Player Actions and Consequences, ...or, when characters do stupid things Options

[Mercer]

To my mind there's two types of railroading (or at least two): conscious and unconscious.

The first, conscious railroading, sucks. This is when the gm decides ahead of time how an encounter, scenario, plot or combat should turn out. I should point out that however the gm wants anything to turn out, it won't. The pc's never go that way, refusing to either surrender, take prisoners, turn over the MacGuffin or anything else. Players are contrary bastards, but then this is the joy of being a player (for me anyway). If I want strictly defined areas of play, I have video games (or I did until my dog ate my PS2). The beauty of table-top rp'ing is that there's no invisible wall keeping you out of some place. We are limited only by our imaginations (which is more of a limitation some days than others).

The second, unconscious railroading, sucks worse. It usually comes up when a gm is improv'ing an off the map encounter, but it can worm its way in to prepared things. This is when the gm doesn't realize that he thinks the situation has to turn out a certain way, but its the only ping pong ball bouncing around his options box. It usually occurs to him as something that seems perfectly obvious, and the game stalls until the players either read his mind or start grenading orphans in frustration. Everything the players do that the gm doesn't agree with he skews against them, usually without realizing it.

A third type of railroading occurs to me, and its the one I'm most guilty of. Its where I design an encounter or scenario with no clear way to succeed or survive and then put the pcs into and see what happens. I'll call this the Railroad-Track-to-Nowhere approach. (I don't advocate it, but some of the best gaming stories are the ones where the whole group meets a horrible end, like the dwarf who caught two 10-round bursts from twin HMG's and then was rammed by a crashing, out of control helicopter. Players don't like for their characters to die, but if its really, really interesting they can take a lot of pride in it.)

[Taran]

[Herald of Verjig...]

[fistandantilus4....]

weredigo? where did he go anyways?

[Dawnshadow]

[Fox1]

[Kesh]

[Fox1]

[hyzmarca]

[Ryu]

I can create scenarios where characters die because of player personality. No big art. That does not constitute railroading if said player has the choice of doing different.

If he/she does not have that choice because he/she can´t percieve the obvious solution... and I know that beforehand... and do not warn them... that´s bad.

If in a given situation the railroading is constituted by character restrictions (see "never surrenders"), and there would have been an acceptable solution for other characters, the player has to deal with it. I would stil not overdo that if the player does not appreciate the challenge of defining the characters way to cope.

[Fox1]

[Jrayjoker]

[Fox1]

[Ryu]

Fox: Feel free to read the whole post, not only part of it. In the part you quoted, do notice that creating scenarios does not involve putting them to use. In the part you did not read I differentiate between player and character railroading and suggest caution even in the later case.

[Fox1]

[Jrayjoker]

Blah, blah, blah railroading blah, blah, blah....Can't we all just agree to disagree?

[Fox1]

[Kagetenshi]

That assumes an infinite number of GMs and no outside relationships between GM and players.

~J

[Fox1]

[ShadowDragon8685]

It's not easy to tell your mates you're quitting their games. Or to get out of yours.

[Fox1]

[Apathy]

Please forgive me if I'm repeating things everybody else has already said; I'm a lazy sob who didn't bother to read the whole thread.

Taken from the RPG Cliche List:

Railroading. Any time the gamemaster will not allow players to deviate from the adventure's one set path or even make their own decisions. Campaigns with heavy railroading offer few draws over CRPGs or (for that matter) the multitudes of solo game books that proliferated during the 80's. See also T-Rex On The Plains.
T-Rex On The Plains. A particularly irritating form of Railroading where the gamemaster uses huge, nasty monsters (or high-level adversaries) to scare players back onto the path. (So named for a peculiar incident in an AD&D game where the players went off task and took a shortcut through a field they had heard about. It was a featureless landscape, but a T-Rex appeared literally out of nowhere and chased the players back onto the main road. Needless to say, the game ended soon after.)

Being [at best] a so-so GM myself, it's not my place to judge whether what Faenor did was railroading or not - it depends on intangibles like

• Was the GM's intent to force the player along a certain path?
• Did the player have alternatives that didn't require him to compromise his ideals?
• Were the players aware before-hand that in this GM's world recovery by Doc Wagon was equivalent to a prison sentence, or did they get blind-sided?
• If the player had thought of an inventive way get away without doing what the GM had hoped for, would the GM have gone along, or penalized him/forced him back into the original plot scenario?
• Did the player and the GM discuss the expected tone of the game before-hand, and did the player realize what the consequences of having so absolute a moral code?

[edit]I guess the bottom line is: If the players and the GM enjoy the gaming style and the world that the GM's created for them, then it's a good game. If people aren't having a good time, then somebody needs to think about changing the way they do things - regardless of whether it's railroading or not.

[Taran]

[Apathy]

[Fox1]