Why I Dislike the term Railroading

[Reynard]

By common definition this isn't even an adventure it is merely a treasure stocked single room.

I take issue with your "common definition" of an adventure. And adventure is a confluence of PCs and some stuff in the setting. A dungeon, even if linear, counts as "Stuff" and there's PCs there, so it's an adventure.

 

[Obryn]

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.

I am not willfully misinterpreting you. As I've said, I'm not really sure we're speaking the same language.

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.

Well, if you assume that nobody else could do it, instead...

But let's make it smaller scale - it's a village the PCs started in, but have moved on from. It will be destroyed if the PCs do nothing. Railroad?

-O

 

[Doug McCrae]

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

I can see where you're coming from there. It's very heavy-handed. The PCs, assuming they are at least halfway sane, have very little freedom in this situation.

I think something can be heavy-handed without necessarily going so far as to be a railroad, but that's splitting hairs. It's the same ballpark.

However I would also have to say that this kind of thing, if it is a railroad, is not necessarily bad railroading. It happens all the time in superhero and superhero-like genres. Genres where the PCs are the good guys, big damn heroes. That's a lot of rpgs.

 

[Obryn]

I can see where you're coming from there. It's very heavy-handed. The PCs, assuming they are at least halfway sane, have very little freedom in this situation.

I think something can be heavy-handed without necessarily going so far as to be a railroad, but that's splitting hairs. It's the same ballpark.

It also brings up an interesting point that I don't specifically remember seeing before. Usually I've seen "railroading" include a break with versimilitude. That is, there's something happening that's arbitrary and inconsistent with the game-world. Such as, for example, preventing characters from capturing or killing a villain when it's realistically within their power.

I don't think cultists bent on world destruction are necessarily out of character for a game world; it's something that could happen if you assume that there are both crazy cultists and magic capable of destroying a world So yeah, interesting point for discussion.

-O

 

[Ariosto]

I am not willfully misinterpreting you.

Here's a tip: Instead of telling me that I said this or that, quote it. Start with some basis in clearly established facts, however accurate your interpretation may turn out to be.

Better yet, stick with telling me what you have to say.

When it comes to what I think, I am most assuredly in no need of being informed by you!

As I've said, I'm not really sure we're speaking the same language.

And yet you have confidence enough in the meaning to make such accusations? One can only wonder what the word 'reckless' means to you.

 

[Scribble]

I wonder which part that might be -

Here is one example:

Different people have different tolerances for it.

Different people who change it to mean "only railroading I don't like" change it to mean different things.

Some people who really like it a lot do all sorts of things with the language that leaves it pretty useless for communication except with fellows fluent in their cant.

Confusion is a weapon in the cause of attacking critics of railroading.



That does not look like an improvement. It's just a wordier way to say 'railroads', subject to all the same trickery in rhetoric.

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

I'm not haranguing anyone.

It seemed to me that you felt there was an accepted definition of railroad that people were trying to subvert for some reason.

I dissagree.

I just feel there are people with a different definition of what railroading is.

They're not trying to subvert anything or confuse anyone. They simply dissagree with you.

That's all.

Did I misunderstand your meaning? If so, as I stated it was not intentional, I just missed your meaning.

 

[Obryn]

Here's a tip: Instead of telling me that I said this or that, quote it. Start with some basis in clearly established facts, however accurate your interpretation may turn out to be.

And yet you have confidence enough in the meaning to make such accusations? One can only wonder what the word 'reckless' means to you.

Ariosto, I'm not discussing this any more with you in this thread. You're interpreting my behavior as malicious, and I don't think further discussion will be either entertaining or productive.

-O

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I guess the issue I have is that, unless you happen to be playing in a "Real World" rpg, very, very few "events" occur in a game that aren't at least tangentially related to the PC's. Sure, you could mention that some city far away just had an earthquake, but, really, do people actually do this?

Constantly. Nothing adds more verisimilitude than feeling like the world is going on around you.

