What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?

[Reynard]

Well that's a pretty specific example, isn't it? Lots of games have a plane shift spell, but the differences in wording and possible castings per day make a difference. As does what you might be thinking of in terms of 'creative' use. I'll play if you want to expand a little.

I was replying to @TheSword who suggested stopping the player from using plane shift to just immediately leave the faewild was stopping a "creative solution" to the trapped problem. That isn't a creative solution, it was a standard solution that was not possible.

 

[Maxperson]

I know I am in the minority here, but it is railroading IF you as a DM didn't set up a reason as to why and how all the exit points are blocked. And by that, I mean, if this was something that just kind of appeared out of nowhere, without interconnecting threads ting the big-bad in your climax to coercing or having control over the feywild's gates, then it would seem odd to me. Odd to me, and I wouldn't care. But to some, it could be considered railroading, if and only if, those threads weren't tied.

There were no blocked exit points. All that happened was that the tuning forks were stolen.

I don't use railroading as a pejorative term. So my definition is:

"Having a sequence of events in a story that have been thought through by the DM. It can still have options. The play can happen in different sequences at times. It can still follow player's interests and/or include their PC's stories. And it can still go off rails at times."

To me, that is a railroad.

There was no sequence of events. There was only the one event of tuning forks being stolen.

 

[Maxperson]

On a side note, this statement also leans more into the railroad for many players. So now, the players are just acting on impulses you provide (not them), and they have to appease and succeed whatever veiled solution (that you don't even have) in order to get out. If you had specific ideas in mind and written out. Ones that you know they could logically do in the sandbox you created - that would be much less of a railroad than, find a solution and I'll decide whether it works at that moment.

No. Having no rails does not equal a railroad. Having no set solution such that any reasonable solution the players come up with will work is the opposite of railroad. Having a set, written down method that must be used and no other will work to get off the plane, is a railroad.

 

[Maxperson]

I think the general definition is that the DM exerts too much control. That is what it all boils down to in a nutshell. Call it lack of player agency. Call it having to follow a path. Call it lack of options. Whatever you call it, it distills down to the DM exerting too much control over the narrative.
A DM setting up a sandbox isn't what many call railroading.

Having no set solution such that it's entirely player agency is not the DM exerting any kind of control at all.

 

[Maxperson]

Mamba, that question does not matter. You're right, their first idea failing doesn't make a railroad. But, and this is important, for some, having to simply fill a blank canvas with the DM's whimsical desires, is railroading. It is the old: Gygax, the DM, makes you search the dungeon, until he feels that you have explored enough to find the secret door.

No offense, and this is where I take offense to many, there aren't that many options to escape a plane. You can create many, especially if you have the adventures exploring a sandbox map. But, if you did the work as DM, you would probably have four or five options for them to get out and double the amounts for them to explore. (This is, of course, if you insist they are trapped there.)

• That rhakshaka that teleports north, south, east, west, constantly selling favors for souls. He might have a way to get out.
• Since we're dealing with the Feywild, those two rivers that flow uphill into the latent volcano. Yeah, there are tunnels underneath that are attached to other things that no one controls. But the turtle dragon, Bligmouth, really really really doesn't like visitors.
• That dryad's tree that's full of empty rum bottles and broken heart carvings. Maybe if you get inside her tree, it's like a dimension inside a dimension. It's there you can get out. But to get in her tree requires her permission (forced, coerced, granted, etc.)
• Apparently Winter Court is still managing to bamph in and out. Maybe an assault or surreptitious encounter can help the group use this to their advantage.
• Keeping with the Feywild theme, those blood oranges that grove from old lady's orchard are said to be imbued with honeybee wings, and honeybee wings are known to hold a bit of teleportation magic. So maybe she knows something? (Or her hive knows something?)

If you are going to eliminate conventional magic options (except for wish), then you, as a DM need to think this through. The PCs are trapped in a Hawaiian style island environment, full of volcanoes, orange groves, sugarcane fields, and one where the Winter Court is just pissed at never having any control. Build four or five more areas, with each area leading to NPCs that can offer ideas on how to get out. Maybe two or three ideas each. Let the players roleplay. Let them explore. And make sure you know how they can get out. Because if it is just, "When I feel like it," then that is railroading to many players.

