Why I Dislike the term Railroading

[Nifft]

Nifft, "lecturing" people who were actually there in the "history" that came before you, with such an attitude on top of such ignorance, can use up patience quickly. When you take it to such absurd lengths that it is hard to believe you can even fool yourself that you have read the books, and you ask me to speculate as to why you are confused ...

Really, you've got to tell me which it is.

Because anyone who does read the books can verify that it's not the books that are missing the discussion of the D&D campaign. It's definitely you.

Well, see, I was asking you to clarify, and you answered with insulting bluster.

You were there? Great. I was there too. Your experience is not the only valid one, and the fact is that yours disagrees with the experiences of quite a few other people -- I think you're the only one in the thread who thinks D&D grew out of "sandboxing".

Nobody asked you to speculate on my mental state. I have asked if you understand why what you've said doesn't make sense, given the context.

Cheers, -- N

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Folks, it is turning a trifle toxic around here, can we please limit the personal attacks? (Says the person who threatened to hit Hussar with a Nerf hammer.)

When writing an adventure I tend to view any overly linear plot as a railroad, and avoid it. The result can be plots that seem much more complex than they actually are, or than they need to be. But there are ways to chivvy the PCs back on plot without telling them what their characters are doing. But I prefer confusion to dragging the PCs from encounter to encounter. (I prefer to use a clue club rather than a lasso.) And, honestly, it doesn't take long for the players to adjust to my style of play, aside from the plaintive and occasional 'where's the dungeon?'

As a player, I tend to feel I am being railroaded when the GM either offers no choices or over rules any choices that the players may make. And I have quit games over this. (My favorite being the time everyone quit the game, without conferring with each other... I guess we all planned on quietly not bothering to show up - I was the only one who bothered officially quitting the campaign, and giving reasons. A year later the GM had the same thing happen again, with a completely new group... I guess he missed the clue club hitting him on the head.)

I don't want to run a game that I wouldn't enjoy playing.

The Auld Grump

 

[Obryn]

Folks, it is turning a trifle toxic around here

Turning?

-O

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Turning?

-O

What can I say? I am fond of understatement and irony.

The Auld Grump, come think, I threatened to hit Hussar with a Nerf hammer when I was agreeing with him.... Now I am going to need to pull out the really big Nerf hammer.

 

[Umbran]

We'll keep this simple - Ariosto and Nifft, both of you have been around here a good long time, and should know better than to get personal like that. Stop it, please, if you wish to continue participating.

 

[pemerton]

One might almost say the whole reason for the Forge's existence is the belief that White Wolf's 'storytelling system' is very inappropriately named.

Pithy!

What's the difference between action-resolution and task-resolution?

Action resolution is a general category that includes task resolution and conflict resolution.

The difference is that for conflict resolution you wear a beret, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, and dig Mose Allison. Plus, if you don't get the result you want, then it was obviously task resolution and you need new, hip dice.

More or less what Ariosto said, minus the snark - D&D combat has always been more conflict resolution than task resolution, for example.

Task resolution: think 3E skills - the player specifies the task to be attempted, the GM sets the DC, the dice are rolled, the player knows whether or not the PC succeeded at the task. But it is still up to the GM (not necessarily on a whim, but based on his/her overall role in refereeing the game) to determine if success at the task gets the PC where the player whats him/her to be. So the dice determine whether or not I succeeded at opening the safe, but not whether or not I succeeded at finding the incriminating documents that are my real concern.

Perhaps the most prominent example of poor D&D task resolution mechancis is 3E Diplomacy checks - no matter how well you roll how often, there is no mechanical, non-GM mediated conduit to persuading someone of something. (AD&D hide in shadows can have similar problems - what most players really want is a Sneak skill, where if they roll well then it follows that they've won the contest and their enemies can't see them.) Contrasts very markedly with 3E combat.

Conflict resolution: think 4e skill challenges or D&D combat - rolling the dice doesn't tell us so much whether or not a particular task was successful, but whether or not a particular goal has been achieved (enemies dead, in the case of combat).

The line between the two can blur. RQ and RM use task resolution in combat, for example - unlike D&D they have complex rules for defence, armour, injuries, death spirals etc - but because of their damage rules it is quite possible for enough task successes to produce goal successes (ie enemies dead). A pretty common line one hears is that an RPG needs complex rules for combat but not social - my reading of this is that what is really going on is that complex rules for consequences of tasks can turn task resolution into conflict resolution, and most RPGers want the combat rules of their game to resolve conflicts (ie tell them whether or not the PCs beat the enemies). Another example, in 3E, of a complex subsystem to turn task resolution into conflict resolution is the crafting rules.

In a game where most skills are physical, and the use of them is to move around a tactical space (eg 4e stealth, acro, athletics) then task resolution can amount to conflict resolution without much complexity. But as soon as the tactical space disappears, the limits of task resolution become clear eg How many swimming checks do I need before I get across the English Channel? One? One per mile? One per 6 second round? In a conflict resolution system this issue of check-mongering (whether by GM's, which generally makes it harder for players to win, or by players with good bonuses in a system that grants XP per check) is done away with - frame the scene in terms of the conflict at stake, and then resolve it. If the conflict is a short combat, fine. If the conflict is a swim across the Channel, fine. Roll the dice and see who wins - PC or opponent. This also illustrates the downside of typical conflict resolution mechanics - it can make things very abstract, tends to do away with tactics, and leaves the burden on the players and GM to introduce a lot of the flavour (see eg AD&D combat, notorious among critics as nothing but a series of dice rolls, or 4e skill challenges, notorious among critics for the same reason).

