QuoteGeez! What kind of psychotic world allows people with different likes and dislikes to play the same games!?!?!? This must be stopped! TO WAR, MY BROTHERS!

The degree to which swine apologists will go to deny that the method of mainstream roleplaying products in the early-mid 1990s shifted noticably toward railroading is ridiculous.

Face it, guys: It happened. Everyone except a vocal minority was appalled by it. These are the facts.

Quote from: YamoFace it, guys: It happened.

Yes.  Yes, it did.

The implied reasoning for "why", we can debate all day.  But any careful looking shows that a 'shift towards railroading' in actual printed, released game material did happen.

Quote from: Levi KornelsenYes.  Yes, it did.

The implied reasoning for "why", we can debate all day.  But any careful looking shows that a 'shift towards railroading' in actual printed, released game material did happen.

There are probably many reasons.

For TSR, one of the biggest reasons was probably that Dragonlance was the only thing they had that was selling at the time.  So they wanted more stuff like that.  Intead of identifying it with the superiority of the products, they identified it's sales with story based modules.

Another reason is probably that railroady story based modules were easier and quicker to produce.  Dream up a track, throw a few encounters down, and call it a day.

And if story based modules succeeded, it was probably because they read better.  The real classic modules (like old Giant modules and early B series) played great, but read like shit.  The ones from the latter 80s all read fairly well but were generally a bore to play.  But, then again, they were really only aimed at entertaining the GM of the group who bought and read them.

Quote from: Elliot WilenSo, don't you see a conflict between the general GM approach suggested by the "how to wing it" essay, and what you're talking about here?

Nope. Different target audiences. If you're talking about how to wing it in relation to a module you need stricter guidance. The mere fact that you're looking at a module means you've preplanned what the group will encounter. As such, if you're to get your money's worth from that module, you'll want to play as much of it as you can.

QuotePersonally I think a prepared dungeon fits into the concept of something you can prepare in advance after being told what the party plans to do next ("We're going to explore the Forge of Fury!" [yes, that's the one]), and which can then be "run" without leading and guidance by the GM. Whereas a prepared sequence of scenes as implied by the essay is something else entirely--something I don't particularly care for, in general. I'd rather see the preparation of situations with characters and intersecting motivations, maybe with a timeline that suggests what will happen if the PC's don't intervene, than a plotted-out series of events leading to a climactic scene.

You can do either a dungeon or a prepared set of scenes in response to "we want to do ___." You can also do them without any input from the players. They're both tools, not methods.

A preplanned setof scenes is basically the same as a dungeon, except that in the dungeon you explore places, whereas in the set of scenes you're exploring situations. In a dungeon there will be rooms that can be reached out of order. Likewise there will be scenes that can occur in no specific order. Also in a dungeon you'll have sections that can can't be reached without passing through other sections (lower levels, gaurded areas, etc.)

QuoteBut any careful looking shows that a 'shift towards railroading' in actual printed, released game material did happen.

There was also a shift towards omre story oriented games (like Arena of Thyatis and The Veiled Society) instead of settings with dungeons and reasons to go there (like Little Keep on the Borderlands and Quest for the Unknown). With a story module there has to be some railroading if the entire module is going to be played. That's the nature of the beast. If you write something that isn't a dungeon and isn't a plotline with some "troubleshooting" sections to continue to move it onward, you've probably written a setting, not an adventure. Whether that's bad or not is a matter of some debate.

The following is part of the GMing advice in Arena of Thyatis:

QuoteYou must be prepared to change plans as characters do things you didn't expect.

There's more to the paragraph, but the point is that the adventure itself tells you not to railroad. Similar advice can be found in other sources. On the flip side, you'll have some that tell you to railroad. Oddly enough, different people have different opinions. That this was as true in 1990 as it is today shouldn't really come as a surprise.

My personal method of operation is to find an adventure that I think looks like it'll be fun to run. I start my group on it and then give nudges if needed. Sometimes though the players find somethng else they're really excited about, and that gets me excited, so we go off the beaten path and I wing it. The later, unless things happen to prevent it, they usually go back and complete the adventure because of whatever hook got them started on it.

If I were to write GM Advice it would basically say that. If you can walk the fine line between nudges and player motivation you're doing great in my book. Where that line falls depends on the group. Some players just want to be led along by the nose and meet the various challenge. Others buck at the slightest touch of reins. The important part is figuring out what your players like and trying to cover all the bases. If you're lucky like me you get a group with similar tastes. Woe to the GM that has 2 guys who need handholding, 2 guys who are independent leaders, and someone who straddles the line between the two week by week.

I used to run very free-form games, sorta of anti-railroad but with stuff that people might still think of as railroad... basically, I'd just go along with what the characters do and weave it into some sort of sense, rearranging stuff 'off set' to lead to more interesting results.

One of the ground rules was 'generally, if you aren't stupid, you'll survive.' And most people did fine, doing dramatic risky things that, canonically, they'd survive...

But then there were a handful of players. They would die.

A lot.

I must have gamed with an unusual crowd my entire gaming career. I've never really had a GM who would just throw his hands up if we didn't go through a dungeon in one push.

Well, maybe my first ever GM...we entered that first ever dungeon and a portcullis dropped... magically locked and everything. I never did find out were the other side was.  

