Why I Dislike the term Railroading

[Ariosto]

So, we're back to the claim that the only legitimate use is as a deprecation by a participant in a particular manifestation of a behavior -- and then, I guess, only with the approval of every other participant.

After all, if the standard is, "I like it, therefore it is not railroading", then where do we draw the line that permits someone to call something railroading?

 

[Ariosto]

Wouldn't it be simpler to take "YMMV" as read?

If you dig getting repeatedly captured and rescued by deus ex machina in the Dragonboil Chronicle, and consider it "act carpentry" or something, then that's fine.

When someone writes, "and there are another dozen modules with more such 'railroading'," then you know to expect so much more fun. Other people know to avoid the thing and spend their shekels on something "free of plot lines and all that baggage", such as Satanic Mills of the Hell Furnaces and Their Tea Rooms.

 

[FireLance]

After all, if the standard is, "I like it, therefore it is not railroading", then where do we draw the line that permits someone to call something railroading?

Immediately beyond the line where they are permitted to use the word "like", of course.

 

[pemerton]

Ariosto, I'm saying that GM metagaming is not per se railroading.

Games like HeroWars and Sorcerer and Burning Wheel mandate a lot of GM metagaming, mostly in response to the players' character building - for example, if a player spends points to put a certain relationship into his/her PC, the GM is obliged by the rules of the game to bring that relationship into play in some fashion.

Thus, these games are not about the PCs just being plonked down into a campaign world and looking for rumours. They're about the GM setting up situations that speak to the PCs the players have designed, and the players then resolving those situations - or at least attempting to - in ways that express the players' priorities.

It's clearly not sandboxing.

It's not early D&D either. Now not all early D&D was pure sandboxing. There was some metagaming by the GM - eg Gygax put particular rooms or encounters into Castle Greyhawk because he knew they would be appealing to particular players (eg the Fraz-Urb'luu room, and I think maybe also the trapped godlings). But the sort of play I'm talking about is all this all the time, and much more up front rather than with at best a nudge and wink of acknowledgement.

It's not all new, though. At least some Champions play was like this back in the 80s, according to what I've read (eg what does a player do by taking the Hunted property, other than signal to the GM that s/he wants to play a PC who confronts a particular enemy - query whether this should also be worth bonus points for upping your PC's power!). And I know from experience that Rolemaster - another pretty old game - can be played this way.

It's there to an extent at least in 4e as written - eg magic item wishlists - and 4e is easier to play in this fashion than early editions of D&D, in my opinion and experience.

All I'm saying is that this is not railroading, even though it is the GM using the GM's power over the game to set up situations within the game in a metagaming (and hence non-sandbox) fashion. It's not railroading because the GM's metagaming is in response to the demands stated by the players at character creation. And it's a type of play that doesn't really make sense for games - like the ones I mentioned - that don't allow players to make such demands at character creation, because they do not allow for players to metagame at that stage.

 

[pemerton]

Wouldn't it be simpler to take "YMMV" as read?

Maybe. But there is a confusion that is common in discussions of railroading - and I'm not sure if you're making it or not - between games in which the GM metagames to override the players' choices, and games in which the GM metagames to give effect to the players' choices.

The first sort of game is (what I describe as) a railroad. In D&D play, I think AD&D 2nd ed is it's heyday, and perhaps Planescape is the heyday of the heyday. These game rules and modules give the GM the authority, more-or-less expressly, to (i) decide who the villain is, (ii) decide who the PCs will cooperate with, (iii) decide, without reference to action resolution mechancis that the players can meaningfully engage with, whether or not any action taken by a PC succeeds, (iv) to decide the consequences, both causally and thematically, of any decision that a PC makes. What do the players actually get to contribute in these adventures? As far as I can see, a bit of colour that is completely confined to the encounter at hand but has no implications for anything to come after. I'm personally puzzled by the apparent popularity of the modules from this era, but there you go. Not everyone is looking for the same thing as me in a roleplaying game . . .

Adventure Paths seem to me to also have strong hints of railroading, but unlike 2nd ed modules they have plenty of opportunity for players to make meaningful choices in tactically rich combats. So they have features (i), (ii) and parts of (iv) from the previous paragraph, but at least as far as combat is concerned they do give the players action resolution mechanics to take advantage of. For those who like the tactics and don't care so much about overarching story or theme, adventure paths should therefore be pretty playable without complaint.

