D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[EzekielRaiden]

To expand on this, I also think you can have a non linear campaign and still have railroading.
Take the forgotten realms for instance (as a published setting i know well) - maybe the players want to try and get one of the characters to become a Lord of Waterdeep. Maybe they want to forge a new trading route through Anaraouch desert, or set up a smuggling route in the sword coast. Maybe they want to try and found an eleventh town in Icewind Dale, or some sort of outpost for forays in Chult. They may want to try and destroy the Zhents, or the Harpers, or the Red Wizards.
If a DM running a sandbox campaign in the Realms says no to players attempting the above, then I feel that is railroading, as forcing the players away from what they want to do to perhaps more run of the road general adventuring / dungeon exploring.

I would not, personally, call that a form of railroading--if the GM is open about their actions. "Guys, I understand you'd like to do that, but <explanation>". For example, let's say they want to destroy the Red Wizards of Thay. That's...a really, really big task. Even if the players fail, that's kinda reorienting the entire experience around just this one thing, which is going to be a LOT of Wizards, and going to involve a lot of pretty icky scenarios because the Thayans love them some slaves. If I, as GM, were running an FR sandbox campaign out of Waterdeep and the players said "We want to go destroy Thay!", I would level with them: "I'm deeply, deeply uncomfortable with the kind of society Thay is. I find its leadership almost universally repulsive, and I find its practices barbaric in the best of cases. I don't think I could run a game focused on Thay, even if I really wanted to...which I don't. I absolutely understand and appreciate your desire to destroy Thay, because it's absolutely monstrous, but I just...don't believe I could make that a fun, thrilling, worthwhile experience. I would be miserable running it and I'm pretty sure you'd eventually notice. Is it okay if we look for something else to do instead? The Zhentarim also practice slavery, would that work for you?"

Again, the core difference is that this is genuinely engaging in a dialogue. It's letting the players actually make informed decisions. Railroading doesn't allow that, either because it's just ham-fisted denial, or because it's more subtle manipulation (or coercion).

Where someone like Permerton may differ to me, is that if a DM says yes to the above, but is the one determining what is required and odds of success for each step, that Pemerton may consider that railroading still, which I dont. Yes, is different level of agency to a situation where the DM and players together determine possible steps and odds of success, but no more railroading to me, though I think either approach would work, especially if everyone has reasonable understanding of the world or access to get it.

Well, at least for myself, the issue lies in whether those odds are determined in a legitimate, fair way. Again, the example of "sure you can do it, but only if you get three nat 20s" is something I use as a very obvious bait-and-switch "yes". That is, the GM who does that is saying they "allow" something, but then ensuring it actually or functionally cannot happen, which is...just the same as saying "no" but with more steps. Three consecutive nat 20s is a 1 in 8000 chance, meaning functionally never going to happen, certainly not on command exactly in that moment.

This doesn't mean that all possible difficulty assignments cash out as railroading. Perhaps the players are genuinely trying to do something difficult; that's not unusual in the slightest. But the GM needs to set reasonable, context-appropriate difficulty, even if it's an action or effort that isn't particularly to their taste. Some of the time, the only reasonable answer is "I'm sorry, you can't do that", too, to be clear--but the GM should always explain why, and should be patient and understanding and genuinely listen to player input, because it's always, always, always possible to be wrong even when you're very sure you're right. God in Heaven, do I know that feel.

 

[pemerton]

Would you be willing to attempt to summarize your position on this debate over railroading in one sentence?

If the GM is more-or-less unilaterally deciding the significant content of the presented scenes, and/or what is at stake, and/or what follows next, I will describe that as railroading. And so, conversely, non-railroad play (as I think of it) means that the players exercise real influence over the significant content of the presented scenes, and their stakes, and what follows next.

I haven't changed my mind on this over the past month.

Further, there is a critical difference between GM points being used, and the techniques (or lack thereof...) in D&D.

That is, the manipulation is done openly. You openly spend your Doom Pool on things.

