D&D 5E What does "Railroading" actually mean!? Discount Code on Page 8

[Ruin Explorer]

Railroading is when the choices of the players are being constrained by the DM for reasons that have nothing to do with the scenario and everything to do with the DM having a preferred outcome.

Yeah, this.

The other definitions seem at once too broad and too narrow.

Some people feel railroaded if you start your campaign with one of the best starter vignettes ever:

DM: You are naked in a dungeon, find your way out ....

There's a difference between a premise and a railroad. That's a premise.

The problem usually occurs when the DM, for whatever reason, refuses to explain the premise of the adventure as a premise, and instead decides to just drop it on the players. It's incredibly easy to avoid this being a problem. You just either:

A) Explain that the premise will be secret and surprising, and ask the players, are they up for absolutely any start? If you get a yes, you're good to go.

B) You explain what the premise is, i.e. that you start in a dungeon with no stuff, and ask if they're okay with that? You get a yes, and you're good to go.

Many good adventures have a highly specific premise. Indeed, my experience is that adventures that start with a specific premise tend to work better than "You meet in a pub"-type campaigns. But you need player buy-in, either a generalized "any premise" buy-in (which you will likely get from groups you've played with for a long time), or quick summary of the premise (which can actually often lead to more interesting characters).

The tavern situation is an actual railroad, on the other hand.

Putting this in context, in this adventure book the objective is to slay Jarl Torrfin the Bleak. That's fairly set, and honestly negotiation isn't going to work on this particular Frost Giant. Does that mean the players have been railroaded into this confrontation?

Maybe? This is more about the DM than the adventure. If the DM is absolutely unwilling to break away from the adventure and change the scenario, no matter what happens, that's going to be railroading. But if the premise is "We must stop Jarl Torrfin", and Mr Torrfin won't let himself be taken alive (if he can avoid it) and won't negotiate because it's not in his nature, that's not railroading. If you suddenly get towards the end, never having heard of Mr Torrfin, and an NPC steps out and is like "THOU MUST MURDER THIS GIANT!" and the PCs are like "What, no..." and the NPC is like "BUT THOU MUST!" and so on, that is likely railroading.

With adventures rather than DMs, people typically refer to adventures as railroads when they don't allow the PCs to make choices where it seems like there really would be choices. Especially if NPCs, magical barriers or the like enforce that lack of choice. I've seen it a number of times in a very clumsy way, where the PCs arrive at some sort of scenario, and are expected to do a specific thing, but that's not reasonable expectation, and many players/PCs will not do that, but in order for the adventure to go anywhere, they must. So just avoid that. Think about groups very different to your own, and what they might do. Think about whether the premise of the adventure necessarily required characters that would do this.

If your premise was "jolly adventures in this small region", and half-way through said jolly adventures the PCs are suddenly expected to get on a boat to the new world, not to return for years if ever, and one of the PCs was designed so they had a family and stuff, and others have ties too, then obviously it's unreasonable to expect them to get on said boat - but if all the rest of the adventure relies on the boat, well, yeah, that's a railroad of a really extreme kind.

It’s a pretty common game design technique.

Forget about it Jake, it's an RPG messageboard.

Er, or more to the point, the irrational and extreme hatred some people have for illusionism of the most minor and harmless kind can never be truly accounted for. I was particularly amused on another site when some guy posted a massive rant about illusionism, and kept going for pages, when his actual play on the same site showed he was engaging in what most people would call illusionism...

I mean, I get being irked by the concept, but when people get into terms like "fraud", hoo boy.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

It’s a pretty common game design technique.

I stand by my words.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It’s a pretty common game design technique.

A prime example is a wandering monster table. It doesn't matter which route you take into town. The DM rolls on the same table to see what you encounter.

 

[Campbell]

In this essay M. Joseph Young points out a contradiction in mainstream roleplaying game design - the idea that the GM controls the story, but players control the protagonists.

There is an idea floating around the role playing game world that went unchallenged for a very long time. Rule books for many games have described an approach to play that we almost take for granted. Yet if we were to stop and consider what it was we believed, we would almost certainly realize that it was internally contradictory, impossible on its face.

Most readers will agree that in a standard role playing game, the referee, or game master, has complete control over the story, and that the character players have complete control over their characters, who are the main characters in the story.

As far as anyone knows, Ron Edwards was the first person to point out the problem in this idea. If one person has full control of the main characters in the story, how can another person control the story? The story is presumably about what the main characters did. If the character players have full control over what the characters do, then the referee cannot have control of the story; conversely, if the referee has full control of the story, then the players don't really have any control over what the characters do.

I am not overly fond of railroading as a term, mostly because a good number of people have very rigid requirements for what they consider to be railroading. From my perspective what is important is that the GM designs a scenario that is meant to be played and lets players control the protagonists. No matter how artful whether in scenario design or at the table if the GM is thinking in terms of How can I get the players to have their characters do X it is a nonstarter for me. This is a large part of why I prefer classic module design like Castle Amber and Keep on the Borderlands to more modern adventures like Descent into Avernus. It is also why I tend to prefer the sorts of GM techniques seen in games like Stars Without Number or Apocalypse World.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

A prime example is a wandering monster table. It doesn't matter which route you take into town. The DM rolls on the same table to see what you encounter.

That depends. Not if each road has a different monster table or a different chance of encountering monsters.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That depends. Not if each road has a different monster table or a different chance of encountering monsters.

And how often do you see that?

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

And how often do you see that?

Really? I always do that. Every town, forest, etc. also has its down encounter table. I've always played that way.

 

[Minigiant]

Repeated loss of player or character agency that correlates to the DM's desires and not the world's simulation or themes.

The issues is who lays the tracks, not the tracks themselves.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I always do that. Every town, forest, etc. also has its down encounter table. I've always played that way.

Seems like a lot of work for zero benefit, but even so, there are lots of paths you could take through a forest, and still get the same random encounter, there are lots streets you could walk down in a town and still have the same encounter...

Unless you actually map out the exact position of everying in the world you are still engaging in this narrative slight of hand.

 

[Charlaquin]

A prime example is a wandering monster table. It doesn't matter which route you take into town. The DM rolls on the same table to see what you encounter.

I probably wouldn’t categorize that under illusion of choice, unless the DM isn’t accounting for any travel variables at all. Most DMs who use random encounter tables (like myself) try to take player choices into account here - a longer but safer route might mean more rolls on a table with less dangerous encounters, while the shorter, riskier route might mean fewer rolls get made, but the encounters are more deadly if they do get rolled. Just as an example.