Shadowrun and Railroading: Why ?

[silva]

Ok, so Im reading the GM advice on the new and shinny Shadowrun 5th edition core book, and... Im baffled.

Im baffled that after 5 editions the authors still advice the GM to make the game a railroad where he tells his favorite story for the players to jump from scene A to B to C.

No, really, take a look:

Primarily, the gamemaster is responsible for bringing the initial story seed, or spark, on which the session will be built...

...Think of the game as being like a boat, with
the gamemaster controlling the rudder and the players
rowing the oars. The gamemaster sets the direction, the
players drive the game forward...

...Once you’ve talked to your players, spend some quality
time talking to yourself... What motivates you to tell these stories? What kind of stories do you want to tell?...

...An astute gamemaster
can have the best of both worlds: Allowing the
players to make their choice, while still having the story
go in roughly the same way as they had planned...

...a scene is written around
contributing one or more points to the overall plot of
the run. Building the overall plot of the adventure is
done by stringing together multiple scenes that make
up the whole..

...What needs to happen in a scene can be incredibly
varied and depends a lot on the story the gamemaster
is trying to tell...

...Having written (or at
least read and reviewed) the plot of a run, the gamemaster
should be familiar with the overall storyline and
where the points of greatest drama and excitement will
occur...

...if the players are really engaged in sneaking their characters
into a building, disabling sensors, and focused on
avoiding fights, then the gamemaster can take the scene
that they planned where a security team stumbles upon
the players and remove, or delay, it... Controlling pace is all about watching the players’
engagement in the story and adjusting the timing of
events to maximize it

Now, what really baffles me is the fact that the Shadowrun setting and premise together produce one of the best environments for player-driven/sandbox gaming ever. You got independent criminals trying to make cash and rep in a very dynamical environment full of potential opportunities, employers and sponsors - gangs, corps, police, governments, tribes, criminal sindicates, rogue operatives, etc. Also, you have this neat concept of "Contacts" in place which further help to build a network of relationships and conflicting interests just waiting for the players to tap in and generate a million gaming hooks per night ...

...but then the GM is adviced to run it like a fucking Fighting Fantasy gamebook with a set plot and scenes and "pace" and climax and shit.

Am I the only one to see the paradox and amazingly wasted opportunity here ?

[Whipstitch]

Nope. 'round these parts we talk shit about Catalyst on the regular.

[vagrant]

CGL is a bit shit, and they seem to focusing a lot of the book around convention play 'Shadowrun Missions' than something you'd do at home. From that perspective, railroading is almost mandatory.

[virgil]

That is something I really appreciate from the Alexandrian. It is probably the only designer I've ever seen that gives in-depth advice for adventure design that isn't pure rail-road. I see mention of stuff like random encounters and the 3E DMG has charts for EL guidelines per level, but that's not advice for working with the group to provide choices in the narrative.

[kzt]

Because Bull is big into shiny metal rails and the Dev is clueless.

[phlapjackage]

CGL is a bit shit, and they seem to focusing a lot of the book around convention play 'Shadowrun Missions' than something you'd do at home. From that perspective, railroading is almost mandatory.

You know, seeing it from this perspective...a lot falls into place for why SR5 is the way that it is.

[silva]

Oh, and the SEGA GENESIS Shadowrun videogame actually was one of the earliest electronic sandboxes in consoles. But if its devs had listened to the advice on the books, they would never manage to do that.

Go figure..

[Ancient History]

Shadowrun might be over twenty years old, but none of the people currently writing for it have been doing so for more than a couple of years, really, and even then I think a lost of them have been taken over by the Missions mentality.

[Dogbert]

Sounds like whoever was the hack that wrote the GMing section skipped half his script writing classes, and can't grok the differences between passive media and RPGs, like how while you can have your conclusion and key points written, the whole script is only a point of reference because the existence of players turn all plot points into potential turning points.

