What's Wrong with the Railroad?

[Edena_of_Neith]

I went through the DL series, from DL1 through DL9. The TPK at the High Clerist's Tower finally ended it.
So, I have been through an experience involving Railroading.

So what to do?

(shrugs)

Just don't railroad the players. Or how someone else DM, if you're exhausted as a DM (and that happens quickly enough ... being a DM can be hard!) What else can I say?

(humor)

Also, remember that Railroads are easily derailed ... if they are in D&D!
Simply ask the Cute, Female Wizard. Or, ask the Ogre. : )

 

[Janx]

it's funny how much players will whine and cry railroad, but then happily sit down for 10-100 hours of railroading on their xbox.

Just about every RPG in videogame is a railroad. Oblivion is closer to a sandbox. Fable is a railroad.

<<<spoiler alert>>>>















Worse, at least for Fable II (which I mostly liked until the 2nd half of the main plot), my PC is forced to do things "as a good guy" that I wouldn't have tolerated in an RPG.

At one point, I'm forced to meet up with the 3rd "hero" to find. I'm forced to sit through a cut scene where he kills an NPC I like. Then I can't target him and kill him, ever. Because the BBEG needs to use him. Despite the fact, that if I killed him, the plot would be foiled and the world would be saved.

In a game that touts it's openness, that's the ultimate railroad. Not letting a player do something (that makes sense), and instead making them do something that doesn't make sense. With no ability to stop it, short of turning off the game.

 

[Dausuul]

it's funny how much players will whine and cry railroad, but then happily sit down for 10-100 hours of railroading on their xbox.

Just about every RPG in videogame is a railroad. Oblivion is closer to a sandbox. Fable is a railroad.

Almost the only reason to play pencil-and-paper RPGs in preference to video games is that PnP games allow you to go off the rails. In just about all other respects, video games are massively superior. You can play them from the comfort of your own home, nobody has to take on the responsibility of DMing, you can play solo if you don't have a group, and all the number-crunching is handled for you by the machine. Plus you get pretty pictures.

Therefore, video gamers are often prepared to tolerate levels of railroading that would be considered totally unacceptable in PnP. (They sort of have to, actually, since we're nowhere near the level of artificial intelligence needed for a true sandbox-style CRPG.)

I love Diablo II, but if I were playing in a PnP campaign that didn't offer me any more choices than D2 did, I'd walk out before the end of the first session.

 

[pawsplay]

Meaningful choices - RPG Talk

A little snippet on RPG Talk.

 

[Toben the Many]

Meaningful choices - RPG Talk

A little snippet on RPG Talk.

Interesting. I would say in the campaign I'm in right now, there are no real meaningful choices. However, the "right" choice is always made so enticing that we'd be fools not to take it. I guess that's why, thus far, the campaign has not felt too forced or too directed. All of the choices our characters would have made were the "right" ones anyway.

I will say that there are meaningful choices when we explore, of which there is a lot of in our game. We have missed big clues and campaign elements by simply not exploring particular sections of ruins and dungeons where we have been.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

At the point that it is no longer especially vulnerable to being derailed, I generally stop considering it a railroaded plot. There are a few specific criteria that fit what I (and I suspect many others) would call a railroaded plot.

- The players cannot alter the outcome of any plot critical events.
- The players are only permitted to take a single course of action at any point where a decision is called for.

Having a linear plot is not enough. A railroad has a linear plot and tends to make assumptions about the players reactions to events within those plots.

The kind of plot I'm talking about does make assumptions as to the reactions of the players to events within those plots. So far, my assumptions haven't been wrong. For instance, if I write an adventure where creatures attack a town and then the mayor asks the PCs to figure out where they came from and recover the people who were kidnapped in the attack, I expect the players to say yes and go on the mission. If they say no, then it derails everything. But they never say no. It's possible it is because of the gamer culture amongst everyone I know. We've all ran into circumstances where we decided to just say no to an adventure hook. Most of the time it either got the DM or the rest of the group annoyed at us so badly that we don't do it anymore. It sucks when you are playing a game and the entire group is offered an adventure and they all say yes except one of them. It normally illicits a "Fine, you don't go on the adventure, roll up a new character."

Pretty much all the plots I've ever written hinge on the PCs WANTING to finish the goal of the adventure. I give them choices, but they are almost always between "Do something that gets you closer to your goal" and "Do something that takes you further away from your goal." I can fairly accurately predict which choice they'll take. For instance, if the King comes up to them and offers them help on their quest in exchange for doing something for him, I can assume that they will do it.

This is a pretty bad strawman example. That is not even D&D, that is just a DM telling the players what happened.

Surprisingly, it isn't a strawman, it is an account of an actual game a friend of mine ran.

