D&D General Why defend railroading?

[EzekielRaiden]

I disagree with your opening position -- that there is a significant difference between fiction made up at time A and fiction made up at time B. You've confused this construct with assigning intentionality and consideration to time A, and none of this (and a suggestion of bad faith) to time B, but this doesn't follow -- there's nothing about time A that engenders these, nor anything about time B that prevents them. Ultimately, in the situation where the GM is responsible for detailing this fiction, when it is created makes little difference. Instead, these things that you've assigned arbitrarily to specific times do -- intentionality, coherence, consideration, etc. These are not restricted to time of invention.

Why does it not matter? Asking for permission after the fact vs. before the fact absolutely matters. There are plenty of things where whether you do it ahead of time or after the fact matter--legally, financially, morally--so I see no reason why this is invalid here. Indeed, I would want far more than just a "this is not the case." MOST things, it matters whether you do them before or after. Why should DMing suddenly be special and different? Having a warrant before a search or an arrest matters. Having money before you spend matters. Killing after you've tried non-lethal measures matters.

I also reject the notion that this can be simply distilled to "the DM creating the fiction." Things that have been entered into the fiction can be interacted with. If you only introduce things right in the present moment, you deny the players any agency in what happens. That's...pretty clearly exactly the problem I'm having here.

In other words, there's nothing about prep that makes it better than ad hoc in the moment creation of fiction. The only test is the fiction created. I can prep Illusionism, I can prep railroads, I most certainly can prep moments of Force, and I can similarly create these ad hoc in the moment. There's no magic to prep.

Hard disagree. See above. Time matters. A lot, actually, for lots of moral/ethical/legal/financial reasons. I don't see why DMing gets a special pass in this regard.

 

[Charlaquin]

The specific example I put up was:

"A party gathers information and knows about the existence of a settlement on road A that has a bridge, a road B with a bridge, bandits roam the area, and there's a ford at point C. The DM has a village planned out on road A, bandits planned by the bridge on road B, stream ford C between them has an old hermit planned, and the deep water D has planned giant leeches." It happens that an ogre will show up no matters no matter which way they go.

It was then noted by others that it would be different if the party were trying to avoid places with ogres and one would show up anyway, for example. Putting in the Ogre no matter how they tried to avoid it feels bad to me - like a mini-version of having the princess die no matter what.

In the quoted example I give here, the party still has plenty of choices to make, and their choices still matter in all kinds of big ways.

But how many of those choices result in dying of dysentery?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Why does it not matter? Asking for permission after the fact vs. before the fact absolutely matters. There are plenty of things where whether you do it ahead of time or after the fact matter--legally, financially, morally--so I see no reason why this is invalid here. Indeed, I would want far more than just a "this is not the case." MOST things, it matters whether you do them before or after. Why should DMing suddenly be special and different? Having a warrant before a search or an arrest matters. Having money before you spend matters. Killing after you've tried non-lethal measures matters.

Because those things aren't the same thing as making stuff up? I mean, there are also lots of things where timing doesn't really matter, so do those prove my point? This argument is on poor footing -- it's not logically sound.

I'm a player. My GM just told me that there's an orc in the next room with a pie and the room is 10'x10'.

Now, tell me if my GM made that up last week, or just now. You cannot. Ergo, timing on when you make things up has no effect.

I also reject the notion that this can be simply distilled to "the DM creating the fiction." Things that have been entered into the fiction can be interacted with. If you only introduce things right in the present moment, you deny the players any agency in what happens. That's...pretty clearly exactly the problem I'm having here.

Oh, I very much disagree here. Take the above example, the player has agency with this situation -- they can choose to talk to the orc, fight the orc, sneak and steal from the orc, or walk away from the orc (or some other odd things I'm sure). This is full of agency for the player, whether or not the GM just made the orc up or not.

As for entered into the fiction, sure -- nothing that has been prepped has been entered into the shared fiction. If I write down, last week, that there's a pressure plate trap in the floor, and then it catches a player, the impact of that trap is exactly the same as if I just added it a few moments ago because I thought I would be fun (presumably that's why I might have added it a week ago). Prep isn't entered into the shared fiction, and is just as prone to the problem you're dancing around but not getting to.

