Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.
Note, however, that both parts of this equation are important: The choice must be negated and the reason it’s being negated is because the GM is trying to create a specific outcome. The players must try to get off the train and the GM has to lock the doors.
A simple failure to achieve a desired outcome is not railroading: If the doors are unlocked, but the players can’t figure out how the door handles work that’s not railroading. For example, a player might want to hit an ogre with his sword. If he fails his attack roll, that’s not railroading. (If the GM secretly changes the ogre’s AC so that the PC misses, that’s railroading.) If the PC tries to break down an adamantine door with a fluffy pillow, that’s still not railroading even if the GM says they have no chance of success.
It’s also not railroading if the GM has a preconceived outcome, but doesn’t negate player choices in order to make it happen. As an extreme example, consider a campaign where the PCs are FBI agents in New York during World War II. On May 2nd, 1945, the newspaper headlines declare that Adolf Hitler died on April 30th. The GM, of course, knew that Hitler was going to die on April 30th long before it happened, but the newspaper headlines are not railroading the PCs.
The same remains true on a more intimate level: The GM might make a note that the beautiful dame Jane Adams is going to contact one of the FBI agents on May 15th with information about a KGB operation targeting Manhattan Project scientists. Unless the PC deliberately goes into hiding for some reason, it’s still not railroading when Jane Adams shows up.
Finally, choices having consequences is also not railroading. If a PC punches somebody in the nose and then they punch the PC back, that’s not railroading. If a player says, “I’m going to hop on I-94 and drive from Minneapolis to Chicago.” Then it’s not railroading when the GM says, “Along the way, you pass through Eau Claire.”
In fact, choices having consequences is the exact opposite of a railroad. Railroading makes a choice meaningless. Consequences make a choice meaningful.
(Of course, not every consequence is a negative one: If the PCs piss off the Red Dragon Gang, the gang might retaliate. But it’s also possible that the PCs might be given a medal by the mayor who also asks them to do a favor for him. Or they might be contacted by the Red Dragon Gang’s rivals who want to hire them as enforcers. And so forth. None of that is railroading.)
RAILROAD BY DESIGN
Railroading, in the purest sense of the term, is something that happens at the gaming table: It is the precise moment at which the GM negates a player’s choice.
In practice, of course, the term has bled over into scenario prep. We talk about “railroaded adventures” all the time, by which we generally mean linear scenarios which are designed around the assumption that the PCs will make specific choices at specific points in order to reach the next part of the scenario. If the PCs don’t make those choices, then the GM has to railroad them in order to continue using the scenario as it was designed.
However, not all linear design was created equal. And it’s not really accurate to describe all linear scenario design as being a “railroad”.
Linear scenarios are built around a predetermined sequence of events and/or outcomes.
Consider a simple mystery:
Scene 1: The PCs come home and discover that their house has been broken into and an arcane relic stolen from their safe. They need to figure out who did it, which they can do by analyzing fingerprints, looking at their neighbor’s surveillance camera, asking questions around town to see who took the job, or casting a divination spell.
Scene 2: Having discovered that Jimmy “Fast-Fingers” Hall was responsible for the break-in, the PCs track him down. They need to figure out who hired him, which they can do by interrogating him, following him, analyzing his bank statements to figure out who paid him, or hacking his e-mail.
Scene 3: Having discovered that Bobby Churchill, a local mob boss, was the guy who hired Jimmy, the PCs need to get their relic back. They can do that by beating Bobby up, agreeing to do a job for him, or staging a covert heist to get it out of his vault.
That’s a fairly linear scenario: House to Jimmy to Bobby. But because we used the Three Clue Rule to provide a multitude of paths from one event to the next, it’s very unlikely that a GM running this scenario will need to railroad his players. The sequence of events is predetermined, but the outcome of each scene is not.
Non-linear scenarios do not require specific outcomes or events, allowing freedom of player choice.
