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

[Scott Christian]

As a player, it's what I would consider railroading if I did it as a GM.

It's a collection of techniques that are used to limit and guide player choice.

How I respond to that depends on how subtle it is, what I perceive the reasoning to be, how often it happens, and whether the GM becomes hostile (overtly or covertly) if I try to get off the rails.

What does the bold mean given the context of your statement?

 

[Celebrim]

What does the bold mean given the context of your statement?

It means that applying techniques like small world, obdurium walls, false choices, or Schrodinger's maps can be justified if the GM is doing so because it's impossible to prep a fully open world with infinite choices and also have real granularity about it.

For example, in my own campaign right now I'm running a Star Wars bounty hunter game set in the rise of the empire. The convention in the game is that the guild master Yagmur offers the players a job to acquire some high value bounty. In reality, this is a false choice. I don't really have anything prepared if they say "no", and my players understand this and take the hook. I don't like this, but it's a necessary convention to run the game. In the ideal world I'd allow players to log into the Imperial database and browse through the 100's of thousands of bounties, filtering them by sector and value and type of bounty and let them select the job they are most interested in, and no matter what they selected I'd be able to run an interesting game for them. But the constraints of my ability to provide this much content just prevents that true open world. So I have to run some sort of narrow-broad-narrow structure where they are given a mission, they go learn about that mission in a manageable environment with a limited number of points of interest, and they explore that environment in the order of their choosing, collecting clues and likely getting into trouble, and then as a result of their investigation they figure out one of the locations they could find the acquisition at and arrange some sort of heist to assassinate, kidnap, rescue or whatever else they need to do to acquire the target. That's a small world. It feels pretty open but it has some walls around it. I don't actually detail whole worlds with billions of inhabitants and if you get off the map details will be improvised and sparser than what you would get if you stay in the expected portion of the sandbox.

Generally speaking as a player I would also play along with this sort of thing for the good of the game rather than trying to actively derail it, especially if I am having fun. I understand the limits of preparation and imagination put limits on what can be supported and I'm not going to fault the GM for that.

However, if a GM has rails that are too clunky, overtly involve the GM telling me what to do in director stance, require certain choices by me to stay on them, is railroading because they have expectations about what the players will do or how certain scenes will play out (like the villain will escape in Scene B), or if they actively try to prevent me from going from A->C because the plot they created absolutely depends on me going through the exact same hoops (often stupid hoops), then I'm much less likely to be forgiving.

 

[MGibster]

In a few months I'll be running a Delta Green campaign, and in this campaign the player characters will be marked by a cosmic entity. To avoid spoilers, let's just say the mark comes in the form of a splinter. During the course of the first scenario, each player character will get a splinter no matter what they do. Even if they take great pains to avoid getting a splinter, they will receive one in the most implausible manner imaginable if that's what it takes.

Is this railroading? Yes. Does this take away agency? Absolutely. But it's a horror game, and one of the themes of the campaign is the PCs dealing with the knowledge they are unwitting pawns carrying tasks assigned to them by an unknown entity billions of years in the past.

 

[Fenris-77]

My sense of railroading is based less on agency and more on the use of GM force. I think that linear adventure design is fine and I'm not interested in attaching a stigma there (even if it's not to my personal taste).

I think railroading lies more in the heavy-handed use of GM force to keep the players coloring inside the lines - the refusal to entertain player ideas and plans because they don't match the prep, or the use of shaky diegetic elements that exist only to reduce choice down to an acceptable range, that sort of thing. There is an obvious connection to player agency there, but I think that the reduction of agency is a symptom, not the disease.

 

[FrogReaver]

My sense of railroading is based less on agency and more on the use of GM force. I think that linear adventure design is fine and I'm not interested in attaching a stigma there (even if it's not to my personal taste).

I think railroading lies more in the heavy-handed use of GM force to keep the players coloring inside the lines - the refusal to entertain player ideas and plans because they don't match the prep, or the use of shaky diegetic elements that exist only to reduce choice down to an acceptable range, that sort of thing. There is an obvious connection to player agency there, but I think that the reduction of agency is a symptom, not the disease.

IMO. One cannot have player agency at all without the possibility of a choice now to restrict choices in a later moment. If it’s impossible for your choices to do that then those aren’t meaningful choices.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It means that applying techniques like small world, obdurium walls, false choices, or Schrodinger's maps can be justified if the GM is doing so because it's impossible to prep a fully open world with infinite choices and also have real granularity about it.

For example, in my own campaign right now I'm running a Star Wars bounty hunter game set in the rise of the empire. The convention in the game is that the guild master Yagmur offers the players a job to acquire some high value bounty. In reality, this is a false choice. I don't really have anything prepared if they say "no", and my players understand this and take the hook. I don't like this, but it's a necessary convention to run the game. In the ideal world I'd allow players to log into the Imperial database and browse through the 100's of thousands of bounties, filtering them by sector and value and type of bounty and let them select the job they are most interested in, and no matter what they selected I'd be able to run an interesting game for them. But the constraints of my ability to provide this much content just prevents that true open world. So I have to run some sort of narrow-broad-narrow structure where they are given a mission, they go learn about that mission in a manageable environment with a limited number of points of interest, and they explore that environment in the order of their choosing, collecting clues and likely getting into trouble, and then as a result of their investigation they figure out one of the locations they could find the acquisition at and arrange some sort of heist to assassinate, kidnap, rescue or whatever else they need to do to acquire the target. That's a small world. It feels pretty open but it has some walls around it. I don't actually detail whole worlds with billions of inhabitants and if you get off the map details will be improvised and sparser than what you would get if you stay in the expected portion of the sandbox.

Generally speaking as a player I would also play along with this sort of thing for the good of the game rather than trying to actively derail it, especially if I am having fun. I understand the limits of preparation and imagination put limits on what can be supported and I'm not going to fault the GM for that.

However, if a GM has rails that are too clunky, overtly involve the GM telling me what to do in director stance, require certain choices by me to stay on them, is railroading because they have expectations about what the players will do or how certain scenes will play out (like the villain will escape in Scene B), or if they actively try to prevent me from going from A->C because the plot they created absolutely depends on me going through the exact same hoops (often stupid hoops), then I'm much less likely to be forgiving.

Yeah, in any game that requires prep these sort of limitations always exist to some degree. And it is fine. Like if in the case of your game once they accept the job they have plenty of genuine choices it is OK if how we got there was bit railroady. This is exactly the sort of use of "railroad" i think it is acceptable, short segments of railroad here and there that get the players to the place where they can make plenty of interesting and genuine choices is perfectly fine.

Though of course you can try to alleviate this a bit. In my pseudo sandboxy D&D game I often have just vague ideas prepared about a lot of things, and only once the players express interest in one of them I prepare them fully. We also have practice that in end of the session players tell what they plan to do on the next, so that they have a genuine choice but I can also prep for it. I think it is a good trick for making a small world seem bigger than it actually is. Like in the case of your bounty hunting game it probably would be possible to have a few broad outlines of different jobs, and then they choose it in the end of a session, and then you prepare the one they chose for the next. Though given what I recall about your insane amount of prep, this might not be practical in this specific case. It also is not necessarily as satisfying pacing wise, as it probably feels more like a coherent "episode" if the job choosing and the job itself happen in the same session.