[silva]

That is something I really appreciate from the Alexandrian. It is probably the only designer I've ever seen that gives in-depth advice for adventure design that isn't pure rail-road. I see mention of stuff like random encounters and the 3E DMG has charts for EL guidelines per level, but that's not advice for working with the group to provide choices in the narrative.

Yup. Agreed. Its ironic that railroading is generally bashed as a cheap/undesirable gaming style, but then most rpg books dont know how to advise otherwise.

There are only 3 published rpg books Ive read that give out an actual structure and advice on sandbox gaming - Judges Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy in 1978, Chaosium´s Griffin Mountain in 1982, and Vincent Baker Apocalypse World in 2011. Ive heard that the original 1st edition D&D also portrayed a sandbox structure of play but that it got lost in subsequent editions. Anyway, its sounds weird to me that only 4 games radically depart from the railroad model in all rpg industry.

[Nath]

IIRC, WEG Stars Wars 2nd edition Gamemaster Handbook did address the possibility to play open adventures or campaigns. It was merely a few pages, but at least it acknowledged there was another way.

[Username17]

The thing is, open sandbox world adventures was basically assumed for Shadowrun through most of SR3 and SR4. Shadowrun books don't even bother giving you linear dungeons or whatever, they give you character interactions and opponents and agendas and ask you to figure it out yourself. Vampire was for the most part the same way.

While both games certainly had the occasional pre-made railroad adventure made for them, those were the exception rather than the rule. Mostly you got "plot books", which you were expected to have sandbox interactions with.

Sandbox isn't unusual or rare. It's just how things were done for most of the 90s and 2000s for most of the big games. Hell, even AD&D and 3rd edition D&D mostly has encounter tables and explorable dungeons rather than a set linear set pieces.

4th edition D&D's reliance on railroading you through a specific set of set piece encounters was really weird, and people hated it. Having Shadowrun adopt that style for 5th edition is simply extremely puzzling.

-Username17

[virgil]

Sandbox isn't unusual or rare. It's just how things were done for most of the 90s and 2000s for most of the big games. Hell, even AD&D and 3rd edition D&D mostly has encounter tables and explorable dungeons rather than a set linear set pieces.

While the rules just assumed that's how they were done, they never really discussed it or gave advice as to how it work. I don't know a single DM I've played under, regardless of system, that didn't outright ignore encounter tables and ran a fixed narrative. Once in a great while, there was a DM that was more improv, but that was amateur-level work and ultimately still not sandbox.

Do you know what the support is for random encounter tables? They include a chart for them, and that's it. As a result

[vagrant]

I've never once ran a Shadowrun game as anything but a sandbox. With the sweet shit that exists in the world, why in hell would you want to restrict your players to your own wankery?

[Whipstitch]

Particularly since the evergreen cyberpunk cliche is that of the Job Gone Wrong. If you fluff a setting as containing many double-dealing puppet masters then I think you need to accept going in that the PCs will occasionally tell Mr. J to get bent.

[vagrant]

Hell, the best runs I've ever seen weren't about finishing the job, it was figuring out how to fuck the J over and not end up a pile of slag for the organleggers.

[Dogbert]

Running a true sandbox is like drawing manga in that both are styles that look deceptively easy but actually require the highest degree of mastery unless you want your end product to look like the doodles of an elementary school kid.

The less preparation you star with, the more skill you require.

That's a reason why dungeon crawls will always exist. As bland as some people may find them, they're the perfect training wheels for MC as the variables inside are minimal. If you need a "controlled environment," dungeons are as good as it gets.

[TheFlatline]

I've noticed that the people writing or are closely related to writing SR5 are particularly nasty about this.

From what I can tell from forum rantings, railroading is specifically needed because to let players exercise imagination is to let them manipulate the rules in ways that are not permitted, and any inkling of your players getting out of line by having fun or being creative must be snuffed out immediately by your cold, hard boot.

In other words, the rules are so fucked up that they can only accommodate railroading. They're too fragile to stand up to creativity.

