Time to Ride the Train

[GreatWolf]

I had a thought bouncing around in my head, which I thought I would share with all of you.

This was actually prompted by a comment of Jesse's.

That is, the information doesn't serve as an initial motivating conflict but rather as an indication of what the player would like as his character's high point of climatic resolution. This is tricky to do with out railroading and it doesn't always work. The result is a very strange blend of Narrativism and Illusionism.

The emphasis is mine.

This is an interesting comment, because it speaks to something that I have recently discovered in my own gaming:

Railroading isn't bad, if you're taking the players where they want to go.

I recently ran a Castle Falkenstein adventure for my wife.  I railroaded mercilessly.  I laid out the entire plot beforehand and used large amounts of sleight-of-hand and misdirection to keep everything on track.

She loved it.  Why?

I am currently running an Unknown Armies game.  In fact, we're due to finish up tonight.  We've been employing an odyssey model, which allows each scenario to be self-contained but function within a broader context.  Again, I have railroaded and, with one major exception, everything has gone according to plan.

My players love it.  Why?

The answer is simple.  My players love it because my railroading is taking them to their goals.  They are not interested in cooperative storytelling.  (Well, at least not for these games.)  No, they have certain character concepts that they want to explore.  My wife wanted to play a character in a Victorian era romantic adventure.  Therefore, I laid railroad tracks through events that let her explore this character concept.  (E.G.  I gave her a Villainous Plot and a Dashing Hero, etc.)  The same goes for the UA game.  Each of the players are interested in playing through the results of intense stress on fairly normal people.  (Basically, the characters were handed a baby that everyone wants.  So now they are traveling across the country, fleeing from fear into the unknown.)  So the players are more interested in roleplaying their characters' growing love for the baby, the forming of a "family" among the characters, and the struggle of an innocent to "grow up" without yielding to despair.  Every week, I laid my railroad tracks to bring them into situations that enable the players to live through these characters, to grow, to change, to hurt.

So often railroading gets a bad rap because the GM is taking the players where he wants to go.  However, if the GM loads up the players and takes them where they want to go, everything works so much better.

[jburneko]

Hello Seth,

I want to say up front that I completely agree with you.  A lot of this ties in with my assertion that a little kicker-like element goes a long way and my analysis of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  

Correct me, if I'm wrong but it seems that what your essencially doing is allowing the players to define their personal emotional involvement in the game upfront and then orchestrating a means for them to capitalize on that investment.  This seems similar to what I was describing up in the Narrativist Missions thread where I talk about Points of Premise.

The idea being that at some point either explicitly, "Hey, where do you see your character going from here," or implicitily, through game-world events, ask the players to decide where their character's emotional investement lies in relation to game events.  At that point you then construct a fairly 'standard' adventure from that point to your next Point of Premise.  

I think this is perfectly workable.

Jesse

[Mike Holmes]

This seems to me to be simply a restatement of a simple principle. The railroading that people object to is that which disallows their pursuit of the premise of the game. For example, if you have a Simulationist wargamer type player who wants to wield an army, they will object to the GM forcing them to resolve their wars in fashions not designed by themselves. OTOH, such a character *may* not mind at all railroading the rest of the plot to get the war started in the first place.

Very simply, the players must have something to do. They must be more than simple window dressing, and their decisions should, in some cases, cases in which they believe they have established a social contract to have such influence (presumably because they find the case interesting), be allowed to change the course of the game. For Narrativists, they want a part in directing the plot. For Simulationists, the actions of their characters should have consistent effects. For Gamists, they should have the ability to determine and pursue strategies. Take these elements away, and you have railroaded that player in a fashion that they will find most displeasing.

But by all means, if the players do not have an interest in one of these elements, feel free to make the choices for them, and get them to the place where they can make those decisions.

Mike