After all this conversation (which believe me, was NOT my intention), the player accepted that he screwed up. My main question was "did I overreact?" He and I have talked about it, and he realizes that it wasn't the smartest thing to do by far. I was curious to know what other people would have done in my situation; whether or not I had gone too far, not far enough, or just right. I also wanted to know what other people thought in the situation. There never was a question of railroading. He and I both realize that sometimes things just happen. And honestly, he's satisfied that he's racking up a huge lawyer fee and having some stuff confiscated (satisfied, not happy; big difference). I didn't mean for this to evolve/ de-evolve into people battling out on a forum.

Agree to disagree, whatever. I just wanted opinions if I'd over stepped the "crap on player for poor decision" and what, if anything, can be done to remedy it.

Well, that comes back to the question of "do you have a legitimate reason for DocWagon to have turned the character over"?

~J

My reason for having DocWagon turn him in: They didn't.
They took him to a public hospital (the campaign is set 2053, so no Valkyrie system for triage) and a random die roll to see if a doc wagon or public hospital was closer. I honestly thought that they would take him to the closest hospital due to his massive wounds. (this tidbit of info was taken from Neo Anarchist's Guide to Real Life) He absolutely refused to part with the grenade launcher. So I had the hospital staff make a procedures roll at target 6 to see if they would notice that. And they also called the Star as he had a valid SIN and was brought in with multiple gunshot wounds.
in turn, he can blame the people who saved his life.

That would be a mistake on the part of DocWagon, then.


As has been said before, unless they like the idea of it being open season on ambulances and medics, they NEVER get one of their patients sent up the pipe.

sadly, contray to it's name, i dont think railroading is a one track definition, generally, i think that if theres one SUCCESSFUL means of accomplishing a goal, the GM is most likely treading atleast near a set of tracks, meanwhile, if there's multiple directions all leading to the same intermediate step, then it may also be close to railroading. less so if each of those steps have other intermediates as well.

for example, lets say the characters are getting to step c from point A. if options 1, 2, and 3 all lead directly to step B, than it could be problematic (you walk, ride or peddle to the next location, nothing happens along the way..)

but if theres obstacles to be oversome at each step, its not such a problem (one route proves to be easier because you detour around some osrt of accident on foot that you would've had to wait for id you drove)

Has no one here ever run their group through a published module?

@ Taran:

"Agreement" is certainly an option here, original tone notwithstanding. As is disagreement

Unless you have a GM that will come up with random runs at the drop of a hat when the group doesn't play the one he's planned, the game is off. Everyone "loses". And I don't know about other people, but game cancelled because the GM does good, planned runs and one wasn't accepted.. Most people aren't nearly as good at improvising an entire Run/Game/Session as they are with notes and plans. And personally, I consider not gaming because there's no accepted run to be quite a punishment -- especially on the in character view, where I don't get to advance, don't get money, and probably lose another month of lifestyle.

Shadowrun is Very Much a game where you either Play or don't play -- and so is "railroading". Any actual Run you either accept, or don't accept -- and unless your group has a whole load of other stuff on the go, if you don't accept, your session is over.

Ok.. I'm going to bite..

So you're saying GM A, who isn't good at improvising but typically does exceptionally good runs, comes up with a good stealth run that would normally be acceptable, but since the majority of the characters have had an atrocious last few days .. (Player B got dumped, C had her mother get hit by a corp car, D and E got mugged in the Stuffer Shack.. all random events that were rolled for from pregenerated tables of events.. F and G got away clean, had good weeks) and the players have all had bad days and so feel like killing rather than sneaking, and turn down a typically acceptable (or even exceptional) run, but the GM can't do another...

That the GM needs to railroad?


Also:

A run your character wouldn't touch normally, but the character doesn't even have money for rent, because it was sucked up on hospital bills? Hardly railroading, but it's very defined punishment for not taking the run. Something very intrinsic to the world, I would think.

...

Likewise: I had said nothing about a run that wasn't acceptable. I said a run that the players didn't accept. There is a difference. Players can not accept for a multitude of reasons, including bad days and other, unpredictable events. Saying a GM who can't do totally different runs at the drop of a hat to account for this must railroad is doing yourself and the GM a disservice.

If your group is happy with an overly broad definition of railroading, then that's fine. But that doesn't mean that the idea of railroading is that broad.

Generally, getting the rent isen't that hard, if you're not trying to support an ultra-lux habit or something.

Just steal a Ford Americar, and have the group troll negotiate the sale to a chop shop. Or, have the Face do it. Then repeat until everyone has the rent money. Then go looking for the good.

Fox1: I have said, repeatedly, that for these examples, the GM in question can't do runs on the fly. He or she is neither comfortable nor skilled at it.

What you said is that the run isn't acceptable, so they improv an entire run (which I'm discounting, that's vastly harder to do and not every GM is willing to do it), or do nothing.

I added pregenerated random events so that you couldn't use that to call foul. It's a relatively painless way of actually making things happen in the world. "attempted mugging " and so on. Very easy, very general. Nothing about success, just that some incident happened. The entire purpose of that line was actually to give the characters a reason to just want to kill something, so that it's nicely coherent. Otherwise "not wanting to force my character to do something he wouldn't do" becomes "character forcing me to play a game I don't want to".




Now.. as for the railroading: I really, really don't buy that the general usage of railroading is that any time the GM wants an event to occur and has bad consequences for some of the other alternatives is railroading. In fact, I think that definition is useless.