Linear scenario design and non-linear scenario design exist on a spectrum. Generally speaking, requiring specific events (“you meet an ogre in the woods”) is less restrictive than requiring specific outcomes (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him”). And the more specific the outcome required, the more likely it is that the GM will have to railroad the players to make it happen (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him and the killing blow has to be delivered by the Rose Spear of Vallundria so that the ogre’s ghost can come back and serve the PC at the Black Gates of Goblin Doom”).
With that being said, it’s often quite trivial for an experienced GM to safely assume that a specific event or outcome is going to happen. For example, if a typical group of heroic PCs are riding along a road and they see a young boy being chased by goblins it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they’ll take action to rescue the boy. The more likely a particular outcome is, the more secure you are in simply assuming that it will happen. That doesn’t mean your scenario is railroaded, it just means you’re engaging in smart prep.
My point here is that you can’t let fear of a potential railroad make you throw away your common sense when it comes to prioritizing your prep. This, by the way, leads to one of the most potent tools in the GM’s arsenal:
What are you planning to do next session?
It’s a simple question, but the answer obviously gives you certainty. It lets you focus your prep with extreme accuracy because you can make very specific predictions about what your players are going to do and those predictions will also be incredibly likely to happen.
Where you get into trouble is when your scenario expects something which is both very specific and also very unlikely.
For example, in the Witchfire Trilogy from Privateer Press, there’s a moment where the PCs have all the information necessary to realize that a specific NPC is the bad guy they’ve been looking for. This makes it incredibly likely that the PCs will simply confront the bad guy. The author doesn’t want that, though: He wants the PCs to put her under surveillance and trail her back to her secret hideout. So he throws up a bunch of painfully contrived roadblocks in an effort to stop the PCs from doing the thing they are nevertheless overwhelmingly likely to do. (So You Want to Write a Railroad? is an almost endless litany of even more egregious design failures from another published scenario.)
THE RAILROAD EXCUSES
Another way of thinking about this is that the more specific and unlikely the necessary outcome, the more fragile your scenario becomes: It will break if the PCs deviate even slightly from your predetermined sequence. Once the scenario breaks, you’ll have to resort to railroading in order to fix it. This is why I often refer to railroading as a broken technique seeking to fix a broken scenario.
It’s fairly typical, for example, to hear someone say, “I only railroad my players if it’s really important.” And when you delve a little deeper, you virtually always discover that “really important” is a synonym for the GM making sure their predetermined outcome happens. These are literally people saying that they need to railroad because they designed a railroad.
Another common rationalization for railroading is that GMs have to use it in order to keep problem players in line. However, if your relationship with your players is that they’re naughty children who are testing their limits and you’re a parental figure that somehow needs to keep them in line, then your relationship with your players is fundamentally broken. More generally, what you’re talking about are issues outside of the game. Attempting to handle those issues with in-game behavior modifications is simply dysfunctional. It’s no different than if a player at your table was cheating or if they poured a drink over the head of another player: These are all problems which require intercession. But none of them are going to be solved through railroading.
One specific example of this is often cited as an exception, however: Behavior which is deliberately disruptive through the agency of the game world. For example, the guy who tries to assassinate the king when the PCs are called in for an audience. Ultimately, however, this example only cycles back to the previous two: Either the guy involved is a jackass (which is a problem that needs to be solved outside of the game) or this is really only a “problem” insofar as it disrupts your preconceived notion of how the royal audience was supposed to play out (which means we’ve arrived back at “I need to railroad them in order to maintain my railroad”).
(Note, too, how often these “problems” can quickly be solved by having the game world respond naturally to the circumstances: Crazy McGee has just assassinated the king. What happens next? Well, the king’s guard is going to try to arrest them. If they escape, there’s going to be a manhunt. Then there’s going to be a power struggle to fill the vacuum. The other PCs need to decide whether to help hunt down their former comrade or help him escape. There may be a rebel group who concludes that the PCs are on their side because of the assassination. And so forth. That all sounds like interesting stuff.)
Nobody minds the railroad if the destination is Awesome Town!
The theory here is that if you offer a big enough carrot, nobody will mind being hit by the stick a few times.
