D&D General Why defend railroading?

[TheSword]

Yes. All paths lead to ogres. I get it.

I don’t think you do.

Conceive of an adventure that takes place in one location… an inn.

Several events and actors arriving are scheduled to happen in that inn across the day and night. Actions the PCs take earlier in the day might change what occurs later on (agency). At 10pm an ogre is going to enter the bar room looking for a thief who stole from him earlier in the day. How that encounter goes will depend on choices they took earlier and how they interact with it. I fail to see how there is any loss of agency in this adventure… the adventurers choices meaningfully affect how the future story is resolved.

The didactic approach I keep seeing repeated is that everything must be plotted on a map and the adventures wander around bumping into encounters. Which is in itself a fallacy because a hex grid still assumes that the PCs happen to be passing the exact correct point in that 25 square mile area hex.

It’s an approach what is unfortunately rooted in place Maxperson and I really don’t think you get it yet.

 

[Maxperson]

Conceive of an adventure that takes place in one location… an inn.

Several events and actors arriving are scheduled to happen in that inn across the day and night. Actions the PCs take earlier in the day might change what occurs later on (agency). At 10pm an ogre is going to enter the bar room looking for a thief who stole from him earlier in the day. How that encounter goes will depend on choices they took earlier and how they interact with it. I fail to see how there is any loss of agency in this adventure… the adventurers choices meaningfully affect how the future story is resolved.

That's not the quantum ogre situation. At 10pm there will be an ogre no matter what. That means that if the players are over at a different bar having a good time until 11pm, they've missed the ogre. All paths do not lead to that ogre. The quantum ogre would be if at 10pm, the ogre was in the bar, at the inn, outside in the woods while the PCs look for a night blooming flower they want, enters their room while they are sleeping, or any other choice that they might make. The ogre in your above example is avoidable depending on what the PCs choose.

 

[Umbran]

Because it is one thing for circumstances to accidentally result in choices that don't matter, and quite another for the DM to intentionally cause choices to not matter.

Plus? The point isn't making EVERY choice matter. The point is making choices that seem to matter actually matter.

See the scenario I posted above that ended up with it raining - the choice seemed to matter, but didn't. This is a pretty normal thing in life, but it should be eliminated from our games?

But from there, I also note that we wind up with a failure for that general statement to hold.

What happens when the players are wrong? The quantum ogre again - the party thinks there are ogres, and they make choices based upon that, but... there never were any ogres, and the GM never said there were ogres. To the players it seemed like it mattered. Now, I have to make it actually matter? I have to add in actual ogres somewhere to fulfill a seeming they invented?

And, what happens when there are people in the setting who give misinformation for reasons? They can create situations in which it seems like choices matter, but don't. The ogre is told where to go find the party. This would violate the stated requirement - that what seems to matter must actually matter. Do we now only ever give the players correct information, to make this happen?

I mean, let's turn this around for a sec. Wouldn't it be pretty bad to make a player believe that a choice they made genuinely didn't matter at all, only to turn around and have it actually matter a lot?

I think the term you want for this is "bait and switch". And, yeah, frequently this can be deeply unsatisfying for the player. But this certainly isn't the "nobody knew about the ogre, so I moved it" case.

So, I think this boils down to only a limited set of cases, rather than the general one you state above. And it amounts to - screw with the PCs, but don't screw with the players.

 

[pemerton]

Because the direction the players went was a choice they made. And by having it always go to the outcome the GM had planned, you are stripping that choice of any value.

As I've already asked, why is this any different from choosing the colour of the PCs' cloaks - this latter is a choice the players make, and it almost never makes a difference to anything that happens next. So why isn't that railroading?

I am assuming this is a situation where the players believe their choice is driving where they end up.

Well of course the choice will drive where they end up - if you sail east across the Mediterranean you're going to get closer to Dalmatia than Ireland. But that doesn't mean it will determine what challenges the PCs confront.

In most campaigns choosing which direction to go is not the same kind of thing as choosing which color cloak to have (especially if that decision is what is supposed to determine what you encounter or where you end up: and you reach those things regardless of the direction you choose).

You're assuming that choosing where to go should be different from choosing what colour cloak to wear. But why? That's just convention, inherited from dungeon crawls and hex crawls, and to treat it as more than that is just begging the question! I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that in a campaign in which the GM treats the direction of travel as mere flavour, the players choosing which direction to go is not much different from choosing the colour of cloak to wear; and is not supposed to determine what encounter takes place!

in certain games maybe that is just flavor but those are definitely edge cases

If the GM is telling them what he is doing, like I said, I don't have a problem with it. It is still railroading, but at least people have bought into the idea. But there isn't any reason for me to assume this isn't secret.

<snip>

In most situations, this sort of action by the GM will be regarded as railroading. If there is some mitigating reason why it isn't the poster can include that detail in the example. Otherwise I just have to go with some baseline assumptions.

I can't tell if you're saying that it is always railroading but you don't think it's wrong, if you're saying that it isn't railroading because of some "mitigating reason". (And I don't really get your use of normative language ("mitigating") here - your preferences aren't normative for RPGing in general.)

