D&D General Why defend railroading?

[pemerton]

Door A: underground creek and mushrooms
Door B: WOLVES!!

If the player take door A and the DM moves the Wolves, no railroad.

Door A: Ranger hears creek and detects a dampness in the air indicating possible underground growths.

Door B: Ranger hears growling and scrabblimg of claws on stone. A soft yipping indicates the presence of some sort of canine.

If the players take door A and the DM moves the wolves, railroad. More like a force feed than a railroad but I find our nerd nomenclature to be misused anyways.

Well this is in a whole different territory, as there is not even a pretence on the GM's part of honouring the already-established fiction.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah sorry, if that's what the definition of railroading is, then I'm firmly in the "Roailroading is not bad" camp. There's nothing wrong with having a set of encounters pre-planned and dropping them into different situations regardless of player choice. If that wasn't the case, it would be impossible to consistently deliver really clever well-designed encounters while also maintaining player choice.

Except here you're not doing both, because you simply can't do both at once..

You can either maintain player choice and the integrity thereof, which means locking in the encounter locations ahead of time and committing to those locations even if the players/PCs manage to miss the lot of 'em, or drop your set of pre-planned encounters into the PCs' path no matter what they do, and make the players' choices relatively meaningless.

 

[Umbran]

Choices have meaning, even if the players are unaware of what that meaning is.

And this is a base assumption that I don't think everyone agrees upon. We do not all agree on whether "meaning" and "following event" are the same thing. And, if we don't all agree upon that, this discussion cannot resolve.

Agency is shown when you take an action intended to produce some effect or result. If you are not intending anything, you are not exercising your agency.

If you randomly generate a series of syllables and intone them, you have sounds, but those sounds have no meaning. They are just random sounds (one literal definition of "noise"), gibberish containing no semantic content. Even if a few syllables in a row sound like a word in some language, it isn't like you meant to intone that word. You did not have information in mind and attempt to communicate it.

We all live in a world in which things happen that have nothing to do with our own actions or intentions - events unrelated to us sometimes impinge upon our lives. It is not, so to speak, all about what we want. Does this count as a removal of your agency - are you railroaded into dealing with the thing?

If you don't feel those restrict your agency, then the quantum ogre - the monster who appears separate from your choices - does not either.

If you do feel those things restrict your real-world agency, well, then such removal of agency is part of life, and that means it should have some place in our games from time to time.

 

[Lanefan]

No, they absolutely must know. Otherwise it just random and thus not a real choice.

Yes and no.

If they don't know what lies in which direction, and if what lies in each direction is pre-planned and locked in, the choice of which way to go might not appear to be a real choice at the time it is made but turns in to having been a real choice when looked at in hindsight.

But if the same thing (a haunted house, in the ongoing example) is going to appear no matter which way they choose to go then yes, that choice was never real.

 

[pemerton]

"A haunted house is a location, and locations don't move, while creatures generally do." Now, I might invent a haunted house and place it in an area I expect the players to visit, but I see that as very different--that's populating a location before the players arrive. Yes, populating a location means me as DM inventing fiction to fill what was an empty unknown.

There's no point disputing taste. But I think that's all that's in play here. From the point of authoring fiction, there's no difference between you come across a beggar on the side of the road and you see a foreboding house on the side of the road.

 

[pemerton]

Oh, and on the topic of not having locations be on random encounter tables or be otherwise mobile -- you're absolutely missing out on a great encounter tool. "Monster lair" is a great encounter idea. As is "fairy grove" or "thin place between planes." These don't need to be in fixed places, planned beforehand. They can be on encounter tables, or encounter lists, or just dropped in when it feels cool.

And just in case anyone thinks this is too "new school", Classic Traveller had this back in the late 70s/very early 80s (of course with sci-fi rather than fantasy flavour).

EDIT: It's probably worth mentioning that Appendix C of Gygax's DMG also has random encounters with castles and with ruins and even settlements, explicitly noting that a GM may not have pre-mapped all these features. Contra @EzekielRaiden, I struggle to see how this sort of random encounter is railroading or any sort of threat to verisimilitude.

 

[Lanefan]

So so your parties find dungeons in ways other than: (a) happening to trigger pre-planned conditions to give them information about the dungeon, (b) having sought out information about places of interest, or (c) bumbling across them in there preset location on the map?

