To Hyzmarca: No need to apologize; i was not clear.

To Fistandantilus: Oh, that happened a long time ago. Fortunately, I've got it in a three ring binder with all my other splatbooks. If it's worth saying, say it with blunt force trauma!

To everyone: i appreciate the input. And I didn't mean for it to go on this long; I was just curious to know if I over reacted or not. And the general concensus is: Bone the player, but try not to take him out of play. Once again, it's appreciated. Now here's a question: How much does a lawyer cost in SR? I can't find any info anwhere in any books!

for the littlest things, start with a 1,000 retainer. That's for things like basic custody, if it's an easy one. I would guess in the tens for a long term criminal defense lawyer of some caliber. If it's one that drags on, add in more tens. If you add more lawyers, add in more tens. Better hope he either 1) got paid well in the past. or 2) doesn't mind a court appointed attorney that probably got about 2 hours with him for prep between his other dozen cases, and a quick trip to doing a nickel (yay lingo! have him get used to that too!)


"when all else fails, apply brute force"

Depends on the caliber of the lawyer and the cost of the relevant market. In a small town today you can expect to shell out anywhere from $150 to $190 an hour, plus various costs (filing fees mostly, but some firms charge for every staple). In a bigger city (like Seattle) anything from $200 to $500 an hour. Generally, the lawyer will want a lump sum of anything from $1,000 to $10,000 up front. A truly hefty criminal case can drag on for two or three years (during which time the accused may either be free on bail or stuck behind bars) and cost upwards of $100,000.

Another source of major expenses is the "expert witness." Experts are anyone whose training or experience allows them to explain evidence in a way helpful to the jury. There are expert psychiatrists, doctors, and engineers. There are experts who can look at skid marks from an auto crash and tell you how fast the different cars were going when they hit.

Check out:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...28/ai_112685749

for a description of a case where an individual used an illegal weapon in self defense.

From this escapade, I see two things you did wrong.

One: The DocWagon HTR team should have been conducting triage on the trip. Part of this triage should involve sedating the patient and 'losing' the evidence that could get him in trouble. He is, after all, a Super-Platinum member who can summon an HTR team on notice by smashing his armband. It's like paying for your own, personal, very well-armed military dust-off.

Two: DocWagon should not take it's patients to the first available hospital, they should always take them to a DocWagon facility. And if they had employed a Valkyrie booth, you could have had a DocWagon physician working on him during the trip.


The player, however, fragged up. Grenades in an A zone are a bad idea, although given the number of opponants, and the quality of the one opponant, I can see how he was convinced that the grenade launcher was his only option.

He fragged up WORSE when he refused to let DW pitch his evidence. Always, Always, Always pitch the evidence. You can always buy more grenade launchers.

Actually this was railroading of the worst sort and the more he defends (or others defend him) the more he proves it. He was trying to force a character to surrender, when he already knew the character wouldn't and was carrying an MGL-12. Now he goes to the rest of you for approval becuase he is starting to feel guilty for what he did. Well let him feel guilty. He got exactly what he wanted when he set this up. A more rational GM would have had a single unarmed and harmless teenager deliver a HUD with the proper video file to get the player to stand down and follow. Then again he would get to tell the story of how his half ass handling of the situation really screwed the character over.

If the character's only available method of response is a grenade launcher, I'd say that's a poor character concept.

But he did say that the character had improved invsibility, and could have ducked out and made a run for it. So that's an option.

He could have surrendered, that's an option.

He could have opened fire with something that wasn't a grenade launcher (presuming he had something) that's an option.

I've gmed Shadowrun since 2nd Edition. I've NEVER railroaded a player, on purpose or otherwise. I find characters can come up with completely unprecedented responses to any event. But you couldn't GM if you didn't put characters in a situation where you EXPECT them to react a certain way, at least some times. (you expect characters to take a job when the Johnson offers it, for instance, course that doesn't always happen, see numerous threads to that effect)

I guess the grenade launcher was one of those responses you don't plan for... Probably not the wisest choice, according to the consensus here. The consensus also seemed to let him know (in a dastardly GM way) that it wasnt' wise, but let him live.

Lothazar did you have some personal connection to the story?

How was this railroading? There was an obvious course of action (fight the gangers with the grenade launcher, a situation Dante created for himself). But unless the GM said 'you are in a room with no furniture or windows and all the walls and cieling are made of 12 feet of concrete', Dante had a ton of options he simply didn't consider.

He could have blown through the floor and escaped that way. He could have climbed out the window. He could have hidden in the apartment. He could have turned himself invisible, grabbed a kitchen knife, hidden in the corner and ambushed them. He could have called Lone Star himself and hidden his weapon. He could have...

How is it railroading because the GM let the player put himself in a dumb situation, then presented a challenge with only one 'obvious' solution? I enjoy regularly putting my players in situations with no obvious solutions at all.

If you want a roleplaying game where every challenge has multiple obvious solutions, read a 'choose your own adventure'.

If there's one thing that bothers me in this whole scenario (overtones of railroading aside) it's the fact that he actually ended up nearly getting killed by a bunch of gangers who were handed SMGs and ski-masks, and told "go kill this guy".

Either whoever played this character doesn't know what he's doing, or these were some really durable and skilled gangers... Multiple grenades tend to do horrible, horrible things to anyone - how much cover is there in an apartment hallway?

Sooth. I would have expected the gangers to all go down in the first pass.

~J

It doesn't help when the player rolls total garbage, and they bounce down the stairwell. His GREATEST shot was when he rolled two successes and a twelve on the deviation dice.

Any grenadelink?

Edit: no, otherwise he wouldn't be able to roll a twelve. Badly-designed character.

~J

@ Fox1:

A (qualified) yes to your first example. A firm NO to your second and third examples. (Any time a GM "create[s] a case where you have to go outside your comfortable boundaries" or tries to bring about more group interaction is now to be termed "railroading"?)

Out of curiousity.. what do people think railroading is?

My view has always been that railroading is: creating the plot such that it can only go in one direction.

Most extreme example being "the players don't have to think, they just do what the GM tells them and roll whatever dice".

More moderate cases being: "You have to go to this location and do this. No, there's no reason whatsoever for your characters to do it, but that's what you have to do anyway."


I personally am not sure that anything counts as railroading if the PC in question can choose NOT to do it. Bad GMing, maybe (depending on situation) but railroading? No. It's something else to my mind.

Apparently being (strongly) encouraged (by the fear of imminent death) to think outside the box is now to be generally discouraged, as GM railroading.

Atually, the most railroadish GM decision in this case was having Doc Wagon hand him over. He pays them too much for that even if he is an idiot. There is one basic rule in business, the customer is always innocent.

Having his home raided is one thing. It can be justified far more easily. Having him wake up in custody can't be justified by anything unless DocWagon has gone non-profit and decided that having its paramedics ambushed and killed by vengfull Shadowrunners is a good thing.

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.)

weredigo? where did he go anyways?

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.

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.

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

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

~J

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

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.