What I think that problem might be is when the GM withholds critical information from the players and springs a gotcha. Again, this doesn't hinge on when the GM imagines this gotcha -- it's still a gotcha. This removes agency no matter when you think of it. Again, nothing about prep is magical here.

Hard disagree. See above. Time matters. A lot, actually, for lots of moral/ethical/legal/financial reasons. I don't see why DMing gets a special pass in this regard.

I'm sorry, can you tell me what the moral aspects of pretend elf games are in regards to when I, as a GM, imagine something? The ethical aspects? Goodness, the legal ones (I mean, do I have any legal requirements in D&D)? Or the financial ones? You're just saying things that are important in other contexts as if their importance somehow adheres to pretend elf games just because you've invoked them.

I mean, I pointed out games that are designed to work where everything is created in the moment of play -- prep just doesn't work. And these are popular games -- FATE (arguably can be run with some prep as well), Powered by the Apocalypse games, Forged in the Dark games, Burning Wheel games. These eschew prep for play in the moment -- everything is right now. So, if you're going to continue this argument, you need to account for these games as well in your position. I'm curious what legal ramifications these games may now face.

 

[robus]

One example is training new DMs. When one of the guys in my group wanted to try his hand at DMing for the first time, he asked us to stick to the rails, because he was learning and didn't think he could handle trying to cope with that AND learn the basics of how to run a game at the same time. We agreed and it was fun, if less fun than normal campaign.

It took me 4 years of DMing to finally feel comfortable enough with running the game that I could put aside published adventures and continue with something of my own devising.

What turned out to be a liberating feeling would have been terrifying at an earlier point.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm sorry, can you tell me what the moral aspects of pretend elf games are in regards to when I, as a GM, imagine something? The ethical aspects? Goodness, the legal ones (I mean, do I have any legal requirements in D&D)? Or the financial ones? You're just saying things that are important in other contexts as if their importance somehow adheres to pretend elf games just because you've invoked them.

I was, quite clearly, using those things to make the argument that time usually does matter, and thus GMing needs a reason for it to not matter, because the default state of things is that temporal order does matter.

But since you're so ready and willing to twist my arguments into ludicrous caricatures, I'm out. Have good games, whether as a player or a GM.

 

[Malmuria]

As a player I often like the idea of having a grand quest or a specific world-saving goal. Often that means a railroad.

If you really want to take this to the extreme - the DM spends days building a grand quest to save the kidnapped princess. he fleshes out the bandits hideout, develops a few new monsters. It is expect to be about 50 hours of play.

The players show up to the town the king begs them to save his daughter and the players decide meh ... let's go to the city down the road and open a trading coster. Instead of adventuring we are going to take downtime and try to make money as a trader.

Perfect--I would say to the players: You try to set up a business trading in a nearby town, but it's going to be difficult because you don't have any money and there are already established guilds. Guild A says they will help you get started if you help them deal with some giant wolf spiders in their warehouse. Guild B will help you if you sabotage Guild A. Guild C is secretly a cult. Meanwhile, the bandits have absconded with the princess in a hurry, leaving valuables in their hideout, but locals say they've seen weird monsters around there. The king/noble is sort of mad at you for not helping him, and that might come back around some day. Also whatever world-destroying plot that's happening in the background moves a little bit closer to completion, and this manifests itself in the world in some way.

What do you do?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I was, quite clearly, using those things to make the argument that time usually does matter, and thus GMing needs a reason for it to not matter, because the default state of things is that temporal order does matter.

No, that's not how that works. I mean, I can say that, geologically, when you eat dinner doesn't matter, so now you have to prove why the default state of things is that time does matter. It's entirely specious because it's just based on the chosen example -- you can choose any example to make an argument of this nature.

But since you're so ready and willing to twist my arguments into ludicrous caricatures, I'm out. Have good games, whether as a player or a GM.

Fair enough, I did have a bit too much fun with you staking prep as a legal argument. To be fair, though, that one was rather silly to start.

 

[Maxperson]

This. If the presence or absence of an ogre had no bearing on the players’ decision making process, then the presence of an ogre on the path they chose doesn’t invalidate their choice. They didn’t choose to go the way that doesn’t have an ogre, they just chose to go left. Had they chosen to go left because they knew there was an ogre to the right, and ended up having to fight the ogre anyway, that’s invalidating their choice.