Nothing was shut off except for one spell. The naturally occurring fey crossings were still a way off. Finding a creature or god that could get them off would have worked. Wish would have worked. The gate spell would have worked. Divine intervention would have worked. And on and on.

You are reading a lot more into what happened than actually happened.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So I had this situation last night when a player got upset because he felt the party was being "railroaded" and I take issue with his definition. I set up the adventure in which the party is stuck in the Faewild after the Winter Court stages a coup and takes over. They have locked down the plane, closing gates and using magic to steal plane shift tuning forks from those arriving. The player made some (incorrect) assumptions about why this was happening and then decided to just nope out and plane whift the party home, which is when the player discovered they were at least momentarily trapped in the Faewild and would have to find a way home.

I do not consider this to be railroading. I consider it to be setting up the adventure. There is no predetermined path to finding a way home. They can try anything they want, and they have 2 wishes on hand (and if they used those, they would work, but no one tried). This little jaunt is a side thing right before the climax of the campaign, meant to give them one last level bump as well as potentiually find allies in the Summer Court if they decide to break the Winter Court's hold.

Anyway, two questions:
1) Do you specifically think what I did here was "railroading"?
and 2) In general, how do you define "railroading" or being railroaded as a player ina game?

1) He's not wrong that that's railroading, imo.

Because to me one of the most classic forms of railroading is "DM changes the rules/way the universe works to force a specific course". It's not outrageous railroading because it's not totally inconceivable that someone would come up with a spell specifically to target the components of the Plane Shift spell, but, it's not a good look, and it frankly opens the door to a lot of spell shenanigans that isn't attractive. I also disagree that this is merely "setting up the premise of the adventure", because there's no option to say "no thanks" and there was no warning beforehand, the already-existing characters are already in the situation.

D&D makes this issue come up a lot because D&D has a lot of spells that, if you designed it from scratch, wouldn't exist, because they're so good at just blowing up situations. Plane Shift being a good example. Like, if you designed D&D from scratch now, unless you were intentionally aping D&D or trying to be "compatible", you'd probably make all "planar travel" be via portals or complex, conditional rituals (which likely weren't part of any "standardized" magic system) and which couldn't just be dropped as solutions or "get out of jail free" cards.

Other RPGs tend to have much less that feels like railroading in this fashion, because they have more flexible views of the world and magic, and tend to have less in the way of "get of jail free" magic (or "go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200" magic, for that matter). And where they do it's often worked into the world a lot better than it is in D&D, so players may well expect it and thus be sanguine when it happens.

As for Wish, I mean, did they think of that and disregard it, or did they assume that because you'd blocked one route you'd have blocked all routes? Or just forgot they had it? Or one or more PCs control the Wishes and don't want to spend them?

I might consider it railroading if the PCs were engaged in something else, and this came out of left field and you forced them into it.

That's how it read to me here. This isn't the start of an adventure, it's something the PCs were already doing, and now suddenly their spell components have been nicked by unstoppable, novel magic of a kind that's primarily PC-targeting.

Any time a scene is framed as "your characters are trapped", players are going to be somewhat unhappy. We instinctually want to escape from a trap, it's not surprising that a player who burns a 7th level slot on an escape spell that doesn't work is going to be salty about the combination of "still being stuck" and "wasted a big slot on something that didn't work".

I'm not saying it's a railroad, exactly, but the adventure design is closer to the train station then I would prefer as a player. As a GM, I probably would have framed that concept with more carrot, less stick.

Yup. You should always be super-extra-careful with anything that involves trapping or kidnapping/black-bag'ing the PCs, because players not only absolutely hate being trapped, they're gnaw-your-own-arm-off aggressive about breaking out of traps, and also tend to be willing to expend extreme resources to do so, which leads to my questions re: Wish above.

