Tuesday, September 10, 2013

On Railroads and Useless Choices

Reflecting on two posts here.

Tim Shorts mentioned playing a bad railroady game.

I realized that, to me, railroads are bad if you don't like where they are going.

The A-series modules are pretty railroady. The A1-4 supermodule wasn't any better, although it did a better job of connecting one set of rails to another. But the thing about them is that no group I ran through them wanted to get off the rails. The trip was entertaining and they wanted to stop at all the stops and get to the destination.

Where railroady adventures fall down in my experience is when they're either diverting from places you'd rather go, or forcing results on you.

Th end of A3 is kind of like that, with a false choice - either scripted ending is fully scripted. Either you get captured (the setup for A4), or you fight. If you fight, you win and then get captured (presumably as part of a power play by the capturer, who wanted you to clear out his rivals) or you lose and get resurrected for questioning and end up captured. Kind of lame, although the fight itself is really fun. It could have been executed better. Yet the part that galled people I ran through this series was "your stuff is gone!" and not "you are captured!" My takeaway is that people dislike auto-failure and auto-defeat more than a clear statement of "there is one path." At least in general.

So railroady adventures can be good if you're all on the same page about what's fun and where to go.

Wide-open adventures are cool if your choices matter and you have some means to determine which choice is what. Where railroads are fun is when the choice doesn't matter and you don't want to make the choice anyway. Which is partly why false choices are kind of annoying.

Eric Treasure felt the same way I did about Dungeon Robber. Very fun, but when you're faced with four direction choices and all of them are random, it's a useless choice. It's not agency. It's like having someone offer you four choices for dinner - chicken, chicken, chicken, or chicken. Why ask? Just serve me the chicken. You can't make any choice better or worse, and none of the have any different results.

I once got work edited by someone, and he "suggested" a change. I said no, because I disagreed. I was overruled - which annoys me decades later. Yet I cheerfully send in manuscripts to SJG and tell Steven Marsh and Sean Punch to change whatever they feel needs changing without asking. They do me the courtesy of not asking for my approval on things I don't have any say on. I realized that a false choice feels kind of disempowering, like you're a kid again. "Do you want to do A or B?" "B." "Well, we'll do B some other time." Yeah, thanks.

I think that's what's nice about a clear railroad vs. a false choice - if you don't even pretend there is a choice, and you make the single path clearly and fun, it's not a bad thing. It may not be the Platonic ideal of gaming perfection, but it's a good way to spend an evening. Nothing but not-fun choices on a path is about as fun as false choices - it's being stuck on a tour bus seeing sights you don't want to see.

No great insight in the above, I know. But this was rattling around and I felt like it made sense to write it down.

15 comments:

  1. many early adventures tournament games, A series was pretty unchanged while others added wilderness and made more open ended

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    1. This is true, but besides the point - it is still a railroad. But a fun one, generally.

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  2. I think a certain amount of metagaming is good in considering railroads. If I want my party waking up in prison, I won't play out the fight beforehand -- I'll start the game as they wake, and talk about what they remember about what happened before. They're all grown-ups; they can cope with it. The difference is that by narrating that I'm making it clear that this is where I want to start (and by implication that they have a fair shake at getting out of it); if I throw them into a hard fight so that they'll get captured, it feels false, because fights are for PCs to win or lose, and a standard enemy wants to kill you, not capture you. (I'm reminded of the Desert of Desolation, which basically starts with "the king doesn't like you and has dumped you in the desert with a mission". Not entirely unlike what Tim mentions, but going back and beating up the king would be way more trouble than going in and doing the dungeon. It's a bit of a force but it more or less works for me.)

    One that doesn't work as written is Beyond the Mountains of Madness, which I find a very railroady adventure, especially in the early stages... but a good GM doesn't need to run it as such. Much more interesting to let the PCs have some freedom (and indeed, as happened when a friend of mine ran it, treat it as a first-contact story rather than a horrible-things-will-eat-you story).

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  3. We're running into a bit of the railroad issue here and there as we play Jade Regent, the Pathfinder Adventure Path, using DF. Some of the "choices" we're faced with make zero sense when considered from the overall strategic goal of "Get Ameiko to Tian so she can be empress." They're effectively side-quests to the overall strategic goal, and I find myself having to embrace the rails in order to have fun with it. DF makes this easy (or easier) because it's within it's genre idiom, but I can tell it grates on some of the others.

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    1. It doesn't grate on me, so much as I can't tell ahead of time when I'm supposed to embrace the rails or when the adventure is actually offering me a choice.

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    2. Yeah, that is one of the things I mean by false choices - it is just better in a is-the-game-fun sense if you tell people what the choices are or are not.

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  4. Yes, I don't see any problem with a railroady adventure as long as there's player buy-in. (I never understood people complaining about "Horror on the Orient Express" being a literal railroad. Well, yes, that's sort of the point.) Pathfinder Adventure Paths bug me because they do tend to present those false choices, or else say that X can't happen until the players are Y level, and woe betide you if they advance too quickly or slowly.

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  5. but when you're faced with four direction choices and all of them are random, it's a useless choice. It's not agency.

    I agree. I realized this in my own game at one point and started trying as much as possible to put in differentiation and hint as to what might lie down each corridor (sounds, smells, flickering lights, etc.) to at least try to give some information that would make the choice meaningful. I think info is the basis of all meaningful choice.

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    1. Of course, that wouldn't be possible on an intersection by intersection basis in a megadungeon. I was running smaller dungeons where it was.

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    2. I think you have a good point - most of the time, there must be some differentiation. Maybe not intersection by intersection, but if the PCs scout down them both there must be something to tell them apart.

      Critically my megadungeon isn't random, so it's not like either way gets you the same roll to see what you find, and you can always backtrack. That annoying useless choice in Dungeon Robber actually is a great way of showing why actual decision agency is such a big deal.

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    3. It would be an insurmountable amount of prep work to do, for sure. (Though a whole megadungeon kinda is already, isn't it? heh).

      But during play, you would look at your map and (perhaps with the help of glancing at dungeon dressing tables/wandering monster/random sounds charts) respond to player questions about each direction of the intersection, wouldn't you?

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    4. It's not the prep work, as you say, it's answering the questions as they come up!

      You can't always tells the difference, but the point is, there is a difference. Dungeon Robber is fun, but it's random, which means if you have four doors to choose from, they all equally lead to the same thing - a random room or hallway. In a pre-done dungeon, that's not the case, even if some choices do ultimately turn out to be an illusion or make no difference.

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  6. I never mined the A series railroad. It was fun, and although there were junction points that you got shoved to (e.g., captured without weapons and gear) your choices still seemed to matter between the points. The one railroad that bothers me to this day is the Health Police adventure from GURPS Space Adventures. It is a nicely written and all, but its plot has large points that PCs are all along for the ride, and nothing they do matters. The PCs can't kill or escape from the bad guy until a certain point, no matter what they try. But by that point I and my group just stopped caring. So the GM has to stop you from doing anything not purely scripted for 3/4+ of the adventure, and then motivate you to defise a way out of the bad guy's trap in the last 1/4.

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    1. I have never read that adventure, but that does sound pretty egregious.

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  7. The adventure I mentioned was just poorly executed. I understood what the writer intended, but I think his intentions were flawed from the get go. If he'd written more as a loose sandbox adventure the setting he had would have been a nice starting point, but the adventure demanded the players to complete tasks, boring tasks, before you move on to the next chore.

    There are times and adventure need to have a linear plot line, but the writer needs to make it shiny to keep the players interest. It's no easy task, but I've seen it work very well.

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