D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Ruin Explorer]

I’d really like to know. I keep seeing arguments about player choice and agency and railroading. And for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone would defend railroading. Any advocates of railroading willing to explain why it’s good to do?

The simple answer is because about 50-90% of what gets called railroading isn't. So your perception of it being "defended" likely stems from people defending fairly straightforward adventure design.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Meaningful choices are basically the currency of role-playing games run on. If you don't have meaningful choices, you don't just have an issue with railroading you have weird pacing issues.

This is why so many DMs struggle with journeys.

DM: So you start out on the journey to Fallcrest. After three hours you come to a fork in the road. The sign says Fallcrest to the left and Starmount to the right. What do you do.
Players: We go left.
DM: Ok you travel for another hour. You come to a rickety old bridge. What do you do?
Players: We cross the bridge and keep going.

I'll agree your example is painful, and not extraordinary, either. But, what I consider a meaningful choice in a game varies greatly depending on the game. What I will gladly accept as a limit on my choice in D&D I would absolutely walk out on a Blades game if the GM tried to do the same thing. Same with some D&D games -- if the GM wants a game I don't, it's a bad fit, but that mostly means we're disagreeing on where I have meaningful choices.

A player may only really engage with combat challenges, for instance, and only want a fun story to link these together. For this play, the meaningful choices are combat tactics and build choices (for D&D). Restricting or handwaving these will strike this player as badwrong. But the GM can put as heavy a boot on the plot as they want and this player is more than happy. Alternatively, you could have the reverse priorities in a player, and that player will complain about a railroad. But this is fine, preferable even, for the first player, so, then, is it a railroad there or a linear adventure?

 

[Don Durito]

Isn’t characterization a set of meaningful choices?

To a degree. But characterisation basically becomes more meaningful when it informs choices.

Is it more meaningful to have your Paladin spout moral platitudes, or to have him make the choice to do the right thing, even if it's not to his own advantage.

Aren’t tactical choices in combat meaningful?

To a degree. But they tend, I find to get overshadowed by the choice to engage in combat in the first place. Combat tends to work better and be more engaging when it is a result of some kind of player choice.

 

[Don Durito]

I'll agree your example is painful, and not extraordinary, either. But, what I consider a meaningful choice in a game varies greatly depending on the game. What I will gladly accept as a limit on my choice in D&D I would absolutely walk out on a Blades game if the GM tried to do the same thing. Same with some D&D games -- if the GM wants a game I don't, it's a bad fit, but that mostly means we're disagreeing on where I have meaningful choices.

A player may only really engage with combat challenges, for instance, and only want a fun story to link these together. For this play, the meaningful choices are combat tactics and build choices (for D&D). Restricting or handwaving these will strike this player as badwrong. But the GM can put as heavy a boot on the plot as they want and this player is more than happy. Alternatively, you could have the reverse priorities in a player, and that player will complain about a railroad. But this is fine, preferable even, for the first player, so, then, is it a railroad there or a linear adventure?

This is why I said earlier in the thread that there are two ways to look at railroading, from the perspective of DM practice, and the perspective of subjective player experience. Only the second is necessarily bad.

If I feel railroaded, then something has definitely gone wrong.

 

[Charlaquin]

Meaningful choices are basically the currency of role-playing games run on. If you don't have meaningful choices, you don't just have an issue with railroading you have weird pacing issues.

This is why so many DMs struggle with journeys.

DM: So you start out on the journey to Fallcrest. After three hours you come to a fork in the road. The sign says Fallcrest to the left and Starmount to the right. What do you do.
Players: We go left.
DM: Ok you travel for another hour. You come to a rickety old bridge. What do you do?
Players: We cross the bridge and keep going.

You’ve got to give them reasons to want to put whatever they’re doing off to check something else out! Don’t just have a sign pointing to Starmount, have smoke rising from the horizon in the direction of Starmount!

 

[Don Durito]

You’ve got to give them reasons to want to put whatever they’re doing off to check something else out! Don’t just have a sign pointing to Starmount, have smoke rising from the horizon in the direction of Starmount!

But then it wouldn't be a failure to offer a meaningful choice. The example there is of what happens when the DM tries to pace a game through interaction without having a meaningful choice. It fundemantally fails. You can't pace that way. You either have to punctuate things with some kind of choices, or just narrate what happens until there is a meaningful choice (or, third option use a more narrative technique like 13th Age montages to let the players narrate what happens in between).

 

[Charlaquin]

But then it wouldn't be a failure to offer a meaningful choice. The example there is of what happens when the DM tries to pace a game through interaction without having a meaningful choice. It fundemantally fails. You can't pace that way. You either have to punctuate things with some kind of choices, or just narrate what happens until there is a meaningful choice (or, third option use a more narrative technique like 13th Age montages to let the players narrate what happens in between).

Sure, but at this point we’re well outside of the topic at hand.

 

[Mallus]

To a degree. But characterisation basically becomes more meaningful when it informs choices.

Is it more meaningful to have your Paladin spout moral platitudes, or to have him make the choice to do the right thing, even if it's not to his own advantage.


To a degree. But they tend, I find to get overshadowed by the choice to engage in combat in the first place. Combat tends to work better and be more engaging when it is a result of some kind of player choice.

I was really responding to the comment that players who didn‘t make ‘meaningful choices’ are just ‘audience members’. That’s overly dismissive of a wide variety of creative input/action on player’s parts.

 

[Don Durito]

Sure, but at this point we’re well outside of the topic at hand.

It's all connected.

Railroading often occurs because a DM tries to connect things with illusory choices., or because they have presented the players with choices they don't know how to follow up on.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Sure, but at this point we’re well outside of the topic at hand.

Are we? I feel like someone might very much decide I'm railroading if I skip over the guards and get to the action (to borrow from a much-debated paraphrase of 4e's).