There’s a fair amount of truth to that, but what always strikes me about this popular meme is the extraordinary amount of hubris it demonstrates. See, any time that a player chooses to do something, that implicitly means that it’s something that they want. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they should automatically succeed at everything they attempt, but if you’re artificially negating their choice in order to enforce your preconceived outcome, what you’re saying is, “I know what you want better than you do.”
Which might be true. But I’m willing to bet that 99 times out of 100, it isn’t.
The railroad creates specific situations. The goal is to see how the PCs react to those specific situations.
This is a more nuanced and deliberate application of railroading techniques. The idea is that the choices you’re interested in are those made in specific moments. The methods by which individual moments are reached are of less interest, and, in fact, it’s more important to create specific moments of particular effectiveness than it is to enable choice outside of those moments. You’re basically stripping out the strategic choices of the players in order to create intense tactical experiences.
In practice, however, railroads warp the decision-making process of the players. When you systematically strip meaningful choice from them, they stop making choices and instead start looking for the railroad tracks.
So railroading PCs into a situation to see what choice they’ll make doesn’t actually work: Having robbed them of free agency in order to get them there, you’ve fundamentally altered the dynamic of the situation itself. You’ll no longer see what their reaction is; you’ll only see what they think you want their reaction to be.
I suspect that GMs who habitually railroad have difficulty seeing this warping of the decision-making process because it’s the only thing they’re used to. But it becomes glaringly obvious whenever I get the players they’ve screwed up: Nothing is more incoherent than a player trying to figure out where the railroad is when there’s no railroad to be found.
For example, I had a group who spent all their time trying to figure out which NPC was the GM NPC they were supposed to be following around because that was the method their last GM had used to lead them around by the nose. Since the scenario I was running for them revolved around a conspiracy with multiple factions who were all more than happy to use the PCs to achieve their own agendas the result was… bizarre. (Unfortunately, I only figured out what had gone so horribly wrong in the postmortem.)
Of course, it gets even more obvious once the players start demonstrating Abused Gamer Syndrome.
Go to Part 2: Methods of the Railroad
THE RAILROADING MANIFESTO
Part 2: Methods of the Railroad
Part 3: Penumbra of Problems
Part 4: Chokers
Part 5: More Chokers
Addendum: Random Railroads
Addendum: I Want To Be Railroaded
Abused Gamer Syndrome
How a Railroad Works
Speaking about excuses, what about “This DM just totally sucks at improvisation, so going off the rails results in a crappy game until he’s had time to re-prepare?”
Check out GM Improvisation 101. A good quote from it:
“A lot of times when I hear gamers talk about improvising, it’s spoken of like it’s this super amazing skill that is rare and difficult – like Bruce Lee’s 1 inch punch or something. But here’s the thing: it’s only difficult because most rpg advice for GMs is the exact opposite of improvisation.”
You might also find Don’t Prep Plots useful.
I’ll be honest, I’d like to hear the story about the group that expected there to be a GM NPC. It sounds interesting, in a “gawking at the car crash” sort of way.
Some of that does look useful, although this bit does not bode well:
“If you were playing a Batman game, could you take 5 minutes and simply make up a dastardly plan for the Joker? Sure. You get what kind of problems the Joker creates. You can probably make up Joker action and reactions on the spot. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it’s easy enough to come up with something.”
No. I don’t understand the Joker – I have no idea what he would want, or how he would go about achieving it.
I could probably mine old issues for ideas, but that’d be the exact opposite of improvising.
@Brendan: Bumbling in Freeport. Meant to include a link to that, actually.
@AMX: I actually had the same reaction to that bit about the Joker! I’d feel pretty comfortable playing him from moment-to-moment, but actually concocting one of his schemes is not something I’d generally want to attempt on the fly. (If I absolutely needed to, you could certainly boil a fair portion of his schemes down to “poison X with Joker gas”. Filling in an arbitrary value for X is relatively easy; the problem I’d have is coming up with a scheme that would feel uniquely Joker-ish to accomplish that.)
What I think that really means is that the Joker is not a great Source of Problems for you and me.
