Consequences, Railroading, and Schrodinger's Dungeon

[kyoryu]

When we say "The quantum Ogre is bad", that's because Quantum Ogre is a shorthand for a railroading technique, and railroading is a shorthand for denying player agency, and denying player agency is bad.

The example of the Quantum Ogre itself, a random encounter on the road that gives people a chance to throw some dice, is fine.

I actually love this post, but I'm going to sliiiightly disagree with you.

QOs aren't necessarily bad - if the players are aware of the fact that it's a linear game, and have bought into that. Levels of agency is a preference - some people want more, some people are okay with or even prefer less. What matters is that everyone is on board with it. The issue with QOs and the like is when the GMs claim that the players do have agency, while doing everything possible to subvert it.

Is taking something of yours bad? Not if you tell me it's okay. Otherwise, yes.

I go back to the point I made with random encounters: It's usually not productive to talk about a technique being "bad". It's usually more productive to talk about when the technique is useful. Very, very few techniques are always bad. The closest I'd come is DMPCs, and they're not necessarily bad (they work sometimes!) but the risk of them blowing things up is high enough I always suggest avoiding them.

[Batcathat]

I think it depends on which definition of railroad you go with…. But really your at the crux - what does invalidating player choice actually look like? Can one invalidate an informationless choice?

Personally, I would say that getting to pick between A and B without any information and having it result in different outcomes is more freedom than picking between A and B and having it result in the same outcome is better, yes, but admittedly the difference is rather philosophical at that point.

Are any DMs ever actually saying - no matter the situation X happens or is what’s going on behind the scenes more nuanced - ‘I know the plausible moves the players can make and introducing fictional element X in any of them makes sense’?

Sure, it doesn't have to be railroading if X shows up whether the party chooses A or B. It's likely they encounter ogres whether they go to the Ogre Mountains or the Ogre Swamps and hopefully the choice matters in other ways. But I don't think that's what people are complaining about when they're talking about Quantum Ogres or railroading but rather GMs that, yes, more or less say that no matter what, X happens.

[BRC]

I actually love this post, but I'm going to sliiiightly disagree with you.

QOs aren't necessarily bad - if the players are aware of the fact that it's a linear game, and have bought into that. Levels of agency is a preference - some people want more, some people are okay with or even prefer less. What matters is that everyone is on board with it. The issue with QOs and the like is when the GMs claim that the players do have agency, while doing everything possible to subvert it.

Is taking something of yours bad? Not if you tell me it's okay. Otherwise, yes.

I'll agree with the greater point about Railroading, but I feel like the QO actually has little place in such a game, specifically.

Unlike most railroading techniques, the QO is a slight of hand at it's core. The players are presented with choices, but the outcome is predetermined.

If your players are okay with/aware of the fact that they're in a linear game, why bother with the sleight of hand at all?

I guess with the specific example of the random encounter on the road, it's easier than finding reasons to remove roads from contention, but I think the Quantum Ogre as random encounter is a harmless bit of shortcutting even in non-linear games.

For a linear game to use the quantum ogre (In any significant sense), the GM would need to present the players (Who are fine with being railroaded) what seems to be a significant choice, and then negate it.


I'm starting to dislike the phrase Quantum Ogre, since, as I've mentioned, the ogre on the road isn't really a significant choice, and it's hard to separate the term from the example. Here's a better one.


The PC's storm the dark lord's Fortress. The Dark Lord flips a switch and boasts "My tame wyvern is waiting for me on the roof! The Priestess you came here to rescue is chained to the bottom of a pit in my dungeon belowground, and the switch I just hit opened a pipe to fill that pit with water!". He then Vanishes, with what the PC's recognize is a short-range teleport spell.

The PC's are presented with a choice: Save the Priestess, or stop the Dark Lord from escaping.
(The GM wants them to Save the Priestess, doing so will have great ramifications for the rest of the campaign).

If the PC's go down to save the priestess, the Dark Lord escapes on his wyvern.
If the PC's go up, to intercept the Dark Lord...it turns out he was lying, he actually teleported down to a secret tunnel, and the Priestess's cell is on the top floor.


If the Players are onboard with railroading, what's the function of giving them the choice at all. Just have the Dark Lord vanish and the PC's rescue the priestess.

[kyoryu]

I'll agree with the greater point about Railroading, but I feel like the QO actually has little place in such a game, specifically.

Unlike most railroading techniques, the QO is a slight of hand at it's core. The players are presented with choices, but the outcome is predetermined.

If your players are okay with/aware of the fact that they're in a linear game, why bother with the sleight of hand at all?

I generally do agree with this. But if the players are aware of the game structure, then while I might not find it necessary or useful, I don't see it as harmful any more.

I'm starting to dislike the phrase Quantum Ogre, since, as I've mentioned, the ogre on the road isn't really a significant choice, and it's hard to separate the term from the example. Here's a better one.

Outside of the RPG space, it's often called the Magician's Choice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(magic)
https://secrets-explained.com/basic-...ician-s-choice

[Frogreaver]

Sure, it doesn't have to be railroading if X shows up whether the party chooses A or B. It's likely they encounter ogres whether they go to the Ogre Mountains or the Ogre Swamps and hopefully the choice matters in other ways. But I don't think that's what people are complaining about when they're talking about Quantum Ogres or railroading but rather GMs that, yes, more or less say that no matter what, X happens.

I’d suggest that here in the forums many people see railroading around every corner. But in actuality when they dig into the topic they almost always backpedal to the point that railroading narrows down to being a very rare thing in actual practice.

See where the discussion has turned about quantum ogres for example. Now we have people going - yea quantum ogres aren’t railroading or quantum ogres aren’t really quantum ogres. In either case it illustrates the point.

[MR_Anderson]

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I am much more interested in finding out where the players will take the story rather than ensuring they will eventually meander to the same final destination.

If the players go tubing on a river, they will go downstream. If the players get out and try to climb a cliff, they may or may not reach the top. Maybe they decide to hike upstream. Maybe they take a flight to a lake. At this point the metaphor is being strained but it still holds.

No matter where the players go, there they are. I don't need to have them go to a "single final destination". They can blaze their own trail and we will discover where the final destination of this trail will be.

You are adding additional characteristic to the items in the river, which breaks the parable/metaphor I was using. The climbing a cliff, is the equivalent of an item diverting into a canal or taking some other path in the river. Hiking up stream is the equivalent of time travel.

For instance, you in your life are on a river and your story will end at some point, will it end at the end of the river or before? Most likely people and thusly characters die before the end of the entire river empties into the sea.

The question becomes what parts of the river do they see!

This is DMing. FOR YOU.

This is DMing. For you. AND SOME OTHERS.

I agree. I never know where the party will go more than a few sessions ahead, and that only because they've told me. They're considerate enough to stick to something once they've started, so I know what the "final destination" looks like...for this 2-3 session arc. I usually don't even know what the central conflict/BBEG will be until multiple levels into the campaign. And they've taken me on many twists and turns and unexpected detours. And I've thrown them for a few as the world reacts to them.