If there's an ogre down both paths, then the choice is irrelevant. An irrelevant choice is an invalidated one. The only difference between your two examples above is that with the first example, they don't know that their choice is invalid.

 

[Charlaquin]

If there's an ogre down both paths, then the choice is irrelevant. An irrelevant choice is an invalidated one. The only difference between your two examples above is that with the first example, they don't know that their choice is invalid.

Now that’s just silly. You wouldn’t say the choice is invalid if there aren’t ogres down either path. There are all sorts of reasons one might choose to take one or the other that have nothing to do with ogres. No matter which road I choose to take to work tomorrow there will be cars on it, that doesn’t make my choice of whether to take University or Colorado Blvd invalid.

 

[Composer99]

By my reckoning, railroading in any gameplay layer requires that:
(1) The players have not chosen to forfeit making choices within that gameplay layer. (Players can legitimately want not to have to make meaningful decisions within any given gameplay layer. On this point, overgeeked is clearly mistaken in asserting the existence of railroading.)
(2) The players are presented with the illusion of meaningful choice within that gameplay layer when no such meaningfulness exists in actuality.

That is to say, a definition of railroading cannot consist solely of a lack of meaningful or consequential choices within any gameplay layer or at any possible decision point. It must account for both the players' knowledge and consent with respect to same.

Since the term railroading is inherently metaphorical, let's extend/abuse the metaphor some:

If the players willingly buy tickets and get on the train, they are making the meaningful choice within any given gameplay layer, to be freed of the obligation to make further such decisions, as is their right. At the gameplay layer of "what kind of game do we want to play?", they are choosing to play a game where the plot-path, as it were, is a more-or-less invariant line from plot-point A to B to C (and so on as required), with few, if any, meaningful decisions required on their part about which plot-path to take. Because players can legitimately want to not have to make those kinds of choices, it is not railroading to play a game where they aren't expected to make them, provided they agree to play that sort of game, which is itself a meaningful and consequential decision.

Railroading happens when the players think they have the option of choosing between walking, taking the bus, bicycling, or carpooling, only to find that they are stuck on the train no matter what their choice. At the gameplay layer of "what kind of game do we want to play", they are led to believe they have multiple decision points about which plot-paths to take and which plot-points to travel to (and in what order), only to find that no such option set exists.

Just like in real life, some of these choices might have pertinent constraints. Boating down a river requires possessing a boat, for instance, whether the PCs purchase or fabricate it. Just like in real life, some of these choices might be contextually better than others. If the PCs are following a river, boating down it is often going to be the optimal travel path - walking might be fine in most respects, but slower, and swimming for hours on end might be folly (whether due to the risk of exhaustion, having to leave equipment behind, or what-have-you). Accounting for such considerations is not railroading - quite the opposite, in fact: they're usually what give gameplay decisions meaningfulness and consequentiality in the first place.

Tying back to my remarks in the thread about best practices, it strikes me that the problem with railroading is the DM being misleading, intentionally or unintentionally, about the kind of game being played. It is a fault in communication - a social fault.

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In case I need to clarify a bit about what I mean by "gameplay layer", suffice it to say that in many TTRPGs, gameplay happens at several different layers, some of which happen within the diegetic frame (so to speak), and some of which do not. For instance, in D&D 5e, character-building is a distinct layer from, say, making round-by-round decisions during combat, which in turn is a distinct layer from "what spells should I, a wizard/cleric/druid, prepare today?", which in turn is a distinct layer from "do we want to play a published module or a homebrew game?" Important to note here is that within any given layer, players can legitimately choose not to make "meaningful and consequential" decisions and leave them up to other players and/or the DM.

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Apropos of Schrödinger's Ogre, personally, I wouldn't care to run a Schrödinger's Ogre encounter as a DM, but having a Schrödinger's Ogre does not imply railroading is happening of necessity.

If we use overgeeked's own proposed definition of railroading, Schrödinger's Ogre as used in several examples posted on this thread does not, in fact, "remove meaningful and consequential choices from the player". It exists independently of those choices. The meaningfulness and consequentiality of each choice follows from the path chosen and/or the destination, and is unaffected by the presence of absence of the Schrödinger's Ogre.

This is not to say this game structure can't be used as part of railroading. But clearly not every instance of it constitutes same.