This comes back to a concept I’ve referred to in the past as smart prep: You want to create a toolbox of stuff that you can play in the moment (the same way that the players are playing their characters). That step is pretty similar to the Source of Problems concept. Then you want to focus your prep on stuff that can’t be reliably improvised during play while adding a high value to play.
What constitutes “can’t be reliably improvised during play” will vary from GM to GM and also from system to system. One example that’s pretty universally true, though, would be an awesome prop or handout.
The other thing to consider is that improvisation is a skill. And, like any skill, it can be practiced. For example, you could take a city supplement like San Angelo: City of Heroes, flip through it select a random location, and then use the “poison X with Joker Gas” construction to give you the seed of the Joker’s scheme. Then see if you can spin off 4-5 cool or twisted or ironic ways that the Joker could do that in under 2 minutes. (It’ll be useful to think about why the Joker wants to poison this target.)
Your comments about the Joker made me think about the difficulty of playing the “mad genius” villain, which in turn made me think about some advice about playing genius villains. I don’t recall what supplement it was, but I think it was either a Dragon Magazine towards the end of its run at TSR or the Eye Tyrant Book. The gist of the advice was that while a DM during preparation may not be a genius and may not anticipate the PC’s plans, the genius villain would do so. The DM, therefore, could retroactively hold that the villain had prepared the right counter to some or all of the PC’s plans, because the villain anticipated them.
It struck my young self at the time that players would not like that one bit. This advice may not fit perfectly with your definition above, as it is not forcing a preordained outcome (the PCs may still win the fight), but it still smacks of railroading.
I am curious, however, if you have any other thoughts on playing genius villains – those with Intelligences so high and experience so deep that a DM couldn’t possibly match them.
I actually thought I’d written a bit about this here at the Alexandrian in the past, but apparently my memory is playing tricks on me.
What I’ve generally concluded over the years is that players are rarely if ever disappointed when they find an Achilles’ heel to the villain’s plan, whether I intended for that weakness to exist or not. So I generally just let them succeed.
In situations where that’s less than satisfactory, I find the “retcon planning” solution to be your best bet. But I’d temper it one of two ways:
First, generally default to the response to the PCs’ plan be an obstacle to their plan and not a complete impediment. For example, if they decide to go into the sewers under the bad guy’s base and use a spell to drill up into the base, then the bad guy’s anticipation of that possibility is to put a bunch of guards in the sewer (which the PCs can defeat) or an alarm spell (which they might be able to detect and disable).
Second, filter it through a mechanic. How clever is the idea that the players have come up with? Set a DC accordingly and then make an Intelligence check for the bad guy. In Numenera I might have the PCs make an Intellect test opposed by the bad guy’s level (“Did they outwit him?”) and then use a GM intrusion to instantiate his precautions if the check failed.
Use the two in combination and you’re probably golden.
That article on “abused gamer syndrome” starts off by defining Killer DM as one who “wont do anything to prevent PC death”…
: /
Lost me with that.
[…] Alexandrian has been writing (a lot) about railroading over the last weeks and I read an older article by the Angry DM from a couple of years back a few […]
[…] for the players to intervene in the course of events in meaningful ways, or you risk running a railroad on […]
About the “railroad creates specific situations”, I read somewhere (can’t remember where; maybe it was a post here http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?168563-Dungeon-layout-map-flow-and-old-school-game-design) that if this is what you want to do, the GM should just quickly describe the stuff happening between those interesting scenes to the players, and then drop them in the situation before asking “ok, what do you do”. This way, it’s clear when the players have agency, and clear what the game is about.
I think the example was for a series of combat encounters that happen in a linear dungeon; some people were saying that a super linear dungeon was a good way to set up cool combat encounters. Someone else said that at this point, the map is not even needed : at the end of an encounter, if the players decide to go on, just describe the PCs walking in tunnels and whatnot instead of make them go through the motions. It saves time, and if the game you want to play is tactical combat, this way you get more of what you want in a single session.
It could be taken as some kind of reductio ad absurdum, but to me, that’s a perfectly valid way to play. Of course, if you play like that, the illusion of player agency between combat encounters is broken. I’m under the impression that GMs (and maybe even players) that actually enjoy this kind of game still want to keep this illusion alive.