The Doom Pool doesn't involve manipulating anyone.

To elaborate:

In classic D&D (Gygax & Arneson; AD&D; B/X) the fundamental job of the GM is to (i) draw a dungeon map, then (ii) key that map (with monsters, traps/tricks, and treasure), then (iii) to referee the PCs' expeditions into the dungeon. There are two core aspects to that refereeing: (a) being fair in adjudicating the players' attempts to have their PCs acquire information (by listening at doors, using detection magic, etc); (b) framing scenes when the PCs open doors, or otherwise enter rooms (or similar encounter areas), in accordance with what the key says is there to be discovered/encountered.

When a GM does (b) - that is, on the basis of their key, tells the players what their PCs encounter - the GM is not manipulating the players. They are just playing the game, in accordance with its rules and principles.

Now, compare MHRP:

There are no maps or keys. The GM is allowed to frame scenes, with up to three Scene Distinctions and whatever NPCs/opposition the GM thinks fits. But the GM is not at liberty to introduce new elements into the scene, except via the use of the Doom Pool to do so.

So, for instance, when I use a NPC's action to add a die to the Doom Pool; and then spend that die to add an element to a scene; that's not manipulating the players. It's just playing the game, in accordance with its rules.

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.

To be honest, I don't think this focus on techniques sheds a lot of light.

For instance, consider your fourth point: in map-and-key play, with fair refereeing, that's not railroading. It's just the GM doing their job as referee.

And your final dot point only matters if plays is based around a map-and-key in the way that I've described above - ie with the GM using the map-and-key to coordinate scene framing, and the players acquiring information about the map and key (normally by declaring low-stakes actions that oblige the GM to provide that information) such that their action declarations about where to go are meaningful rather than random/arbitrary.

But not all RPGing works in that fashion. For instance, when I GM Prince Valiant, I don't use a map or a key. When I open up the map of Britain (on the inside cover of my copy of Pendragon, which came as part of the Prince Valiant Kickstarter), or when I pull out my map of Europe c 800 CE (photocopied from my Penguin Atlas of Medieval History), and the players choose where their PCs are travelling to, this is about coordinating descriptions of the action (eg place names, coherent travel times) and the overarching themes/stakes. The players' choice of theme/stakes affects my decisions about what scenes to frame - that's what makes my Prince Valiant play not railroading - but I don't care about where they're travelling beyond that. I frame the scenes that I think will work.

This is not illusionism - it's not a pretence that things are being decided one way when they're being decided another way, nor any sort of obscuring of how GMing decisions are being made. The players know exactly how decisions are being made: they know I'm choosing to frame a scene that I think is interesting relative to the themes and stakes the players have chosen.

 

[Celebrim]

Wait wait wait wait wait.

So, now it's not, even remotely, about any form of agency at all--even though that's pretty consistently what everyone else uses the term for--and is instead solely and exclusively about GM caring about the content being undertaken or skipped?

I'm a bit baffled by this. It's obviously about agency. The issue is how do you have agency as a player if the GM is effectively all powerful and capable of using fiat to shape the fiction. That's the core issue. And the issue is that because of bias - which you've agreed on all my examples - a GM can't trust himself to not be shaping the story primarily according to his own whim and so must be careful when employing certain techniques in order to mitigate his own potential bias while still making the game fun. But if we could imagine a situation where we know the GM isn't shaping the story to his own whim, then obviously we also know that he is not shaping the story to his own whim and therefore the players have agency.

Absolutely the heck not. Like how do you even start from this as a base? What? Seriously? You're literally making it so if the GM cares about their campaign, in any way whatsoever, that automatically means EVERYTHING they do is railroading. Seriously? You've turned the term into something totally useless!

Oh come on. I will be frank. You've offered up a definition that entirely relative and that acted like "I know it when I see it" is an adequate explanation, and now you are all puffed up and emotional about my suggestion that if a GM is sacrificing his own preferred story then at that moment he by definition can't be railroading is some novel or radical observation? And now you've gone off on a rant that has nothing to do with time skips or hand waves and acted like that is somehow relevant to my point.

