Why I Dislike the term Railroading

[evileeyore]

And the "should" and the "trying" here are both game and group relative.

But railroading is not. Liking and not liking and the degrees of investment in the rails is group relative

Has the GM cheated?

Cheating is also a tool. Neither good nor bad.

This is illusionism at best (if the players don't know because they choose to be deceived) and railroading - or, if you prefer, cheating - at worst.

On no. It was railroading the whole way.

None of that is inherently here or there in the context where 'linearity' counts. There are eight million stories in the naked city, each one in the event 'linear', and that is one of them.

So? You have anything to add or subtract from what I said or are you just admiring your own voice?

When the DM decides that this is "the" NPC business to which the players "must" pay attention, then that's a pretty significant step. It establishes the motive for getting pushy. The DM now has a way to get, and so faces the possibility of not getting his way if he just stands back and lets the players play.

Correct. If the DM forces the Players to take the hook that's dangled, it's a railroad. If not, it isn't.

Simple.

Wait... So the PCs would be fully capable of hypothetically freeing the prisoners on Day 1 and stop the Evil Vizier from transporting them to Sunburst Vale? (Perhaps forcing him to kidnap more victims on Day 3, and similarly postponing the rest of his plans unless they catch him first.)

Sure. I'm all about that.

Indeed I might even have set it up so the characters have the resources to foil all the kidnappings and deal with the Vizier before he can bring forth the Aithar Ghosts.

Or not. Depends on which genre I'm running, how much my players wanted to invest in the rails, etc.

I'm confused. Where, exactly, is the linearity in that design? To my eyes you appear to be describing a non-linear scenario. That's not a plot, it's a situation.

You know what, I think your right. I was tired and I'm probably arguing the Sandbox/Railroad styles and using Non-Linear plot pacing to describe the Sandbox style.

Eh. It's what I prefer to run so I tend to use "linear" when events fall in a "should occur in this order" and "non-linear" to describe "can occur in whatever order".

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.

Yup.

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

Why not? If the players prefer to ride the rails, why isn't that a railroad?

I know what your saying, I'm just pointing out, using the tool doesnot automatically make the game bad. It's the how much the players like being railroaded and the skill to which the DM guides the game. Too little of either (enjoyment and skill) lead to the term becoming a curse instead of a blessing.



Let's be clear: I like having some rails. Too much freedom to faff about has lead to every "sandbox" campaign I've been in falling apart.

 

[Reynard]

My preference is actually to wind back the problematic game elements. Only put elements into the game that promote, rather than detract from, the desired play experience. Doing it this way also reduces the sense of player vs GM sparring which ingame nerfs tend to lead to.

Ah, see, that player vs GM sparring is a feature from my perspective. having players think "outside the box" and surprise me is a great pleasure, and the occassional "Gotcha!" on my part can be a lot of fun for everyone involved.

YMMV, of course.

 

[ExploderWizard]

So, essentially, you're okay with railroading the cultists who both possess the power to blow up the world, and the desire for it?

-O

Who is playing the cultists and decides what their capabilities and desires are?

The DM most likely.

OMG! The DM is railroading himself. Yikes!

 

[Zhaleskra]

I wrote an outline of an adventure once. Hell, it's not an adventure it's a situation. Rather than only one right answer, it only has one wrong answer. The PCs are free to do whatever they want, but the consequences for choosing the One Wrong Answer is a TPK.

 

[Desdichado]

Sure, that's fine -- if y'all will just publish an ENWorldese lexicon.

It's a bit of a drag having to learn that an 'adventure' is now basically opposed to what an adventure used to be in D&D, and the myriad other conventions. It's a really big drag that 'sandbox', contrived as a politically correct way to refer to what 'campaign' formerly meant, has been lynched and strangled into uselessness.

Come on, guys. Either give a term you will accept, or let it be. Trying to silence discourse you don't like by stealing the language is dirty pool.

