The Gaming Den

You know, one of the things that continually surprises me about DMing is how much people are willing to be railroaded if it leads to some action or somewhere interesting.

And I don't mean the typical 'soft' railroad tricks of Schrodinger's Gun and That's The Only Quest Available For A Good While or The Princess Has A Request. Or published modules where players go along with the story because otherwise someone would've wasted 20 dollars. I mean railroading as in having someone's father come along and demand that they do this thing, even if it means retconning their backstory. I mean DM of the Rings level, with non-interactive cutscenes and all that crap.

So I have been wondering. Do you think that there would be a market for 'scripts', where basically everything is already plotted out except for game-over points? Not just broad sketching, either, but down to the 'your party heads down to the train station at 12;00 pm to discover necromancer attacks' level. I know the idea is pretty much an abomination to the concept of roleplaying, I just want to know if there's any money in it.

Anything I say is purely anecdotal, but I totally see where you're coming from. Most of my players love railroading. Maybe it was because we all started with 2E and I made all the classic bad DM mistakes and they got used to it. Whatever the reason, any time I try to run a sandbox game, I get met with blank stares, people hanging out at taverns, and the players literally saying stuff like "I roll a Search (for DM Plot-hook) check".

Maybe I just suck at making all the sand-box plot hooks enticing, but with my last group, I could totally see them at least liking that style of game. I've never been one to buy modules, but there do seem to be people who both like modules and like being lead by a carrot-on-a-stick.

It's not popular to say but players can be really, really lazy. Or if they're not lazy, story takes a lesser priority to dice rolling and imagining things exploding and people dying. I've had sessions where I'll set up a 'soft' railroad with very obvious tracks and when I ask my players what they would like to do I receive blank stares. So I agree with RP, I can definitely see players liking that style of game.

In terms of a marketable product, I think it would appeal to fans of Choose Your Own Adventure books or two player RPGs; if such a beast even exists. If it was well-written it would be a fun activity to kill a lunch hour. All you need is a friend and some dice. It would be a good intro product for those new to RPGs without bogging someone new down in tremendous amounts of decision making.

I could also see it as a useful education tool; creative writing, theater, and statistics/probability mixed into one game.

I buy modules all the time and I'm not ashamed to run them with my self-created adventures. While I can think of stories easily enough, stating out NPCs and setting up a balanced encounter is a bear.

Scripts that can be used for fantasy games already exist and sell very well. They're called fantasy novels.

I've never had anyone complain about a story starting on rails. They just tend to get pissy if you refuse to let them off at any point.

Some people aren't cut out for sandbox play, where they need to drive the action...they aren't imaginative enough, they lack initiative, whatever. But I think most people dislike having their choices limited to "turn to page 3" or "turn to page 19", like a choose-you-own-adventure book. Shit, you can do that by yourself.

Once the basic premises are outlined, I feel it's the DM's job to make the story fit the player's actions, not vice versa (within reason).

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So I have been wondering. Do you think that there would be a market for 'scripts', where basically everything is already plotted out except for game-over points? Not just broad sketching, either, but down to the 'your party heads down to the train station at 12;00 pm to discover necromancer attacks' level. I know the idea is pretty much an abomination to the concept of roleplaying, I just want to know if there's any money in it.

Can you be more specific as to how this is different from a Paizo adventure path, say?

PoliteNewb wrote:But I think most people dislike having their choices limited to "turn to page 3" or "turn to page 19", like a choose-you-own-adventure book. Shit, you can do that by yourself.

This is pretty much what I'm saying, yes. The decisions and outcome of success has already been determined for you. It's your (as both the player and the DM) job to provide the roleplaying and details the story doesn't cover and also to make sure that you succeed at the choke points.

In other words, it's like a linear or nearly-linear jRPG and you are providing voices and fidgeting to otherwise silent protagonists. It's pretty much like being actors in a play where you roll dice instead of acting or singing. Unless you have an Ibsen-level directing control freak, while your actions are pre-determined you have a tiny bit of wiggle room as to how you go about the actions. As in, you can decide what witty/pithy line you say to the evil priest who killed your brother but you don't really have a choice of stopping the plan via an alternative mean.

hogarth wrote:Can you be more specific as to how this is different from a Paizo adventure path, say?