So you are using the river methodology. You are just viewing it from above the point of the players. You can see from the decisions that they made which places are coming like rapids, waterfalls, or flowing through a calm lake, but not developing start to finish.

Frankly, I think you're out-and-out wrong about GMing. Reading your post feels like someone who has only ever directed stage plays telling me that my film needs to consist only of a fixed camera pointed at a stage. To say I disagree with you completely would be an understatement.

...

I think you are “out-and-out wrong” about your assumptions of my methodology, but that is probably my fault for not giving explanation.

There is no script, the choices the players make impact the outcome of events at a level they can change.

Think of it like an improv show, not a play. There is an ultimate control by an entity (or multiple entities), but the majority of the show is the participants reacting to what the control(s) places before them. Ultimately there is a beginning and an end to the improv show, it is no different than that flow of the river, and great fun is had.

Players absolutely can impact their paths, but there often comes a point when their will is at conflict with power greater than them. Even if the players rise to become gods, is there not higher gods? If they rise yet again, there are yet even more. D&D Lore has a hierarchy of power, and the flow of that river will always fall with in that power scheme.

Think about MR_Anderson's River (I will describe my understanding of it as it relates). That campaign promises the Players that their PCs will eventually reach a predetermined finale. No matter how lost the PCs get there will be mechanics that guide them back to the river and towards downstream. It is strategic hard and soft denial or counteraction of player agency. When MR_Anderson is forthright about that campaign premise to their playgroup, I presume their playgroup liked the idea that their player agency would be denied/counteracted if they made a game breaking mistake. Sort of like how a sandbox GM might ask "are you sure?" except the GM and playgroup already decided they want to answer "no" to gamebreaking mistakes. So if the PCs get lost or are about to break the game, then MR_Anderson strategically negates that player agency as a means of satisfyingly the play preferences of MR_Anderson and the rest of their playgroup.

I think we would still call that a railroading mechanic despite the entire playgroup wanting the mechanic to be used. It is a mechanic that negates / denies player agency, and in this unusual situation that was something the playgroup valued positively.

That is why I have taken to using railroading as a neutral connotation describing the mechanisms that deny/decrease player agency that some (many) players might have preferences that object to some or all of those mechanism in some or all situations.

Your understanding is fairly close. I have sat down with the players together and individually, we’ve got a feel for where they want to go for the next 10-20 levels and what everyone wants out of the game. They may not achieve it based upon their decisions, or they may overachieve, again based upon their decisions.

Very few players ever know what the game is ultimately going to throw at them, but in certain instances I work some of it out with a player(s) ahead of time so they don’t think I’m screwing them over and/or their character’s progression isn’t worthless at some point. Thus future outcomes are DM and Player controlled, but there is an element of in the moment with dice and other players that might change everything planned.

I have a player who wanted to play a vampire, but I said absolutely not as it would not fit into the story, as some sense of a story must be maintained. This is one of our agreed upon rules. However, the same player has been tossed into a situation that he now knows more about vampires and has a possibility of becoming one. Prior to playing he didn’t know I changed Vampires in my world from regular D&D Vampires to Vampires that operate like those in Vampire the Masquerade.

I had no intention of allowing a player to become a vampire, but through a series of events the players have placed themselves in such a position to make it happen and make sense within the story. The players are confined within the path of the river, but that doesn’t mean they can’t find a path within the river itself that will achieve what they want.

It is the Job of a DM to ensure the players are enjoying the game, but the players are also buying into how the DM runs it, this is regardless of methodology. It is a mutual agreement on both sides.

I’ve been on both sides of completely player driven outcomes and player decided content. Ultimately, a certain player or a few players drive the entire group, and the DM is pulled in too many directions, it is fun for a few, but usually not all.

I would rather refer to those as LINEAR, rather than railroading.

Linear is more neutral, to me, while railroading has at least the implication of being forced or coerced.

||

...

Well, that's the paradox - as I understand it, the River isn't exactly linear.

...

So… to me… Railroading is the act of using the tools to negate player Agency. So I can understand (I think) the concept of the tools being neutral. Although "changing game physics or established facts" being put to good use sounds like a mythic rare occurrence, that requires "the River" level of explicit buy-in in session 0.

Actually… I'm not completely certain what tools "the River" uses.

Railroading is bad, because it is by definition bad. Illusionism is bad, because it is by definition bad. But the tool of "changing established facts" can, theoretically, have consequences that aren't horrific for all groups in all circumstances.

You are correct, fudging numbers or game physics to maintain the course of the story is railroading, and it is very bad. It does more harm than good to try and control the flow as the DM, an example is rather than just let a big bad guy be defeated earlier than what you planned, you force an escape from the situation instead of going with the flow. There is always another bad guy.

I look at the River methodology as follows:

Spoiler: River Methodology

Show

It is just understanding the flow of a story. It could be undefined, semi-defined, or completely defined all the way through, but it must have sensible form.

Water doesn’t flow up hill unless something specifically is done to make that happen. Human nature is the same way, and players are human regardless of the character they play, thus stories are going to go in predictable directions for the most part, and illogical paths are blocked unless you are playing a Monty Python adventure.

The River metaphor helps to remind you that just like the passing water, that time for everything else doesn’t stop just because the players decided to do what they wanted to do. If they take time away from what is going on, the bad guy is still going to proceed with his/her plan.

Items in the same river can take different paths, but all paths lead down stream. Players do not have the ability to control everything about their world, but they can control things near them, and controlling enough things could change the entire flow. But, flowing water has to go somewhere, and they aren’t controlling the flow of that water forever, even diverting a river will still result in reaching the Sea almost every time, even by a different path.

Sometimes regardless of what people try to do, the river will always flow through a certain point that is inevitable; this is like the lowest pass in a mountain, no matter what is done above or below that point, a river will always find that point and flow through it.

Also, no matter where you are on a river, there is flow of the water before that point and after that point, and you should understand what those paths are, because you will be asked questions and it will contribute to players immersing themselves into the game.

This allows the Freewill of the DM to provide a flow, the Freewill of Players to be applied to the flow, and the product of those Freewills applied over a Controlled Randomness within a Logical Consistent Story.

I’ve been DM’ing for well over 20 years, and in my opinion it is the perfect system. Most of what the Players want is achieved, most of what the DM wants is also achieved. A little is given by both parties and sometimes both sides are surprised by the final product and a new or redefined flow of the River.

I do have buy-in from the players on certain things like not being so serious about every little check needed all the time, or making simple mistakes. We’ve implemented a “red light” system that we turn to red in certain encounters or situations so they know when absolute full attention to checks, movements, and choices is needed and that mistakes could result in character death or worse. This allows for a fun time to hang with the guys, as well as maintaining meaningful impact of decisions by the players as needed in certain key events.

