>DM railroads you and designs extremely skewed obstacles to stop you from deviating from a pre-determined path
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>DM railroads you and designs extremely skewed obstacles to stop you from deviating from a pre-determined path
Bad DM detected. A good one would've vetted out "creative" players.
>no no No NO! This isn't about you, it's about ME! You have to play out my fanfiction! Stop trying to have your own adventure!
If you have no interest to participate in the game I've prepared, you are free to leave.
There's a difference between not being interested in the game you've prepared and not wanting to remove the interactive element from the interactive storytelling game.
That's right.
>>no no No NO! This isn't about you, it's about ME! You have to let me piss and shit everywhere because its a tabletop game, I don't owe you SHIT. Stop trying to plan even the most basic adventure or dungeon in advance, I'll go left when you ask me to go right every time just out of spite.
This is why you have no games.
A great DM would have the creative skills to roll with the punches and improvise
You both argue from a different pov, because there absolutely are creative players and "creative" players. One of those moves within the confines of the game and considers if his actions makes sense in the world and also that in the end of the day he is still playing a adventure game with other people. The other (and I have one of those in a campaign) goes on one hand super hard into "that's what my character would do" but also consistently runs away from the the party to attempt to defeat the enemy by setting up Home Alone style traps using his niche real world knowledge where he has the GM rule how specifically lamp oil works in the world other than "it burns" and generally tries to "subvert" every little straightforward thing the GM sets up for the party, because freedom of choice and creativity these games offer obviously means trying to now do everything but that.
The last few sessions was the first time I felt somewhat railroaded by the GM for the first time (and even then he tried to make it make sense) and only afterwards really realized that we not only would've missed out on the final confrontation with an antagonist we had since the beginning of the campaign if he hadn't done that, but also that this final confrontation was dampened a lot due to the "creative" player trying to get around even entering the fricking place and not involving the rest of the party when he ran around doing random "smart" bullshit, until we just went in there and then it turned out everything he did before would've been useless for what we encountered inside, nothing of it came into play and we ended up doing fine without it. Last session he almost certainly would've died because he choose to run off again after the GM gave our party a reason to stick together that should've been the most prevalent specifically to his character and I still regret that we didn't let him.
I just create the illusion of choice. All options eventually lead to the same conclusion. They can try to infiltrate the city through the sewers, go in through a secret tunnel in the crypt, or use a cart laden with burning explosives and send the singing army into chaos while they run into a breach in the wall. They will inevitably run into the manor I expect them to find.
>I just create the illusion of choice. All options eventually lead to the same conclusion
This. For example for my new table I have this as an introduction one shot
>Start with something cliche: party arrives at conservative shemite town (middle east/Arabia) on scene one, mercenaries and bounty hunters needed, a gang of bandits have been raiding neighbor towns and this and they need to be stopped
>party either crosses the dunes at the risk of dying since neither them or merchants they can buy stuff from have enough resources to do the journey (is doable just really hard and risky), they take the main road which not only would give the bandits more days of advantage but deviates A LOT from where they are supposedly going or they cut through an old merchant route that locals don't even wanna talk about but, mysteriously, has the only prostitutehouse in that area
Whatever they choose they eventually are lead to the prostitutehouse
This is great... as long as you don't tell them about the prostitutehouse when discussing the old merchant route.
Because if there were 3 paths to choose from and I already knew one of them led to a particular location, it'd be stupid to end up at that location after choosing another option.
All I just do is move stuff around to different locations the players bumble into. There's honestly not to much difference between a set of traps being in a cave or a tower. The actual location is just so much set dressing.
> noob "DM"
REAL GMs design extremely skewed obstacles just to destroy the hopes and dreams of the players, knowing that there was never a path, or hope of surviving.
it's not a real tabletop RPG unless the DM is an actively malicious entity who only has fun when he's destroying his players and ensuring they never enjoy themselves.
I too enjoy a good OSR game.
I drop whatever I was doing and direct all my attention towards thwarding GM plans at all costs.
We Final Destination now.
I don't plan anything for my players. It's easier that way.
>verification not required
We had a game where the DM described this as a random encounter.
>You're walking along when you see the only way forward is a deep ravine
"But we're walking along the coast line. We said we wanted to walk along the beach."