The really fraught disagreement is from and among people whose interest clearly is in keeping up the arguments over words. They can be disagreeable from here to eternity with scarcely any effort.

Meanwhile, those of us trying to accommodate them just get railroaded into weariness and disgust.

Surely you're posting this in an attempt to be ironic, right?

 

[Piratecat]

Enough bickering, folks. See my notes on the previous pages and PM me with any questions.

 

[Hussar]

Interesting stuff.

I'm not sure if the whole "Linear Adventure" without railroading was answered fully or not, so I'll chip in a bit.

Someone brought up Tomb of Horrors:

There's a perfect example. The encounters all pretty much follow one after the next. Until you solve X encounter, you cannot move on to Y encounter. Until you find the secret door in the pit in the first room, you don't get to move on, for example. The few branches you get are almost all dead ends (in more ways than one. )

Other examples:

The players decide to form a caravan to transport goods from City A to City B. The route from A to B is pretty much pre-determined, after all, you can't take wagons cross country and there's a ford in the river to contend with as well. Geography dictates a linear adventure. A good example of this would be the Sea Wyvern's Wake from the Savage Tide adventure path where the PC's are hired to transport goods from Sasserine to Farshore by ship.

Mystery style adventures are likely going to be fairly linear. You need to find clue X that will lead you to Clue Y and so one and so forth. While the clues might come in a fairly random order, you need to find enough clues to lead you to the next step and, unless you get very lucky, you cannot skip steps.

Note, they don't have to be this way, but, this is a fairly standard mystery form.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Free booze and strippers will be present at the session to add to the atmosphere. I doubt that I would have any complaints but that that wouldn't make it any less of a railroad.

Sadly, at least one of my players would complain.

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.

I must disagree here. Adventure Paths offer a framework that a good DM can use to allow the players freedom of choice. The Paths set out a series of events that happen within the game world. How the PCs react to the events is entirely up to them. Many of the good Paizo APs even give advice for players choosing courses of action that weren't anticipated.

[sblock=Example from Rise of the Runelords]We agreed upon the setting of Golarion as a group. We also agree as a group that we would like to play a heroic campign, so all characters are required to be non-evil. To give the players a starting focal point I asked them to explain why their character was attending the rededication festival for the newly completed Sandpoint Temple. Each player had varied reasons why their character was attending.

Goblins attack the festival. The party helps fight the goblins and saves the town from major death and structural damage. From this point the characters are not required to do anything. The Path assumes the characters will investigate why the goblins attacked and lays out what various townsfolk know, what was happening while the PCs were fighting, who is behind the attack, and what their motivations are. How the characters approach the events that are occuring is entirely in their hands.

The one option that isn't covered in the scope of the Path is the characters walking away. Maybe they decide they don't want to deal with murderous goblins and leave the next morning for the city of Magnimar. The adventure leaves me unprepared at this point, but by no means does the adventure even hint that in this instance I should railroad the party back on track with the goblin problem. I would just have to wing it at that point until I could better prepare for the PCs new direction and their inaction against the goblins may have reprecussions on the setting if I determine it's unlikely that local NPCs could not handle the problem - which is a likely decision since we agreed upon a heroic campaign, which to me carries more weight than just the choice of alignment.[/sblock]

 

[ExploderWizard]

Interesting stuff.

I'm not sure if the whole "Linear Adventure" without railroading was answered fully or not, so I'll chip in a bit.

Someone brought up Tomb of Horrors:

There's a perfect example. The encounters all pretty much follow one after the next. Until you solve X encounter, you cannot move on to Y encounter. Until you find the secret door in the pit in the first room, you don't get to move on, for example. The few branches you get are almost all dead ends (in more ways than one. )

Other examples:

The players decide to form a caravan to transport goods from City A to City B. The route from A to B is pretty much pre-determined, after all, you can't take wagons cross country and there's a ford in the river to contend with as well. Geography dictates a linear adventure. A good example of this would be the Sea Wyvern's Wake from the Savage Tide adventure path where the PC's are hired to transport goods from Sasserine to Farshore by ship.