This allows general fun and not stressing details about every rule every moment of each session. It’s an agreement that I as the DM, won’t screw them over for playing sloppy or distracted while at the same time they don’t complain about the decisions I make just to move the game forward at times.

Our group has played since the 80’s, so we have plenty of experience in D&D and have learned that we like characters and adventures that come together forming a story, something memorable. We’ve also learned the hard way what inter-party fighting does, so it is something that the DM can impose his will to try and prevent.

I know that not everyone will agree with these controls and this methodology, but that is okay. I just wanted to make sure people didn’t see it as absolutely Railroading or Linear style. The River methodology as I use it is basically Player Freewill tossed into the River the DM created of his/her Freewill. The players can do anything they want, so long as it makes sense storytelling-wise, and somethings are inevitable.

For instance the players in my game just found out that they live on one planet, and that there is at least one other near by that was/is inhabited. There are ships that sail among the stars called Aetherships, and there is an event coming that will basically destroy all life on their planet.

Did I railroad a Spelljammer adventure, some would say yes, but the cataclysm is the result of actions by other NPCs prior to the life of all the PCs, so they must deal with that event, as it had been set into motion already.

Do I want to run a Spelljammer Campaign, yes, but the players might decide to resettle elsewhere. I am willing to bet that after basically 40 years of playing together, knowing the players, and that they never have played Spelljammer (most of them not even knowing what Spelljammer is), they will want to explore what it has to offer.

[BRC]

I generally do agree with this. But if the players are aware of the game structure, then while I might not find it necessary or useful, I don't see it as harmful any more.

I feel like the pointlessness is why it's harmful. In the standard scenario, the technique serves a function. Here it's just kind of random.

I’d suggest that here in the forums many people see railroading around every corner. But in actuality when they dig into the topic they almost always backpedal to the point that railroading narrows down to being a very rare thing in actual practice.

See where the discussion has turned about quantum ogres for example. Now we have people going - yea quantum ogres aren’t railroading or quantum ogres aren’t really quantum ogres. In either case it illustrates the point.

A quantum ogre is railroading. It's also a quantum ogre. But it's not always bad.


Think about it like Spicy Food.

Some people like spicy food, others do not. People who enjoy spicy food can probably enjoy mild food, people with low spice tolerance will hate spicy things.

For the sake of this argument, spicy food is generally considered a Bad Thing (This is where the metaphor falls apart a bit).

Put a drop of hot sauce directly on your tounge and it will burn. Put a drop of hot sauce in a bigger dish and the dish won't become spicy (A bit of Railroading can overwhelm a single scene, but railroading a single scene doesn't mean you've railroaded the whole campaign).


The Archetypical Quantum Ogre, a random encounter on the road to bigger and more important things, is that drop of hot sauce into the pot. Yes, it is Hot Sauce, and Yes, Hot Sauce is spicy, but it's inclusion does not necessarily produce a Spicy Dish.

If I ask you "Did you put anything spicy into this" and "is this dish spicy", those questions can have separate answers.

[Frogreaver]

I feel like the pointlessness is why it's harmful. In the standard scenario, the technique serves a function. Here it's just kind of random.



A quantum ogre is railroading. It's also a quantum ogre. But it's not always bad.


Think about it like Spicy Food.

Some people like spicy food, others do not. People who enjoy spicy food can probably enjoy mild food, people with low spice tolerance will hate spicy things.

For the sake of this argument, spicy food is generally considered a Bad Thing (This is where the metaphor falls apart a bit).

Put a drop of hot sauce directly on your tounge and it will burn. Put a drop of hot sauce in a bigger dish and the dish won't become spicy (A bit of Railroading can overwhelm a single scene, but railroading a single scene doesn't mean you've railroaded the whole campaign).


The Archetypical Quantum Ogre, a random encounter on the road to bigger and more important things, is that drop of hot sauce into the pot. Yes, it is Hot Sauce, and Yes, Hot Sauce is spicy, but it's inclusion does not necessarily produce a Spicy Dish.

If I ask you "Did you put anything spicy into this" and "is this dish spicy", those questions can have separate answers.

Most quantum Ogres are just the DM introducing fiction to the game. If that’s railroading then everyone railroads.

[Batcathat]

I’d suggest that here in the forums many people see railroading around every corner. But in actuality when they dig into the topic they almost always backpedal to the point that railroading narrows down to being a very rare thing in actual practice.

I think it's less about railroading being rare and more about it coming in many different degrees and people having varying tolerances to it. Railroading is rarely as obvious as "No, you can't do X, do Y instead" and usually more along the lines of letting players try lots of different things but not succeeding until they do it "right" (which, like the Quantum Ogre, isn't necessarily railroading but often is).

But by all means, if you have some indisputable examples of many people claiming railroading and almost always backpedaling, feel free to share.

[BRC]

Most quantum Ogres are just the DM introducing fiction to the game. If that’s railroading then everyone railroads.

"Most uses of spices are just the chef introducing some flavor to the food. If that's cooking spicy food than everything is spicy"
And yet you can recognize the difference between bell peppers and jalapenos.

[Jakinbandw]

Most quantum Ogres are just the DM introducing fiction to the game. If that’s railroading then everyone railroads.

A quantum ogre is if I am given 2 roads to walk down, and instead I teleport, then the gm says that my teleportation fails and I'm on the road in front of an ogre.

The quantum ogre is bad because it involves lying to the players. That same GM could have asked that I not teleport because they had an important encounter on the first road, and they hadn't yet prepared for me to arrive in the town this session.

It's not the lack of choice that people are upset about in the quantum ogre example, it's the blatant lying to the players.

[Easy e]

It's not the lack of choice that people are upset about in the quantum ogre example, it's the blatant lying to the players.

This makes sense to me. However, it feels like the Quantum Ogre is a symptom and the cause is having an adversarial GM/Player relationship.

I bet you could rail road and lie to your players a lot IF the players did not feel like the GM was out to TPK or thwart all their schemes in the first place. Not that I recommend trying that approach, but a lot of these discussion are talking around the fact that the players and GMs are not working together.

[Tanarii]

"The Quantum Ogre" example uses a random encounter on the road because that's an easy scenario to comprehend with minimal other context.

No, it doesn't. It involved planned encounters that occur in a specific order, regardless of which of three different areas they could possibly be the players choose to go to.

[kyoryu]

Think about it like Spicy Food.

I love this analogy. It also encapsulates a lot of the frustration in the conversation to me.

