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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9760468" data-attributes="member: 4937">So first of all, I really like how you are thinking about this.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. 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).  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.)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.</blockquote>

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