The second sort of game - in which the GM metagames in order to give effect to the players' choices - is the one in which, if a player specifies in her backstory that her wizard PC betrayed her mentor before setting out on the road to adventure, then the players can know with a pretty high degree of confidence that the cult leader, or the shadowy figure they saw ducking back inside the wizard's guild, is that mentor. Or in which, if a player's backstory is that his PC is a former slave who wants to free the other slaves in the society, then the players can be pretty confident that a major antagonist in the campaign will be a poweful figure who believes in the existence of natural slaves. Or in which, if a player pays build points for the carpentry skill, then adventures will contain barns that need raising or boats that need repairing.

That sort of game is not a sandbox - the GM is choosing to put certain challenges in front of the players and not others - but it is not a railroad. The players' choices aren't being thwarted. Rather, the choices they made at the character build stage are being given effect to. And needless to say, in this sort of game none of the features (i) to (iv) above need be present.

 

[Beginning of the End]

As to the GM's visible hand - after reading Edwards' discussion of ouija board roleplaying, and noticing that that is applicable to some of the sessions I've GMed, I've become a bit more ready for the GM to use force, rather than faff around hoping the action resolution mechanics will get the game to an interesting place.

I think Edwards is excluding the middle here while playing a bit of a shell game.

(1) Let's postulate that the players are, in fact, capable of identifying what they would like to be doing.

(2) Ergo, when I ask them, "What are your characters doing?" They will respond with an action which they believe will let them do what they want to be doing.

(3) If I, as a GM, don't understand why they're doing action X, then we may fall into "faffing about". This is a dilemma. But it's a dilemma which is incredibly trivial to resolve when the GM says, "Why are you doing that? What are you trying to accomplish?"

Ta-da. Problem solved.

(4) The other potential source of "faffing about" would be insisting on minute simulation of intermediary steps. For example, the next point of interest in the campaign is attending a carnival in six weeks. But the GM insists on running the players through every intermediary day.

But that's just bad GMing. If you're interested in simulationism then the correct solution is zoom out to a more abstract resolution of those intermediary days. Nobody roleplays every single moment of every single day in the exact same amount of detail; so it's a bit of a strawman to suggest that the desire to do so is a problem that can only be resolved by abandoning simulationism.

Tangentially, Edwards had an incredibly poor understanding/appreciation of simulationism in the Threefold Model. In addition, when he formed the GDS he hyper-focused on the small slice of Threefold's dramatism that he personally liked, labeled that small slice Narrativism, and then shoved the rest of dramatism into simulationism. The result is, predictably, a complete mess.

This means that whenever Edwards starts talking about simulationism in one of his essays there's about a 90% chance that what he's saying is complete and utter bollocks. It will look just fine to most Edwardian Narrativists, but to anyone who actually finds Threefold simulationism appealing, it's almost certainly going to look like codswallop.

One of the weirdest thing to me, then, about the "redefinition" of railroading, is that these sorts of character-driven games- in which it is the GM's job not to build a sandbox in which the PCs wander around, but to cut straight to the chase by introducing situations into the game that speak to the attributes and relationships the player has built into his/her PC - get redescribed as railroads. Whether or not this is condescending, it's just radical misdescription.

Providing an adventure hook isn't railroading by anyone's definition. It's the point where the GM insists that the PCs take the adventure hook that railroading occurs.

One of the skills that a sandbox GM needs to develop is the capability to predict what the PCs are likely to do. These predictions aren't made in order to pre-write the script, but they are useful in guiding the GM's prep time. (Since no mortal man can prep every single detail in the game world.)

And there's a pretty simple trick to mastering this skill: Ask the players what they're planning to do and what they're interested in.

In the case of the systems you describe, these questions are formalized into the game itself. And that's incredibly useful.

To sum up: Catering to the players' taste isn't a railroad.

 

[pemerton]

I think Edwards is excluding the middle here while playing a bit of a shell game.

(1) Let's postulate that the players are, in fact, capable of identifying what they would like to be doing.

(2) Ergo, when I ask them, "What are your characters doing?" They will respond with an action which they believe will let them do what they want to be doing.

