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

[wizard71]

That is not a definition of railroadibg I have ever seen before.

Again, the Deck is optional. Also, the player that drew the Void card didn't throw a fit. He rolled up a new character to play in the meantime. Like an adult.It is

 

[wizard71]

You are missing the point entirely. The deck creates conditions that you have no remedy for because you cut off planar access. That is the definition of a railroad.Taking away agency and forcing all actions down a single, predetermined path. The players cannot
respond to their actions to remedy the results of the Deck because you are forcing them to deal with the planar issue.

 

[Marc17]

Just now joining in at the original questions:
1.) No, I don't think that is railroading.
2.) As a player, my definition is when the player stops havign fun as they try to get off the train at a reasonable place but cannot. They are further forced to act out the rest of the adventure without the ability to affect anything. Not talking about when characters have to deal with the results of their actions. Not talking about when something happens to them they can't affect if they can continue on in. reasonable fashion. Not talking about if everybody is on a train and just going along with it to the end but having fun. Probably not even when the players want to get off, but the DM explains that that's not in the advenure and he can't run anything that's not in the adventure. That's probably just bad DMing. I'm talking about when the players want to get off the train at a given stop, but the door won't open and the train starts moving. They try and get to another car and a steward stops them. They try and jump out the window but it won't open and is indestructible. I've seen their actions ignored or never have effect. I've seen player's actions "corrected" for them. I've seen their actions dictated to them cut scene style. I've seen a player have his character jump off a cliff to just die and the DM just laughed and said "The wind blows you back up to the top of the cliff." Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of my encounters with this have been with badly written adventures. The old Dragonlance modules specifically come to mind as teh people that ran them tended to love everything about them, and the players just wanted to treat it like another dungeon.

 

[Reynard]

You are missing the point entirely. The deck creates conditions that you have no remedy for because you cut off planar access. That is the definition of a railroad.Taking away agency and forcing all actions down a single, predetermined path. The players cannot
respond to their actions to remedy the results of the Deck because you are forcing them to deal with the planar issue.

I disagree with all of this.

 

[Maxperson]

You are missing the point entirely. The deck creates conditions that you have no remedy for because you cut off planar access. That is the definition of a railroad.Taking away agency and forcing all actions down a single, predetermined path. The players cannot
respond to their actions to remedy the results of the Deck because you are forcing them to deal with the planar issue.

Except that's 100% wrong. They had the option to use a wish and just leave. They had the option to handle the planar issue. They had the option to seek out a rival archfey and try to talk it into getting them off the plane. They had the option to try and locate a natural crossing between the fey and prime plane. They had the option to sit tight and wait it out. They had the option to go seek a god and try to talk it or it's proxies into helping get them off the plane. They had the option to wait until morning and commune with party gods to figure out a different way. They had the option to....

There was no predetermined path the PCs were forced down.

 

[Hriston]

As I averred, its a particularly dumb or uncharismatic character who is regularly being played as smarter or smoother than they are because the player took advantage of them as a dump stat, but doesn't want to reflect that in any way. Now if the table expectation is "they just get to", that's as it is, but I think that's a problem.

(As I noted, its less likely to happen these days because for the most part the bottom of the traditional D&D attribute range has largely been pushed up for PCs. Some game systems don't force that, however, and if non-random its a way of making a tradeoff that may be utterly painless but free up resources for other attributes that matter much more to the character).

Well yeah, the basis of calling the use of force railroading is that table expectations are such that it's perceived as a violation by the player whose character is on the receiving end. I don't know if that means "they just get to", but it does mean there's a general understanding that force is off the table as a means of addressing the behavior being labeled as problematic.

I'm still not entirely sure what "degenerate cases" refers to in your last post. Is it the player's dumping of the relevant stat (Int or Cha (or Wis?) in a D&D context) and then not adequately "reflect"ing that (in someone else's eyes?), or is it the particular case of a table where the sort of play you describe is expected to be permitted? If it's the latter, I'm not sure why that would be considered a problem at all since, presumably, all the participants are on board with that expectation.

In either case (since I don't see that you've spelled this out in your post), what is the "greater evil" here that justifies railroading, and why are they the only two options? Apologies if you've more thoroughly explained your position elsewhere in the thread.

 

[Hriston]

I don't really see how it becomes the GM's prerogative to tell a player how to play their PC.

If (say) a low INT is an aspect of the character, then why can't the player play that? When we play Classic Traveller, we expect the players to play their PCs' INT and EDU. That's just part of what it means to play the game.

I think the expectation in RPGs that individual players are the ones who get to play their particular characters is pretty much universal. This is probably why force often gets labeled as railroading.

 

[bsss]

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: No.
2: A railroad is when there is only one (or very few) way(s) for the adventure to progress, and so it shall progress. It can happen because of a closed adventure design, where there is one line of set dominos and the whole material depends on the party taking a specific action or there's nothing to do, or it can happen from GM mistake, where they are either enamored with a particular idea or overwhelmed by something unexpected that they accidentally made all the dominos point to the same thing in a heavy-handed way.

It's important (to me) to call it a mistake, not malfeasance. Oversights happen, not all adventures are bangers, and so on. But definitely, setting up one situation where some solutions are just not on the table due to the fiction is absolutely not a railroad, and that has nothing to do with sandbox play vs. not. Countermagic, dead magic zones, fog, crevasses, anti-scrying, planar locks, the list can go on and on. Complications make things interesting and sometimes the complication is that the best option is not available to a player or the party despite it normally being a thing their sheet says they can do. If it becomes a pattern, that's a different matter, but an adventure's story is absolutely allowed to mix up the parameters.

 

[Hriston]

Is there a reason you keeping making the same joke at my expense? I don't know what you're talking about.

It was meant to address this question from the post to which you were responding:

Is there another stat, other than Intelligence, in which characters with a low value are expected to be roleplayed in a way that prohibits participation in some aspect of the game?

Since you prioritize exploration of the setting over more challenge-oriented play (focusing on exploration of situation), I was suggesting an expectation might exist that PCs with low Wisdom would be considered unfit vehicles for allowing their players to fully participate in a game with those priorities. It was meant to set up an equivalency between not being free to make decisions for a low Int character in a given situation and not being able to imagine the setting in which a low Wis character finds themselves because their low score prevents the player from acquiring information through play about the when, where, and who of the game world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It was meant to address this question from the post to which you were responding:

Since you prioritize exploration of the setting over more challenge-oriented play (focusing on exploration of situation), I was suggesting an expectation might exist that PCs with low Wisdom would be considered unfit vehicles for allowing their players to fully participate in a game with those priorities. It was meant to set up an equivalency between not being free to make decisions for a low Int character in a given situation and not being able to imagine the setting in which a low Wis character finds themselves because their low score prevents the player from acquiring information through play about the when, where, and who of the game world.

My wife often claims she has a low wisdom, but for her that really means that she makes rash decisions, not that she is not perceptive of her environment. We represent this by having a lowish stat but proficiency in appropriate skills (and expertise dice in specific areas in my game). Wisdom is an exceptionally fuzzy stat, but we do our best to represent our scores in a way that makes sense to us. That's all I want, for attributes to be a recognizable part of the mix.