>Right... it's a subtle thing. You start descending down and see that suddenly the ocean is 50ft above you. You're now in a 20ft wide ravine.
"Why would we do that? Let's steer the party into the jungle to avoid this."
>You can't... there's no way to go around this.
Can you draw what it looks like?
>No. Here's a battlemap for the ravine
Ok.
>You're walking along and waves from the ocean are pouring over the sides and flooding the ravine. You're in difficult terrain and the path ahead is increasingly narrow.
Alright. Let's go back we'll take the long way.
>There is no way back.
Ok.
>Suddenly, you hear moaning and gasping from above and a zombie hoard pours over the other side of the ravine, falling down on you like giant hail.
Where did the zombies come from?
>What do you mean?
You said there's no way to go around to get to where the zombies are coming from, so where did they come from?
>Look. I spent a lot of time on this set piece. You're in a deep ravine and zombies are raining down on you. Roll initiative.
too many autistic DMs who think the game is just about constantly indulging whatever their autistic action/fantasy obsession is
Too much false marketing telling customers who would give money for a product that is stated to revolve around indulging action/fantasy obsessions.
I see you've met the devil.
Back in the day I played dnd3.5 under a DM who was like this. Coming up with these huge set pieces and railroading us into it, playing out his own fantasies. They weren't very well developed and he would rush through them. We stop playing but a decade later pick it up again, this time I'm the GM and we're playing Call of Cthulhu. Every single god damned encounter with anything has to be the biggest most bombastic shit or he'd lose interest and get sullen. He'd often passive aggressively ask "Is that it?", he quit playing after a few months because he felt like I wasn't providing enough cool stuff.
Things that did not satisfy his conditions for "cool stuff":
>Meeting a minor god and banishing it
>Multiple battles with cultists wielding tommy guns
>Escaping not-Innsmouth when all the fish fingers are after you
>Uncovering a magic item that can turn people into skinsuits
>Locked in a haunted house with a lizard person ala Blade Runner
>Tossing a squid man into a burning car
That was 5 years ago now and I've had bad players since, but that's the only one I've been bitter about. Lives rent free in my head.
He sounds like he just wants to play a fantasy or action adventure rpg. Call of Cthulhu isn't always about huge bombastic encounters. Shit my monsters can very subtle to the point where players aren't even sure of they are mundane or not (skins suit people like in your example)
Also he seemed salty everyone wanted you to DM instead.
Probably. He was really hyped about Pf2e when it came out, and loves the big cool dnd monsters like liches, terassques, dragons, etc. All the more power to him I just wish he would be honest with me, for both our sakes.
>Also he seemed salty everyone wanted you to DM instead.
I don't know if that's true, but I'll pretend it is for a few hours just for the ego boost. Thanks.
I can see it, in the back of your mind you're wondering how you could have improved, or moved to impress him.
Yup, it's adventuring time.
in my one experience as gm I made a scenario where the players were on a train that was being hijacked and had to fight their way from car to car to get to the bad guys. they got mad when I told them that the door heading directly towards the engine had been welded shut and they would have to find an alternate path and said they weren't going to play if I was going to railroad them. who was in the wrong? to clarify this was literally the first session and the setup for the players meeting was that they were all passengers who happened to be in the same train car when the hijackers showed up.
Did the hijackers bring a welding torch onto the train? You could have just said it was a sturdy metal door and it was barred from the other side.
it was a long time ago so I don't really remember the specifics. just that they were really focused on going through the door that they weren't supposed to. they tried using a bunch of different skills to open the door which of course I said all failed after pretending to roll for it. eventually I just told them that it wasn't going to open and they should consider going the other way which is when they threw a fit. I think if I had been a more experienced gm I could have coerced them into it more cleanly, but I don't think it was an unreasonable scenario.
If we assume the door was barred in a sensible way then that'd be fine, door is locked, find a way around. That you are literally pretending to roll to enforce that scenario is so incredibly unfine though.
If my players complained about "railroading" while literally on a train I'd have a field day with them.
They hate puns.
>so incredibly unfine
You write like a homosexual.
>Putting players on a train
>They only call you out on a railroad halfway through
I just want to say this is pretty funny, just an aside
But seriously for a second-
>who was in the wrong?