A: "I don't like spicy food."
B: "Well, how do you define spicy food?"
A: "It's food that tastes hot. Usually because of peppers in it."
B: "Ah, are green peppers spicy?"
A: "Uh, no?"
B: "So, then, how can you say that peppers make spicy food?"
A: "Because some peppers are spicy!"
B: "That sounds really vague."
A: "Look, if you add spicy peppers to food, it gets spicy, and I don't like that."
B: "So, if the chef adds things to food, it makes it spicy? But since chefs add things to all food, doesn't that mean all food is spicy? And therefore there's no objection?"
A: "No! It's not the fact that the chef is adding stuff to the food! It's the fact that it's spicy!"
B: "Sometimes people put a little cayenne in food, and that doesn't seem to bother people."
A: "Yeah, a little spicy stuff usually doesn't make the food spicy."
B: "So spicy food is okay."
A: "No! Just a touch of cayenne won't make a whole dish spicy!"
B: "Lots of people like spicy food."
A: "But I don't! Make it for people that like it, that's fine, just tell me so I don't have to eat it!"
B: "What if I just don't tell you? And add lots of peppers but give you bread and honey and milk to eat with it. Then maybe you won't notice it's not spicy."
A: "How about you just don't give me spicy food?"
B: "But there's no definition of spicy food. Or all food is spicy. One of the two."
A: "UGH! I don't like spicy food, that's all!"
B: "But some people say they don't like spicy food, but some things that are spicy they're okay with."
A: "Yeah, but that's because they don't like really spicy food but are okay with food that's a little spicy."
B: "So, there's no standard definition of spicy. Therefore giving you spicy food is okay."
A: "How about no? I mean, there's a pretty reasonable limit at which food is definitely spicy. And maybe if you're adding enough that it might be spicy, just tell people?"
B: "Some people are super sensitive and think that even a little bit of pepper is spicy. So, really, isn't all food spicy?"
A: "No! Those people are outliers! There's reasonable defintiions that like 90% of people agree on."
B: "Hrm. I don't think so. I think it's really just okay for me to make spicy food and serve it to everyone, even if they claim that they don't like 'spicy' food."

This makes sense to me. However, it feels like the Quantum Ogre is a symptom and the cause is having an adversarial GM/Player relationship.

I bet you could rail road and lie to your players a lot IF the players did not feel like the GM was out to TPK or thwart all their schemes in the first place. Not that I recommend trying that approach, but a lot of these discussion are talking around the fact that the players and GMs are not working together.

Nah. For some people the point is that level of decision making, and taking it away takes away the fun.

And then there's the fact that the deception required usually starts to become apparent after a while - typically when players notice their decision don't ever impact anything, or when they start running into the increasing walls put up to keep them on rails. That kind of inherently leads to an adversarial situation.

If you're gonna run a linear game, just acknowledge it up front.

[OldTrees1]

That’s a big place of disagreement. IMO, Agency is not a more or less affair. Either you have agency or you don’t. Either you had a meaningful choice or you didn’t. Either your meaningful choice was invalidated or it wasn’t.

Agency is very much a more or less affair. A character can get more meaningful choices or fewer meaningful choices. They could have a meaningful choice about which city to visit AND a meaningful choice about what enemies they might encounter, OR they might only get 1 of the choices OR neither choice OR both choices and another choice on top of that.

Player Agency is a measurement of all these atoms of agency. You can have more or less. The PCs in a sandbox campaign have more agency than the PCs in a tyrannical Railroad. Both have some agency, but one has more than the other. One gets more choices about more things and has fewer choices invalidated.

You are adding additional characteristic to the items in the river, which breaks the parable/metaphor I was using. The climbing a cliff, is the equivalent of an item diverting into a canal or taking some other path in the river. Hiking up stream is the equivalent of time travel.

For instance, you in your life are on a river and your story will end at some point, will it end at the end of the river or before? Most likely people and thusly characters die before the end of the entire river empties into the sea.

The question becomes what parts of the river do they see!

I look at the River methodology as follows:

The river analogy implied to me that the river already exists. So I thought it was a parable for the flow of a A to B story with the players controlling the path from A to B. Under that parable my GMing style would break the parable by allowing the players to choose their destination. They might never go to B. They might leave the river.

However it sounds like I misunderstood. You are using the river banks to represent the limits of player agency on the river of time. You are not assuming the river's shape / destination / etc are defined. So it sounds like your river can be paraphrased as "Players don't have 100% agency and time happens". If that is what you meant, then I want to understand why you wanted to reinforce that common sense.

That said, how you described your use of the river (the flood for example) is not universal to all GMing. However you might get more relevant replies this 2nd time around. However you can't step in the same river twice, so expect some misconceptions to be carried downstream by the first attempt. (River jokes were intentional)

I love this analogy. It also encapsulates a lot of the frustration in the conversation to me.

My sympathies to "A".
If "B" could progress further into the conversation then maybe "C" could pop in with a different (lower/higher) tolerance than "A". Then "A" and "C" would recognize their preference can and do differ. Then they would attempt to explain their specific difference.

[kyoryu]

My sympathies to "A".
If "B" could progress further into the conversation then maybe "C" could pop in with a different (lower/higher) tolerance than "A". Then "A" and "C" would recognize their preference can and do differ. Then they would attempt to explain their specific difference.

Differing tolerances were brought up :)

[Frogreaver]

A quantum ogre is if I am given 2 roads to walk down, and instead I teleport, then the gm says that my teleportation fails and I'm on the road in front of an ogre.

The quantum ogre is bad because it involves lying to the players. That same GM could have asked that I not teleport because they had an important encounter on the first road, and they hadn't yet prepared for me to arrive in the town this session.

It's not the lack of choice that people are upset about in the quantum ogre example, it's the blatant lying to the players.

The primary complaint I've seen here is that it is railroading.

No, it doesn't. It involved planned encounters that occur in a specific order, regardless of which of three different areas they could possibly be the players choose to go to.

Why does the number of encounters this happens with have any bearing?

"Most uses of spices are just the chef introducing some flavor to the food. If that's cooking spicy food than everything is spicy"
And yet you can recognize the difference between bell peppers and jalapenos.

Except my position is not making that kind of fallacy. Have fun berating a position that no one is taking.

Agency is very much a more or less affair. A character can get more meaningful choices or fewer meaningful choices.

IMO, Agency is not about the number of meaningful choices you get but whether you get to make meaningful choices.

I'm not disputing that there can be more or less meaningful choices, nor that some choices can be more meaningful than others - only that whatever that's measuring, it's not agency.

They could have a meaningful choice about which city to visit AND a meaningful choice about what enemies they might encounter, OR they might only get 1 of the choices OR neither choice OR both choices and another choice on top of that.

Yes they could.

Player Agency is a measurement of all these atoms of agency. You can have more or less. The PCs in a sandbox campaign have more agency than the PCs in a tyrannical Railroad. Both have some agency, but one has more than the other. One gets more choices about more things and has fewer choices invalidated.

This still appears to be one of the largest parts of our disagreement. If it's really a tyrannical railroad i'd say the players lack agency.

[JNAProductions]

Then make your position clear, Frogreaver. Because right now, it is not clear at all.

[Frogreaver]

Then make your position clear, Frogreaver. Because right now, it is not clear at all.

I have been. What would you like to know about it?

