D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Fenris-77]

Good lord, we're back to quantum ogres.

 

[Maxperson]

Because no player agency is being thwarted. Players didn't make informed choice about haunted house in the first place, so their choice is not being overruled.

They have no choice if all roads lead to the same thing. No choice, no agency. No agency, yes railroad.

 

[pemerton]

if I am presented with four cardinal directions to choose from, and no matter which direction I choose, the adventure the GM has planned is going to happen, that is absolutely a railroad. The choice of direction is meaningless in this case.

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if you are tricking the party so they think their decision to go west was the thing that led them to the haunted house (even though all directions led to it) absolutely, it is a railroad.

The first thing needn't be a trick, though.

In many FRPGs players are able to choose what colour their cloaks are. This almost never matters to what happens next. But is it a trick? Or a railroad? - whatever colour of cloak I chose for my PC, the game plays out the same! I don't think so - everyone knows that choosing your PC's cloak colour is just for fun.

In a game where choosing whether to go East or West or whatever is just for fun - eg like @Crimson Longinus, it's just a way of making the world feel big - then there's no railroad.

And there can be intermediate cases too. In my Prince Valiant game, the PCs chose to cross the upper part of the Balkan Peninsula, from the Dalmatian coast to the Black Sea. The landing of the vessels the PCs and warband were traveling on the Dalmation coast was sheer GM stipulation: I told them that storms made their ship captains seek port. This was because I had an "episode" (the Prince Valiant terminology for scenes and short scenarios) that I wanted to run, and that would make sense in Dacia/Transylvania. I think it was the players that chose to proceed to the Black Sea and from there to Constantinople, rather than heading overland directly. After resolving interactions with soldiers in a border town, I used an encounter with a "dragon" (a giant crocodile) because that worked for a boat trip. If they'd not gone on boats at that point, I might have used it later instead, when they sailed from Anatolia to Cyprus.

Railroading in Prince Valiant would mean (as examples only, not necessarily exhaustive) deciding how NPCs - even the Emperor in Constantinople - act, regardless of player action declarations to influence them or change their minds; or arbitrarily taking away a PC's horse or armour or special item. But details of geography just aren't very important: the whole point of the game is for the GM to serve up episodes that will allow the players to exemplify their conceptions of their character's errantry (if a knight) or connection to the Arthurian world more generally. Whether the episode occurs in Scotland or Dacia is just not that significant.

 

[Maxperson]

Good lord, we're back to quantum ogres.

It's not the ogres. It's the concept that's being argued. Ogres are just the creature of choice for some reason, much like trolls and the metagaming debate. You can replace Ogres with Gelatinous Cube, Giant, Dragon or One Eyed One Horned Flying Purple People Eater and nothing changes.

 

[pemerton]

I still don't believe railroading is a situation of Sandbox v. Linear game design.

A linear game defines the scope of area of the action. They can do whatever they want but there's nothing to see and not much to do other places. Its not entertaining to go to X city and do Y because there's no interesting conflicts in X city and no complications doing Y. This lets the DM ensure that the place they are having fun in is the place where the DM has concentrated his efforts into.

A sandbox is a game where the entire world has a more diluted sense of interest and while the cool stuff isn't condensed enough for an overall greater storytelling device, it allows the players to feel like they're encouraged to engage in activities that would lead them far off from a road.

So, in a nutshell. Sandboxes are off-road experiences, linear games are on-road experiences. Neither of which is necessarily railroading since the DM isn't forcing or punishing the players for their engagement techniques.

I won't tackle sandboxes in this post, just "linear adventures".

As I see the term used, a linear adventure mostly refers to an adventure where the sequence of events is pre-scripted largely independently of the choices the players make in the play of their PCs during the course of the adventure. A module like Speaker in Dreams I think would be an example. Looking beyond D&D, I think the typical CoC adventure is like this.

If "railroading" is to have a non-pejorative use, which presumably it is going to if anyone is going to defend railroading, then I would be happy to apply it to that sort of adventure. Basically everything that matters in the fiction - who is the antagonist, what happens next, how do the NPCs behave, etc - is determined independently of play. If the adventure is a published one, there will often by suggestions to the GM as to how to make sure the prescribed events happen (eg back-ups if players initially miss a clue; replacement villains if the PCs kill a leading villain in an early fight; etc).

Playing such adventures may be fun, or not - obviously different people enjoy different things on different occasions! - but to me they look like a railroad. The core of the fiction is pre-determined; the main contribution the players make is to characterise their PCs.

 

[Fenris-77]

Yes, I understand how the ogre stands in for many other things. It's a stupid bloody argument about an example only the worst kind of DMs would even consider. It's not worth the time to type it out.

 

[pemerton]

Because it is a location. And by making it come up no matter what direction they decide to go, even if their decision is effectively randomly choosing, it means it doesn't matter which direction they go: they will always encounter the haunted house. Also by letting the players pick a direction but then secretly deciding that direction always leads to X, you are creating the impression that the players have a choice, while they in fact do not.

You are the one introducing the notion that it is secret. Why assume that?

As far as it being a location - yes, it doesn't matter which direction the PCs go. Why should it? Why is location a more important element of the fiction than the colour of a PC's cloak?

 

[Maxperson]

Yes, I understand how the ogre stands in for many other things. It's a stupid bloody argument about an example only the worst kind of DMs would even consider. It's not worth the time to type it out.

Multiple DMs in this thread have said they use or would use it, though.

 

[Maxperson]

You are the one introducing the notion that it is secret. Why assume that?

As far as it being a location - yes, it doesn't matter which direction the PCs go. Why should it? Why is location a more important element of the fiction than the colour of a PC's cloak?

I don't think my players want me dictating the color of their cloak, either.

 

[pemerton]

Presumably if the players are choosing a direction it's because they want to go to a certain specific place that they do know about.

I don't think so. Not to say that I'm hard disagreeing with you, just that I think it's really worthwhile to open up our perspective about what decision-making matters in a RPG.

In my Prince Valiant game the PCs wanted to go from Britain to Constantinople. So we Google up a map of Europe, and talk about how they are going to do that. Given there's a map, they have to nominate some or other route. It doesn't follow that anything is expected to turn on this.

I think we have to be very careful about assuming, because D&D's history begins with maze exploration (where obviously going left or right should matter), that decisions about which way to go always matter. And conversely, just because D&D's history has had creatures that always attack (eg some undead, or hobgoblins vs elves) or that need special attacks to damage them (eg many oozes) and that's fair enough because it's part of the puzzle-solving aspect of play, I think we can't just assume that it's never railroading to include an encounter that has only one way in or one way out.

Turning to a different sort of example, but still trying to bring assumptions to the surface and recognise the diversity of RPG play: I mostly play RPGs where it's taken for granted that an effect of action resolution might be that the GM gets to tell a player how his/her PC feels (D&D 4e has various fear effects; Burning Wheel has Steel and Duels of Wits; Classic Traveller has player-facing morale; MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has mental and emotional stress; etc). Conversely, a lot of D&D 5e players seem to object to that very strongly. The objectors have identified one particular aspect of player decision-making - the characterisation of the PC - as an object of meaningful choice. Fair enough! But in the games I prefer characterisation of the PC isn't where the main action is for players.

Different decisions matter for different players who are looking for different things from their RPGing.