What's Wrong with the Railroad?

[Reynard]

Throw a situation at them, and see what they do with it.

*This* is DMing to me. Running a module (or, heaven forbid, an adventure path) feels like refereeing or narrating or something else. But giving the PCs maximum freedom of choice, and forcing maximum consequence of those choices, is what makes it dungeon Mastering.

Unfortunately, not all players *want* to have maximum freedom or to accept the consequences of that freedom. For a lot of players, the linear story where they are promised level 1 through 20 with some cool fights and locations in between is the perfect game. I've tried to run these, and it just isn't satisfying.

 

[gizmo33]

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.

If a DM is going to run 3E as written then I think this sort of thing is going to be a problem. There's only so much a DM can do - let's say there was a hypothetical game system where each time the PCs finished an encounter, they went up 10 levels. I can see in that case it would be very hard to design a challenging adventure with any sort of flexibility at all as to when you experience the encounters.

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).

But this seems to be a major point of the "railroad" discussion/debate. It seems to me that you're saying that this one clue in this one place in the universe is the only way to learn some information.

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.

How is a room with kobolds and traps not trasferrable to about a million other dungeons? Or a fire/lava room not usable in any dungeon complex built near a volcano? Replace the kobolds with grimlocks, or add an efreeti to the lava room to increase the challenge level.

 

[jdrakeh]

There's nothing wrong with the railroad, if that's how your players prefer to travel. Also, as many have already pointed out, what you describe in your first post isn't what I would refer to as a railroad.

For me, a railroad is typified by players making choices or pursuing avenues that the GM hasn't considered and the GM telling them "No, you can't do that!" because the GM doesn't want the players to make any choices or pursue any avenues that may change the plot.

That's a "railroad" — the GM consciously restricting the freedom of choice available to the other players to preserve 'his' (or her) plot. Specifically, it's the GM putting his or her own desires above those of the players with little or no regard for their desires or goals during actual play.

IMO, the recent thread about 'station squatting' highlighted the worst characteristics of the "railroad" mentality with regard to GMs. The OP in that thread repeatedly talked about how players who didn't want to follow the course of action that he chose for them needed to be shut down.

A true "railroad" is about the GM not recognizing that the players have a right to entertainment or control their own characters and, instead, ignoring the desires of the players completely, dictating choices to them, and disallowing them freedoms typically associated with RPGs in order to fulfill their own desires (i.e., the GM's desires).

That having been said, if the players are content to have the GM make all of their choices for them, then there's nothing wrong with the railroad.

 

[S'mon]

I think players need to have complete freedom of action within the scenario/adventure, but they need to be willing to buy into the premise. Eg, in a Call of Cthulu adventure the Investigstor PCs should be free to pursue any avenue of enquiry they wish, to fight, flee, interrogate etc as they wish, and there should not be a preset sequence of unalterable events. OTOH, the players do need to be willing to act as investigators. I recall running the CoC intro scenario "The Haunted House" for my wife years ago, and after a couple spooky things happened, she identified the source as the basement, and, quite reasonably, flatly refused to go down there. She made it clear her PC wasn't crazy and had no interest in exposing herself to danger. Which kinda floored me... In the end the two gung-ho male NPCs with her went down there and sorted out the BBEG by themselves.

I'm currently running a club D&D 3.5e campaign where the premise is that the PCs are the heroes of Willow Vale, defending the land from evil and undertaking missions at the request of the goodly king. There is no place for evil PCs, PCs who take every opportunity to kill the innocent, or cowardly PCs who refuse to go on the mission (although for the latest one I gave the group as a whole the choice whether to undertake it). OTOH, the missions themselves are traditional setting-based adventures (eg B5 Horror on the Hill), and within the scope of the adventure the PCs have complete freedom of action. They could retreat/fail, which would have negative but not necessarily catastrophic consequences.

 

[ProfessorPain]

There is nothing wrong with a structured adventure plot. The problem is when the GM doesn't allow deviation from the events he has planned. Sometimes railroading is okay, it has to happen once in a while (sometimes there really is only one option). But I can't stand it when the GM simply won't let you do anything except what he has planned.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

There is nothing wrong with the railroad - if you do it right.

 

[Dausuul]

IMO, the recent thread about 'station squatting' highlighted the worst characteristics of the "railroad" mentality with regard to GMs. The OP in that thread repeatedly talked about how players who didn't want to follow the course of action that he chose for them needed to be shut down.

A true "railroad" is about the GM not recognizing that the players have a right to entertainment or control their own characters and, instead, ignoring the desires of the players completely, dictating choices to them, and disallowing them freedoms typically associated with RPGs in order to fulfill their own desires (i.e., the GM's desires).

This.

 

[maddman75]

I think players need to have complete freedom of action within the scenario/adventure, but they need to be willing to buy into the premise.

This is wisdom. In any game, you do have to buy into the premise. In a typical D&D game, the characters are going to be exploring dangerous places, killing the things that live there, and taking their stuff. Yes, you could run D&D with a different premise and many people do - and you need to tell your players about this premise. Same with other games - Cthulhu assumed the PCs will want to investigate cults and monsters, Buffy assumes they'll want to fight vampires and do teen angst, AFMBE assumes they want to not be eaten by zombies.

Players should have total autonomy, and its cool to play someone who needs a little convincing. But I'm not going to move mountains to convince your D&D character to go kill some orcs, any more than I'm going to center the whole game on your Buffy character ignoring vampires or your AFMBE character dousing themselves with barbecue sauce. My usual answer is 'Okay fine, your character is not at all interested in what everyone else is doing and goes about his life. Would you like to make a character that is interested so you can play the game?'