And I don't understand your assumptions. If someone is presenting this sort of thing and saying it is not railroading, why would assume they're talking about a game where it would be railroading? Isn't it more likely that they're imaging a game where it wouldn't be, because the table doesn't assume that choices about geography and direction of travel are all that important?

I mean, there's nothing special about imaginary geography that means it has to matter in RPGing. In The Dying Earth RPG your clothes matter more than where you go. In Agon 2nd ed the GM just tells you, at the start of each session, which island your ship has been brought to. What matters is which gods you upset or propitiate.

Now if the GM is lying that's a different thing, but why are we assuming the GM is pretending the choice matters as more than just a bit of colour?

 

[TheSword]

You might not know from one or two situations. But if I happen to notice that there's always an elaborate, detailed location or encounter in every place we go, I'm going to start assuming the fix is in simply out of a knowledge of how much prep time is involved. And this is from someone who was prone to using a few random table rolls and pulling things like a barrow-field encounter entirely out of my butt on the fly at need on occasion in my GMing career (I only use that because a player flat out asked me afterwards whether that was preplanned and looked, not disbelieving but boggled when I said no).

That's the gig with a lot of forms of illusionism. It becomes harder and harder to pull off over time when people start to notice your patterns, and most people are not nearly as good at misdirection when it comes to it as they think they are. That's why I generally think its best used sparingly and/or with people who've already bought in to you doing it.

There is nothing wrong with the temporary suspension of disbelief.

If you took your approach to most adventures Bilbo would never have found the ring. Captain Zodge would never have coopted the PCs at the Griffon Gate. They never would have come upon the town as it was attacked by the Blue dragon. The PCs wouldn’t be in town for the Swallowtail Festival. They wouldn’t be the group attacked by bandits on the road to Millmaster… they would be in the group after that gets there without problem.

Unfortunately… that just isn’t very interesting.

 

[pemerton]

My point is that even with something so minor, the DM dictating what color their cloak has to be, removing their choice on something that makes no difference other than a bit of fun, is still railroading and the player will not like it.

Who in this thread, other than you, has suggested that the GM might choose the colour of the PCs' cloaks?

 

[Cadence]

No. No I'm not. I've been using that example for what I would do for many pages now as a way NOT to be railroading the players. What I am doing, though, is making the "massive"(I guess) assumption that there is a quantum ogre negating player agency and that all paths lead to the same event, because that's what you guys are saying.

Incorrect. If both paths(and off road and teleporting, and...) lead the players to ogres, they lead to ogres. THEN they lead somewhere else, but not until AFTER they lead to ogres.

Yes. All paths lead to ogres. I get it.

I think it's just that some people don't think it's worth the effort to worry about whether the players' decisions affect everything after it, instead they only worry about the parts the players were aware of, players were concerned with, and parts that were already established in game lore finalized through revelation to the players -- whereas other people worry about all of it. The only problem I see is when some people label the former as not role-playing or construe rail-roadings definition to have been bestowed from on high to apply to both equally -- instead of merely being things they don't like or things they wouldn't want to participate in or their definition of it.

I'm in the former camp. Part of that might be that it feels really hard for me for someone to have written down every possible encounter the players could have anywhere in advance -- and that if one is made up on the spot it feels like it is probably related to what was already in the DMs head. Comparing having one or few pre-visioned encounters in their head to drop in when it seems appropriate (the ogre dropping in a bit down any path), to deciding to roll a die when it seems appropriate to pull out one of several encounter ideas out of thin air or a random table (occurring at some point that seems reasonable down whatever path they chose) seems to me a matter of degree than type. Making sure the party always gets to the dungeon and spends a week there, in spite of their intentions and/or trying not to, seems very different to me.

 

[Cadence]

But if I happen to notice that there's always an elaborate, detailed location or encounter in every place we go, I'm going to start assuming the fix is in simply out of a knowledge of how much prep time is involved.

I think this is the first time I think I've read that quickly thrown together and vague location descriptions and encounters are better than having things well thought out and detailed. (Or maybe just really well ad-libbed. I'm not sure I can always tell for some DMs).

 

[TheSword]

That's not the quantum ogre situation. At 10pm there will be an ogre no matter what. That means that if the players are over at a different bar having a good time until 11pm, they've missed the ogre. All paths do not lead to that ogre. The quantum ogre would be if at 10pm, the ogre was in the bar, at the inn, outside in the woods while the PCs look for a night blooming flower they want, enters their room while they are sleeping, or any other choice that they might make. The ogre in your above example is avoidable depending on what the PCs choose.

Yes but this is the inn the PCs chose to stay in. There was no adventure until the DM started events happening. The adventure is triggered by the PCs staying in the inn, that’s the adventure. It’s not triggered in their absence by flower picking.

 

[Umbran]

The difference is in choice. Those games like 4e ARE railroads. The players are on rails with no chance to avoid by choice, but they have chosen to get on that train with full knowledge that they will be railroaded.

So, this has gotten reported as sounding pretty edition-warring. You might want to consider that going forward.

And, I'm sorry, the fact that the GM is in charge of framing does not mean the GM will void player agency. Do not conflate "can" with "will".