Those three options are certainly the majority, but I've also had

d) the adventure comes to the party (e.g. during downtime the party's home base is attacked by someone they've pissed off in some prior adventure, or by something random that's big/numerous enough to make 'em sit up and pay attention)
e) the party doesn't even realize they're in an adventure until it's over (e.g. they think they're simply travelling to an adventure site but in fact the adventure is the travel, a la (is it B8?) Journey to the Rock)

Following up with (c) above as well as random.encounters, how do you avoid a lot of low level TPKs? Do the dungeons appropriate for the high level characters always telegraph they're going to be high level, not have traps appropriate for high level parties, and not have monsters that pursue flee-ers? Do the high level random tables not include predators that would just eat a low level party?

For my part, these things can cause a lot of low-level casualties but it's extremely rare a whole party gets wiped out: someone always has a getaway car of some sort.

 

[Lanefan]

At some point too little threat of death does take a lot of the excitement out for me. To much takes out any real investment in them as characters (as opposed to something akin to trying to get a high score in a particular play of a video game).

That "trying to get a high score" vibe is what keeps me invested in a high-death game: how long can I keep this one going before it dies? The longer my character stays alive, the higher my "score" is...

 

[pemerton]

How much you can get away with reskinning depends on how much you reskin and what exactly it was the players wished to avoid.

I think the bolded bit is crucial.

Eg if the PCs are hoping to avoid ogres because they have been cursed so as to be peculiarly vulnerable to ogres, and they successfully perform actions to try to hold off the effect of the curse, then springing an ogre on them seems like negating the consequences of those actions. That seems pretty railroad-y. But if the opponent is a giant mace-tailed lizard that just happens to closely resemble an ogre in stats, well that doesn't seem railroad-y at all (in this context).

Contrast the PCs hoping to avoid ogres and other similarly dangerous encounters because they're low on hit points. Suppose they have successfully performed actions that have revealed to them that ogres are the dangerous things around here. And suppose they've cast invisibility to ogres on themselves. In those circumstances, just making up the presence of a dangerous mace-tailed lizard that the PCs just happened never to learn about while doing their research into local threats seems like it might be pretty railroad-y.

Trying to diagnose railroading without coming to grips with what is at stake and how the GM's manipulation of the fiction relates to that is silly.

Yeah some players are never going to enjoy exploration under these circumstances.

Although part of the art in doing this is working out as you go how it all interacts with every else that has already been established.

I guess it's possible to do an exploration-oriented hexcrawl with on-the-spot generation of hex contents. But it's probably not ideal, given that it really limits the capacity to give the players the sort of information that might let them make reasoned decisions about which hex to explore next.

But most generate-content-on-the-fly RPGing is probably not exploration oriented. I did this all the time GMing 4e D&D. But it's not to support exploration - it's part of framing situations that will engage the stuff the players care about. (Which in my games isn't normally the map.)

As I mentioned far upthread, some of this may lead to problems though, if you really are (in some sense) "making the world exist" only in the moment it's called for. A player felt there was no tension, no weight to choosing, if they were choosing Currently Faceless Void #1 vs Currently Faceless Void #2, when I would roll and whatever I would roll would end up being in whichever thing they chose.

This seems like a problem only in the sense that I find RPGing which prioritises mapping - and minutiae of architecture more generally - unbearably tedious, and hence old school dungeon crawling may lead to a problem.

I mean, we all have stuff we don't like, but that's not really a problem with that stuff. Problem carries normative weight that just isn't apposite in this context.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Sure...until it isn't, and for some reason the colour you randomly chose for your cloak back then has suddenly become relevant now.

You've a party of 6 PCs. It's windy and cold sometimes, so naturally each PC is wearing a decent cloak. Two chose white (to blend in if-when it snows), two chose green, one went with brown, and one decided to go a bit flamboyant and chose gold.

Six months and two countries later you walk into a town you know nothing about; and within half an hour the guy in the gold cloak gets arrested for impersonating royalty, as here only royalty can wear gold. And now the PCs have a problem....

A silly example, perhaps, but I've seen worse; and it points out how even the least relevant-seeming choices can have impact down the road. (also nothing to do with railroading, FWIW)