Your own definition means nothing is a railroad if the players consent to it and everything is a railroad if they don't. And you complain my definitions are useless in the application? Your whole standard is, "If I do it then it's not a railroad!" and you are utterly oblivious to any other opinion. So don't get all high and mighty with me.

And, more to the point, I have done exactly this with my own game. Not exactly in the sense of "caravan skipping past orc bandits", but I prepared--with rather a lot of detail--a "boss fight" of sorts near the end of a druid sanctuary the players came to call the Charred Marsh Grotto (since it had been set on fire and they'd put out the fire before entering). The players, through exploiting a loophole I hadn't considered, completely demolished the monster without making a single attack roll. They just baited it into one of the traps, which (functionally) deleted it. And I absolutely let that stand, because the players earned it, fair and square. I do think it would have been more satisfying and exciting to do the fight I'd planned, but I consider it utterly unacceptable to intrude on the players' efforts in that way...so I won't do that. Ever.

So, hey, you can do basic things of dungeon mastering, but that is only in the most remote sense the same thing. All you did there is follow the logic of your own scene that you created without being immature about it. Congratulations, you aren't a jerk. A computer could do the same thing, as you have pointed out (and in fact many computer boss fights do end up having some loophole or glitch you can exploit to trivialize them). But the point of my hypothetical example would be closer to you agreeing to let the players say that they had won without actually running the fight. Because remember, I was primarily talking about hand waves specifically as a technique, not just abstractly whether you would accept the consequences of your own fictional design without pulling some railroading technique out to subvert your own myth.

So, by your own lights, I'm apparently a GM who specifically doesn't railroad, even with your nonsense "if the GM cares about it, then it happening is always ramming the players through a railroad" definition. Something you've claimed should be impossible.

See this is so telling. The whole time we are talking you aren't really interested at all in understanding what I'm talking about. The whole time, all your speech with me, all your argument is actually just proving to me (or yourself) that you aren't a railroader, which is of course never even something I considered under contention and isn't even an interesting topic of conversation. You are here proclaiming victory over something irrelevant to me and suggests you haven't got a clue what I'm actually talking about you are just focused on your own emotional validation.

None of your examples involved any railroading technique. So why would you expect me to think that they were railroading?

 

[kermit4karate]

"Railroading is the word for when a GM, through coercion or manipulation, enforces an inflexibly linear experience as part of GMing, that the players would not accept if they were aware of it, or do not accept if they are already aware of it."

Also, if I may, a secondary point I've been trying to make WRT some of the arguments here: "We should not redefine 'railroading' to be positive/neutral/context-dependent, both because we already have a neutral term ('linear'/'linearity'), and because there is no current alternative which captures the current usage."

Holy crap, I think I finally get it. Thank you. Using the definition from your first paragraph, which should appear in RPG textbooks, frankly, due to its clarity, it seems like this has largely been about semantics.

Here's my one-sentence response:

"Based on your definition of railroading, I completely agree."

 

[EzekielRaiden]

None of your examples involved any railroading technique. So why would you expect me to think that they were railroading?

Because you said that a GM having things they like and thus think would be cool to have in their game is railroading.

Or at least that's where your examples keep pointing, whether or not that was your intent.

Because when you say things like...

And the issue is that because of bias - which you've agreed on all my examples - a GM can't trust himself to not be shaping the story primarily according to his own whim and so must be careful when employing certain techniques in order to mitigate his own potential bias while still making the game fun.

Especially after you have (repeatedly) said that all games feature tons of railroading...what am I supposed to think?

Your own definition means nothing is a railroad if the players consent to it and everything is a railroad if they don't. And you complain my definitions are useless in the application? Your whole standard is, "If I do it then it's not a railroad!" and you are utterly oblivious to any other opinion. So don't get all high and mighty with me.