(3) If I, as a GM, don't understand why they're doing action X, then we may fall into "faffing about". This is a dilemma. But it's a dilemma which is incredibly trivial to resolve when the GM says, "Why are you doing that? What are you trying to accomplish?"

Ta-da. Problem solved.

Often. But nevertheless I have had the problem in my own GMing. It comes about when the answer to "why are you doing that" is a bit more metagamey - more about the players' desires than their PCs' desires - and a bit more abstract. An approach to gameplay that is hostile to metagaming (which characterises a lot of RPG stuff from at least the mid-80s on, including D&D stuff both from TSR and in Dragon magzine), and that emphasises the purity of the ingame situation, can make posing this question, let alone answering it, hard - at least in my experience, this is sometimes the case.

In other words, I haven't been tricked by Edwards. At least for me, he's helped diagnose something that I've actually experienced. Would I have remedied it anyway without the diagnosis? - Maybe, but I think the diagnosis helped.

The other potential source of "faffing about" would be insisting on minute simulation of intermediary steps. For example, the next point of interest in the campaign is attending a carnival in six weeks. But the GM insists on running the players through every intermediary day.

But that's just bad GMing. If you're interested in simulationism then the correct solution is zoom out to a more abstract resolution of those intermediary days. Nobody roleplays every single moment of every single day in the exact same amount of detail; so it's a bit of a strawman to suggest that the desire to do so is a problem that can only be resolved by abandoning simulationism.

In my experience this can depend a bit on the game in question. For example, if the game has an ongoing scenario in which time pressures (even mild ones) are in play and/or a detailed gameworld in which the players are highly invested, and has detailed rules for action resolution based on daily resources (eg magical power points, non-instantaneous healing) together with an expectation that all parts of the gameworld, including NPCs, are acting under the constraints of these same action resolution mechanics, then despite all the goodwill in the world from players and GM pressures can arise to go more granular than anyone really wants. The pressures are the result of a shared view that anything less granular is in a certain sense "cheating", not allowing the action resolution mechanics to do there thing and really tell us what is happening in the gameworld.

Rolemaster is a particularly egregious example here, but I think that D&D - especially 1st ed AD&D or 3E - can, at least at certain tables - namely, the purist-for-system ones - fall prey to the same problems.

One way to overcome the problem is obviously to suspend those purist-for-system inclinations and do some handwaving instead. This gives a fair bit of power to the GM, if we assume - as a general rule - that the GM has the ultimate say over whether or not the action resolution mechancis get temporarily suspended and hands get waved instead. Too much of this and railroading or adversarial GMing can threaten. But in a group with a robust shared understanding of the sort of game they want, it should be fine.

Another way to overcome the problem is to build various sorts of limits on the action resolution mechanics into the rules. I'm coming to favour this only because it makes my life as a GM easier - it's not that my group doesn't trust me (we've been playing together for a long time), but solid mechanics save me having to think about things!

Providing an adventure hook isn't railroading by anyone's definition. It's the point where the GM insists that the PCs take the adventure hook that railroading occurs.

One of the skills that a sandbox GM needs to develop is the capability to predict what the PCs are likely to do. These predictions aren't made in order to pre-write the script, but they are useful in guiding the GM's prep time. (Since no mortal man can prep every single detail in the game world.)

And there's a pretty simple trick to mastering this skill: Ask the players what they're planning to do and what they're interested in.

In the case of the systems you describe, these questions are formalized into the game itself. And that's incredibly useful.

I think it's that formalisation into the game that some people seem to regard as suspect.

 

[pemerton]

Tangentially, Edwards had an incredibly poor understanding/appreciation of simulationism in the Threefold Model. In addition, when he formed the GDS he hyper-focused on the small slice of Threefold's dramatism that he personally liked, labeled that small slice Narrativism, and then shoved the rest of dramatism into simulationism. The result is, predictably, a complete mess.

This means that whenever Edwards starts talking about simulationism in one of his essays there's about a 90% chance that what he's saying is complete and utter bollocks. It will look just fine to most Edwardian Narrativists, but to anyone who actually finds Threefold simulationism appealing, it's almost certainly going to look like codswallop.