Most of the advice, and the related comments on why it might have sprung into being are completely alien to my gaming expirences.  I've had railroady GM's, sure... one guy insisted on stopping my action at a con so he could quote the last page of the book...where my pregen character did exactly what I had said he'd do... once we got to the last page, that is.

Quote from: UmaSamaOnce I was running a session for a group of friends, and there's this dude who happens to be a total dick in real life, so as expected his character was a total dick, a Gnome Bard called Sir Lombard the Bard, the thing is that he was so annoying that onother of the pc's killed him for being as ass, not me, but another pc, the funny thing is that the rest of the pc's just looked at each other for a moment and then said "I don't care, the bard's an asshole after all"

Reminds me of the time I was playing my midget (2' 8") dwarf Cleric (lapsed Buddhist) and his Ranger henchman. We were given point, mostly because the Ranger could fire his crossbow over the dwarf. Well, another player decided he wanted all the glory. So he had his (all 18s) PC force his way to the front. The Ranger took offense at this and gave the twerp a swipe with his bastard sword.  Really torn up by this the errant fellow promptly expired.

The Ranger got 100 experience for his action, and the player of the now deceased PC had to roll up a new one. Average stats this time around.

I've met good GMs and bad GMs. One of my worst experiences came at a Con, where I basically walked out of a Deadlands one-shot with some silly excuse. Pundit and a few others weren't so lucky. :heh:

I experienced the same as Jong did. My silly excuse was to be the waiter for the group. Everytime anybody´s drink was empty, i´d fetch him a new one, as well as cunningly ordering sausages and steaks at the barbecue stand in overlapping order, so that they would be finished and ready to be fetched in sequence rather than all at the same time. Thusly I managed to stand up and walk around many a time, avoiding the worst Cyberpunk game ever.
The DM was a real lawncrapper, who was filled with unhealthy glee at every scene involving violence. he even turned a regular night City night Club into ultra violence.
Somehow he thought, spending a night at the disco means being handed tonfas at the entrance, as well as using it on the dancefloor. And this was only the beginning...
He totally relished in and grinned at every use of force in the game. Creepy as well as boring. Our pre made characters were of such a high power level, they would have made perfect sense in Rifts. Sadly, the NPCs were just as overpowered. Sort of like Superheroe Ultra Violence with a psychopathic DM...creepy indeed.
Did I mention the mission weas totally boring?

Quote from: JongWKI've met good GMs and bad GMs. One of my worst experiences came at a Con, where I basically walked out of a Deadlands one-shot with some silly excuse. Pundit and a few others weren't so lucky. :heh:

I thought Pundit had never met a bad GM? :rolleyes:

Anyway, yes dungeons are pretty much on rails. Even if you let the players have full run of the throttle (which can actually lead to worse experiences) it is still forward and back on the tracks. *shrug* Good, bad, it is what it is.

As for this item, well it is a period piece and as such it seems to fit. WW wasn't exactly alone.

QuoteOver on RPGnet there was a thread where some people whined about a dungeon that had a killer encounter, while others noted that there was nothing that compelled the characters to actually fight the monster. (It was a Roper, which I gather is a very dangerous but slow-moving creature.)

The Roper though has a very long reach.  Also there is a problem with tossing in unbeatable foes, especially ones that are trap-like (which the Rope is). You condition the players to slow down the game pace to a snail's pace. The fear of doing things naturally brings this out. Although in my estimation "Save or Die" traps are the worst for that.

P.S. Settembrini, how exactly would you classify your technique of blowing up the world if the PCs don't accomplish a task you prespecified by a preset point in time? I'm not saying doing that is catagorically bad, and it does have it's time and place, but you should probably think a little more about what you do before you cast that stone at bringing players back onto the track you've laid out.

Blowing up the world if something doesn't happen seems to be as railroady as you can get to me. It's a big leap from :this adventure will end if you don't ___" to "this campaign will end if you don't ___."

One problem, particularly in D&D, is that thinking around obstacles is not adequately rewarded.

How many DMs do you think give just as much XP for working out a way to avoid a monster as to fight it? How about talking the guard into doing something rather than slicing him into little bits?

Some do, sure. But there is such a kneejerk 'no risk no reward' element that ends up pushing players into being strategically stupid, tactically smart.

After wrestling with this, my solution was to give flat XP per session and let the players solve problems as they liked.

I definitely do.

The ones that don't haven't read the DMG, which specifically states that you get XP for overcoming challenges, not just killing monsters. It's not a problem with D&D, but with DMs. A DM that won't give XP for bypassing a monster in D&D also won't do it in Hackmaster, Rolemaster, or any of the other games that give an amount of xp per monster.

I never liked the flat XP idea, but that's a topic for a different thread entirely.

Quote from: James McMurrayBlowing up the world if something doesn't happen seems to be as railroady as you can get to me. It's a big leap from :this adventure will end if you don't ___" to "this campaign will end if you don't ___."

It was a con senario. That changes the parameters somewhat in my estimation. Not to whether or not it is a railroad, but as to how much railroading tends to be tolerated.

There's this rpg.net quote I've seen that goes roughly like "People don't mind railroading as long as the view from the carriage is great and the destination is coolsvile." Both of which are subjective I suppose.

Ah. Yeah, con events need a bit more direction becauase you can't generally go off on a tangent and finish the adventure next week.

That quote definitely depends on the people. My players would either get up and walk out or do things to destroy the campaign if the session became a locked down railroad, no matter how pretty the scenery was. I'm the same when they run.