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

[Micah Sweet]

Usually that absolutely nothing interesting will happen outside of the path.

To me, if that's true it represents a failure in worldbuilding on the GM's part.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

To me, if that's true it represents a failure in worldbuilding on the GM's part.

Sure. But it also is a rather common form of railroading.

 

[Neonchameleon]

That’s interesting to me. Being railroaded doesn’t typically apply to crpgs save your one example and that determination revolved around your expectations.

That’s part of why I brought up crpgs, to understand why the term applies to tyrpgs and not to crpgs. So far the best explanation has been different expectations.

Could that not be the real underlying complaint of railroading in ttrpgs? The DM actions aren’t meeting expectations?

That is a big part of the real underlying complaint, yes. That the DM actions aren't meeting the expectations the player signed up to the game with. The promise of TTRPGs that makes them in many ways superior to e.g. CRPGs despite being far slower and having far worse graphics is that you can try anything your character should be able to.

Railroading is therefore felt keenly in TTRPGs. Meanwhile CRPGs have many advantages but one thing they can't do is respond on the fly to anything that wasn't pre-programmed in advance. So it's not an expected feature of the medium any more than visuals are expected of a radio play. (Mass Effect is a special case because Mass Effect 1 is a sandbox and Mass Effect 3 is almost purely linear so ME3 does not give you the freedom of earlier Mass Effect games).

I think your point is valid.

But also, sometimes characters lose agency. Circumstances (known or unknown) can cause things to happen they cant prevent.

I guess, it all depends on the campaign and the story and how cheesy or illogical the event is. And how often it happens.

This is why I'm talking about disrespect not agency here. And I am using the word disrespect without one shred of hyperbole. Setting a dimensional lock across which Plane Shift didn't work would have taken away the agency of Plane Shift. But it would have been a case of "Things Happen."

But because instead of something big and far away the chosen method was the disrespectful and invasive method of stealing small, valuable, well protected items off the player characters it felt a whole lot worse to them than respecting the basic competence of the characters to protect their own valuables would have.

People are arguing about whether it's "railroading" because in formal terms it is at most light railroading; all that happened at the macro level was simply taking away a single spell. But how it was done was blatantly disrespectful of the character's competence and that made it feel bad to the player. And although railroading wasn't the root problem the term normally used for "a lack of agency that feels bad" is Railroading the player used it, identifying the feeling but missing the root cause.

 

[Celebrim]

To me, if that's true it represents a failure in worldbuilding on the GM's part.

Not necessarily. While it is true that one of the more common railroading techniques is "Small World", where the only thing interesting to do is the thing that you have prepared the players to do, it's not necessarily a failure of simulation or world building that there isn't a really interesting thing to do on every block. The most unrealistic thing about Batman is he can hangout on a rooftop and be there to stop a mugging. In reality, the "interesting" parts of life are widely scattered in time and place. The stories that make for good adventure stories aren't just everywhere, or else the 0th level commoners and 2nd level farmers just wouldn't survive it. Most of the time any realistically informed world is pretty stable and boring. If you don't want to be recruited into an adventure by the infamous wizard that shows up once a generation and sends young hobbit lads off on foolish adventures, and you miss that chance there isn't necessarily anything but tatter farming and the occasional chicken that got lose from its coup for the next twenty years - and that wouldn't be a failure of worldbuilding.

In fact, if anything, it's a pretty dramatic and unrealistic application of GM force that interesting things are happening at all, much less that those interesting things are scaled so that the PCs can engage with them at some level. If the PC's turn down one hook and then around the next corner or in the next village there is something equally interesting going and another baited narrative hook, that's railroading too - just one we tend to not question because we recognize it's done to empower the players not disempower them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not necessarily. While it is true that one of the more common railroading techniques is "Small World", where the only thing interesting to do is the thing that you have prepared the players to do, it's not necessarily a failure of simulation or world building that there isn't a really interesting thing to do on every block. The most unrealistic thing about Batman is he can hangout on a rooftop and be there to stop a mugging. In reality, the "interesting" parts of life are widely scattered in time and place. The stories that make for good adventure stories aren't just everywhere, or else the 0th level commoners and 2nd level farmers just wouldn't survive it. Most of the time any realistically informed world is pretty stable and boring. If you don't want to be recruited into an adventure by the infamous wizard that shows up once a generation and sends young hobbit lads off on foolish adventures, and you miss that chance there isn't necessarily anything but tatter farming and the occasional chicken that got lose from its coup for the next twenty years - and that wouldn't be a failure of worldbuilding.

In fact, if anything, it's a pretty dramatic and unrealistic application of GM force that interesting things are happening at all, much less that those interesting things are scaled so that the PCs can engage with them at some level. If the PC's turn down one hook and then around the next corner or in the next village there is something equally interesting going and another baited narrative hook, that's railroading too - just one we tend to not question because we recognize it's done to empower the players not disempower them.

Sure, but I was responding an absolute. You should be able to go somewhere and find interesting to do, or come up with something.

 

[bloodtide]

Railroading is not about the agency of the characters. It's about the agency of the players.

A simple example: if my PC is possessed by a demon, my PC has no agency. But if I, as a player, get to decide what actions the demon compels my PC to take, then (everything else being equal) I have agency as a player.

The problem here is what about the great many tyrant players that are writing their own novel?

The DM says the character gets possessed.

Then the player just says "whatever DM my character just acts like normal, anyway I want!"

Well, okay, then you don't have a game....