D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[Celebrim]

If nothing else some of the discussion in this thread has at least given me some idea as to why certain systems include meta currency for the GM. I know Modiphius 2d20 systems do. I mean, if the GM has their own meta currency they can use to force the narrative down a certain path, even if it's against player wishes, it shouldn't really be railroading, right?!? I mean, isn't that the whole reason why a GM would need meta currency, to give them the ability to railroad, as long as they have the currency to pay. Or am I totally off on that idea?

I think it's really interesting to see how different systems deal with this problem. In trad systems (which is what I run), I have particular processes of preparation to play and in play that are designed to limit my own bias. For example, I might say before the game that the vile Necromancer has four elite orc guards with 32 h.p. each and in saying that to myself I'm making a little contract to myself - "No matter how well the PCs are doing (or how badly) I'm not going to fudge how many elite orc guards show up or how many hits points they have. What happens is what happens."

But a lot of non-Trad games specifically subvert and encourage the subversion of all the processes that in a game like D&D I'd be using to keep myself from railroading every whim that I might have as a GM. Some games are like, "Of course if the fight was too easy, more orc guards show up. Prioritize the drama." And well, if you do that, then either you are saying very much, "The GM always knows best." or else you have to somewhere else in the process of play create other limits or strictures on what the GM can (or should) do or create.

 

[Celebrim]

I really am unsure what you mean here.

So first of all, I really like how you are thinking about this.

In a game that is a railroad, the tracks very much do go somewhere. If they only mostly go somewhere, that's exactly what every single game in the world does and so cannot be railroading unless everything does.

Well, maybe everything does then. Let's look at a concrete example.

Mass Effect 1 is IMO certainly one of the greatest if not the actual greatest cRPG ever made. After a tutorial section that is quite linear, it appears at first glance to open into a pretty open world. You have no real force being used on you as to what to do or where to go. You'll start stumbling into various plots and quests as you talk to people, and you can choose which ones to pick up on. In particular, there are three major paths you can take as to where you want to go. And there are dozens of side paths. And within that you are free to pursue one of two alignments in every scene each with its own custom dialogue response. So it seems like you have a lot of freedom. There are tracks going in lots of directions. But this is a cRPG so it should be no surprise that all this apparent freedom is illusionary. You can pursue each of the three roads, but eventually you need to take all three roads. After all three roads are taken, then and only then do you get enough clues to find the fourth road which returns us to a linear structure leading to a climax. None of the side quests actually lead anywhere - they are just short dead ends that are sometimes entertaining. And most interestingly, it doesn't matter which alignment you play, you get the same basic results. You get different conversations but the same outcomes, differing only at best by color. There are really only like two or three decision points in the entire game that are in any way meaningful in a macro sense - and don't get me wrong one of those actual decision points is amazing - but the entire game despite appearing open is a railroad.

Indeed, one of the promises that ME1 made was that what you did would actually matter. And one of the several reasons the game series goes downhill over time is that it was increasingly obvious that the developers vastly underestimated the cost of making a TTRPG that could play like a cRPG with meaningful decision points and choices that mattered. Not only was the game play dumbed down in later installments but it was increasingly obvious that all choices only differed by color not in any substantive way.

But you might think, ok that's a cRPG. TTRPGs are different. You have an intelligent agent as the referee and he can make the world broader. And to some extent that is very true. But in practice, most games I think - and certainly most published adventures - are by necessity more like Mass Effect #1 than not. They are relatively small worlds with only a few detailed locations. They have choke points you have to pass through in what is very much the same Narrow-Broad-Narrow structure you see in cRPGs. You can do something very different but it's not clear to me that that happens very often or that the majority of people prefer it to a more linear plot with tracks that mostly all lead to particular places.

When we in the TTRPG space talk about something not being a railroad, we mean some sort of true open world with player set goals and ability to go anywhere. And that's a really hard experience to create. I haven't had a game like that since college and even it eventually started to pale to me because on the macro level I seemed to have freedom, but on the moment to moment level the fact that there was no real preexisting fiction meant that I actually had no freedom. If the GM has to make anything on the spur of the moment, then well they can make anything on the spur of the moment and then well it's inhumanly impossible for them to not end up metagaming against you even if their trying to present fun challenges.