Another feature of confict resolution mechanics is that, if there is no conflict, then the mechanics don't come into play ("say yes or roll the dice!"). If everyone at the table is happy with it, it happens. This can facilitate framing scenes and closing them. And it is unlike classic RM-style task resolution, where even simple manoeuvres in uncontested situations (like a high level mage casting a light spell) require dice rolls to see what happens (and thus create a risk of spell failure). These sorts of mechanics create pressure in favour of "continuous play" without much overt scene-setting. This can in turn create somewhat grindy play - too much detail for the sake of it - or else lead to the GM suspending the action resolution mechanics for some purposes - the White Wolf "Golden Rule", which I agree with Edwards (based on experience of D&D GMs applying it) is an invitation to railroading.

 

[pemerton]

Who is calling that 'railroading'?

Upthread, discussing the cursed sword scenario, ExploderWizard suggested that if the GM puts an element into the gameworld not because it emerges out of the inherent logic of the gameworld, but because of a metagame desire to cater to or accomodate a player's PC, then this is railroading.

EDIT: also, when you say this:

It's basically replacing the campaign game with the tournament game.

you tend to imply that there are only two options - what you call "campaign" gaming, which most others here are calling sandboxing, and what you call "tournament" gaming, which you've already identified as a railroad. Which of these categories do you think that the sort of play I was talking about - GM metagaming play to give effect to the choices made by players in building content-heavy PCs - fits into? My view is that it doesn't fit into either, but that however you want to label it, and whether or not you enjoy it, it is pretty clearly not railroading.

"You see gum on the street, leave it there. It's not free candy."

I don't know where you picked up that view. I don't recall ever playing with folks who held it. I certainly did not find it in any rules-set of my acquaintance.

I wouldn't expect you to know where my experiences come from. That's part of what makes them mine and not yours! I was just reporting them. And based on my experience with other RPGers both in the flesh and on the internet (I'm thinking especially of the ICE boards, but also threads that I've seen here and at RPGnet), I'm not the only one who feels that strong purist-for-system sensibilities mitigate against handwaving the action resolution mechanics in order to advance the game past the boring bits.

Even if the rulebook says "ignore the boring bits", it may pragmatically contradict this by giving heaps of rules for the boring bits (eg costs for food, starvation tables, etc, or haggling tables, or whatever). Also, part of the appeal of purist-for-system play is that the mechanics produce interesting bits in a somewhat unpredictable emergent fashion - so too much handwaving in order to skip over the boring bits runs the risk of losing the benefits of that playstyle. And handwaving, like the White Wolf Golden Rule, can be an invitation to railroading (or illusionism, but I'm not a big fan of that either).

So for me, the solution to the boring bits hasn't been to stick to purist-for-system gaming and add in some handwaving. It's been to look for a game that keeps a lot of the mechanical crunch that I enjoyed in my "pervy" purist-for-system days, but which supports a more thematic and bang-centred approach to play from the ground up. At the moment, that game happens to be 4e. Burning Wheel would probably also do the job.

 

[Ariosto]

I speak of the people who in the last few years have posited an ideal "sandbox" campaign

All of those I have seen have been opponents of 'sandbox' campaigns. People who like old-style campaigns, I have found, tend to have their hands full with actual-factual practicalities!

The way the "positing an ideal sandbox" routine goes, in my experience, is that it's used as the first premise in a tortured logic supposed somehow to "prove" something or other about a whole lot of fantasy campaigns from 1970 to the present.

Obviously (well, apparently not to some), those of us who have been participants in such play are likely to believe our own eyes rather than such rhetoric. We are not the intended audience, methinks!

nothing is altered for dramatic reasons EVER

The rules did not stipulate a category of "dramatic reasons" to move pieces, switch cards, change the way dice landed, and so on, in Rail Baron or The Russian Campaign, or other games.

Neither did they in miniatures rules sets, such as Chainmail.

Neither did they in D&D.

So, I reckon that how many people do this or that is likely to depend on just what you mean by "dramatic reasons".

I like having an overarching plot in which the player characters accomplish great deeds.

A great cosmic conflict (Law vs. Chaos being the default) has been recognized from early days as a background element that adds gravitas, in part by reminding even the most godlike of player-characters that there are greater powers. A high-level character might accomplish some deed of significance in that larger scheme, without ever fully comprehending it.

If what you mean is the plot of a story, in which the characters are like an author's story-characters, their survival and success guaranteed (or doomed) for the sake of the tale, then that is something else. It could be another game, but the wags who call old D&D "bad design" would be right if the intent had indeed been to produce such a convenience for the armchair novelist/stage director.

I do not like being told that this is wrong.

In the context of old D&D, it's no more wrong than trying to do the same thing with any other device not designed for it. It tends to be awkward -- although even an awkward tool in the hands of a master can deliver quite impressive results! Some people, strange as it may seem, are going to play the game pretty much according to the description and instructions, rather than expecting it to be something else.

It's not that something else can't be splendid, just that it is, well, something else. People wanting something else might have chosen something else in the first place. There are other tools that are probably, off the shelf, better suited to the job.

A more recent game called D&D may be just that, in fact!

The "story-telling" game, by whatever name, has been over recent decades a burgeoning field of new developments going beyond, e.g., Castle Ravenloft.

I doubt that many people see any moral aspect to the choice of one or the other pastime.

If that's railroading, then fine. Choo choo.

Right on!

 

[pemerton]

What is so compelling about the faux-academic enterprise?

Because I'm a humanities academic trying to understand his RPGing experiences? Doesn't seem that surprising to me!

 

[pemerton]

I would disagree with this on the grounds that "invisible railroading" or "illusionism" still has a very real effect on gameplay, and those effects are very similar to and arise from the same root causes as visible railroading.

IOW, I think there's a useful distinction between visible and invisible railroading. But the two are still clearly joined at the hip.

Agreed.