So I've been reading through the reviews of the starfinder society scenarios (and several of the pathfinder ones) that come out, and it seems to me that people are preoccupied, and putting an inordinate amount of importance on choice in a scenario. In short, I think people are too fast to cry 'railroad!'
Being linear is the least of the Starfinder Society scenarios' problems, it seems to me. (I guess I'll save the details for the Starfinder forums.)
For me "railroad" is a verb more than an adjective. It doesn't necessarily describe the existence of plot points, it describes a GM-ing style that has not only a specific set of plot points in mind, but a specific and rigid set of ways they must be executed. A plot only feels like a railroad if it has this kind of rigidity explicitly built into it, or if the stations of the railroad have not been designed to go anywhere interesting for your player group or their character concepts and you refuse to adjust them.
The phrase "say Yes to your players" is becoming a cliche, but it doesn't have to mean (and mostly doesn't mean) committing to unstructured sandbox gaming. The most useful sense of what it means, at least to me, is "let your players approach the story in their own way, and contribute to it." If they're playing the We Be Goblins adventure, let them be anarchic and naughty and wacky and goblin-y. It they come to a problem which they decide to solve in a way you hadn't pictured and their solution is logical to their characters and fits the setting, don't force them to choose the "correct" solution because you hadn't planned for what they came up with. That's railroading.
Of course there are reasons it happens. Some people just have trouble thinking on their feet and freeze or say "no" reflexively; in fact this is an easy trap to fall into no matter how experienced you are as a GM, but it gets particularly bad if this habit has been long reinforced or gone unquestioned. (And it usually goes unquestioned, because nobody really wants to critique the GM to their face. It feels like ingratitude after all the work they put in, they're usually a friend to boot, and why would someone who refused to listen to you during the session be willing to listen after it?) Other GMs become so obsessed with playing out carefully-"balanced" and number-crunched sequences in a specific way that they really might as well just get into programming CRPG's. Others yet, and I'm guessing this is the most common problem, are frustrated novelists so in love with their version of a story that they try to force players into being largely passive spectators for all the wonderful scenery they've cooked up.
I'm playing in the latter sort of game right now and it's incredibly frustrating. The scenery is lovely as far as it goes -- but the sense of being picked up and forcibly put back on the rail cars anytime I think of doing something the GM hasn't planned for (and there turn out to be a lot of logically and thematically appropriate things that they haven't planned for) is not lovely. It's exacerbated by the fact that, despite having gone through some effort to pre-clear my character concept as a fit with the table, that character concept really isn't a fit for generic dungeon crawling which it turns out is most of what the AP consists of. I'm making the best of it and trying to appreciate the positives (and there are positives) but I'd be lying if I said this doesn't dull the enjoyment.
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It they come to a problem which they decide to solve in a way you hadn't pictured and their solution is logical to their characters and fits the setting, don't force them to choose the "correct" solution because you hadn't planned for what they came up with. That's railroading.
That is a great definition of railroading, both concise and passionate.
Others yet, and I'm guessing this is the most common problem, are frustrated novelists so in love with their version of a story that they try to force players into being largely passive spectators for all the wonderful scenery they've cooked up.
Yet in my games, when the players go off the planned path, they see a lot more of the wonderful scenery. It is not necessarily the scenery that I or the module's author had created in advance, but they go through lots more scenery. Thus, I like to study the world in such a way that I can improvise.
For example, in Palace of Fallen Stars, the 5th module of the Iron Gods AP, the planned encounters were with the powerful people in the city of Starfall. But the party skald had disguised herself as a 3rd-level cleric of Desna when the party entered the city disguised as low-level visitors. She went to help the poor, because that is what a cleric of Desna ought to do. Fortunately, the module had a 6-page article on Starfall itself with a description of the slums. I had to create new characters and borrow some bad guys from the random encounter table and spark a riot against the oppression mentioned in the article, but I created opportunities to meet, befriend, and help the poor. If the players had stayed on script, they would never have seen that part of the city.
Yet some of those new encounters I wrote for Palace of Fallen Stars never were used, because the party left the city once their disguises became to fray. They jumped into the next module, The Divinity Drive two levels too early. In this case, I had to break the railroad myself to rebalance the encounters.