[icefractal]

One factor that's inconvenient to theories of better gaming, but IME often true, is that the extent to which people mind railroading depends a lot on how satisfied they are with the game in other regards.

The same players who I saw being happy playing a fairly linear game and even voluntarily waiving certain actions to avoid breaking the plot ... were (in a different campaign) pushing hard against every NPC and feeling railroaded when they were at all blocked, even in IC ways.

The difference? The first game was run better than the second. People enjoyed it and felt the GM had their best interests at heart, so they rolled with it. In the latter game, it wasn't as fun and the GM (a different one) had previously burned through his trust, so people more often took the most negative view.

I'm not saying that's the only thing that matters, but it does matter.

[JNAProductions]

I have been. What would you like to know about it?

The position in general. You have not been as clear in your position as you think you are-so please, summarize.

One factor that's inconvenient to theories of better gaming, but IME often true, is that the extent to which people mind railroading depends a lot on how satisfied they are with the game in other regards.

The same players who I saw being happy playing a fairly linear game and even voluntarily waiving certain actions to avoid breaking the plot ... were (in a different campaign) pushing hard against every NPC and feeling railroaded when they were at all blocked, even in IC ways.

The difference? The first game was run better than the second. People enjoyed it and felt the GM had their best interests at heart, so they rolled with it. In the latter game, it wasn't as fun and the GM (a different one) had previously burned through his trust, so people more often took the most negative view.

I'm not saying that's the only thing that matters, but it does matter.

For sure-in the same way a great movie can get away with a plot hole, while a crappy one can't without being mocked.

[Frogreaver]

The position in general. You have not been as clear in your position as you think you are-so please, summarize.

Meaningful Choices are choices that can change/alter the fiction in important ways.

Agency is a person's ability to make meaningful choices. Implicitly this has a few requirements. (1) That you can learn (learning is essential because as the fiction is changed new information must constantly be considered) , (2) That you don't enter a state such that no further meaningful choices can be made (PC death being the prime example of such a state but not the only), (3) This applies to all aspects of the game the player has access to (can't think of a better way to say this 3rd one).

Railroading is when the GM uses force (of which there are many techniques) for the purpose of removing otherwise legitimate player choices, usually so that the game goes in the direction he has prepped for. Unless done for a whole campaign it doesn't remove player agency due to (2) - but even in somewhat shorter bursts it can lead to a rather long setup phase (long parts of sessions or multiple sessions) where the players have no meaningful choices. Typically players signed up to play a game where they can typically make meaningful choices and so railroading is typically bad because in most instances it's a dramatic break from player expectations. It's this mismatch of expectations that is the real problem with railroading. But very short railroads in the midst of a broader campaign can provide the GM with an excellent tool to setup interesting challenges and fiction for the players while still keeping up with their expectations that they will have mostly meaningful choices. So railroading is not necessarily always bad.

Is this the kind of stuff you were looking for?

[OldTrees1]

IMO, Agency is not about the number of meaningful choices you get but whether you get to make meaningful choices.

I'm not disputing that there can be more or less meaningful choices, nor that some choices can be more meaningful than others - only that whatever that's measuring, it's not agency.

Yes they could.

This still appears to be one of the largest parts of our disagreement. If it's really a tyrannical railroad i'd say the players lack agency.

I am confused, in a tyrannical railroad the players might get at least 1 meaningful choice. Therefore they have some agency. They have agency but they have less than players in a game with less railroading. Even in a game where the PCs have no agency, the player has agency over if they get up a leave.

If you try to cast it as a binary between "any meaningful choices vs 0 meaningful choices" then you are either ignoring or equating the entire possibility space of 2+ meaningful choices.

I understand how "If there is a meaningful choice, then the player has agency" however I don't understand how "The game that only let's you have 1 choice" is equivalent to a sandbox where you get a wealth of meaningful choices. It is meaningful to describe "The player does not have agency over this and that" or "The player does have agency over that and this". Those are descriptions of the meaningful choices the player gets and the shape of the agency they have.

There is a difference between the tyrannical railroad and the open sandbox. One has more player agency than the other. If this is an irreconcilable difference, then I don't want to engage with you equating all games to the tyrannical railroad with a single meaningful choice. So if that is where it must be, then let's drop it.

[Frogreaver]

I am confused, in a tyrannical railroad the players might get at least 1 meaningful choice. Therefore they have some agency. They have agency but they have less than players in a game with less railroading. Even in a game where the PCs have no agency, the player has agency over if they get up a leave.

IMO. A player has no meaningful choices in a tyrannical railroad. Any potentially meaningful choice they make will ultimately be negated because in a tyranical railroad the train stays on the tracks regardless of what the players do.

Nor do I find it logical to bring up actions outside the game when talking about player agency within the game. (As you did above).

If you try to cast it as a binary between "any meaningful choices vs 0 meaningful choices" then you are either ignoring or equating the entire possibility space of 2+ meaningful choices.

I understand how "If there is a meaningful choice, then the player has agency" however I don't understand how "The game that only let's you have 1 choice" is equivalent to a sandbox where you get a wealth of meaningful choices. It is meaningful to describe "The player does not have agency over this and that" or "The player does have agency over that and this". Those are descriptions of the meaningful choices the player gets and the shape of the agency they have.

Because Agency isn't a measure of how many meaningful choices you have.

There is a difference between the tyrannical railroad and the open sandbox. One has more player agency than the other. If this is an irreconcilable difference, then I don't want to engage with you equating all games to the tyrannical railroad with a single meaningful choice. So if that is where it must be, then let's drop it.

This blows my mind - I said players had no agency in tyrannical railroads - and yet here you are telling me that I'm equating sandboxes to tyranical railroads when my position is actually that players have agency in sandboxes and don't in tyrannical railroads.

[MR_Anderson]

The river analogy implied to me that the river already exists. So I thought it was a parable for the flow of a A to B story with the players controlling the path from A to B. Under that parable my GMing style would break the parable by allowing the players to choose their destination. They might never go to B. They might leave the river.

The DM/GM determines the river as he/she likes, and the PC are metaphorically tossed in at some point, usually not the beginning and not the end, so not A or Z. In this metaphor/analogy we are limited to 26 points with letters, but understand it really is infinite, and not always sequential.

So lets say players find themselves at C, and they want to go to F. Well maybe they can go straight to F, or maybe going straight to F makes no sense. If it makes no sense, then maybe they need to go to E before they go to F, but D is a waste of time so it certainly is skipped as it isn’t needed. I would let them go to F if that is what they want, just after E.

Maybe if they go to F, they can never go to L, M, N, O, & P. These letters can represent places in time. Maybe going to F is blowing up Alderaan with the Death Star, and Alderaan had L through P.

These letters could also represent events or actions in a character’s life like becoming a vampire. For instance, back to the player who wanted to play a Vampire in my world; his character never would have known about vampires at the beginning, he had to find vampires through playing the character to unlock that path story-wise.