Because that's exactly what the issue is...?

If you knowingly consent to something, you're not being coerced or manipulated. But no, there are absolutely some things which cannot be done openly. Fudging dice, for example, specifically requires that it be done secretly. If you do it openly, you aren't fudging, you're just choosing to ignore the dice. So it's incorrect to say that this makes everything the same. The very fact that it must be done openly and with consent forbids some behaviors and requires other behaviors.

And it's not like this is the only area of life where consent makes all the difference. The exact same action is theft at a bookstore and correct library usage at a library. I eat my family's food despite not having paid for it myself, which would be theft if I did not have consent to do so, but is perfectly acceptable because I do. Trespassing is a crime that a legitimate owner or resident literally cannot commit because they have consent. Plenty of other things, their legality or legitimacy specifically hinge on whether or not consent has been granted. This isn't some insane whackadoodle standard. It's how a huge chunk of actual IRL practice works.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Holy crap, I think I finally get it. Thank you. Using the definition from your first paragraph, which should appear in RPG textbooks, frankly, due to its clarity, it seems like that this has largely been about semantics.

Here's my one-sentence response:

"Based on your definition of railroading, I completely agree."

When I finally have to get concise, I often can.

It's just a matter of getting my brain in the right gear. 99% of the time, logorrheic sludge.

 

[kermit4karate]

If the GM is more-or-less unilaterally deciding the significant content of the presented scenes, and/or what is at stake, and/or what follows next, I will describe that as railroading.

Unfortunately, now, this one-sentence description of railroading fundamentally differs from @EzekielRaiden's a short time ago, and because of those differences I disagree with it.

My response:

"If a key component of railroading is the lack of player acceptance, either explicitly given or convincingly assumed, then a DM unilaterally deciding on important aspects of gameplay, by itself, is insufficient to call something railroading."

 

[Maxperson]

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's not that it's pervasive. It's that it is almost universally a bad thing when it does rear its ugly head. In order for it to not be, you have to redefine it like @Celebrim is trying to do.

It's also common enough to be more of an issue than the rare bad DM.

 

[kermit4karate]

It's not that it's pervasive. It's that it is almost universally a bad thing when it does rear its ugly head. In order for it to not be, you have to redefine it like @Celebrim is trying to do.

It's also common enough to be more of an issue than the rare bad DM.

Well, it has become apparent to me over the past few comments by @pemerton, @EzekielRaiden and @Celebrim that each is saying, perhaps even thinking, very different things when it comes to railroading, so until the definition part of 'railroading' gets worked out, this discussion will continue to go nowhere.

There are too many people answering for others, too many straw man fallacies and too much anti-DM bias creeping into the longer replies that the positions are inconsistent across posts.

Based on this one-sentence response from @EzekielRaiden earlier, I can completely agree about railroading.

Based on this definition of railroading, I get it and completely agree, but based on other definitions and uses of the term used elsewhere in this thread? I completely disagree, so it entirely depends on how the term is being applied.

This, I agree with (thank you @EzekielRaiden):

"Railroading is the word for when a GM, through coercion or manipulation, enforces an inflexibly linear experience as part of GMing, that the players would not accept if they were aware of it, or do not accept if they are already aware of it."

 

[Maxperson]

Clearly, it doesn't just go to one place. It won't get you absolutely anywhere you choose, door-to-door, no. And your choices for stopping to pick up donuts on the way to work are limited. But, I can use it to go from home, to work, to a restaurant and a movie theater pretty reasonably, without the cost in time and money of bringing a car down into the paved-cowpaths that Boston calls city streets.

This is a modern railroad. One can focus on how it limits the choice of path and destination, or one can focus on how, for getting to where it does go, it is pretty darned efficient.

I don't think anyone is arguing that a railroad is inefficient at forcing the PCs to where the DM wants them to be. You can't get off of a railroad in-between stops, and the stops are where the DM is forcing the players to go.