D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Lanefan]

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?

Because some of us as DM put our maps etc. together before play and as players expect our DMs to have done likewise.

Put another way, we'd like to think that had we gone a different way we would not have got to this particular place and had we gone this way later (or sooner) we would have; that the location of this place (castle, haunted house, whatever) has always been here and that would have remained true had we never come here.

 

[pemerton]

Part of the problem with some of these examples has to do with the issue of journeys in games.

Journeys can become problematic because once the PCs have decided to make a journey they have already often made the most significant decision of the journey.

If there's multiple routes from A to B then there's some decisions to made. But if they are taking the most obvious route by road then any encounter that then occurs on the road is pretty much unavoidable, whether then rolled or GM authored. This requires really that any encounters themselves offer the players significant agency.

It also requires the GM to read the room somewhat. If the players are really eager to get to Fallcrest, then if the GM takes the fact of a journey to constantly delay that and throw encounters at them along the road, this can feel like railroading.

A lot of this seems to be about the burdens of convention.

If the players spend a week of downtime in Greyhawk, the GM probably doesn't roll random encounters for every day of R&R. So why roll encounters for every day of travel if the PCs spend a week journeying from Greyhawk to Urnst? Obviously in resource-based hexcrawls, there's an answer: the journey is not meant to be resource-expenditure free. But in 5e D&D, where everyone knows that (on the standard rest sequence) a 1x/day encounter is likely to just be a nova-fest, why bother? I'm serious here - what reason is there, beyond fetishisation of the tradition of random encounters?

There are other options too. Eg in Burning Wheel, maybe the journey is interesting enough that it's worth resolving - so the GM calls for an Orienteering check and if it fails then the PCs encounter some obstacle to their successful journeying. (In my case, this was the spring they were hoping to find in the foothills on the edge of the Bright Desert being spoiled, meaning that they had to make more endurance-type checks due to a lack of water.) In 4e D&D a skill challenge can be used in the same sort of fashion.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

While I grant that de gustibus non disputandum est, I really do see a difference here. A beggar can, logically, be anywhere--because he or she is a creature, and thus not bound to a singular location. There may be places where they are more or less likely to be, but there's nothing in principle wrong with a beggar showing up at any point along a journey, even in the absolute thick of the woods hundreds of miles from even the closest road.

You can't say that about a house, unless you do the work to justify why it's there. Houses don't just spontaneously appear. They are, as I said, built. That makes a difference--they're rooted much more strongly in the world.

And just...I don't know how to express to you that "moderately involved, complex side-adventures consistently plonked right where the PCs happen to be" is a significantly different thing from "a single individual who/simple location which may or may not have anything to offer the PCs plonked right where the PCs happen to be." The former is "do this (sub)plot, I don't care where you decided to be, it's happening." The latter is "here's a hook, take it or leave it."

Yes, it is possible, through a fair amount of effort, to turn even the Addams Family-style haunted house into just "here's a hook, take it or leave it." I said as much earlier, when I said that some things were in a grey area. But I as a player can usually tell (and I'm dead certain my own players could tell) the difference between "haunted house as hook" and "haunted house as pushy (sub)plot." The level of effort, the amount of stuff present, and the DM's emotions and presentation style all factor into one's sense of this--such senses are not 100% perfect, but mine aren't bad, and my players collectively are quite good at it, hence why I try to avoid it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If the journey isn't "meant" to be meaningful, I try to read the room. If the party seems ambivalent, I'll add an encounter if I can impromptu make up something interesting. If they seem bored, I'll definitely try to throw something at them to spice things up.

Wait, wait, wait! Earlier you were adamant that in your games you never have things to be in certain locations and happen at certain times just because the PCs are there then, and doing so is dishonest illusionism, deceiving the players and railroading! Except now you're saying that you're doing exactly that!

 

[pemerton]

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

They have no choice over what encounter happen next. Why is that important?