What he says about simulationism made sense to me when I was a purist-for-system simulationist (Rolemaster, to be precise). And in my view the way that discussions go on the ICE boards is strongly confirmatory of Edwards' account of purist-for-system play and game design (eg the notion that one might pay build points to cement a piece of equipment, or a social status attained in game, is utterly anathema to the posters on those boards, just as it was to me when I was a hardcore purist-for-system player).

I've experienced what Edwards classifies as High Concept simulationism - enjoyably at convention one-shots (especially Chaosium based games), without much enjoyment at other convention one-shots and in longer-term play - but have never really set out to run a game that way myself, and have no desire to.

I don't think there's anything particularly compelling about running together purist-for-system and high-concept simulationism. At least for me, they're pretty different play experiences. Edwards takes them to be unified by having "exploration" as a priority, but what is being explored is pretty different in each case (system and its implementation of ingame causality in purist-for-system, a genre or thematic package in high concept). In my view this is an attempt to find theoretical unity where there is no pressing need to. I'm not sure that it therefore undermines particular comments about the experience of playing particular games. (My play preferences may be similar enough to Edwards' to mean that we are both victims of the same blindness, but I don't think so - I can't imagine him being interested in 4e, for instance, whereas at present it's my game of choice.)

But I do think there is something compelling about distinguishing high-concept play from Edwardian narrativism - and this is the real point of Edwards' classifactory scheme. Edwards wants to use this distinction to attack Vampire, Lo5R and similar games with which I've only got a pretty passing familiarity. But again, my agreement with Edwards on this point is based on my own play experience - it's all about where the thematic material comes from. If it's pre-packaged - high-concept. If it's injected by the players in the course of play - narrativism. I've played both sorts of games, can spot the difference pretty easily (alignment and personality mechanics can be one pretty clear indicator), and know which I prefer. And I like a classificatory scheme that can capture this contrast, as Edwards' does.

Of course, others who don't object so strongly to on-going high-concept play may not want to draw the line so sharply!

 

[Doug McCrae]

But I do think there is something compelling about distinguishing high-concept play from Edwardian narrativism - and this is the real point of Edwards' classifactory scheme. Edwards wants to use this distinction to attack Vampire, Lo5R and similar games with which I've only got a pretty passing familiarity.

I got the impression that Ron Edward's nar/sim distinction was informed by some very bad experiences with Vampire. 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.

 

[Doug McCrae]

In typical D&D play plot authority and scene-setting authority blend together, however, because the action-resolution mechanics are so open-ended - the mechanics are mostly task-resolution, and the players are always allowed to have their PCs attempt a task. And conversely, the official rules have very little to say about how we might move from one episode to another other than by the players describing the tasks that their PCs undertake.

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

I don't want to be too forward in analysing sessions of play that you participated in and I didn't - but in the first, it seems to me that what was at stake was not only beating the bad guy, but succeeding in expressing your PC in a way that made her look heroic rather than useless.

Whereas in the second scenario, you are forced to play out your PCs failures in a way that doesn't at all express your conception of your PC.

In both scenes, the outcome was predetermined. Each GM used different tools to get to the ending he wanted, but I don't think that was important. What I saw as important in making one good and the other bad was the GM's reasons for doing so. The first GM wanted a satisfying story, the second (I think, I could be wrong, as I never asked him) wanted the PCs to experience failure.

Otoh one could see a major failure by the heroes as part of a satisfying story. The middle section where the protagonist experiences setback. A different player might have found the Fall of Atlantis to be good railroading, leading to some fun angst, soul-searching and the like. Some people love that stuff, and it's very much in the X-Men style (a big influence on the second GM).

In the actual game, I think all the players pretty much just ignored it, or came up with reasons why their PCs wouldn't care that much. Rather implausible, but I think it's pretty clear the players didn't want to deal with the realistic psychological consequences of something like that.

Mind you it's asking a lot for the players to have what I think were the desired responses, when the setup was so, in my view, contrived and unlikely. If anything it would be more reasonable to suspect that the whole thing was an illusion and that a Mysterio-type was behind it. Maybe that would've been passive-aggressive. Or really cool, if the GM had run with it.

Also, Golden Heroes, the system we were using, actually gives you combat penalties for being angst-ridden, and bennies for being really pleased with yourself. Now I come to think of it, that was probably not an insignificant factor.