Why I Dislike the term Railroading

[ExploderWizard]

Whereas I don't see how it's a railroad at all. It's a setup (or a plotline, if you will) - that is, a game-world element presented by the DM which is outside of the players' control. This is part of what I've been talking about with the expansion of the term - I don't know why it's helpful to include this generalized setup under the umbrella term "railroading."

-O

Any adventure that destroys the campaign world if the Pc's don't snap to is a railroad.

When I do run save the world scenarios it is at the end of a campaign and I make no effort to provide the illusion of free will.

 

[Ariosto]

Evil cultists are using the power of Orcus to blot out the sun. You have 24 hours to save the world.

You have a deadline, and if you fail to accept the hook, bad things will happen to you. HOWEVER, you have full freedom to figure out a way to do it; find a powerful spell, discover an ancient relic, make a deal with a powerful entity, or just kick cultist ass until there isn't enough of them left to cast the ritual. (In theory, you could join them as well, but that's pretty much a game over scenario too).

Addendum: The relic is always found in the Labyrinth of Ut-At-Ra, the spell is always lost in the vault of Prazzam, the Red Dragon, and the cult's ritual is always being held at the Free City and happens at Midnight.

That's not what I would call a linear scenario. It's a situation.

A linear scenario, to my mind, is something like the 4e "Living Forgotten Realms" scenarios I have seen. "The players shall go through Combat Encounter A and Skill Challenge B to reach either Combat Encounter C1 or Combat Encounter C2 (followed by the other, because the DM will spring it thus or so) ...".

 

[Doug McCrae]

Here's a couple of examples of railroading, one good, one bad, that I experienced as a player.

Good:
Penultimate session of a fixed length campaign. My PC is trying to stop the BBEG escaping. He is an evil eunuch wizard riding an amorphous shapeshifting dragon. I think I suspected that he'd have to get away because it was a strongly anime/action movie/genre fiction influenced game so he had to be the opponent in the final encounter. I really gave it everything I had to stop him, I made a lot of hard rolls, as the GM described the monster's crazy tentacles grasping my catgirl PC.

Told you it was anime! Anyway I loved it. My character was amazingly physically capable and I felt she had finally been properly tested by a physical challenge and got to show what she could do. I never felt that I must be able to succeed for the encounter to be fun. I was fine with following the rules of 'story'. I mean, what's one more tier of rules in an rpg? There are already so many.


Bad:
The PCs were defending an underwater city from attack by raiders. Atlantis or Lemuria or something. There was a brief combat. The raiders (who have been raiding this place on and off for a long time prior to this) shot the force field of this hundreds (maybe thousands) of years old city once and their guns went through it like a light sabre thru butter. Boom! No more city. Thousands dead. All our fault. One of the PCs had even been in charge of the force field, not sure what he could've done.

It was a setup, there was no way we could have successfully defended the city. In fact I learned afterward that the GM had been talking about the adventure beforehand to someone else and described it as "The Fall of Atlantis" or somesuch.


Why is the second one bad and the first one good? In the former we still got to be big damn heroes, it was only delayed by one session. We didn't majorly fail. In the latter we had a huge appalling, terrible failure that had all been planned by the GM, for no particularly good reason imo, and, maybe worse, it was completely implausible. How could the city have lasted for so long if its force field went down to one blast from raiders they've been contending with for years?

There was a sense, with the first GM, of essential benevolence, of using the railroading for the purpose of telling an entertaining story. Whereas with the second GM I get the sense he was saying, "Hah! Gotcha! You thought you were heroes? Well you just lost a city, not so heroic now, eh?" Can't be good, that.

 

[Ariosto]

By over and over again claiming that people have "changed the meaning" of railroading.

Take your "over and over" and go pester Obryn with it.

 

[Beginning of the End]

The player said it was linear because they interrogated one of Demoniak's junior minions and he put the PCs on to a higher up minion and then that higher up told them about a base, a mobile communications centre. That section of the scenario was linear in the sense that from those two particular minions, there was only one interesting branch point. But at any time the players could've got off that 'line' and followed up any other number of clues if they had wanted to.

This is a common failing in these types of discussions: You can't diagnose linear vs. non-linear design by looking at the sequence of events as they played out at the table. Events at the table will always fall into a linear sequence. It's the potential for other outcomes that determines linearity in design.

We're also very bad at thinking about the potential outcomes of choices we didn't make. Check out How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich.

 

[Ariosto]

We're not. We're calling it a linear adventure. And you're calling linear adventures "railroads."

Please stop that. What I actually wrote is plain for everyone to see.

I called it NOT a railroad, and explained why.

You are trying my patience with this behavior, Obryn. Once more, and I shall report it to the moderators.

Relax, guys. We'd rather have people report problems (or not), but threatening to do so is definitely not the best tactic. Thanks. ~ PCat

 

[Scribble]

Ariosto- If I've misunderstood what you've been saying then I apologize.

I don't think you've been quite as clear as you think you've been though.

You might notice when you actively defined what you considered a railroad, I agreed (mostly) with what you said... It's only the part where you indicate others are changing the definition, that I disagreed with.

 

[Ariosto]

Of course railroading is not a grammatical antonym of sandbox. Neither do a lot of things bear such relationships to "democracy", or "free enterprise", or "marital fidelity" or what have you, that are nonetheless opposed in pretty basic ways to the ethos of the undertaking.

 

[the Jester]

Any adventure that destroys the campaign world if the Pc's don't snap to is a railroad.

Not if you're okay with the world being destroyed.

 

[Ariosto]

It's only the part where you indicate others are changing the definition, that I disagreed with.

I wonder which part that might be -- but not as much as I wonder why you are not haranguing Obryn instead (or, at the very least, as well).