UPDATE: Ooops. Hadn't meant to send. Continuing on.

Our only disagreement (I believe) is that you think that you should call a game where the GM makes several efforts to suggest that a town might be a good place to go a game "with some degree of railroading" and I would just call it a "game where the GM really wants something, but isn't going to force it on you"

So I'm not terribly interested in defining that point where the GM is working hard to achieve some end he desires where we can then say, "That's enough; it's a railroad." This comes out of my experience of arguing about this topic for the last 20 years or so where people would bring up different things you could do as a GM that in their opinion made you a railroader. And these discussions just developed into name calling and arguments about whether this thing was normal or bad. So if you read my essay I make a sharp distinction between the verb "to railroad" and the noun "a railroad". I'm less interested in defining the noun, that is when you've done enough "railroading" to define your game as "a railroad" than I am in the processes that you use "to railroad".

So again, back to your claim that it's only a railroad if something in the story absolutely has to happen, and if there is a degree of freedom about it then it isn't a railroad, what if the GM is just patient and as complex about how he railroads you as the designers of Mass Effect #1. If you don't go to the preferred location first, well then plan B opens up and it will lead you back to the preferred location. And if for some reason the party then leaps instead of zags, well plan C opens up to handle that contingency. Sooner or later though, this mastermind GM steers the party to the location after all. How much of that has to happen before you think it isn't a railroad? Suppose I have a typical narrow->broad->narrow structure. But instead of one door out of the small world I offer three - that is three different ways to "solve" the problem of the scenario and find the breadcrumb to move on to the next area. Does this mean it's not a railroad if all three doors eventually lead to the same next area after minor detours or color differences? How much freedom does there have to before you feel like you aren't trapped and the GM isn't saying "no" to you arbitrarily all the time?

Does this game meet your standard of "no freedom"?

There is a lot of theory going around about how if you have player driven goals that then you can't have railroading. The idea here is that with player driven goals the GM can't plan ahead so you don't have these narrow->broad->narrow structures. In theory the map should spiral out in all directs in an infinite fractal and not have these limited geometries I've been talking about. But I've never seen it actually happen, not at the table or in any online examples of play. One of the problems I have is it turns out IME that you end up in Open Worlds with a stage that the players are on. The experience I've had with them is that we always go nowhere we just end up changing the drapes. The scenery is like the color in Mass Effect's alignment system where it is there but it isn't actually doing anything in the sense that say a dungeon actually does something and creates a meaningful geometry of time and space. The fiction even starts feeling like this. Fiction gets created but none of it has the experience of discovery that you have in well a dungeon where it feels like you actually found something that preexisted you - the dungeon as archeology experience. I don't have the get experience watching these games or playing these games that I have or the players have more agency than what I described for the traditional play. Indeed, my experience is that they have less because its so easy to meta against them and apply high illusionism to everything. The closest I have to verifying this is watching two groups in a con play the same scenario and it really did feel like the conversational options in Mass Effect #1 - lots of variety but ultimately similar end results. I'm curious to actually run one of these systems in a con just to see whether things do branch meaningfully if the GM allows it, and especially if they can branch more meaningfully than a trad game (which will be hard to tell in a con duration format, but the same can be said of trad games).

My argument is that railroading is the complete absence of ability for a player to choose a certain action. It is a qualitative thing, but, like all qualitative things you could turn it into a quantitive scale by counting the number of qualitative incidents. For example, you do exactly that!

More or less yes. But I would prefer to deal with the non-zero chances where the GM is consciously weighting against that outcome as well. For example, a particular path could be blocked by a particularly lethal series of encounters each of increasing difficulty and foreshadowing. That it isn't theoretically impossible to push through the gauntlet doesn't mean that this isn't Obdurium Walls. Think of like Dathomir in Jedi: Fallen Order. You could in theory go there before you've done all the things you are supposed to do before you go there, but it's not going to be particularly productive if you are going through the game for the first time. (And there is I think eventually a hard wall that blocks off the ending of Dathomir until you've ended other stories.)