Going by what you've posted to us, the players were wrong, not you. A door being welded shut in a hijack scenario is perfectly logical. A railroad is dubbed so not just for linear moments, but moreso especially if the linear scene is arbitrarily or unnaturally linear.
However!
I also think you've tinkered and cherrypicked this story of yours to make it read like your players are unreasonable. I can't know this as fact, I just have a hunch.
This could have been avoided.
You only have yourself to blame.
>DM creates consequences for actions taken by players
>"I'M BEING RAILROADED!
While players can certainly be oversensitive tards, GMs are also capable of being railroady shitlords.
See this shitlord
>they were really focused on going through the door that they weren't supposed to
>which of course I said all failed after pretending to roll for it
>if I had been a more experienced gm I could have coerced them into it more cleanly
See this moron for a classic example of the railroading GM
doesn't seem much like railroading, he just set up how they can't do one specific thing, and they spent all session trying to do it anyway. there's probably another term for it when players spend the entire game trying to do something impossible, bogging down the adventure and getting nowhere.
if 1 out of every 5 of you fricks wouldn't stop trying to rape the underage townsfolk then that's what you get.
>"hmm... it seems there is some unstoppable force that keeps leading me down this particular path by creating extremely conspicuous circumstances and improbable events..."
>"I guess that force is my Destiny! Onward, friends! Victory or death!"
This. One of my favorite things to do is to play a Neutral Good character with a negative INT score who helps people just because and doesn't understand why anyone else wouldn't want to. He walks into every trap, takes every bait, falls for every shady questgiver and stops to ask every distressed npc what the trouble is. He is actively genre-unaware.
Its great. Instead of spending all of my time and energy trying to outsmart the GM, I throw myself willingly into the jaws of whatever he has prepared today, and in doing so drag the rest of the party along for the ride. It drove one of the people I was in last campaign up the wall because he was trying to play an edgy 'too cool for this nice guy shit' character who would refuse to help people unless they made it worth his while first. So you know what would happen? Every time my GoodBoy ran off after trouble and the rest of the party gave chase, the edgy loser would get LEFT BEHIND and have shit all to do that session. Because everyone else was doing the quest and he chose not to participate.
Same, people I play with tend to get choice-paralysis or just try to overthink anything the DM says,which make each set piece last way longer than it should. So Everytime I play "big dumb guy" who just want to hit things/get paid/do his job and walk forward whenever it's taking too long for the other people to make a choice.
1. Thank your for your service, you are a good player
2. Your table culture is good and I endorse it
>my players enjoy it, and i enjoy it, and that means the game is good
Can't argue with that. We can argue what is the best method in theory, but in the end if people are having fun it's mission accomplished.
I had this happen on a game I was running. I had been GMing for the same group for three years, a PC dies and the player threw this at me.
He completely threw me off my plans because so far our long running Dark Heresy party had been pathologically distrustful of every NPC they meet, to the point that even when they interacted with fellow members of the inquisition they had a sniper and a getaway plan ready.
Then this guy comes along, goes up to the cult front company office, shows his rosette and asks if they have any demons in the basement.
In a fancy corporate/guild lobby full of heavily armed guards. In broad daylight. On a planet openly distrustful of the Imperium. With an Int score that made it perfectly reasonable he didn't even think anyone would be anything but happy to get some ghostbusting done.
So I ended up having the cult leader talk to him in person to size him up.The player did a good job RPing and I ended up using his reversed Int as charisma for how much balls he seemed to have.
The cult came to a conclusion that the only reason an inquisitional investigator would walk up like that, and then leave smiling on their word was to gloat, having undermined them to such a degree that fighting back was hopeless. The cult promptly imploded from mutual distrust and purges and rest if the arc was about managing the unraveling of the planet's heavily cultist influenced industry and ruling elite.
Next time he did it he got shot though.
>GM puts in work to make the session happen
>players put in no work to make the session happen
>"Let's go the opposite direction as a joke to spite the person who has put in work to make the session happen."
>in the end the session doesn't happen
The solution, of course, is to not play with randos, but only with your friends who are actually interested in everyone having a good time.