While both are fairly linear, once again only due to geographic channeling. This is a feature of a limited setting rather than a linear scenario.

Mystery style adventures are likely going to be fairly linear. You need to find clue X that will lead you to Clue Y and so one and so forth. While the clues might come in a fairly random order, you need to find enough clues to lead you to the next step and, unless you get very lucky, you cannot skip steps.

Note, they don't have to be this way, but, this is a fairly standard mystery form.

OK. Now we are talking scenarios. In a mystery situation the players begin with something to solve and some introductory information to start the investigation. This could be linear if the mystery has only a single way to solve it by following a prescribed trail of breadcrumbs-but that would also make it a railroad. If the mystery can be solved in a number of ways through a variety of approaches then it is neither linear nor a railroad.

"Linear adventure" gets tossed around a lot for something that there are so few great examples of.

 

[Beginning of the End]

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.

Good point. I probably couldn't have articulated my own position if it wasn't for my exposure to Threefold theory, and without that self-awareness I might not be so cognizant of the problem myself. And awareness is the first step towards correcting problems.

My point is that, if this is a problem, abandoning simulationism isn't the only solution. There are solutions consistent with simulationism which will resolve the issue.

OTOH, I also want to clarify something: It's only bad GMing because the group doesn't like that sort of thing. If the group is specifically interested in dealing with the day-to-day grind of their characters (and enjoys doing that), then focusing on that day-to-day grind isn't problematic.

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.

Which I think is a fair assessment. The original World of Darkness rulebooks all claimed a revolution without actually revolutionizing anything. (It's as if I vowed to overthrow the capitalist system by creating an economic system in which people could buy corporate stocks on an open market.) And it was even more problematic to preach storytelling as the One True Way of Gaming when the people preaching it didn't really have a clear understanding of how to achieve Story even in non-systemic ways.

The World of Darkness in the '90s created a generation of dysfunctional railroaders. And when the railroad methodologies of the gaming table got applied by to the ongoing design of the game world itself we ended up with even more dysfunction. I'm not sure the term "metaplot" is ever going to recover, which is unfortunate because properly executed metaplot can be pretty awesome.

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

Say that the player wants to achieve goal X.

Task-resolution systems allow the player to propose various actions which they think will help them to achieve X. Each action is resolved independently and the system tells you whether or not each action is successful. What the mechanics don't tell you is whether or not the completion of the action has any impact on achieving goal X.

Conflict-resolution systems, OTOH, tell you whether or not the character succeeds at achieving goal X.

Wushu is a pure conflict-resolution system: You resolve your success or failure in the scene at hand based on the amount of description you provide to the scene. That description may have absolutely nothing to do with the actions the character actually takes to achieve goal X.

4th Edition skill challenges attempt to wed a conflict-resolution system with a task-resolution system: It resolves individual actions and then tallies them up towards determining whether or not a particular task is successful.

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

Why not? If the players prefer to ride the rails, why isn't that a railroad?

Okay, first: The context of my original post makes it pretty damn clear that the taste I'm talking about isn't the taste for railroading.

Second, sure. If the PCs like railroads and you're railroading them, that's still railroading. But this isn't railroading:

Players: We'd like to fight some goblins.
GM: Cool. Some goblins show up.
Players: We fight them.
And they do.

At no point in that sequence of events has the GM negated player choice in order to enforce a predetermined outcome.

Let's be clear: I like having some rails. Too much freedom to faff about has lead to every "sandbox" campaign I've been in falling apart.

I think that's a false dilemma. The definition of a sandbox isn't "don't provide anything interesting for the players to do". It's certainly possible to design a sandbox like that, but it's just as possible for you to railroad the players into cleaning their socks.