I just had an interesting conversation with someone saying that railroading is necessary to have a meaningful campaign. He was basically saying “I need to railroad the players to be hooked to an adventure, and then stop the railroad”.
It then hit me : people like that are under a “prep paradigm” antithetical to what you are saying here. To them, prepping means a GM prepare stuff to which players will react in game; so it’s “PCs-react-to-prep”. The paradigm you are working under is pretty much the exact opposite : GMs need to prep stuff mostly in reaction to what the players do and want to do, a “Prep-react-to-PCs” paradigm, if you will. (To be more exact, it should be “Prep-as-a-tool-for-the-GM-to-react-to-PCs”, but let’s put that aside for now.)
In retrospect, a lot of the things he said make perfect sense *if* you think of prep as something to which players must react, instead of the other way around. “Why would the PC go in that terribly dangerous place? Why would they attack those clearly superior forces? Why would they help those poor people? Why would they care about the bad guy? I need to railroad them to the adventure, or else they’ll bumble aimlessly from one place to another, maybe having unrelated adventures instead of an epic story!” Under the PC-react-to-prep, you must make sure the PC will be in situation where they can react accordingly; under a Prep-react-to-prep, we ask “Why would you prep an adventure unrelated to the PCs in the first place?”
That paradigm also work at the micro-level. I designed a trap, a combat encounter, a roleplaying encounter, a skill encounter, etc. So I must railroad my players to put them in a situation where they can react accordingly.
My hunch is that paradigm explains in part why so many adventures involve a terrible and powerful big bad evil guy having a plan to basically end the world. That way, players don’t have much of a choice : either they try to foil his plans, or the world ends. It’s a motivation that facilitates the railroad. Same with the uber-powerful NPCs : you listen to them and do as they ask, or they kill you. This also explains why giving useful, actionable informations or powerful tools to PCs is frowned upon, or sometimes thought as game-breaking : once they have all this, it’s easier to be proactive instead of reacive, so harder to railroad. Part of the difficulty of high-level PCs is probably that : it gets harder and harder to railroad PCs once they have access to powerful teleportation, mind-reading and divination spells.
Come to think of it, many campaings must look in retrospect like this : A happened, so the PCs did x. But then B happened, so they did y. And then C happened… and so on and so forth. Under the Prep-react-to-PC, it should read like that : the campaign started with situation x, and the PCs actions lead to situation A; then the PCs actions led to situation B; then the PCs actions led to C; etc.
A lot of “railroad excuses” dissolve once we change the paradigm. At least, most become at least understandable and reasonable under the assumptions from the paradigm “PC-react-to-prep” instead of “Prep-react-to-PC”.
I need a powerful analogy or metaphor to make my point. Don’t plan a game like you would prep a family vacation to Disneyland, plan it like you would prepare for a zombie apocalypse. Don’t plan a game like you would write a speech, but like you would prepare for an interview (as the interviewee). Don’t plan a recipe, but stock on ingredients. Maybe you can come up with better ones, Justin 😉
(Of course, as I said in the beginning, prep is not only made in reaction to players : you need to prep at least some situations before the PCs act. That’s especially true before the first session; but once the game is started most of it, say 90%, should still be made in reaction to the PCs, and should be prepped as a tool to react to whatever the PC do or don’t do.)
(I’ll also add that this paradigm shift is not absolutely needed : if a group actually want to play, say, tactical combats strung together by a plot given by the GM, all the power to them. Thats what I said in my previous comment, #12 here. But then, at least, it’s clear we are not sharing a paradigm, so we are basically not playing the same game at all.)
[…] Mais, comme je le dis dans le Railroading Manifesto: […]
[…] Un beneficio extra de este truco es que puedes evitar el railroading. […]
I appreciate railroading isn’t a good thing. It strikes me the “Three Clue Rule”, by limiting the PCs’ choices, constraining their options, is railroading by another name. Isn’t it? I wonder if letting the PCs do what they want, then creating a scenario in response, more/less on the fly, & letting it play out, is a better call–because that option leaves the GM with the choice to “steer” PCs back toward the desired outcome. Or is that just another variety of railroading…?
