there are two doors in front of you in the dungeon and the left one leads out, and the right to a trap, so long as you have a real choice, you have agency. You don't need to know which is which so long as the left will always lead out and the right to the trap. If you do know somehow, you have greater agency, but it's only a lack of agency if your choice doesn't matter or is invalidated.

In the case of a hand wave or a time skip, ideally you are skipping over everything you know as a GM doesn't have a lot of meaning to it, but whether you are doing that or not, you are still conducting the players to a destination in such a way that their agency is now limited. And maybe yes, you let players retcon out of it and maybe you don't, and that isn't necessarily a railroading decision. That could be based on how quickly the players ask for a retcon and whether they do so before they take actions or receive information that effect the metagame. Like if they await until they get to Monononomp and see that there is a plague flag flying over the city, then I'm going to be hesitant to let them retcon. I might allow them to walk back to the forest of many herbs, but I won't necessarily let them then say, "Oh, I stopped to pick herbs on the way." (Unless they have a trait like Mastermind that lets them take retroactive actions.) That's GM force, but it's not necessarily railroading.

This is a different issue and why I rarely time skip straight to entering a city. Usually I start narrating again as they get closer to the city. They can't wait and only decide to back things up when they discover something that affects the situation. That's not a railroading situation at all.. That's the players trying to game the system, which thankfully my players don't try to do.

 

[Celebrim]

That's not relevant. It's not the end point that important.

Ok, I see what's going on here. I kept getting confused as to why you'd repeatedly contridict yourself in the space of two or three sentences, but you've clarified that mysterious "why" to me.

Have fun with your gaming.

 

[bloodtide]

I mean you can make any combat boring, in a host of ways. But what you mean is, do I see combat with no life or death stakes as automatically boring? And the answer is no. I think it can be meaningful, if there are other consequences.

In the bigger picture, yes. But not in just the combat. In life or death combat...and if your using deadly weapons it is life and death..the only immediate stakes are life and death. If you somehow "loose a fight" and don't have character death, it does not really effect the "big game goal" or the "quest" or the "metaplot".

Nope! Because you've literally just made the argument circular again. You have just inserted, right here, the claim that without death it is automatically meaningless. I reject that, and you haven't proven it. You've just claimed it's true.

I was not proving anything?

Because a character with 0 HP cannot act, and thus pushes the party closer to defeat.

Just because you cannot die does not mean you cannot be defeated. And if you are defeated, bad things will happen because you couldn't stop them.

And Character Death is the Ultimate Defeat.

Just to be clear: you are choosing to ask me to answer the question first, rather than answering it yourself?

Did not I already answer it?

But the answer is simple: Either my character lives in a world where they accomplished their goal, or a world where they didn't accomplish their goal. These two are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, so one and only one can happen. If I fail at a goal, sometimes that can be corrected later. Sometimes it can't. Sometimes I'll pay a cost and just...not be able to pay that cost a second time.

So you have a PC that must get a poison antidote before the queen dies at midnight. The PC heads off to the Dark Woods. The PC foolishly gets into a fight with some orcs, and dies. Quest failure. Game over.

So in another game with the same plot.....the PC is captured by the orcs. So then the DM Railroads the PC by not letting them escape. Quest failure. But the DM does not have the orcs kill the PC and let them escape or just let them go. The PC and the player maybe feel bad for seconds as they failed a quest.......and then just move on to the next quest.

So, even if my character's life isn't on the line, my character's goals are. As @Gorgon Zee so eloquently put it just above, I feel far greater tension and engagement when it is the goals, both narrow and broad, that are put into question. Brute survival, alone, doesn't make for a very interesting question, because the answers to that question are always, exactly two: "no, throw all your investment away and reroll" or "yes, so nothing has changed". Something that can only either maintain the status quo or eliminate it entirely...I mean I don't find either of those outcomes all that compelling. The only change "did not survive" induces is a dull and frustrating one. "Yes" permits other things to change...but plays no part in actually changing them.

Of course goals +life is far, far, far more stakes and tension then just "a goal".

I'm very confused by this thread. If an adventure called The Catacombs of Lusmanora places the catacombs beneath Monomonomp, and the plot revolves around the party's exploration of the catacombs, should we feel bad about trying to guide (a.k.a. railroad) the party to hurry up and get their behinds to Monomonomp?

No.

As I said above, the average game session only lasts a couple of hours. In that time, everyone wants to have fun. Unfortunately not all players quite grasp the concept. Most adventures are fairly straight forward and the players should move along the adventure. But a lot of players get confused or worse. They should know that the Catacombs are where the fun adventure is, and yet they will waste endless time wandering around in the woods foolishly.

And worse, if the DM just sits back and lets the Players Lead around the Random Sandbox and do basically nothing for hours......the players will blame the DM.

So, yes, most of the time, it is best for the DM to railroad the players to the adventure location so everyone can have fun.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't have a problem with the DM using hidden force to nudge the players along a predetermined path, whether it's called railroading or something else. If the players are enjoying themselves, then the results validate the approach.

I don't agree with that. Illusionism isn't perfect and when players find out, quite often they are upset about it. I much prefer to let the players have fun without forcing them overtly or covertly down paths.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't claim that in the general case the players choosing something is a loss of agency. I do claim that time skips (or hand waves generally) are a technique for railroading.

The idea behind a time skip is (ideally) that everyone at the table agrees that they want to move past the "scenary" and get to a certain destination because that is the "good stuff". So yes, the player is in the ideal case choosing something. But what they are choosing to do is willingly board the choo choo train.

No, this is just a complete non sequitur. If players choose that their characters go to a certain destination, then skipping some of the travel time so that they can actually get there in reasonable amount of game time is not any sort of railroading. Hell, insisting that you play all of the two weeks of travel in real time would be railroading, as it would make the players achieving their goal so insanely tedious that they would surely give up and choose to do something within ten minutes walk of their current location instead. (Though realistically the players would just leave the game as this would be utterly terrible GMing.)

 

[Maxperson]

Ok, I see what's going on here. I kept getting confused as to why you'd repeatedly contridict yourself in the space of two or three sentences, but you've clarified that mysterious "why" to me.

Have fun with your gaming.

There wasn't a single contradiction in any of my posts. If you thought there were, perhaps you should read them closer.