Also this particular one stinks of PC-targeting because most beings that can Plane Shift don't use the spell and/or don't use the material component. Only PCs always do. Which makes it a lot less plausible unless the entire goal of the people who set up the spell was to trap planar travellers specifically.


2) Railroading exists on a spectrum rather than being an absolute, and different people have different tolerances for it. Different things trigger people too.

Basically when the DM says "This is what you have to do and I'm not allowing for anything else", that's almost always going to be railroading. But it's often a matter of degree and buy in - like if the players have agreed to steal back the sceptre of Throknar, then they can't call "railroading" when they find it's at the bottom of a dungeon they're going to have to fight through or w/e.

Some DMs railroad simply through lack of preparation/interest - i.e. they only prepare one path and if you don't take it just try to herd you back on to it. That can be extremely irritating if the path is at odds with what makes sense or has big plot holes, and it probably does.

Some DMs railroad by trying to set up situations like this one, or more aggressive ones like having overpowered people ambush the PCs and capture them. You kind of need some kind of buy in or real plausible sense of "It's our own fault" to get away with that imo. Or, and this can work too - immediately come to the PCs with some sort of offer that looks good - i.e. an NPC comes to the PCs asking for help and offering a good deal, like good enough that it makes more sense to take that than, say, blow a Wish to avoid doing so. Like you could have just made some kind of "magical resonance" temporarily disable Plane Shift long enough for this guy to talk to them and do a "whilst you're here" deal. If the PCs are racing to rescue a friend or something I don't think they're likely to be that into messing around with Fae Court bollocks anyway. Combining trapping PCs with the elves who are the most annoying wind-up artists and biggest whiners and drama queens in the D&D universe does not seem like a great plan to me unless you really want drama lol.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Having no set solution such that it's entirely player agency is not the DM exerting any kind of control at all.

That's obviously wrong. It's not even arguable. If you force the PCs into a specific situation with zero buy-in, and then delete the most obvious solution in a way that may be perceived as questionable (which "Uh this one specific material component vanished" is imho), that's absolutely exerting control, even if you allow for multiple possible solutions.

Some groups will be fine with it, some will be really mad, some, like this one, will be mixed.

On the grand scale of railroading this is far from as bad as it gets, but it's definitely making the Geiger counter click.

You are reading a lot more into what happened than actually happened.

The players seem to have been too - indeed that's very common and a DM needs to anticipate it.

 

[Maxperson]

That's obviously wrong. It's not even arguable. If you force the PCs into a specific situation with zero buy-in, and then delete the most obvious solution in a way that may be perceived as questionable (which "Uh this one specific material component vanished" is imho), that's absolutely exerting control, even if you allow for multiple possible solutions.

You're conflating getting to the need to come up with a solution, with solutions. I said not having a set solution is not force. Not that taking away the tuning forks was not force. However, since it was only a single, limited act, it was not railroading, even though force was involved.

On the grand scale of railroading this is far from as bad as it gets, but it's definitely making the Geiger counter click.

A single event of force that then has no set solution or further force cannot be a railroad. It's like coming across a single railroad tie and expecting trains to use it.

 

[Maxperson]

How small can a railroad be? Is a linear dungeon design a railroad?

Not unless it has to be completed no matter what the players decide. If they can opt to walk in, and then opt to leave or head back to the entrance to leave, it's not a railroad. Usually all a party has to do is turn around and walk back out to leave a dungeon, so they are not railroads even through they are generally linear.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Not that taking away the tuning forks was not force. However, since it was only a single, limited act, it was not railroading, even though force was involved.

Sure it was. One act of railroading is still railroading. It's just a less-bad kind. This all feels a bit "Do they give a nobel prize for attempted chemistry?" as an apologia.

A single event of force that then has no set solution or further force cannot be a railroad. It's like coming across a single railroad tie and expecting trains to use it.

This is silly literalism of the kind that is seemingly preventing you from understanding the issue. Your analogy confuses and obfuscates, rather than illuminating (to be fair, many bad analogies do). It doesn't need to be a literal railroad, that's just an allusion/metaphor.