The DM in question decided that the campaign would revolve around destroying a BBEG. In low levels, they would attempt to stop him, but they'd be way too weak to do so, then they'd be turned into goblins by the BBEG and forced to work for him. They'd have to make some attacks on towns in the name of the BBEG and if they failed, they'd die. After a few attacks, he'd give them a way to escape. He had a weapon planned out for each of the players before they even had character's made. The weapons would grow in power based on some criteria. He had the exact criteria and powers they would gained written down and planned out before the campaign started. They were all extremely powerful weapons and it was likely that even if the players specialized in other weapons, that they'd want to abandon their other weapons in exchange for these. Mainly because the only way to defeat the BBEG at the end of the campaign was with a fully powered up weapon.

I wasn't in his campaign, but I worked with him and he'd tell me stories of his campaign and the 30 page book he had written up about his world and about what would happen in his next 20 sessions or so. He thought it was going to be the best campaign from any DM ever.

I knew some of his players as well. Most of them got really annoyed at how railroady his campaign was and it eventually self destructed when he got into a fight with one of his players over being forced to change race to goblin part way into the campaign. That player left, and the campaign continued until some of the other players just stopped showing up for the game since it was no fun for them.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Yes, if you refuse to DM unless the PCs do certain things then, yes, I would expect the players to go along with that. However (obviously) I don't consider this ideal. Or necessary.

I was simply responding to the fact that someone suggested it was a good idea to wrap up your session whenever someone goes off rail in order to come up with a new adventure so you didn't have to fly by the seat of your pants. I was suggesting that my players would not appreciate ending the session every time they did something I didn't expect. I agree with you on this one.

First of all, it's arguable that anyone has "totally" broken your plot. Or that you'd "competely" have to rewrite the adventure. Given the lack of specifics that we have to work with, it's hard for me to explain without fleshing out your example in a (perhaps overly convenient way).

Well, the one example is, let's say you spent a couple of hours drawing the Caves of the Unknown. There are nearly 30 planned encounters in various rooms around the Caves. Every 7-10 encounters you expect the PCs to gain a level, making them 3 or 4 levels higher when they leave the Caves than when they enter them. Also, while in the Caves, you expect them to find a clue to the origin of the BBEG that will lead them to a different town than they originally set out to find(since the first town was actually a red herring designed to get them to enter the Caves).

All the encounters you have designed for the Caves are crafted around the rooms they are in(monsters with push and pull powers with pits, fire resistant monsters in rooms with lava, kobolds in rooms filled with traps, etc). If the players decide not to go into the Caves, then pretty much all of that needs to be thrown out. You certainly might be able to reuse the Caves by having someone direct them to the Caves of the Slightly Less Unknown and continuing from there, but if they didn't want to enter one set of caves, you'll need to work hard to get them into another. If they are intent on walking around the mountain in order to avoid going into the caves, there's really nothing you can do. You need to write up another adventure.

This is one of the reasons I don't like to plan out my game more than a session in advance. I'm also pretty lazy and hate doing prep work. I especially hate doing prep work because my players decided to go somewhere I didn't expect. Which is why I run mostly purchased adventures, since they do the work for me.

It's not an all-or-nothing situation. DMs can improvise. There's nothing, literally, that I can think of that you couldn't think of a scenario for. Yes, it's not the ideal and tightly crafted script that you were thinking of, but it acknowledges the players contribution to the game and incorporates their decisions into the result.

I agree. I just like tightly crafted stories. They are more interesting and more challenging. Nothing bothers me more as a player than going into a battle that you can tell the DM just came up with on the fly. A battle with some goblins on a flat plane with no terrain is no fun. A battle with goblins who are hiding in trees with a leader than enhances the rest of their abilities, with an artillery hiding behind cover while the soldiers stand up front is much more fun.

That sort of thing CAN be done on the fly, but it isn't easy to make it work with very little notice.

I also like stories that make sense. If the BBEG doesn't even know the town they are in exists and they decide not to head into the Caves like I expected, then simply nothing happens. They spend their lives for the next couple of years doing nothing interesting in the town. They don't have any adventures. If they decide to head around the mountain instead of going in, they don't gain the clue or levels I expected them to, they never figure out the clue they need to defeat the BBEG and they fail. I leave the choice in my player's hands, but there often is a choice that is "the best".

 

[S'mon]

Railroads suck.

OTOH, beginning an adventure with "You are captured & in jail" isn't a railroad, it's a premise. It only becomes a railroad if the GM insists on running through the capture and disallows any result other than the PCs being captured and jailed.

A linear plot per se isn't a railroad, as noted above. It becomes a railroad if the GM disallows any player activity other than following the plot. If the PCs can leave the rails and go do something else, not a railroad. Of course it may be up to the players then to find something interesting to do, the GM can't be expected to keep throwing hooks at them.

 

[Jack Colby]

I guess railroading could be seen as forcing players down a particular path even though they don't want to do it. So if your group is enjoying what they're doing I don't think it counts.

However, I think if you're depriving players of succeeding or failing on their own merits then you are doing something wrong. For example, if the PCs can't die no matter how badly they screw things up (or aren't even allowed to screw things up) because the planned "story" doesn't allow for it.