And sometimes the PCs decide to find out if the story about the tattered angel blowing a rusting iron trumpet above the gates of Schweren were true or not. (They were, and the city had plague by the time the PCs got there.) The plague would have happened anyway, as had its portent, the harbinger of plague. Just a reminder that things are not all right in the world. (Plague, religious schism and war, witch trials, a huge fire destroying most of a major city, things like that....)

Also, I have run multiple games in the same setting - and once or twice the handouts have included newspapers relating stories of previous adventures of previous groups. (The cry of 'Holy crap! That was us!' makes the effort worthwhile. )

The Auld Grump

*EDIT*

I tried that a bit in my most recent campaign, a superhero game, with little snippets of info about what other superheroes around the world were up to, but it wasn't very successful. The players didn't really give a toss.

Players are practical, they only care about what directly affects them.

I, on the other hand, have had a great deal of success with it, both with younger players and older ones.

I think if you're asking the question "is there anyone out there who actually does X..." the answer will be yes... (even if it's only one dude.)

[Irish Accent]I'm not just a man, I'm an army![/Irish Accent]

 

[Beginning of the End]

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.

Well, this raises an interesting point I decided to gloss over in my original message for fear it would interfere with clarity.

Could you have a sandbox campaign (in which players are completely free to choose whatever scenario they want) in which the actual scenarios are heavily railroaded?

I think that's an unlikely possibility. Since, as you note, non-linear scenario design and sandbox campaigns share the commonality of enabling/promoting player choice. And if that's what you like, you're unlikely to promote it in scenario selection and then work against it in scenario design. And, as I noted in my original message, I think we tend to see railroading "creep in" from scenario design down to individual decision points rather than vice versa. It's easy to imagine someone controlling macro-level events while leaving micro-level events undetermined; but it's more difficult to imagine a scneario in which micro-level events are being railroaded while macro-level events aren't.

OTOH, it seems at least plausible that such a campaign could exist. And I would actually go so far as to say that if you translated most video game sandboxes directly into tabletop games, the result would be very light sandboxes with incredibly railroaded scenarios.

It also brings up an interesting point that I don't specifically remember seeing before. Usually I've seen "railroading" include a break with versimilitude.

I'm going to dispute the premise. For example, one of the most-cited examples of a railroaded adventure is the "PCs must be captured" sequence form the A series of modules. There's nothing inherently unbelievable about the PCs failing to detect a wall of force trap and then failing their saving throws against the subsequent poison gas attack. It doesn't violate versimilitude, but it doesn't change the railroad-y nature of the encounter.

Similarly illusionism, the practice of "invisible" railroading, would seem to depend on verisimilitude to remain undetected.

Re: The general form of "you must do X or your character will be automatically killed". It's a false choice. We could probably come up with some oddball corner-cases where it's a meaningful choice for a character who has some motivation for seeing the world end, but in practical term it's no different than "you must do X or we'll stop playing the game". It's an in-world version of "this is the scenario I prepped, so we either play this or we play nothing".

Which is fine. Lots of people play the game that way. Heck, I ran a "this is what we're playing" session just last night.

But it's still railroading.

 

[evileeyore]

Is that the distinction you're trying to draw?

No.


I'll borrow your plotline:


Linear: Day 1 the Evil Vizier has his minions kidnap some innocents, Day 2 the minions will transport the victims to the Sunburst Vale, Day 4 the victims will be sacrificed to bring forth and controll the Aithar Ghosts.

What the characterss do after getting a few clues/hooks is totally up to the Players.


Railroad: "The PCs need to face the evil vizier, then they need to travel to Sunburst Vale, and then they need to deal with the Aithar Ghosts."

The Players do not have the choice to avoid facing the Evil Vizier, they have to go to Sunburst Vale, and must deal with the Aithar Ghosts. Choice and controll have been removed from the Players, no matter how much they love going to Awesometown, it was still a railroad.



The simplest way to identify a railroad: Can I go to Craptown? Or Pissville? Maybe I want to go to Vomitaria or Goodyburg. But if my only choices are only Craptown and Awesomevania then it's a railroad.