If you assert that putting pressure on a player, either consciously or unconsciously to bias them to a certain decision is railroading to any degree at all, I'm not with you. As soon as a GM allows the players to take reasonable courses of action, even with possibly unfair costs, it's not railroading.

I disagree. As soon as the GM is putting up barriers to a course of action they don't find desirable for some reason and on the other hand facilitating ones they do find desirable, they are railroading. If I make the difficulty to go through a door a DC 35 or something, because I don't want them to go through the door and I'm just giving a color of the possibility - "Oh shucks, you needed to roll a 19 or higher", and then I do that like three times in a row, I can be pretty darn sure that course of action won't work and I might have well said no.

And if you can see that then you can see how any degree of thumb on the process is railroading I think.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It relates to DM railroading and how the rules allow it.

First, about railroading, I would say who the heck cares? Why define it if it very rarely rises to the point of being a problem?

It does not "very rarely" do that. At all.

This is like the two hundredth post about what railroading is, but there has yet to be a single one that presents a compelling case as to how it's a pervasive problem.

Because the evidence for that is already present in general.

Magic the Gathering is a total railroad. Strict rules the players must follow. Every board game? Strict railroad. Every RPG video game ever made? Railroad, even when they pay lipservice to having an open world.

M:tG is not an RPG of any kind, nor does it have a GM. It's not a relevant point of comparison; railroading isn't possible because there simply isn't the type of structure required for "railroading" to apply.

And very specifically the fact that TTRPGs enable freedom that CRPGs do not is literally THE selling point people always always always bring up. Because in the absence of that--when a TTRPG is precisely as limited as a CRPG would be--then the CRPG kinda wins? It's got better visuals, better voice acting, infinitely more reliable and consistent mechanics, and (theoretically, anyway) better-edited, better-structured writing. If we're accepting railroading, CRPGs are arguably superior to TTRPGs in most ways.

Is railroading a thing? Yes. Is it bad? No.

And here we disagree.

Especially because, as I've said, there is a distinct difference between merely being a linear adventure, and being a railroad. A linear adventure happens to be along a line, and if the players sign up for that, awesome. A railroad is enforced linearity when the players did not sign up for it. It's that simple.

Are some GMs jerks who shout at their players or lie to them for malicious (not gameplay) reasons? Absolutely. Does that really have anything to do with railroading? No, it has to do with them being jerks.

This effort to recharacterize "railroading" as actually totally unobjectionable is, frankly, kind of ridiculous. That is not how the word has been used. That is not how people in general understand the word. Pretending that that discourse has always been completely stupid and irrelevant is...well, as said, kind of ridiculous.

 

[nevin]

This effort to recharacterize "railroading" as actually totally unobjectionable is, frankly, kind of ridiculous. That is not how the word has been used. That is not how people in general understand the word. Pretending that that discourse has always been completely stupid and irrelevant is...well, as said, kind of ridiculous.

as has been stated many times and to be clear I'm not a fan. Some people like the railroad. whether it be enter the dungeon door clear all the rooms or just do what the DM points them at. and that's ok.

Some people like to get on a railroad and not think, just act till the game is over, some people want to ride all the back roads and argue with the barmaid in the city and found an orphanage and wipe out the assasins guild or just walk jimmy home DM plans effectively meaning nothing.

neither of these extremes is bad if the table is ok with it. I know people that do nothing but ride the railroad and they are confused that I like to roleplay look and waste my time on a hundred dead end story arcs some of which may come to fruition.

It's pretty offensive to the ones that like the railroad for you to just say it's always bad. saying It's just not for everyone is a different thing.

It's almost the same thing as take quick point to point travel and waste no time exploring or spend days and days driving there and hanging out in motels and bed and breakfast's in out of the say spots. whether one or the other is bad or good is simply a point of view not an absolute.

 

[kermit4karate]

It does not "very rarely" do that. At all.


Because the evidence for that is already present in general.


M:tG is not an RPG of any kind, nor does it have a GM. It's not a relevant point of comparison; railroading isn't possible because there simply isn't the type of structure required for "railroading" to apply.