[Ancient History]

Keep in mind, Bull and some of the other freelancers are responsible for Missions, which very much is all about railroading. They don't like player options that make work for Mister Cavern, they don't like trying to balance a scenario against different types of PCs. The Missions character creation guidelines were some of the most restrictive, annoying, and arbitrary pieces of nonsense out there...but of course, they were pretty much designed for convention play, not for highlighting material from new sourcebooks or your home table. So, that's why SR5 is the way it is: designed by the people that wrote Missions, for Missions, fuck everybody else.

[Rawbeard]

Missions is so awesome!

[Fucks]

Totally.


Not.

[Koumei]

Once you're actually doing a job and in fact inside an industrial complex, I can see the environment (and the story) becoming very controlled, with the MC knowing most of the variables. Which should not be the same as a railroad, but in those cases, much like when you're in an actual dungeon in D&D, the MC knows the layout (or rather, has it drawn up and can look at it), knows what actors are where, knows what is happening in the timeline (in the sense of "it is approaching midnight", "the timer trap will go off in one minute", "this is when the guards are changing over").

This makes it really easy to railroad, so an MC who isn't very good at it will totally fall into that trap, and shitty writers will flat-out tell you to do this. I think that's the problem. In general, Shadowrun is designed for a player-driven thing, but when you actually sneak into a complex for which the MC has information, then until you leave that place, the MC has all the info there and has a fairly controlled environment (until you blow it up, admittedly), which can make it all too easy to just put encounters wherever, to drop the objective wherever they happen to be after "enough trouble has occurred to take up most of the session" and so on.

There's no way to not make it obvious and ham-fisted when they're out in the streets or whatever though.

[TheFlatline]

Once you're actually doing a job and in fact inside an industrial complex, I can see the environment (and the story) becoming very controlled, with the MC knowing most of the variables. Which should not be the same as a railroad, but in those cases, much like when you're in an actual dungeon in D&D, the MC knows the layout (or rather, has it drawn up and can look at it), knows what actors are where, knows what is happening in the timeline (in the sense of "it is approaching midnight", "the timer trap will go off in one minute", "this is when the guards are changing over").

This makes it really easy to railroad, so an MC who isn't very good at it will totally fall into that trap, and shitty writers will flat-out tell you to do this. I think that's the problem. In general, Shadowrun is designed for a player-driven thing, but when you actually sneak into a complex for which the MC has information, then until you leave that place, the MC has all the info there and has a fairly controlled environment (until you blow it up, admittedly), which can make it all too easy to just put encounters wherever, to drop the objective wherever they happen to be after "enough trouble has occurred to take up most of the session" and so on.

There's no way to not make it obvious and ham-fisted when they're out in the streets or whatever though.

Just because have detailed notes on an area doesn't mean you're railroading. To me railroading is when you don't let players stray from what you've written down, so it's kind of a grey area.

So for example there's a room full of guards- you've anticipated that the runners go in guns blazing, they hack security and turn the turrets on them, or they use a face to try to schmooze by.

But the team's medic remembers the large amount of anesthetic in the surgury room you passed and goes to either introduce it into the air supply or spike their food. Then your hacker and rigger put their heads together and take control of a local aircraft drone and fly it straight into the complex to cause an emergency fire distraction.

Someone who railroads would discourage these other, more creative ideas to stick to what they were prepared for.

[Koumei]

I'm aware of that, what I said was that in those scenarios where you're better planned for what's likely to happen, it's easier for someone to railroad the players (generally because they can already see how it's "supposed" to go) and it can be harder to notice if they haven't actually placed things beforehand and are merely making the next room they enter be "the one you wanted them to find next" and so on.

There's totally a difference between planning and railroading.

[TheFlatline]

I'm aware of that, what I said was that in those scenarios where you're better planned for what's likely to happen, it's easier for someone to railroad the players (generally because they can already see how it's "supposed" to go) and it can be harder to notice if they haven't actually placed things beforehand and are merely making the next room they enter be "the one you wanted them to find next" and so on.

There's totally a difference between planning and railroading.

Apologies I misread what you originally said.