It's NOT railroading if you want someone to get over a violent streak, so eventually he's got his face plastered on every 'star trid, and winds up with "sneak out the back" or "shoot it down with a 'star FRT". It's TO BE EXPECTED. You CANNOT accuse a GM of railroading because a allowing a characters style is a direct conflict with the way the shadowrun world works, by canon.

You can politely ask people not to play that type of character, explain that it doesn't fit the world you are running, but unless you are going to say "Don't come back, I don't want to kill you as your character so richly deserves"...

I'm stubborn (unfortunately) and I hate letting things go. Haven't figured out a good way to let go of anything, because I despise walking away from any type of debate (save the stupid ones, which this doesn't qualify as -- neither one of us has resorted to silly argument forms, although all we're ever arguing about is the definition of a term).

And actually.. I'm not the GM for anything SRish (not confident in my ability to run the setting -- even if I do love it to death).



I think the major difference of opinion is actually philosophical with this one too.. I don't see intent as making a difference, because when I look at intent mattering, everything breaks down, because I don't see how a GM can NOT be railroading. At all. The GM either wants it to happen, or doesn't. Short of making everything random tables.

The instant there's any plot other than purely inter-PC, it touches the world, and so the GM has to influence it. If the GM's intentions matter for railroading, then that means the instant he does anything, he's railroading. He literally has no options that are not railroading, because they all boil down to either helping or hindering -- both are railroading. That doesn't make sense though, because the GM's job is to help create the story and to run the world, so to my mind, logic screams "intentions are irrelevent to railroading".

That leaves railroading as unreasonably restricting the choices of a PC (unlike 'no, you can't make a hole in your cell wall by banging your head against it'). That, I can't see any problems carrying to it's logical conclusion.. so appears to me to be the accurate answer.

A good deal of what has been said here surprises me. To begin, I don't believe that railroading is a problem, at least not the way I do it. If you know your players well enough (IC: a fixer knows his clients very well) then you know what type of runs they are into. Give them what they want and there won't be a problem with them taking the job for the most part.

It also surprised me to hear that some GM's rip apart the written adventures instead of just running them as is and using the space between scenes to integrate the run into their own campaigns. It feels like a waste to buy an adventure you aren't going to use. Do you just incorporate the characters or the maps or what?

I think Shadowrun has to be an organic game. A run is only a small portion of what transpires. Most of my game sessions are planning, meeting contacts, and characters living their own lives, oh and of course trying to get paid... The actual run is a relatively short process when done correctly. If done wrong, players understand the consequences of their actions.

This brings me to the earlier point of a runner who wanted to geek 200 cops. You can't let that happen. Forget GM as God, this is an issue of Player as Stupid. If you don't let the player make the stupid choice then you are, in essence, railroading the player to do "whats best for them and the team." Oftentimes the player isn't going to make the proper choice and they should be allowed to do that. They should be allowed to fail gloriously. When the character faces off against 200 cops the character is saying "It's time for me to die." So I'll let what happens happen and not intervene. If the other players want to stop him (because women are rarely that dumb) then they can intervene.

You have to maintain a level of "realism" (for lack of a better word) in a campaign. Once you forgive nonsense then nonsense becomes the norm.

Putting down 200 cops is a perfectly workable life goal for a character.

As for that particular example, the GM has already thrown sense out the window by having 200 cops out front, so why not start killing them? More importantly, the GM has butchered, cooked, and eaten sense by having 200 cops out front and none out back. Frankly, the proper case in that circumstance is slapping the GM silly.

~J

That's because the front of the building has a Donut Shop.

I find this discussion strange because, to my mind, the goal of a GM is to role play all of the NPC's (and from now on I'm just going to talk about the villians of the campaign) as intelligently as they actually are.

This is especially true of the megacorportations/dragons/IE's. They have so much power and information that, on the level of most players, they can pretty much do anything. If AZT gets angry enough at you, they can *literally* send an army after you.

In practice, this often leads to large, overarching, shadowy, and very often completely invisible to the PC's plots against them that are managed entirely by the GM. This, to me, is the hallmark of the Shadowrun game: you can't compete with the rulers of the world, no matter how long you play, or how good you are. At best you can stave off death for another day.

This is not to say that the PC's are entirely helpless or unable to learn. One of my group's favorite moments was when we discovered and shattered a long-running and not-yet-completed AZT plot to first discredit and then destroy us, because we had damaged them four years previous. One of the characters is a refugee from a ninja clan, and her relatives keep popping up at the most inopportune times. They've already killed one character.

In short, Shadowrun is a brutal world where the clocks ticking down to the characters' deaths are so ticking so loud, the *characters* can hear them.

Quick question: If I am running the game, and I have set it up so that a certain piece of information is held by only one NPC, but the characters need it, and I give them hints and clues during legwork to find that person, is it railroading?

No, you say? Well then it is all a matter of degree then isn't it?

Meh!

Nezumi, that's not railroading. Railroading can only occur in-game.

That's asshattery in the first degree.

And that ain't railroading, that is communication.

I should add to that that you need a good reason for this information to be vital.

That said, if those all stack up, you aren't railroading. The players can find the person, or they can arrange to flee the country with what portions of their resources they can keep in hand, or they can attempt to track down and kill their employer or whoever it is that will be enforcing the consequences in-game, or any of a number of options.

~J