And very specifically the fact that TTRPGs enable freedom that CRPGs do not is literally THE selling point people always always always bring up. Because in the absence of that--when a TTRPG is precisely as limited as a CRPG would be--then the CRPG kinda wins? It's got better visuals, better voice acting, infinitely more reliable and consistent mechanics, and (theoretically, anyway) better-edited, better-structured writing. If we're accepting railroading, CRPGs are arguably superior to TTRPGs in most ways.


And here we disagree.

Especially because, as I've said, there is a distinct difference between merely being a linear adventure, and being a railroad. A linear adventure happens to be along a line, and if the players sign up for that, awesome. A railroad is enforced linearity when the players did not sign up for it. It's that simple.


This effort to recharacterize "railroading" as actually totally unobjectionable is, frankly, kind of ridiculous. That is not how the word has been used. That is not how people in general understand the word. Pretending that that discourse has always been completely stupid and irrelevant is...well, as said, kind of ridiculous.

Dude (sorry, assuming you're a dude but apologize if I'm wrong), you and I have grappled before.

I don't wanna grapple about this one today. The wall has already been sufficiently covered with like nine coats of paint.

I don't think I'm trying to recharacterize railroading because I don't think it's being applied or defined consistently in this thread. By my definition, it rarely rises to the level of being a bad thing. That's the crux of it for me. Not a big deal.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I disagree. As soon as the GM is putting up barriers to a course of action they don't find desirable for some reason and on the other hand facilitating ones they do find desirable, they are railroading. If I make the difficulty to go through a door a DC 35 or something, because I don't want them to go through the door and I'm just giving a color of the possibility - "Oh shucks, you needed to roll a 19 or higher", and then I do that like three times in a row, I can be pretty darn sure that course of action won't work and I might have well said no.

And if you can see that then you can see how any degree of thumb on the process is railroading I think.

Unfortunately, no, I do not.

I fully agree with your examples and frequently bring that up in conversations about this. My usual, similar "this is obviously extreme" example is saying that a player "can" do something, and then forcing the player to make three nat-20 rolls in a row before it can succeed.

The GM needs to be honest about whether things are possible. If they aren't being honest about that, then yes, they're railroading. If they are being honest about it, if they are in fact laying their cards on the table and telling the players where they're coming from, why, and what interest they have, where is the railroading?

If I tell my players, "I don't personally think that this makes sense. Can you explain it to me?" or "Hmm...that just doesn't seem reasonable. Sell me on it?", but they give me an explanation that I don't particularly find satisfying...is that still "railroading" if I then just say "no"? I would not say so, and any definition of "railroading" which would include that seems, to me, to be so overwhelmingly over-broad that it catches tons of things I would never call "railroading".

 

[pemerton]

I think railroading is primarily about the trajectory of play: What scenes are framed? And what is at stake in them? Who decides what happens next?

A GM who requires 3 natural 20 rolls in a row to (say) disarm the Balrog might be making a bad decision as GM - it might just be better to say that disarming the Balrog is in their view not feasible - but that doesn't look like railroading to me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

as has been stated many times and to be clear I'm not a fan. Some people like the railroad. whether it be enter the dungeon door clear all the rooms or just do what the DM points them at. and that's ok.

Some people like linear adventures.

Not all linear adventures are railroads.

Some people like to get on a railroad and not think, just act till the game is over, some people want to ride all the back roads and argue with the barmaid in the city and found an orphanage and wipe out the assasins guild or just walk jimmy home DM plans effectively meaning nothing.

The first group of people would be people who want a linear adventure and are not even attempting to exert their own choices, yes.

neither of these extremes is bad if the table is ok with it. I know people that do nothing but ride the railroad and they are confused that I like to roleplay look and waste my time on a hundred dead end story arcs some of which may come to fruition.

The bolded part makes all the difference, imagine that.

It's pretty offensive to the ones that like the railroad for you to just say it's always bad. saying It's just not for everyone is a different thing.

Except that that's not what I'm talking about, and never have been.

You may have noticed, for example, my question about coercion. Which, I guess, I now need to say "coercive or manipulative". I don't personally see much difference between those things, but others have articulated one, so I'm expanding it to both.

Is railroading always coercive or manipulative? I argue 100% yes.

Are linear adventures always coercive or manipulative? Trivally no.