And the starship Divinity used a literal linear railroad. Its broken rail-based internal transportation system had only enough rails intact to deliver them to the planned encounters. Step one, declare that the entire rail system functioned. They have seen a lot more of the mile-long spaceship than the module intended.
It's exacerbated by the fact that, despite having gone through some effort to pre-clear my character concept as a fit with the table, that character concept really isn't a fit for generic dungeon crawling which it turns out is most of what the AP consists of. I'm making the best of it and trying to appreciate the positives (and there are positives) but I'd be lying if I said this doesn't dull the enjoyment.
Few character concepts fit a dungeon crawl. Such dungeons are designed to wear out the party with minor encounters on their way to the major encounters, dulling their strengths in order to make the sub-boss encounters more of a challenge. My players have learned to handle dungeon crawls by finding ways to bypass the minor encounters, such as amusing roleplaying where they talk to the minions ordered to throw away their lives.
Fair enough, @thejeff. I'm speaking as a formerly-frustrated novelist who has done that to players (yonks ago) and experienced the same from fellow-writer GMs (like the one in the current game I mentioned), so I may be overestimating that particular causal factor. I'm by no means trying to malign all aspiring novelists.
@Mathmuse, I completely agree with you about the key being developing a 3-dimensional understanding of the game world that lets you improvise. Not even sure if I'm there myself yet (I'm running a Starfinder game and drawing on all my own space opera lore, not to mention devouring every "official" thing I can find and afford) but it's absolutely the goal.
It occurs to me that this is also very true:
Few character concepts fit a dungeon crawl.
... but some more than some, y'know? For my own situation this is complicated a bit by Starfinder Themes, which are specifically designed to interact with and have a profile in the world outside the "crawl" in a way that, say, the core Pathfinder classes really don't require.
(Sorry to be getting my SF on your PF. :) I thought I was responding to a "General Discussion" post in the main Paizo forum originally.)
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(Sorry to be getting my SF on your PF. :) I thought I was responding to a "General Discussion" post in the main Paizo forum originally.)
The last time I played Traveller, our characters were grabbed by slavers and temporarily imprisoned in an abandoned asteroid mining station, with all our gear. My engineer character said, "Hey, parts!" and set about engineering a distress beacon. The GM said no. Railroading is especially annoying in a science fiction game, because science fiction encourages exploring and inventing.
Furthermore, Starfinder is a new game and I suspect that GMs and writers have not yet learned the many ways a Starfinder campaign can develop. In the long run, with more experience, their planned adventures will be more prepared to adapt to the players. In the short run, their beginning mistakes make good bad examples for our discussions.
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I wouldn't call rebalancing encounters because players skipped a book removing railroads <_< I mean, they had a reason to do stuff in previous book, so if they skip a book of course Technic League should attack them when their efforts haven't been disturbed. You can of course change the story to allow them to do that, but I don't think making things easier because player's skipped on weakening the enemies/gearing up/leveling up counts as that.
Its of course preference question whether gm should rebalance stuff or let player encounter the higher level stuff with back up mook they didn't take care off, but I think there is difference between player action having consequence and them having freedom if that makes sense? Like, railroading is taking away freedom, but player actions or lack of them leading to consequences isn't railroading.
The party was going back to Torch when they left Starfall. I sprung a plot twist on them that would have diverted half the party to the crashed starship Divinity. The character Boffin foiled the plot twist enough to keep the party from being split, and then decided to go to the Divinity anyway, because Boffin is a total techno-geek and could not resist the shiny spaceship.
The module was clear that the spaceship was irreparable, but making it reparable fit the story that the players were creating. We had a lot of fun roleplaying them hiring trustworthy people in Scrapwall to help them dig out the half-buried wreck and use their magic and engineering to get it flying again. Letting them have a spaceship, to which they added salvaged technology to create an improvised robotics lab and an adamantine smelter, had a risk of trivializing encounters. Thus, I memorized the weaknesses in the spaceship, such as the Technic League could try to steal it or Unity could try to control it again.