I recommend you re-read the Three Clue Rule essay.
If you’re negating player choices to “steer” them back towards a predetermined outcome… Yes, that’s obviously railroading.
rodneyzalenka judging by your comments here and elsewhere it seems you think the clues and nodes are mandatory / forced. They are not. They are placed in the environment to be discovered and experienced. When players encounter them they gain information that makes it likely they will visit other nodes, but it in no way requires them to do so.
@16, @18
I think a good way to look at it is to contrast railroading with driving a car. On a railroad, you can only go in one specific direction and you probably will only go at one speed. You have no freedom of movement.
If you’re driving a car, you don’t have total freedom of movement. You can only drive on the roads, and those roads only connect in certain ways. There are certain paths that will take you most directly where you want to go, there are other paths that will still end up at the correct destination but are unnecessarily long or convoluted, there are other paths that you can drive but that won’t take you where you want to go, and then there are other paths that you can’t drive at all because they involve leaving the road and passing through someone’s house. But you do have partial freedom of movement. You can choose which roads you want to drive on, and you can choose how fast you want to drive on them.
By the same token, a good RPG campaign doesn’t give the PCs total freedom. There are things they cannot do, because they don’t have enough power or because it is simply impossible. Of the things they can do, some will have undesirable consequences, some won’t get the PCs where they want to go, and some will be direct routes towards their goal. And this is actually important, because it means that the PC’s decisions have real consequences.
@Aeshdan
Good analogy. I’d add that the “clues” are signposts on those roads : if the GM don’t put enough of them, the players won’t know what rad to take, or will take them randomly, etc. But following those signs is not mandatory on the player’s part. Moreover, they can get to the destination by taking different paths (which can be a shortcut or not, but that’s another story).
[…] move will lead somewhere interesting. But generally, it’s a bad idea, as this is literally railroading. But what to do about fucking mind […]
@ 19,20
Also, to further extend the analogy, with my car I can drive to anyplace in the city. If I want to go to the grocery store I can, but if I want to go to the gym I can also do that. Whereas a railroad only passes through certain stops in a specific order. And by the same token, in a railroaded game the players have to make certain “choices” and pursue certain goals. But in a non-railroaded game, the players are theoretically able to choose any goal they want, though if the GM is doing a good job prepping then the path he prepped will be the one they are overwhelmingly likely to choose.
With all due respect (and I have much respect for all the wonderful advice and info made available at The Alexandrian over the years), another perspective might be that all games involve constraints on player behavior of one kind or another. Fun is always a product of both constraint AND freedom. A football field is 100 yards. A soccer player may not user their hands. A DM playing 5e may forbid use of material from “Unearthed Arcana”. The notion that one or another of these constraints are necessarily “bad gaming” is, well, ideological, to say the least. Most DMs (and players) I have ever known and played with have enjoyed games that are, let’s say, “narratively constrained”, in one way or another – whether that’s a single chapter of the game that’s a “set piece” in which some event is unavoidable (the bad guy is GOING to get away from the players in chapter 1, no matter what), while other chapters are not nearly so constrained, or a game that, in general, tends to offer multiple prescribed possible outcomes (rather than “absolute open-endedness”, whatever that might mean). Many video games fall into the latter category, and many people play a tabletop game that works in a similar way, and they have great fun doing it. To say that these people are “mistaken” or that they would obviously have “more fun” doing it another way seems far more arrogant than simply running (and enjoying) such a game.
@Nathan: It sounds like you’re on the side of “but my railroad goes to Awesome Town”. Which is fine. Justin already gave his response to it, above.
You put the words “bad gaming”, “mistaken” and “more fun” in quotation marks, but whatever you’re quoting, it’s not the article above here. It never says any of those things.
