What do you consider a "railroading" module?

Crothian said:
Modules cannot railroad only DMs.

Modules can make it hard for a DM to vary from a single course, by creating plot bottlenecks.

The way I see it, there are soft bottlenecks and hard bottlenecks.

Soft bottlenecks occur when the author obviously expects a explicit progression down a predictable course, and doesn't support any other course, but it's possible with a little work to make alternates.

Hard bottlenecks explicitly provide only one solution to a problem, and make any other solution very difficult by design.

A lot of published adventures have soft bottlenecks. Those that don't are usually the easiest to work with and are good at both avoiding unintended railroading and training DMs not to railroad.

Hard bottlenecks are thankfully rarer, but really aggravating when they happen.
 

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griff_goodbeard said:
I tend to agree with this but I remember DM'ing the Avatar triogy of moduals and all three were a super railroad.

I never had much realms stuff and don't know those. But after those novels I know I wouldn't want to see the modules no matter how good! :D
 

I'm curious about this topic, because we're about to release the first adventure of the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga, and by some of these definitions, it's fairly railroady, though I feel the players have a lot of control in what happens.

The goal of the adventure is basically to get a MacGuffin that they have to deliver to a distant group, then get out of a city with that MacGuffin, and then get to the aforementioned distant group with the MacGuffin. That's the plot. I don't consider it railroading that, in order for the campaign saga to continue, the players have to get to the distant group. They have a lot of options in doing, and yes, a few are more assumed than others. F'rinstance:

* There's one major road that leads from where the adventure starts to where they need to get. There are enemies on that road, since enemies know that road is the best way to go. If the party doesn't go that way, they can avoid those enemies, but they might die in the wilderness, since it's winter in the mountains.

* There's an NPC that can help the party out of the city, since the gates are barred to travel. This NPC wants the party to do something for him first. The party can find other ways to get out, and if they do, they miss out on some of the plot points of the adventure, but they have the option of doing their own thing.

* To get the MacGuffin, the party needs to meet a contact who is a particular place. An encounter occurs there. If the party doesn't show, they will have to get the MacGuffin from the bad guys, who would have succeeded in stealing it since the party wasn't present to stop them.

I suppose the players could refuse to even take the mission, but when the GM gets an adventure for his group, I assume there's an implicit acceptance that the group isn't going to go out of its way to avoid the adventure.
 

Psion said:
Hard bottlenecks explicitly provide only one solution to a problem, and make any other solution very difficult by design.

Even these I wouldn't always call a railroad or even bad. It all depends on the context of the module. It could be bad adventure design or clever adventure design that leads to a this.
 

I don't have any examples sitting in front of me, but I do recall seeing modules where the written description (read to the players by the DM) assumes specific actions that relate to that encounter, and because there is no "map" or way for the DM to get perspective of the entire setting, he's kind of forced to progress with the adventure as its layed out (even to the point of the author telling the PCs what they are doing). If the players choose to do something else, its not that the DM couldn't figure out how it would effect the path, its that the players have suddenly dropped a huge burden on the DM (in the middle of the game no less). He can either say "OK go home and I'll spend the next 3 hours seeing what effect your unexpected move has on the the rest of the module", or his other option (and lets face it the most realistic course of action) is to "hint" scare, or otherwise bully the players into accepting they must do this or that. Afterall everyone is there trying to have a good time, and having to watch the DM struggle (because of a railroad module) isn't fun to see.


In a way a module is like a bad movie, if you don't leave in the first 10 minutes (thinking it has to get better) your usually stuck watching the entire thing (and if others are with you...forget it, no one wants to be first).

And I also think its important to destinguish between the railroad "action encounter" and the railroad plot encounter. Often times the later is far worse, esp. if its Romance novel drivel the PCs would rather avoid altogether but can't.
 
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Raven,

Some people definitely have too strict of a definition of "railroad". They must have some real life "railroad" situations going on that make them extra sensitive.

I stick with railroading being when the DM doesn't let you make other smart choices, just because it would screw up their "story". If it is because they have designed a "road" with well defined "blocks", but still leaves ways for players to overcome them, even if its 10 levels down the road, then I consider it "fair".