I have a problem where 2 of the 5 people who play in our group (we all know eachother irl) literally do not give a rats ass and will just rape everything in sight. It happened to another player couple sessions ago and they flat out left the call and quit
>prepare campaign for friend as first time dm, new system, he loves the idea
>have to carrot on a stick him into even just reading the rules for more than a month because hes a lazy bastard
>FINALLY has a character ready, with just a few things hed need to fix
>feel comfortable enough with everything to be able to start the campa-
>"actually anon, im just not feeling like playing"
>he doesnt think theres anything to talk about, doesnt understand why i might be pissed about it
>then starts spinning it off into more issues until we just break contact
HATE HATE HATE
He never wanted to play, sounds like you can't take no for an answer
I'm not sure that guy ever said no until the very end.
NTA. Some people hate confrontation so much they will lie to you, even when it has obvious long-term negative consequences, if it means they can avoid a small fraction of discomfort in the now. He was stringing you along hoping you'd get tired and give up, instead of telling you he didn't want to. Figuring out which of their coded phrases actually meant "No thanks" is a part of the learning experience.
I'm not the GM of that story. I just don't find Anon's advice applicable here.
Imagine thinking an RPG is supposed to be some kind of open world sandbox that some guy with his own responsibilities makes up with all of his time.
Fricking dumbass. Go play grand theft auto or something.
That's what I do. I spent 2 weeks prepping a game world based on a preexisting setting, then I do 4-6 hours of low effort prep for 12-16 hours of game. It is great fun 🙂
This is why I end most of my sessions asking the players what they intend to do, set up based on that and remind them of those intentions in the next recap so they don't forget and 180 without warning. The exception being sessions that end mid-conflict.
If they really want to throw me for a loop, then it's going to cost them game time while I figure out the best assets I have on hand to accommodate them.
Believe me, most players want to be railroaded more than they think. Present to them a truly freeform campaign and 9 times out of 10 they will flounder around and not want to commit to any aspect.
>deviating from a pre-determined path
play an open world mmo then and frick off tg
but the whole benefit of a ttrpg over a video game is that you can do anything?
No, thats not true. Its MORE flexible than a computer game, but it has its own restrictions.
A video game is limited by what the programmers created for you in advance, within the limitations of the software and hardware of the time. A programmer cannot account for everything you could imagine, so you can only pick from the options prepared for you in advance.
A tabletop game is being generated for you in real time, through the combined creativity of the players at the table. Gone are the technical limitations of the program, but what replaces them are the limits of the people doing the playing. The GM is a player in this sense too. You do not need to follow what the GM has written in advance 100% to the letter, but thinking that you can do ANYTHING at any time is likewise a fallacy because the GM is simply not able to account for everything and generate a whole new adventure for you on the spot just because you got a wild hair up your ass and decided to sprint off of the road into the mountains to see whats there instead of continuing onward to the next town and what he's spent the last week preparing for. Its bad form, and creates a worse experience for both you and the GM. Everybody loses.
i am a gm, and i can make a sandbox quite easily
Sure, but your sandbox is not infinite in possibilities and what you come up with on the spot is generally going to be less detailed and lower quality than something you prepared ahead of time.
A CHILD can make a dungeon by just opening the monster manual to a random page and saying "you find one of these guys in the next room". Thats not the same thing as a dungeon where you've prepared specific encounters, traps, and secrets to uncover.
A good GM has to be good at improvising things on the spot because there is always going to be something you don't expect, but a player that throws you curveballs just because they want to make you dance is being an butthole.
Your game is shit
no, my players enjoy it, and i enjoy it, and that means the game is good
i typically just come up with a vague idea of what the setting will be and then make up characters and places as the players move to them
I just make everything up as I go along and remember all the bullshit I made up so it never contradicts past bullshit.
I enjoy the Coloring Book metaphor, especially compared to calling it illusion of choice since I tell my player's what's what:
>The campaign layout are the lines
>You can use whatever colors (classes & plans)
>Just stay within the lines so we can all have some fun
>DM wants to be a television drama writer where the players are just spectators who watch his gay OC NPCs fricking b***hing and moaning and doing everything
>hes so enamored by his gay storytelling that you've gone 4 sessions without combat, and have rolled skill checks maybe three times
anyways I left the group after the 5th session of doing nothing while he railroads us and does his solo theater monologues, has conversations with himself between NPCs using his gay voices. he threw a hissy fit and deleted me from his contacts list. good riddance, what a feggit. theatergays are such homos. that might've been the worst DM I've ever played with.