All I am doing with this river flow is using it to restrict players to the limits of their character and the general flow of the story. Many players play with player knowledge and not always character knowledge, I use this to try and restrict that.

This usually comes off in gaming with a player saying, “I want to do Q, R, & S with my character.” I respond, “Q and R are fine, but no you can’t do S, at least not right now,” or “Explain to me how your character would even know about S.”

It is basically auto approval for anything the players can explain story-wise. I will always have the power to veto anything they want to do, but the players actually have that same power as they could refuse to follow certain parts of the storyline or a certain path that they are presented with.

Funny enough, they have already rejected a certain path and later what I had intended as an ally might end up being a foe, as that story arc happened as the river flowed, they just never went there.

However it sounds like I misunderstood. You are using the river banks to represent the limits of player agency on the river of time. You are not assuming the river's shape / destination / etc are defined. So it sounds like your river can be paraphrased as "Players don't have 100% agency and time happens". If that is what you meant, then I want to understand why you wanted to reinforce that common sense.

Is common sense common?

I wouldn’t agree with everything you just said, but most of it; I mean the river is fluid (A pun, but also serious) as it can change, but sometimes there are some very hard points that I have preplanned and will not change, like the cataclysmic event coming in the adventure I am running.

For story purposes I have other less hard points that do shift as needed, but they aren’t beyond being completely ruined by the players, as they still have Freewill. The story changes with the flow.

That said, how you described your use of the river (the flood for example) is not universal to all GMing. However you might get more relevant replies this 2nd time around. However you can't step in the same river twice, so expect some misconceptions to be carried downstream by the first attempt. (River jokes were intentional)

I understood that there would be river jokes, I banked on it.

So the Flood is metaphorically the world preventing the players from living and doing whatever they want forever. It is no different than if someone moves to the mountains and just does what they want to do and sooner or later adventures come exploring, or an evil tyrant has arose to power and now is coming for a new tax on them.

The Flood is me saying, okay you’ve played the Hobbit in the Shire long enough, time to get swept away by a need of the river.

It really is there to prompt the return to a story line that has been abandoned that didn’t stop on the account of no longer caring by the PC’s, and the flow of that story didn’t get stopped by anything else.

Hopefully I’ve elaborated much more to make what I call the river methodology make sense.

[OldTrees1]

IMO. A player has no meaningful choices in a tyrannical railroad. Any potentially meaningful choice they make will ultimately be negated because in a tyranical railroad the train stays on the tracks regardless of what the players do.

Nor do I find it logical to bring up actions outside the game when talking about player agency within the game. (As you did above).

Because Agency isn't a measure of how many meaningful choices you have.

This blows my mind - I said players had no agency in tyrannical railroads - and yet here you are telling me that I'm equating sandboxes to tyranical railroads when my position is actually that players have agency in sandboxes and don't in tyrannical railroads.

You have accepted no distinction between being able to make meaningful choices vs being granted the smallest possible meaningful choice. Even tyrannical railroads can have the smallest possible meaningful choice. If you don't accept a means of distinguishing along the continuum then I have to assume you use a binary. Since you stated that "if meaningful choice exists then agency exists" and tyrannical railroads can have the smallest possible meaningful choice, then your position as applied contradicts your position as professed. Which should I believe? I went for your position as applied because it implies less of a semantic language barrier. Was that wrong? Are there meaningful choices that don't grant player agency according to you?

Even in a tyrannical railroad the players have some agency, that agency is just limited by the railroad. It is useful to be able to distinguish between different scales of agency. If you are picking an arbitrary point, ignoring all agency below that point, and equating all agency above that point, then I see no value in that.

[HidesHisEyes]

I think you answered your first question with your second. But for the record, how are the majority of XP gained in most games? (hint, killing, and looting).

Well I already acknowledged that we play games that reward killing and looting. But as I said, how many games really push players into that behaviour *for its own sake*? How many games make it undesirable to have a larger goal that just happens to entail killing and looting? Also, I’m a little skeptical about the xp system argument. In my experience very few people actually use the xp system as written in 5E. It seems very standard, in practice, to do “milestone” xp, or devise a homebrew xp system.

And in Dungeon World (yeah it’s a meme among my irl group that I always end up mentioning DW, but there’s a reason for that!) you do indeed get xp for killing and looting: 1 xp for killing and 1 xp for looting, per session. The rest comes from learning about the world, roleplaying your alignment, exploring relationships with other PCs and (the majority) failing rolls.

If the players decide the goals and direction of the game, the GMs role becomes purely reactionary. To take the example to the N-th level, any attempt to add an element to the story that the players themselves did not directly initiate could be seen as "railroading" ("What do you mean the city we are in is being attacked by Orcs?? You're trying to get us to introduce a plot arc!")

Ok but I didn’t take it to the Nth level, you did. You’re talking about this:
PCs: we go to the city
GM: the city is under attack by orcs, the campaign is about an orc invasion now

I’m talking about this:
PCs: we go to the city to seek information on the whereabouts of our missing friend
GM: the city is under attack by orcs. How are you going to handle this situation while searching for the information you want?

That’s not “railroading” in any meaningful sense. It’s the GM introducing story elements, throwing challenges in the PCs’ path as they pursue the goal they set. The GM isn’t forcing them to care about the orcs or engage with them any further than is necessary for them to pursue their goal. But the GM still has the authority to introduce the orcs because the GM has authority over the game world, and is there (partially) to put resistance in front of the PCs.

Again, it’s a mixture of elements, some coming from the players, some from the GM. That mixture produces the story.

Oh, it is fun. For a little while. More so for the players. But trust me, getting everything you want, when you want it gets old and usually devolves into nothing more than an extended power trip.

See above. You don’t get everything you want, because the GM is always throwing spanners in the works, introducing elements that make your life difficult, introducing conflict and tension, so you’ll get an engaging narrative. This is also why it’s not a power trip - your power is constantly being tested against the challenges and complications thrown in by the GM, and sometimes you fail. In my example above I went with the PCs succeeding at killing the king and selling the queen - but they could absolutely fail, end up in jail about to be executed. And then you’d see where the story goes from there.

The general consensus seems to be that if the GM works to come up with a story element, and the players simply choose to ignore it, the GM is supposed to scrap all of that work. If they try to use the work elsewhere, they are now "railroading" players. Meanwhile, what a lot of anti-railroading posts seem to advocate is still railroading...it's just the players railroading the GM. Let the players decide their own goals equates to let the players railroad the GM into having to constantly come up with content on the fly while the PCs roll around the game world like a giant ball of chaos.