That's the difference here. You want "railroad" to be expanded to cover all possible linear adventures no matter what. I disagree with that choice and think it is profoundly unhelpful.

It's almost the same thing as take quick point to point travel and waste no time exploring or spend days and days driving there and hanging out in motels and bed and breakfast's in out of the say spots. whether one or the other is bad or good is simply a point of view not an absolute.

I disagree. Because, again, this is a question of whether that is being done in a coercive or manipulative way.

If the GM forces their players to consistently do this no matter what the players want, then yes, that would be a problem. If it is done with full player buy-in, clearly, there's no problem.

Railroading is enforced somehow; that the players might coincidentally not bump into it is irrelevant. Linearity, on the other hand, is simply a property of an adventure; it may be railroading or not railroading. Linear adventures have no strong negative connotations nor positive ones. (In fact, most prewritten adventures are more linear than not!) And, as I've previously argued (possibly in this thread?), we can even have a term for virtuous, well-constructed linear adventures: rollercoaster. You can't choose anything about how a coaster works, and yet people can find them quite thrilling if they're constructed well. But the people who find it thrillilng are, more or less always, people who knowingly sought out that experience. Hence the thread remains in common: well-executed with buy-in, it's great; unknown execution with unknown buy-in, it's neutral; with flawed execution and (especially) lacking buy-in, it's bad.

This seems a quite effective description. It's not like having good, bad, and neutral words for the same overall concept is somehow weird or wrong. "Fragrant", for example, generally means a good smell, ignoring things like sarcastic usage. "Smell" is generally neutral but may have negative connotations (e.g. "smelly" is usually bad). "Stink" is clearly negative, again ignoring sarcastic/ironic usage. Should we, then, start arguing that things that "stink" actually smell good? That it's unfair to say that "stink" is bad because some people think sweat stinks and others enjoy it? Are we really going to start eliminating words with clear, useful, critical applicability, when other neutral words already exist, solely because some people get upset about the term being used pejoratively?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think railroading is primarily about the trajectory of play: What scenes are framed? And what is at stake in them? Who decides what happens next?

A GM who requires 3 natural 20 rolls in a row to (say) disarm the Balrog might be making a bad decision as GM - it might just be better to say that disarming the Balrog is in their view not feasible - but that doesn't look like railroading to me.

If it is a singular isolated case, perhaps it might not be railroading--but I see it as reflecting a general pattern of pretense. The GM is pretending that they allow the players to act with meaningful freedom, but in practice, they're functionally forbidding anything that doesn't suit their preconceived, essentially fixed pathway.

Like we can see something of a progression of railroading technique, getting more refined but still producing the same results. Consider the party trying to take the south road instead of the north road:

• Flat unvarnished fiat: "You can't because I say so"
• Ad hoc invented obstacles: "You can't because...uh...the south road is blocked"
• Pretense of allowance: "You can try, but the road is so damaged, you're essentially guaranteed to fail"
• Extensive pre-written work: "You can't, because as I established six sessions ago, the south road is blocked."
• Illusionism: "You can!" [But this now just means that the north road adventure happens with a 180-degree rotation of directions]

And this, incidentally, is one of the reasons why I have such a strident opposition to illusionism. It is railroading, plain and simple, it's just highly sophisticated railroading, designed to deny the players even the possibility of objecting. That's why every single source that talks about using it, specifically goes into how the GM must never, ever allow the players to know that it's happening--otherwise it would upset those players, probably by a lot. Manipulative techniques which include such efforts to conceal that any maniuplation has occurred at all are...pretty high on my No No list.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Dude (sorry, assuming you're a dude but apologize if I'm wrong), you and I have grappled before.

I don't wanna grapple about this one today. The wall has already been sufficiently covered with like nine coats of paint.

I don't think I'm trying to recharacterize railroading because I don't think it's being applied or defined consistently in this thread. By my definition, it rarely rises to the level of being a bad thing. That's the crux of it for me. Not a big deal.

Then let me ask simply:

Why does "railroading", this single specific word, NEED to be both positive and negative?

Why can't it just be negative, and we use the other, widely-used, widely-available, inherently neutral term "linear"?

Why do you NEED this one specific word to be positive?