But as long as you have the ability to change and effect things, you aren't being railroaded.

Wait until you have a DM that repeatedly keeps you from successfully doing stuff, because it will kill an NPC he simply does not want dead yet, or somehow ruins his "story" plans. That is railroading.
 

I once played in a Mark of Heroes game where no matter what path you took in the city it led to an arena where the PCs had to fight a giant creature. If they didn't fight, the creature just killed them all anyway. I consider that railroading because there was no way to avoid the arena.
 

I'd like to point at the original DL modules as examples of the choo-choo ride, and at L1 as a great example of a module that is absolutely NOT a railroad.

To this day, L1 remains among my favorite dnd modules of all time. :)
 

Mark Hope said:
To give a recent example, Shadows of the Last War for Eberron is a hideous piece of railroaded design which, even though I played it over a year ago, I am still ranting about. Issues? Me?

Seriously? We had a blast with it and I never noticed any railroading qualities at all with it. Granted, I haven't read it just played through it.
 

All modules are railroads. There isn't a module that has been printed that doesn't depend on some cooperation from the player and which doesn't subtly or unsubtly funnel the characters along particular paths. A good module does a good job of hiding that it is a railroad, and leaves open plenty of oppurtunities for players to get off the train for a while and do thier own thing, but pretty much every module expects the players to progress through certain chokepoints in the plot. In this, they are no different from a computer role playing game adventure, only run well and written well a pen and paper adventure can hide that fact more easily.

The question is, "When is railroading bad."

A player is only being railroaded if no matter what his actions, things turn out the same. Too much linearity is bad, though linearity can often be hidden (for example in 'Sunless Citadel' you've a linear dungeon crawl and plot very cleverly disguised).

A player should never feel like a passenger on the train. So long as they feel like they are driving the train, they'll hardly notice that they are on rails. But if they feel like a passenger, it doesn't matter how many branching paths you have.

Another problem is if the DM instead of saying, "That action fails.", instead says, "You can't do that action." You pretty much should never tell a player that they aren't allowed to do something. Don't preempt their action. DM's are reactive, not proactive. The only time to be proactive is if you think the players are acting without the full information that their characters would have (say like the fact that the ravine is 150' across, and thus not jumpable). But they are allowed to try, and they are allowed to fail (hopefully gracefully). Alot of times when players do something or want to do something that derails the adventure (like kill an NPC which is important to the plot later), they panic. I know I have earlier in my career. But a decent DM should be able to rewrite an adventure on the fly, so that the players get back on the rails without ever knowing that they are. Or, if you can't, there is always a good chance that the PC's action provokes a new adventure in its own right.

Sometimes an adventure which is on rails requires a high degree of skill to hide the rails. A good example is DL1. Played with an inexperienced DM, this is terrible module. Played with an experienced DM, it is a great one. The difference is being able to let the module flow at a pace, and with the sort of detail that hides all the dead ends.

About ten years ago when I was obsessed with detail, I designed an adventure with rigid time lines of events. It seemed a good idea at the time, because it seemed fair. The world apart from the PC's would keep going on whatever the PC's did. I thought I was making the world seem more alive and more real, and I thought I was adding drama and intensity to the plot. It turned out in play however to be a really horrible idea because realism is not what you are going for as a DM. As a DM you want the PC's to solve the problem, you want them to be the heroes. That's really the only way it can turn out fun for you in the long run, and that excessive realism got in the way of that. I quickly dumped my timetables of who would be where when (unless preempted by the PC's of course) and basically changed over to what ammounted to 'cut scenes' and scripted events. The PC's can't see the big picture. A well played cut scene seems just as real and organic and spontaneous as a timeline, but the counter-intuitive thing is that even though in reality cut scenes and scripted events are actually more of a railroad than a timeline (the DM is fudging to produce the desired outcome), to the players it feels less like a railroad because they get to choose the pace of the adventure and in effect when things happen.

In other words, they don't feel like a passenger or an observer. And avoiding that feeling is all you need to do to avoid railroading the players.
 

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