When I add a story element into the game as GM, it amounts to adding a couple of nodes to a mind map. I write about ten words. If it’s a more complex one then I might do some extra notes on NPCs, locations, hazards, monsters (maybe up to 100 words, and maybe a rough map or I’ll download a map). The bare minimum I need to introduce the thing at the table. Because I’m not writing a story or even building a world, I’m doing prep: literally preparing for the game. If the players don’t engage with it I’m throwing about 10-20 minutes of work and if I end up reusing it later they’ll never know. If they do engage with it, my minimal prep plus their actions plus the game mechanics is easily enough for me to improvise without having to come up with entirely new content on the fly. And they don’t roll around like a ball of chaos, in general, because the game/campaign always starts with us figuring out together what kind of game we’re going to be playing, what the PCs care about and what kind of situations they’re likely to end up in. I know roughly what to expect from them, they know roughly what to expect from me, neither of us know what is actually going to happen.

I promise you this works. What I’ll concede is that it is much harder in D&D 5E, mainly because that game wants you to do balanced combat encounters and those take some thought to design. In a system designed to be lightweight and flexible - FATE, Risus, most OSR games and most PbtA games - it works.

[Satinavian]

The primary complaint I've seen here is that it is railroading.

The complaint is not about railroading. The complaint is about railroading and lying to your players about that fact because you suspect you wouldn't get buy in on the railroading.

There are many groups out there playing happily with varying degrees of railroading. They tend to work well because the players know this and are ok with it. They even tend to atcively try to find the rails and stay on them to make the set plot to seem more plausible and avoid heavyhanded measures by the GM to keep on rails.

But when the GM does not have such a group and tries to railroad secretly anyway, it all falls to pieces. Especially prone to thie are GMs who think themself to be smarter than their players and therefore able to hide it.

[Quertus]

That’s a big place of disagreement. IMO, Agency is not a more or less affair. Either you have agency or you don’t. Either you had a meaningful choice or you didn’t. Either your meaningful choice was invalidated or it wasn’t.

Meaningful Choices are choices that can change/alter the fiction in important ways.

Agency is a person's ability to make meaningful choices. Implicitly this has a few requirements. (1) That you can learn (learning is essential because as the fiction is changed new information must constantly be considered) , (2) That you don't enter a state such that no further meaningful choices can be made (PC death being the prime example of such a state but not the only), (3) This applies to all aspects of the game the player has access to (can't think of a better way to say this 3rd one).

Railroading is when the GM uses force (of which there are many techniques) for the purpose of removing otherwise legitimate player choices, usually so that the game goes in the direction he has prepped for. Unless done for a whole campaign it doesn't remove player agency due to (2) - but even in somewhat shorter bursts it can lead to a rather long setup phase (long parts of sessions or multiple sessions) where the players have no meaningful choices. Typically players signed up to play a game where they can typically make meaningful choices and so railroading is typically bad because in most instances it's a dramatic break from player expectations. It's this mismatch of expectations that is the real problem with railroading. But very short railroads in the midst of a broader campaign can provide the GM with an excellent tool to setup interesting challenges and fiction for the players while still keeping up with their expectations that they will have mostly meaningful choices. So railroading is not necessarily always bad.

Is this the kind of stuff you were looking for?

Well, huh.

What is the nature of Agency? In the Playground, one can type most anything. There's some topics, like [REDACTED], that are verboten; and others, like "Moby ****", that we don't have the agency to successfully post. But, generally, really high agency, and a great community that does not abuse that agency.

In videogames, there are cut scenes, where the player has 0 agency. Outside those, the player only has as much agency as has been coded. The Duke can pick up weapons and shoot whichever he wants at whatever he wants, but things that aren't coded to take damage won't take damage, he'll only say his prescripted lines, and he's bounded by the walls of the game. Spiderman can climb on those walls (and the ceiling, and sometimes his foes), and you can choose what he says from a drop-down list, but if cars aren't coded as weapons, he cannot pick them up and throw them, and he can't choose to toss Aunt May off the skyscraper.

But all that is probably just me warming up / stretching / getting into the right space. I don't think we need those examples. I think when you're saying this:

Railroading is when the GM uses force (of which there are many techniques) for the purpose of removing otherwise legitimate player choices, usually so that the game goes in the direction he has prepped for. Unless done for a whole campaign it doesn't remove player agency due to (2)

That what you're saying, to parallel that for clarity, is:

Murder is when the GM uses force (of which there are many techniques) for the purpose of removing otherwise legitimate life, usually so that the game goes in the direction he has prepped for. Unless done for a whole world it doesn't remove live due to (2)

Just because you kill one choice, it doesn't mean you kill all choices; just because you kill one life, it doesn't mean you kill all life. Sure. And most definitions would parallel Railroading with murder, not genocide. And you do, as well.

You just then go on to say, effectively, "murder isn't bad, because they didn't commit genocide, so it's fine - there's still life". And that's a perfectly valid stance to take.

Just… most people don't agree with that stance. Most people (literally and figuratively) draw the line at "murder is bad".

Have I correctly identified the point of confusion / disagreement?

I’ve been DM’ing for well over 20 years, and in my opinion it is the perfect system. Most of what the Players want is achieved, most of what the DM wants is also achieved. A little is given by both parties and sometimes both sides are surprised by the final product and a new or redefined flow of the River.

I do have buy-in from the players on certain things like not being so serious about every little check needed all the time, or making simple mistakes. We’ve implemented a “red light” system that we turn to red in certain encounters or situations so they know when absolute full attention to checks, movements, and choices is needed and that mistakes could result in character death or worse. This allows for a fun time to hang with the guys, as well as maintaining meaningful impact of decisions by the players as needed in certain key events.

This allows general fun and not stressing details about every rule every moment of each session. It’s an agreement that I as the DM, won’t screw them over for playing sloppy or distracted while at the same time they don’t complain about the decisions I make just to move the game forward at times.

Our group has played since the 80’s, so we have plenty of experience in D&D and have learned that we like characters and adventures that come together forming a story, something memorable. We’ve also learned the hard way what inter-party fighting does, so it is something that the DM can impose his will to try and prevent.

I know that not everyone will agree with these controls and this methodology, but that is okay. I just wanted to make sure people didn’t see it as absolutely Railroading or Linear style. The River methodology as I use it is basically Player Freewill tossed into the River the DM created of his/her Freewill. The players can do anything they want, so long as it makes sense storytelling-wise, and somethings are inevitable.

For instance the players in my game just found out that they live on one planet, and that there is at least one other near by that was/is inhabited. There are ships that sail among the stars called Aetherships, and there is an event coming that will basically destroy all life on their planet.

Did I railroad a Spelljammer adventure, some would say yes, but the cataclysm is the result of actions by other NPCs prior to the life of all the PCs, so they must deal with that event, as it had been set into motion already.

Do I want to run a Spelljammer Campaign, yes, but the players might decide to resettle elsewhere. I am willing to bet that after basically 40 years of playing together, knowing the players, and that they never have played Spelljammer (most of them not even knowing what Spelljammer is), they will want to explore what it has to offer.

