Behind the Screen: Railroad Collisions
I's forgot to post yesterday even though I had something worth talking about. Oops. Today, I was gonna post thrice so far, and each time lost the topic in a humorous conversation with the old ladies of my office. Just now, it was shucking nuts with one's teeth. Coconuts to be exact.
So, here's a DM related post, so rare these days. There's a lot of conversation in the online portion of the RPG community pretty much all the time that deals with railroading the players, either by running dungeons all the time or by giving them lame "hooks" for adventures that can't be ignored since the characters live in a vacuum. It's the general effect you get for first generation characters in a developing camaign world. The DM might even try what I did and tell the players something like "You get on top honey. You do what you like. Slow down I'm gonna spurt," umm, wait. No. something like, "There's no plot planned, you guys are free to develop the story as you see fit." The trouble is, there's one city, one village, a river, and the rumor of a larger city to the south, and desert everywhere else. The players have the illusion of choice, but there's no knowledge for them to base choice on. Their decisions then are limited to "Is this 'hook' good for us?" and if the answer is No, the next decision is "Should we got east or west to explore the desert."
Now, if the home brew campaign setting is on it's third or fourth round of characters (maybe more depending on how frequent TPKs are), it's possible to hand the reins to the players, since their knowledge of the setting is greater than their characters. The players can say, "Let's explore the frigid realms of Xhevstainski," and make characters appropriate to that. It's also the case for published campaigns.
But what about the flip side? What if the players say, "You know what, we don't want the reins. We just want to use the same characters to explore a series of dungeons. We just want to kill shit and take its stuff." You'd think that's a DM's heaven. There's really little work in that case, since all you need is a subscription to Dungeon magazine. It is, however, a bit stifling as a DM. Running a dungeon is fun for the group as a whole because it's probably the first DM skill a DM developed. We all know how to do it, and all but the newest of it should do it with more panache than a simple, "You enter a 10x20 room with torches on the wall. A group of five ogres look up from their game of bones and snarl at you." We're still guilty of that, but we should do better. So outside of crafting new monsters, architecture or finding creative ways to screw the players with a programmed illusion spell, it makes the DMs job REALLY boring.
My question is this. If your players want nothing more than a series of dungeon crawls, does that make it ok to railroad them entirely? For instance. The group wants dungeons and treasure. Could you give them a dungeon type adventure every third or fourth go, but tell a story in a greater world (involving their characters of course) in the meantime? Can the sequence of adventures be Dungeon, Caravan Guarding, Dungeon, Save the Village, Assasinate a Rival Noble, Attack a Castle, Dungeon, Dungeon if everything is coordinated and following the events of a young merchant slowly learning that he is the lost son of the last King that was murdered in his sleep and whose death plunged the kingdom into civil war? And if so, is it ok if events at that point have given the characters very explicit reasons to stop the grave robbing and fight to save the kingdom? Where's the happy medium when the players want mindless skull bashing, but the DM wants the next best seller from Oprah's Book Club?
So, here's a DM related post, so rare these days. There's a lot of conversation in the online portion of the RPG community pretty much all the time that deals with railroading the players, either by running dungeons all the time or by giving them lame "hooks" for adventures that can't be ignored since the characters live in a vacuum. It's the general effect you get for first generation characters in a developing camaign world. The DM might even try what I did and tell the players something like "You get on top honey. You do what you like. Slow down I'm gonna spurt," umm, wait. No. something like, "There's no plot planned, you guys are free to develop the story as you see fit." The trouble is, there's one city, one village, a river, and the rumor of a larger city to the south, and desert everywhere else. The players have the illusion of choice, but there's no knowledge for them to base choice on. Their decisions then are limited to "Is this 'hook' good for us?" and if the answer is No, the next decision is "Should we got east or west to explore the desert."
Now, if the home brew campaign setting is on it's third or fourth round of characters (maybe more depending on how frequent TPKs are), it's possible to hand the reins to the players, since their knowledge of the setting is greater than their characters. The players can say, "Let's explore the frigid realms of Xhevstainski," and make characters appropriate to that. It's also the case for published campaigns.
But what about the flip side? What if the players say, "You know what, we don't want the reins. We just want to use the same characters to explore a series of dungeons. We just want to kill shit and take its stuff." You'd think that's a DM's heaven. There's really little work in that case, since all you need is a subscription to Dungeon magazine. It is, however, a bit stifling as a DM. Running a dungeon is fun for the group as a whole because it's probably the first DM skill a DM developed. We all know how to do it, and all but the newest of it should do it with more panache than a simple, "You enter a 10x20 room with torches on the wall. A group of five ogres look up from their game of bones and snarl at you." We're still guilty of that, but we should do better. So outside of crafting new monsters, architecture or finding creative ways to screw the players with a programmed illusion spell, it makes the DMs job REALLY boring.
My question is this. If your players want nothing more than a series of dungeon crawls, does that make it ok to railroad them entirely? For instance. The group wants dungeons and treasure. Could you give them a dungeon type adventure every third or fourth go, but tell a story in a greater world (involving their characters of course) in the meantime? Can the sequence of adventures be Dungeon, Caravan Guarding, Dungeon, Save the Village, Assasinate a Rival Noble, Attack a Castle, Dungeon, Dungeon if everything is coordinated and following the events of a young merchant slowly learning that he is the lost son of the last King that was murdered in his sleep and whose death plunged the kingdom into civil war? And if so, is it ok if events at that point have given the characters very explicit reasons to stop the grave robbing and fight to save the kingdom? Where's the happy medium when the players want mindless skull bashing, but the DM wants the next best seller from Oprah's Book Club?
posted by Amazing Shafeman at 12:20 PM
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