I would feel robbed of the playing experience if a DM "fudged" when I made mistakes or decisions. I think there need to be consequences of player actions or the game feels boring and pointless. Might as well just write a story if it doesn't deviate no matter what. You can make me feel like I have a choice... but I want actual choice.

Theoretically railroading could be entertaining I suppose, for the right types of players. But in general it is bad practice, and that is not just current thinking or some kind of fad. It goes back to the start of DMs trying to use the game as a vehicle for their personal fantasy storytelling needs... the game was not created as a vehicle for storytelling. Keep that in mind and you don't get railroading problems. Don't make it do something it wasn't designed for.

 

[maddman75]

I agree. I just like tightly crafted stories. They are more interesting and more challenging. Nothing bothers me more as a player than going into a battle that you can tell the DM just came up with on the fly. A battle with some goblins on a flat plane with no terrain is no fun. A battle with goblins who are hiding in trees with a leader than enhances the rest of their abilities, with an artillery hiding behind cover while the soldiers stand up front is much more fun.

That sort of thing CAN be done on the fly, but it isn't easy to make it work with very little notice.

I consider being able to run on the fly an essential skill to running a good game. I have three main ways I do this. First, I will make house rules or set up tools to allow me to throw things together quickly. For my Hollow Earth expedition game I put together a spreadsheet with the basic stats for most of the adversaries in the book. Not everything, but enough to get me by in a pinch. Pick a bad guy, think of a cool scene, and see what they do with it. For example, I glanced through and saw Ape Men, and thought an oasis with a tribe of these ape-men would make a good encounter. The PCs hadn't seen them before, and it was a little different than the dinosaurs and vikings they'd been dealing with.

Second, I think of what the PCs are going to want for a cool encounter. In that same scenario, two of my PCs have a motivation of Duty, so they try to protect the innocent and so on. One of the ape-men is tied up in front on a large cave, while the others are gathering fruit. They're peaceful, and offering a sacrifice so they can use the oasis. The PCs figure this out, and go to free the poor beast. Out comes - well glancing at my sheet a Giant Ape. King Kong comes out and we have a really cool fight. Terrain? We've got PCs hiding in the cover of the trees, and the ape climbing up the mountain like its the Empire state building.

Finally, I make healthy re-use of the stuff I had prepared. In that game I went signifigantly off-script. They needed a whosits from the captain to get a McGuffin, and I'd assumed they'd have the spy try and seduce it out of him and had some fun encounters planned in the meantime. Instead, as soon as they got there they pulled a gun on the captain and demanded it from him. Which, being a pirate, he kind of respected. So I didn't get to tell the scholar about the lost city, or have the Overconfident character face off against a saber-toothed tiger to prove her courage. But, they got on the trail a lot faster than I'd planned. I figured the whole game to be in the pirate cove, and they were done with that in an hour. So they got marching and I put the ruined city in their path for the scholar to explore. While exploring, they were stalked by a saber-toothed tiger.

I see no reason you can't do the same in a D&D game. So they don't want to go into the Caves of the Unknown to face the BBEG and all the encounters you prepped. So, reuse them! And there's nothing wrong with pointing them back. You had a cool encounter with goblins using pits they can push PCs into, and they decide to explore around the mountain instead? Pop that encounter into the woods, with pits dug in the forest instead of the dungeon. Maybe the leader has some orders that they're to report any strangers back to the tribe in the Caves, because the Boss wants to know if anyone is snooping around.

I also like stories that make sense. If the BBEG doesn't even know the town they are in exists and they decide not to head into the Caves like I expected, then simply nothing happens. They spend their lives for the next couple of years doing nothing interesting in the town. They don't have any adventures. If they decide to head around the mountain instead of going in, they don't gain the clue or levels I expected them to, they never figure out the clue they need to defeat the BBEG and they fail. I leave the choice in my player's hands, but there often is a choice that is "the best".

This is almost word for word the description of a type of railroad in the 2e DMG, if memory serves. So there's nothing going on in your world other than what you prepare? What kind of BBEG is this any way? Don't they generally have Evil Plots Afoot? If they don't go into the caves, then the city starts seeing weird cultists, or orc raiding parties, or whatever kind of nastiness he's up to.

The clue problem can be an issue. I run a lot of Cthulhu, where the PCs are generally doing a lot of clues and information so they can figure out what is going on. If they miss a vital clue, the game could grind to a halt. So I deal with it by making a clue net. There's something going on, and there's a bit of it here, bit of it there, and if they miss one they might lose out on some detail but they can generally figure out what's what.

For me, running on the fly is one of the greatest thrills. Once you get some good tools set up and some confidence, its really not too hard. These days I never try to protect a plot, I don't even write them. Throw a situation at them, and see what they do with it. Having a 'best' answer is boring. Having several answers all with their own moral and practical implications makes for awesome gaming. IMO of course.