STARFINDER STORY:
"Man, this door in the dungeon is really weird, I wonder what makes it open?"
>"I can't tell you that"
"Alright then, I guess we could go back to base camp, get a truck, tie it off to the door and pull"
>"You know that wouldn't work"
"Well shit, I'm out of ideas"
>"Why don't you use detect magic"
"None of us have it"
>"What?"
And then he called the session right there and then because he hadn't planned for that.
He's a great guy and it's been six years but I'll never let him live it down because I suck.
>he hadn't planned for that
Unlike a good GM he needs to master the fine art of the ass-pull. (a.k.a. learn to improvise).
>I want my players to go through the door
>buuuuuuut, I also want them to only have one way to open the door
Strangely commonplace problem.
While I sympathize with DMs who deal with smartasses who think they can tunnel under any obstacle like Bugs Bunny, I do think more of them need to realize that if the group comes up with a reasonable solution that they hadn't considered, they should just let it run.
What's up with Starfinder having the saddest stories?
https://youtu.be/eqJJvPodzxM?si=y8j_CHGANDASneST&t=922
>I joined because I was promised loot that would be unique to my character, as well as the character development I sorely missed from the first game
Apparently because it has the saddest playerbase. I play RPGs cus they're a fun thing to do with fun people.
I told my friends who have never played an rpg before that I'll try running one but I've had difficulty finding inspiration and setting one up and now they won't stop giving me shit because I was supposed to run session 1 weeks ago and now I've postponed it indefinitely.
I guess its fair, and I did basically do two session 0s cause I switched systems twice, made them do character creation twice, and also lost half of my would-be players in the process but most of them were people I was expecting to lose I guess?
IDK what do you think anons?
What race are you?
why's that matter polanon?
You just KNOW this guy is NICARAGUAN
I'M NOT NICARAGUAN
I'm Honduran
So he's an inexperienced DM/GM or his players are very passive and tend to only do what is served on a platter? Or the players could be of the "Let's just 'subvert the paradigm', LOL!" kind?
> players complain that there are too many possible choices to make and due to the time limit they probably won't get one of good endings
> say it is better if I gave them only one binary choice at a time instead of 6-7 key NPCs with questlines developing in real time
Well, shit...
While there is an argument in keeping it simple to maximise a player's understanding of a situation, if a player up and told me they wanted binary choices I'd tell them to frick off. Literally not suited to playing RPGs.
>WHY ISN'T THE GAME ABOUT ME AND MY CHARACTER AND THE OH-SO-ORIGINAL WACKY SHENANIGANS I WANT TO DO
Anyone who ever complained about railroading is a whiny b***h and should quit gaming altogether.
Here we see the Sandboxius Nonexistious in its natural habitat. Complaining that people who do not go along with a linear predetermined course of events is disruptive and a bad player, and that the only format of play is taking turns on having the GM preprepare stories for the characters to enjoy progressively. When asked what it thinks about sandbox games, or god forbid west marches games, it will declare that these things either do not exist or are so prohibitively work-intensive as to be impossible to run. It is certain of this belief as it is certain the sky is blue and water is wet. But despite its strange and aberrant place in nature, this is not a creature to be mocked or chased away, it is to be sympathised with. For it simply doesn't know how good it could have it.
Most Sandboxius Nonexistious will burn out and have a resentment towards the hobby, but a precious few will pupate and turn into the far superior Enjoyer Ofgamicus, believed to be a symbiote species. They will the enjoy RPGs, and never again think that there is only one way to have fun.
Sandbox games don't exist, Critical Role is bad, and you're not at all funny. Pretty much the type and model for someone who whines about non-existent problems like "railroading."
Big nogames energy here, it's funny.
tl:dr
A lot of words for a nogame homosexual.
I never understand how a DM can be so moronic to get caught railroading. let them pick a path, A or B, congrats, you enter to the same fricking place just with the name you chose...
There is no such thing as railroading. It doesn't exist. Never has. There's a story that everyone participates in and there are paths to the story that make more sense than others. Some players believe their story paths are more important than everyone else's and whine on /tg/ when they don't get their way.