The party took a caravan to Starfall at the beginning of Palace of Fallen Stars as part of their disguise to avoid Technic League attention, with the spaceship carefully hidden near Torch. For leaving Starfall, two teleported to the spaceship and flew it to Starfall to pick up the others. That put it in range for Unity to control. I could either spring that trap immediately or never. I sprung it. Unity announced over radio communications that he was taking control and bringing the spaceship to the Divinity. Boffin disabled the autopilot to manually land and pick up the others, and then turned the autopilot back on for Unity to fly them to the Divinity.
The skald Kirii bluffed that they were a repair crew trained by Casandalee. Unity was not fooled, but it wanted Casandalee to return, so it pretended to be fooled. (By the way, this validated the two modules they spent searching for Casandalee.) Unity hired them to repair the haunted parts of the Divinity. They fought shadows, wraiths, and zombies in the process. They have befriended Unity's minions instead of fighting them, and have been learning Unity's secrets through those friendships.
I could have made Unity hostile to them, but I chose not to. Both sides bluffing, neither being fooled, but pretending to be fooled has opened up unique roleplaying situations.
Its of course preference question whether gm should rebalance stuff or let player encounter the higher level stuff with back up mook they didn't take care off, but I think there is difference between player action having consequence and them having freedom if that makes sense? Like, railroading is taking away freedom, but player actions or lack of them leading to consequences isn't railroading.
Given a choice between deadly consequences for player actions or interesting roleplaying, I choose the roleplaying. The players know their characcters are in the frying pan surrounded by fire. They also trusted me to send those characters into manageable trouble rather than a deathtrap beyond their capabilities. Player mistakes could earn a TPK, bad dice rolls could give an undeserved TPK, but following a GM-approved plot hook ought to be a risky adventure with a solid chance of survival.
Springing a plot twist on them to send them to the Divinity was railroady. Nevertheless, the players wanted to travel that railroad, so they saw it as an opportunity. My wife (Boffin's player) told me that exploring the alien technology, of which the Divinity is the motherload, has been her goal all along in this adventure path. She said that if the Divinity were only a dungeon crawl fighting Unity's minions, then she would have been terribly disappointed. Diving deep into the adventure let them see more of the wonderful scenery she wanted.
Railroads aren't just adventures that assume you choose to go on the adventure. An adventure that describes a tower that has recently become open for exploration is fine--if the players choose not to do it then the GM probably needs to pull another module out of their magic hat.
As with all things, Organized Play constrains these choices a lot. Sometimes you just need to bite down and play the module in front of you because it's that kind of venue.
What a railroad looks like is this: the PCs enter a room with a lever. When the PCs pull the lever it initiates a world ending scenario that they must now attempt to undo. As the GM, nudge the players until one of them pulls the lever. If they attempt to leave, all hallways curl around mysteriously and deposit the characters back into the room with the lever. If they attempt to sleep or carry on other tasks besides pulling the lever the room becomes 5' smaller on every side every 10 minutes until there is only a 5' square for each player to stand in and the lever. At this point the lever will begin to use illusions to trick the PCs into pulling it--commands from their gods or visions of delicious food and drink that beguile the characters. At this point once the PCs grab at the illusion the lever becomes coated in a gluelike substance that bonds with their hand even through gloves or armor and cannot be removed until they pull the lever.
This is the kind of railroading I think people mostly hate. Events that lead logically to other events and assume you will take the path that makes sense to get there, that's just being an adventure.
Or there's the Vecna module where it says to kill the player characters one at a time and it just happens and they can't stop it. That's obnoxious. Don't do that.
But otherwise, yeah there's modules that do some handholding. I think for the most part that's fine.
I think when you're designing an obstacle or challenge the best idea might be to figure out specifically which things you absolutely DON'T want to be able to solve it and then let the players figure out how to get by otherwise. This would be as opposed to planning out several ways that specifically DO get past the obstacle and no other ways.
For example: there's a huge fortress with anti-magic fields all over the outer walls. Any magic or magical effects in proximity to the wall aren't going to work. There are tons of ways they could get around that! You could make a whole discussion thread just talking about different ways of how to get past it.