The question isn't rhetorical. In classic dungeoncrawling generally players are expected to have some influence/control over scene-framing. But there are plenty of RPGs in which the GM is in charge of framing. 4e D&D is one. Most indie RPGs are like this too. It doesn't follow that they're railroads. In those games the players don't have the choice to avoid their PCs being challenged. The domain of choice is how they respond; and the action resolution procedures which flow from that impose strong constraints on what the GM can subsequently do with the fiction.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Huh? When I was GMing 4e D&D (and so was a DM) I used some fairly hard scene-framing. It's at least possible some of that followed discussion of whether the PCs go to X or Y, because we had to have them somewhere in the (imagined) world. I don't think that makes me the worst kind of DM!

 

[pemerton]

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

You misread my post. I said that, whatever colour the player choose for their PC's cloak, in most FRPGs that makes no difference to anything that happens next. It's just for fun.

 

[pemerton]

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)

And if the PCs came across the haunted house by heading north rather than south, them maybe that will matter too.

All you're arguing is that whether or not the choice ends up affecting something else can't be known until the end of the campaign. Taken literally, that means we can never judge any railroading until that point. But I don't think it really changes anything else about the conversation.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Wait, wait, wait! Earlier you were adamant that in your games you never have things to be in certain locations and happen at certain times just because the PCs are there then, and doing so is dishonest illusionism, deceiving the players and railroading! Except now you're saying that you're doing exactly that!

"If I can come up with something interesting" requires that it be grounded in the fiction. If I can't ground something in the fiction, I won't do it, flat.

I have explicitly established that the desert, for example, is stalked by dangerous monsters. There's a tradition (it's too loose to call it an "order") of monster-hunters who stalk the wastes, generally filled with adrenaline junkies (Grim World playbook, called "Slayer") and those who are in tune with the land without revering it per se (Rangers, rather than Druids). This foundation, established literally from before session 0 (due to arising in the previous group's session 0), gives me reasonable latitude for encounters in the desert, even without any other considerations. Any time you wander off the beaten path, you're taking a risk of running into Something Nasty; it's part of why trade routes are well-established and have regular caravanserai locations along them (along with both mercenary and city-state soldiers patrolling them for protection).

Those other considerations include the fact that the party is hunted by no less than three distinct factions who are heavily active in the desert: the Zil al-Ghurab/"Raven-Shadows," a mystery-cult of assassins whom the party crossed on their second adventure; the Shadow Druids, a hive-mind faction of druids who revere death and decay and seek to transcend that cycle, whom the party repeatedly interfered with during their second and third adventures; and the Cult of the Burning Eye, a group that apparently worships a Lovecraftian horror imprisoned on the PCs' world and which uses blood magic rituals to drive themselves to frenzy, whom they have foiled two or three times now on different adventures. (There's also a black dragon gang, but that's almost exclusively operating within the main city, and thus largely irrelevant for wilderness encounters--but quite relevant for in-city encounters!)

This is what I mean by saying it isn't hard to make the justifications for this stuff. It really isn't. Just do a little bit of early work, and inform the players about these things, as stuff their characters should just know about the setting. Boom, instant explanations for a variety of expected encounters. I mean, I already said I was okay with random encounter tables, and that's by definition "placing something" in the party's way--but in an ecologically- and narratively-consistent way, assuming your random encounter tables are actually good and not crappy.

I honestly do not see why this is such a "gotcha," though I would be lying if I said I didn't expect you to come along at some point with a message pretty much exactly like this one. I'd hoped not, but...well. Here we are.

 

[pemerton]

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?

Because some of us as DM put our maps etc. together before play and as players expect our DMs to have done likewise.

Put another way, we'd like to think that had we gone a different way we would not have got to this particular place and had we gone this way later (or sooner) we would have; that the location of this place (castle, haunted house, whatever) has always been here and that would have remained true had we never come here.

Let me restate my question - why would I assume that your preferences are the measure of adequacy for my RPGing.

Or if I'm posting on a public board, why would I make assumptions that your preferences are the governing ones? Wouldn't it make more sense to note - as I have done - that there are different sorts of preferences. In The Dying Earth RPG, sartorial details are much more important than geographic ones.