D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[FrogReaver]

The definition that I'm using was adopted precisely because I got tired of the "I know it when I see it" definitions that rely on subjective statements.



Agreed. Railroading to some extent is a part of all games. It's not possible to railroad 0% of the time. This is something I discuss, and is an important part of the discussion. Fundamentally it comes down to that no RPG runs without some GM fiat.



That's not obvious at all, and in fact that's obviously wrong in the general case. I discuss this as well. Your argument here would be correct if and only if the players had full knowledge of everything that might happen during the time they agree to skip. And this is obviously not the case. You can and I have on occasion use a time skip to jump the players into a trap that they agreed to jump into, but where they didn't fully understand the consequences of their action and where they would not have jumped if they had known what they were jumping into. This is the question, "Is there anything anyone wants to do before the morning?" or "Is there anything anyone wants to do before nightfall?" type question, where I know as a GM that there might be all sorts of things that they might want to do but because I can see they are running out of ideas or because I think the play will be dull if we don't time skip or for whatever reason, I'm luring the players into consenting to loss of agency so that I can get what I want to happen (something I think will be more fun than just having the players sit around and argue or speculate without taking meaningful action).

IMO some concepts are just difficult to place all the nuances into words.

I think using a definition that underfits the concept so as to make everything definable as that concept is infinitely worse.

 

[bloodtide]

I don't. That's the point. If my PC is immortal, why bother wasting the time playing out a combat encounter. Just tell me about how my immortal PC once again laid waste to my mortal foes and get on with the game. The whole point of a combat encounter is to feel tension, brought on by the fear that my PC might not survive. If I know my PC is going to survive, no matter what the rules or dice dictate, all the tension is gone. The combat encounter then becomes utterly pointless and downright boring. I have no interest in spending an appreciable amount of time in a session playing out a combat encounter that has the foregone conclusion; I win, because I am immortal and my opponent is not. I could instead spend that time engaging in different tension building encounters where failure might actually be an option.

I agree. This is one of the Big Things that makes RPGs Unique.

This most certainly requires investment on the players' part and effort on the GM's part to produce meaningful, worthwhile consequences. But I think it is an effort well worth pursuing--and I believe that, in most cases, it produces a game that encourages players to truly care about what happens, rather than what I have seen too many times in games that focus too much on death as the only important consequence.

I find character death makes players care more about everything game related. Not just their character, but their characters story arc and the game arcs.

Too many players get comfortable in the no-character death game and check out, goof off, or worse. They know their character will never die, so nothing really matters.

And all the other things don't even come close to character death.

 

[soviet]

They know their character will never die, so nothing really matters.

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.

 

[Mort]

And all the other things don't even come close to character death.

This is far from universal.

The trick is to root the characters in the campaign world and to make the players actually care about what happens.

Once this is true, you can have all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with character death. You can have many different failure conditions that hit hard.

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.

 

[Celebrim]

IMO some concepts are just difficult to place all the nuances into words.

I think using a definition that underfits the concept so as to make everything definable as that concept is infinitely worse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

I find character death makes players care more about everything game related. Not just their character, but their characters story arc and the game arcs.

Too many players get comfortable in the no-character death game and check out, goof off, or worse. They know their character will never die, so nothing really matters.

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".

 

[Thomas Shey]

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

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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

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

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree. This is one of the Big Things that makes RPGs Unique.


I find character death makes players care more about everything game related. Not just their character, but their characters story arc and the game arcs.

Too many players get comfortable in the no-character death game and check out, goof off, or worse. They know their character will never die, so nothing really matters.

And all the other things don't even come close to character death.

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.

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.

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.

 

[pemerton]

Too many players get comfortable in the no-character death game and check out, goof off, or worse. They know their character will never die, so nothing really matters.

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

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.

Yes, agreed.