The idea of "casual" vs "red light" mode is interesting. I… don't think it's my preferred style, tbh, but I can see those who like "previously, on…" intros to appreciate knowing where/how to focus their attention. I prefer

Spoiler: The medieval scientist boy and the perfectly black sphere

Show

Once upon a time, in my very first campaign, in a player's very first experience with RPGs, the players committed the cardinal sin, and split the party.

This "new" player (his character had made it up to double-digit level) ended up in… a treasure room? 4 artifacts lay in the 4 cardinal directions, but it was what was floating in the center of the room that caught his attention: a black sphere. Perfectly black.

The player kept asking questions, trying to understand exactly what he was seeing, having his character shine lights on it (he had a gnomish flashlight, Continual Light in a metal rod with bullseye lantern tech on one end), look at it from different angles, etc. He also investigated the floating, by walking around it, sticking his hands over and under it, etc.

Finally, when he has concluded that it was beyond his character's comprehension, he decided to take it back to the rest of the party to examine (!)

In as neutral a tone as I could manage, I asked *how* he accomplished this. You could hear a pin drop as the rest of the players (who recognized the Sphere of Annihilation) waited for his answer.

He took off his cloak, threw it over the sphere, and intended to gather the ends and drag it along.

I described how the cloak feel through the sphere, as though the Sphere were but am illusion; however, they're was now a perfectly round hole in his cloak.

He gathered up his cloak, and backed away from the sphere.

Undeterred, he investigated the next relic.

When the bombastic genie popped out of its lamp, before it could finish thanking him, and offer him wishes, he had fled back to where he had last seen the rest of the party.

So… what if your players / PCs were all like, "you know what, we really Hate, with a burning passion, a) spelljamming; b) most everyone in that world; C) the gods, who are powered by the existence of those on that world. Therefore, we a) are going to create an epic dwoemer that makes all spelljamming ships crash; b) get those few we care about off world to our party demiplane; C) create an epic dwoemer that prevents planar travel off world; d) celebrate while watching the world die; e) roast marshmallows over its corpse; F) gleefully watch the gods starve; G) harvest their bodies; h) sell their corpses; I) play a planescape game", how would you respond?

(I accidentally cut out the part where you talked about "railroading" because "your character doesn't know that"; ie, you (seemingly) exclusively play with a single group, and that group lacks role-playing skill / ability to self-differentiate between player and character knowledge. I will have to think about that, and about the definitions of both "player agency" and "railroading". You've definitely given me food for thought. Senility willing, I'll circle back to that once I've had a chance to digest it.)

[Frogreaver]

Well, huh.

What is the nature of Agency? In the Playground, one can type most anything. There's some topics, like [REDACTED], that are verboten; and others, like "Moby ****", that we don't have the agency to successfully post. But, generally, really high agency, and a great community that does not abuse that agency.

In videogames, there are cut scenes, where the player has 0 agency. Outside those, the player only has as much agency as has been coded. The Duke can pick up weapons and shoot whichever he wants at whatever he wants, but things that aren't coded to take damage won't take damage, he'll only say his prescripted lines, and he's bounded by the walls of the game. Spiderman can climb on those walls (and the ceiling, and sometimes his foes), and you can choose what he says from a drop-down list, but if cars aren't coded as weapons, he cannot pick them up and throw them, and he can't choose to toss Aunt May off the skyscraper.

But all that is probably just me warming up / stretching / getting into the right space. I don't think we need those examples. I think when you're saying this:

Railroading is when the GM uses force (of which there are many techniques) for the purpose of removing otherwise legitimate player choices, usually so that the game goes in the direction he has prepped for. Unless done for a whole campaign it doesn't remove player agency due to (2)

That what you're saying, to parallel that for clarity, is:

Murder is when the GM uses force (of which there are many techniques) for the purpose of removing otherwise legitimate life, usually so that the game goes in the direction he has prepped for. Unless done for a whole world it doesn't remove live due to (2)

Just because you kill one choice, it doesn't mean you kill all choices; just because you kill one life, it doesn't mean you kill all life. Sure. And most definitions would parallel Railroading with murder, not genocide. And you do, as well.

You just then go on to say, effectively, "murder isn't bad, because they didn't commit genocide, so it's fine - there's still life". And that's a perfectly valid stance to take.

Just… most people don't agree with that stance. Most people (literally and figuratively) draw the line at "murder is bad".

Have I correctly identified the point of confusion / disagreement?



The idea of "casual" vs "red light" mode is interesting. I… don't think it's my preferred style, tbh, but I can see those who like "previously, on…" intros to appreciate knowing where/how to focus their attention. I prefer

Spoiler: The medieval scientist boy and the perfectly black sphere

Show

Once upon a time, in my very first campaign, in a player's very first experience with RPGs, the players committed the cardinal sin, and split the party.

This "new" player (his character had made it up to double-digit level) ended up in… a treasure room? 4 artifacts lay in the 4 cardinal directions, but it was what was floating in the center of the room that caught his attention: a black sphere. Perfectly black.

The player kept asking questions, trying to understand exactly what he was seeing, having his character shine lights on it (he had a gnomish flashlight, Continual Light in a metal rod with bullseye lantern tech on one end), look at it from different angles, etc. He also investigated the floating, by walking around it, sticking his hands over and under it, etc.

Finally, when he has concluded that it was beyond his character's comprehension, he decided to take it back to the rest of the party to examine (!)

In as neutral a tone as I could manage, I asked *how* he accomplished this. You could hear a pin drop as the rest of the players (who recognized the Sphere of Annihilation) waited for his answer.

He took off his cloak, threw it over the sphere, and intended to gather the ends and drag it along.

I described how the cloak feel through the sphere, as though the Sphere were but am illusion; however, they're was now a perfectly round hole in his cloak.

He gathered up his cloak, and backed away from the sphere.

Undeterred, he investigated the next relic.

When the bombastic genie popped out of its lamp, before it could finish thanking him, and offer him wishes, he had fled back to where he had last seen the rest of the party.

So… what if your players / PCs were all like, "you know what, we really Hate, with a burning passion, a) spelljamming; b) most everyone in that world; C) the gods, who are powered by the existence of those on that world. Therefore, we a) are going to create an epic dwoemer that makes all spelljamming ships crash; b) get those few we care about off world to our party demiplane; C) create an epic dwoemer that prevents planar travel off world; d) celebrate while watching the world die; e) roast marshmallows over its corpse; F) gleefully watch the gods starve; G) harvest their bodies; h) sell their corpses; I) play a planescape game", how would you respond?

(I accidentally cut out the part where you talked about "railroading" because "your character doesn't know that"; ie, you (seemingly) exclusively play with a single group, and that group lacks role-playing skill / ability to self-differentiate between player and character knowledge. I will have to think about that, and about the definitions of both "player agency" and "railroading". You've definitely given me food for thought. Senility willing, I'll circle back to that once I've had a chance to digest it.)

I don’t think your going to get much productive discussion when you are intent on portraying your opponents as comparable to those that believe murder is acceptable.