Is that snark? If it's not, I can only articulate a difference aside from comparison. The only Paizo adventure path I own is The Shackled City. As far as that one goes TBH while there are a LOT of decision points it's not very railroady. Like, you get to decide the background of your character and everything and there are insertion points into the plot if you're not level one. Along with a sliding scale of time limits.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

hogarth wrote:Can you be more specific as to how this is different from a Paizo adventure path, say?

Is that snark? If it's not, I can only articulate a difference aside from comparison. The only Paizo adventure path I own is The Shackled City. As far as that one goes TBH while there are a LOT of decision points it's not very railroady. Like, you get to decide the background of your character and everything and there are insertion points into the plot if you're not level one. Along with a sliding scale of time limits.

No, I honestly wasn't sure what you meant. If you really mean a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, then that has a certain amount of appeal, but it's not really a game, is it? Or do you mean an interactive fiction-type game like "Leisure Suit Larry" or "Zork" or "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", where there's only one solution and you have to figure out what it is? Or more like Final Fantasy I, where you grind a bunch of random monsters in between boss fights (which you have to do in a specific order)?

Personally, I think the "adventure path" model gives just the right amount of linearity -- move from dungeon 1 to dungeon 2 to ... to dungeon 6, with the gaps filled in with whatever non-combat stuff you like.

More railroady than all of those examples, though the Final Fantasy I example is pretty close. The script tells you what you're supposed to do and not-very-subtly pushes you in that direction. As in, if people are unsure what to do then the DM makes them get to the next step either by railroading or just flat-out moving them to that point in the script.

The difference from, say, Final Fantasy I or Quest for Glory is that you can actually stall those games out by grinding for monsters or just dicking around and not advancing the plot. Like in a play, you are not allowed to do this for that hypothetical railroading script idea.

If it leads to me rolling my dice, I'm perfectly fine with railroading that doesn't involve DM penis extension. D&D is about rolling dice and killing monsters for me. If I wanted a truly well written story, I'd read a good book. As is, I love to roll dice, drink beer, and hang out with my friends. Any serious plot tends to detract from the rolling dice and drinking of beer in my experience.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: As in, if people are unsure what to do then the DM makes them get to the next step either by railroading or just flat-out moving them to that point in the script.

Now I'm imagining my DM saying: "It puts the stinking cloud on the dragon, or else it gets the hose again!"

hogarth wrote:Personally, I think the "adventure path" model gives just the right amount of linearity -- move from dungeon 1 to dungeon 2 to ... to dungeon 6, with the gaps filled in with whatever non-combat stuff you like.

They are not all the same. Up until Kingmaker, I found them to be very linear. Kingmaker and the first Serpent's Skull are much more of a sandbox...

I just tell my players that I don't have notes written if they want to go do something else. I actively seek out feedback as to what the players want to do, but I also inform them that if they avoid my notes the sessions will be shortened.

One GM i had was kinda like this. We're rolling along through the woods after our last adventure trying to go somewhere and we run into a town that just suffered a dragon & hobgoblin raid, slaves were taken. Do you help the villagers? OF COURSE you do...

chase seen ensues, now you run into a series of encounters along the trail of the slave wagons. Your choices... follow the dragon or the hobgoblins.

Another adventure - you're traveling and you bump into a kid in the woods. The kids sibling has been hauled off to be ghoul food - do you save the kid? OF COURSE YOU DO.. now of course the nearest town is actually filled with necromancers who were raising the ghouls, so you run into a new series of encounters.. your choices.. when do you run from the necromancers.

Are those railroady? I enjoyed them

A lot of things that would be railroady in play are fine as setup material. For instance, if you try to railroad the PCs into being captured so that you can have a "break out of prison" scenario, a lot of players are going to fight to the death to avoid that and be pissed at you if they can't. But if you say "This campaign is going to start out with a jailbreak, so make characters who are in prison", then most people will be fine with it - or at least just choose not to play instead of getting mad about it.

Likewise motivations. If you've got an amoral band of mercenaries, and then you say "You have to go protect this poor village from Cthulu, because that's where the plot is", then you'll probably get some grumbling, at least. But saying "make heroic characters that would volunteer to protect a village against Cthulu" is fine.