You can tell an awesome story by *telling a story*. Lots of people will absolutely enjoy listening to a good performer do Lord of the Rings, and will have no expectation that they can stick their oar in and *make choices* to change how it goes. At the other extreme, you can tell an awesome story together with friends by running a wide-open RPG where every choice is meaningful and no result is predetermined. Who knows where it will end up?
Railroading is a name for the problem that comes up when you try to do something in the middle, where *some* player choices are meaningful and some are not. The distinction is hard to maintain. It’s really hard to say “whatever you do at the end of chapter 1 won’t matter, because the bad guy is getting away no matter what,” without the players getting the idea that maybe none of their choices *really* matter.
I just said that it’s hard, not that it’s impossible. Also, I did not say that it is automatically “not fun,” because it can still be fun to be the audience for a good story even if your ability to participate in it is illusionary. But it is definitely a potential problem that you as GM had better be very conscious of, if you want to avoid either telling your players “you can check out now, because you’re not getting any choices for a while here,” or else having to say “sorry, actually that was a fake choice and you chose incorrectly.”
No, the article says that the only reason to railroad is “arrogance”, which amounts to the same thing as saying it’s “bad gaming” or “mistaken” or not as fun. And in the many hundreds of articles that appear on this topic in OSR circles, those words are used all the time. It all amounts to the same thing. And debating it is pure semantics. One way of gaming is better and one is worse.
What’s entirely debatable is this line of yours: “At the other extreme, you can tell an awesome story together with friends by running a wide-open RPG where every choice is meaningful and no result is predetermined.”
It’s not at all clear that you can “tell an awesome story” through the collaboration of a group at a table. Or at least, not without introducing additional constraints that could easily be classified as some form of railroading. Nor is it clear that making choices completely open-ended makes them more “meaningful” at all.
A story is not just an arbitrary sequence of events. Stories have themes – which includes lessons, understandings, ideas, etc, that are expressed BY the content of the events they relate. Theme here doesn’t mean “setting” or “world” as it often does in gaming (e.g. the “theme” of Agricola is farming), but rather concrete lessons and ideas about what it means to be a good human being – such as, “family and business don’t mix” or “if you try to please everyone, you’ll wind up pleasing no one”. The pleasures of story are particular, and involve many kinds of structures that RPGs either just don’t have or can’t have unless they are imposed using some kind of constraint (“railroading”). An example would be foreshadowing, anticipation, subversion of expectations, and then payoff of expectations. If you have a truly open-ended game, developing anticipation and foreshadowing particular outcomes, for example, just isn’t possible. Or if it is possible, it is, again, only by “railroading lite” of some form. The same with themes. If no intelligence is driving the arrangement of events, at least to some degree, no coherent and discernible theme can emerge.
Now just because you can’t really “tell an awesome story” through an open-ended game doesn’t mean that there aren’t pleasures in an open-ended game. They just tend to be more about socializing with friends and the game-like pleasures of overcoming obstacles through a series of tactical decisions. But as I’ve said, a story is more than just a series of decisions. The events of my day might involve getting up, brushing my teeth, having breakfast, and feeding my cat. That’s not a story. There’s no theme, and no meaningful logic to these events that expresses a theme. Now many people enjoy games for their own sake, despite lacking a theme. Rules have their own inherent tactical interest.
But many people DO enjoy the pleasure of a story more than the pleasure of simply overcoming a series of obstacles that have no obvious or necessary thematic connection. This pleasure doesn’t derive from the fact that it’s what “the DM wants”. Framing it that way is an obvious attempt to make it seem “evil” or “draconian” or, well, “arrogant”. No, the pleasure comes from the fact that what “the DM wants” is to tell a GOOD story, a story that feels thematically meaningful and satisfying and well-told. What “the DM wants” is to entertain the players. This is not only NOT arrogant, it is the opposite of arrogant. It is about serving your players.
I would also add that it’s also something that gains tremendous ADDED interest by being done within that context of an RPG – because of the added tactical interest and the fact that players are granted SOME agency. So no, it’s not the same thing at all to tell a story within an RPG as it is to do it in a book or a film. Hence the stupidity of the “just go write a book” argument.
In fact the reason that “all railroading is evil” is so blinkered and destructive is that the promise of hybrids of game and story is so great.
