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

[Fenris-77]

This last page or two is why I dislike the use of railroad to describe a linear adventure. It's very easy to confuse with railroading, which is an active thing the GM does using force to keep the PCs on those rails. The former is fine, the latter is what I have issues with (as do many people).

 

[Fenris-77]

Aside: is casting a standard spell for its intended purpose a "creative solution"?

Lots of OSR games specifically have spells that allow creative problem solving, and as such some don't have an 'intended' purpose. Even with spells that do (a web spell, say, or whatever), I'm usually pretty forgiving when players try to get creative. It depends on what they are trying to do (some players have a habit of trying to creatively interpret spells to up the power level, which I'm not fine with).

 

[FrogReaver]

I find that people have a railroad scale of 1-10 in their mind that is not the same for everyone. The OP of having the group portal shift into the feywild as part of the adventure seems very low to me. Then taking away spell components to keep them here creeps things up to like a 3 on the scale. I'm still ok to play the game since this in the lead-in and I have played with the DM before and his games are fine.

Problems arise with scenes like in Ravenloft where you are walking down the street and fog suddenly surrounds you and you are now in Ravenloft. Again, it is a lead-in to the adventure so I can play along. Having the orcs show up and take you all prisoner pushed my scale to 8-9 in those cases. I would prefer the DM just saying that you wake up as prisoner to the orcs and tell me how you got here.

I think about it a bit differently.

In the extreme cases we all agree what is railroading. One way of resolving term ambiguity is to anything that even slightly has some element of the extreme cases is a railroad. I understand why that would be appealing, but it defeats the purpose of highlighting the extremely bad behaviors we wanted to highlight with the term railroad to begin with.

But if we don’t handle it that way then the cutoff point for what is close enough to those platonic ideal railroads to be deemed a railroad is very subjective.

One understandably appealing option for dealing with the ambiguity of different perspectives is to only accept the impacted players perspective of whether it was railroading as it removes the ambiguity. However, this does nothing to point out which specific behaviors are railroading, which makes discussion and shared understanding of the topic impossible.

That is, there’s no perfect definition of railroad. They all have their own problems. I think the most useful one is the one that defines railroad as the ideally extreme example and then expands the term to include examples that are ‘close enough’ to that ideal railroad. It preserves the purpose of the term to highlight something to be avoided while maintaining discussability even though the exact ‘close enough’ is subjective.

 

[TwoSix]

How does that jive with challenges that really only should have 1 solution?

I mean, if you as a GM frame a situation such that there is exactly one solution, you kinda laid down the tracks already, right?

 

[Fenris-77]

I mean, if you as a GM frame a situation such that there is exactly one solution, you kinda laid down the tracks already, right?

We might even call that a monorail.

 

[TwoSix]

We might even call that a monorail.

That seems like a cynical ploy to get people to post Simpson memes, my friend.

 

[Fenris-77]

That seems like a cynical ploy to get people to post Simpson memes, my friend.

By moi? Surely not...

 

[Reynard]

Lots of OSR games specifically have spells that allow creative problem solving, and as such some don't have an 'intended' purpose. Even with spells that do (a web spell, say, or whatever), I'm usually pretty forgiving when players try to get creative. It depends on what they are trying to do (some players have a habit of trying to creatively interpret spells to up the power level, which I'm not fine with).

Sure, but I was referring to casting plane shift in order to, you know, shift planes.

 

[Celebrim]

3 or 4.

That's really about the limit of when you can make play be character driven rather than party driven.

I fully agree with one player and one GM, the player's character can uniquely drive the game and every situation can be tailored to the character.

The more players you add the more varying the goals of character play will become and the more mature cooperation is required by the characters to deal with the shifting spotlight focusing and agree on goals that can be explored mutually, and the longer period of time by necessity between which story arc is being spotlighted. I find personally that after about 3 players and one GM, party goals just start to naturally weigh more heavily than character goals, and play becomes more and more party driven.

Once play becomes party driven, individual characters become more interchangable. The story is about the shared quest, and less and less about each character's feelings and self-discovery or personal feelings. And even if we backstory that every character has some personal reason for this particular quest, still that means that the characters remain more interchangeable than if we had that one player around whom everything revolved no matter what he did.

 

[Fenris-77]

Sure, but I was referring to casting plane shift in order to, you know, shift planes.

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.