Entire scripts? I'd try it for a one-shot, if the script was interesting enough. I don't know if I'd play an entire campaign that was run that way though.

If it's important, I tell people what kind of character to make (heroic versus self-serving versus villainous, etc).

If not, I just have a general "If anything about your character would make it be an ass to the other party members, assume I don't allow you to play it". I find that better than simply disallowing alignments and whatnot (because someone who wants to be disruptive will still be disruptive if you don't allow evil, or paladins, or whatever).

IME there's usually someone who's willing to pay a character ability for the ability to be railroaded - a Visions merit or whatever. Sometimes multiple people.

Where I have seen resistance is when people are told what type of character they, personally, have to play (Heroic, self-serving etc.)

Are we talking about something like that:
http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/home/ ... sSeries=24

only for more than one player?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The difference from, say, Final Fantasy I or Quest for Glory is that you can actually stall those games out by grinding for monsters or just dicking around and not advancing the plot. Like in a play, you are not allowed to do this for that hypothetical railroading script idea.

If you remove the idea of random combat XP, then they shouldn't have too much incentive to lag behind and grind. That will be boring, and they'll want to advance the plot.

Of course, FF1 and QfG both feature a lot of talking to NPCs to figure out what the plot is, and I'm assuming you don't even want it to be that difficult. Basically, you want all the quest-givers to either seek out the PCs, or at least have a glowing exclamation point above their head (figuratively speaking).

It can be doable. In my experience, the players like having the important NPCs be obvious. Their basic style of play is:

1) Go to town and spend loot.
2) Tool around town until something interesting happens.
3) Investigate interesting plot hook and follow the adventure. Repeat.


You just need to make sure the connecting points of your plot are obvious and that your players will follow them. I think many (maybe most) players like that.

Korwin: Yes.

Ice9 wrote: Entire scripts? I'd try it for a one-shot, if the script was interesting enough. I don't know if I'd play an entire campaign that was run that way though.

It's mostly an experimental idea. If it catches on then we can publish some more.

I have heard that such things are pretty popular with foreign roleplayers, though. I am more than happy to be set completely straight on this point however.

This concept reminds me of an article I read about Changling: The Lost
http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-418
The guy pretty much hates it, and chews it out.

One of the things he hates is the example of how to basically railroad your characters being the example of how to tell a story in general.

Obviously railroading isn't for everyone, but from reading that article and from what I've read of the Mage: The Awakening adventures, it's pretty much how all white wolf adventures are written. So, look at sales in that direction to see how much people will like it.

So, I know I promised not to buy any 4E material anymore but someone said that the monster manual for the Monster Vault was really nice and it fixed all of the problems (protip: it did not). At least it came with a lot of nice tokens, which I plan to use the hell out of.

But anyway, I bring this up because on Sundays I have been running a 4E game lately that went with pretty much this premise. It was supposed to be an experimental thing but it's proven to be surprisingly popular; people liked it when I filled in spots on their background unilaterally and also when I did the whole 'so you decide to help the peasants and after traveling overland by horsey you end up at the sand farm'. I of course didn't control everything but things were pretty much run like a Visual Novel-style jRPG where you could dick around clubs and talk to NPCs but the plot still hit you like a freight train. I'd say that there were even some But Thou Musts but the players were able to pick up where I was going with it and I never even had to do that. Mind, all of my players were pretty big anime and wRPG/jRPG fans.

It's been a pretty disturbing but illuminating experience. I do think that there is some money in this, as long as the writing is good, it's made clear that this won't displace more sandboxy adventures, and the makers are completely honest about what's going on.

Isn't that kind of how D&D Encounters goes? (I.e., you only have the thinnest shim of options and you basically go from one battle to the next week-over-week.)

I played it once, and it was fine as a beer-'n'-pretzels game. I still like the Paizo Adventure Path model better, though (although some of them are better than others).

Amazingly, like 99% of DM/Player issues, it comes to simply talking it out with the players and being upfront about it.

So basically, you want tabletop JRPGs.
I don't think it's my cup of tea, but it seems like a valid concept.

Seems like 4E would be best suited for it. If you're explicitly taking the "game" out of everywhere but combat and replacing it with story, 4E is probably great.