Every “medium” that has ever existed has had purists. Cinema, for example, when it first came along, had numerous (famous) practitioners who preached that movies should NOT tell stories, or if they did so, they should NEVER have dialog. They should be visual. That was doing it the OLD way, and if that’s what you wanted, why not just write a novel? Or put on a play? No, the MOVIES were NEW and UNIQUE. A different “medium”.
These arguments seemed especially plausible given the excesses of storytelling films of the time – endless dialog cards that broke up the action and forced audiences to read. Even decades later, after the emergence of sound, critics would sometimes complain if a film were too “talky”, or might complain that a film was “little more than a stageplay shot with a camera”. Artists films of the 1970s sought to present a visual logic that had no storytelling at all.
And yet today, the dominant form of film is still one that tells a story. And I hate to break it to you, but in 50 years, if people are still role-playing, the dominant form of RP will be one that has some level of “railroading” narrative imposed on it.
Story simply won’t ever go away because story adds too much to human experience. And “arrogance” is pretending that you can make your players stop wanting all that richness to be a part of their game experience.
I would also add that after watching hundreds of hours of “open-ended” OSR gaming on Twitch and Youtube – from west marches style D&D to Stars without Number and Blades in the Dark and Dungeon World, i have never seen even one “open-ended” game where the PLAYERS seem to be having as much fun as they do on the very-railroaded Critical Role stream. I guess Matt Mercer must be the most “arrogant” DM around, but somehow nobody thinks that about him.
@Nathan Piazza
You’re making a two significant assumptions here: the idea that only the DM cares about making a coherent narrative, and the idea that only the DM is capable of contributing to trying to do so. These things are not necessarily true. Sure, there are players out there who are just at the game because they want to hang out with a group and don’t care abotu the game at all, and players who are only at the game for the “game parts” (usually meaning hitting things), but you seem to be assuming all players are one of those two types. But there are also players who are out to express a character, and players who actually want to help make the narrative coherent, too. The difficulty lies in finding them and making sure they’re competent.
On the competence point, people tend to completely misinterpret me when I say I want players who are trope-literate. I am NOT trying to say I want to play every possible trope straight as a wide-ranging means of railroading! Instead, I mean that I want players who are capable of understanding fictional situations and how stories work well enough to make narratively coherent decisions — that I want player surprises and contributions to be logical. For example, four edgy lone wolves do not easily add up to a good set of character dynamics; there needs to be something holding the group together other than DM instructions and PC aura.
Nathan Piazza wrote: No, the article says that the only reason to railroad is “arrogance”…
I urge everyone to do a little CTRL-F on “arrogance” on this page (and the rest of the series and even the addendums if you’d like; add in “draconian” and “evil” while you’re at it) and then ask yourself a simple question:
Did Nathan actually read this article before replying to it?
Nathan Piazza wrote: If no intelligence is driving the arrangement of events, at least to some degree, no coherent and discernible theme can emerge.
With that being said… The supreme arrogance of claiming that your players have “no intelligence” is absolutely staggering to behold.
If you want to see an example of theme emerging from player decisions, watch the end of Escape from Bloodkeep.
A very short (and spoiler-ific) explanation can be found in this video.
The idea that theme cannot be established and explored non-deterministically in a collaborative art-form is, to be completely clear here, utterly false.
@Nathan Piazza: “It’s not at all clear that you can “tell an awesome story” through the collaboration of a group at a table.”
I am sorry that you have apparently not had the pleasure.
Let me ask a different question: would you rather play in a game run by an inexperienced and possibly mediocre DM who was committed to telling his own Awesome Story and who generously grants you “SOME agency”; or an inexperienced and possibly mediocre DM who was committed to giving you freedom to run and develop your character even if his own Story and Theme was MIA.
“developing anticipation and foreshadowing particular outcomes, for example, just isn’t possible”. I beg to differ. You can absolutely develop tons of anticipation and foreshadow the hell out of what the villain wants to try, and when the dice finally hit the table everyone is completely invested in finding out the outcome.
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