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It’s not really a “house” - It’s Kolat Towers. Kolat Towers is a pair of wizard towers surrounded by a small compound. There’s a lot of spare rooms.
Funnily enough railroading doesn’t really bug me if it’s done in more broad strokes
Basically the players talk about their goals with the campaign in session zero and the railroad is basically the road trip getting the stuff the players want to do done
The broad strokes are things defined beforehand but the finer details are purely up to the players
So basically a wandering road trip rather than a railroad
“Railroading” is often used overbroadly to the point of meaninglessness. My title here is supposed to be poking fun at that a little.
As a negative term “railroading” is supposed to refer to when you actively prevent the players from exploring or doing something they want to do, and that should work, because it doesn’t follow a set path you’ve planned out:
Example: you plan for a villain to taunt the characters, fight them briefly, and then escape. The players do better in the combat than you expected, and would have removed all his HP, so you bump the HP up, then on his turn have him cast dimension door to escape. When a character counterspells the dimension door, you give him counterspell to counter that counterspell. When a second counterspell happens, you have one of his mooks pull out a scroll of counterspell and use it… Because you need him to escape for your plot, so you force it.
That’s negative railroading. It’s much better to let them succeed, then alter your plans for future sessions accordingly. Maybe there’s more to the evil scheme than just this one guy, maybe they won the day and stopped the threat and the next arc is something else (and maybe you can re-use that dungeon you already planned out)
It’s perfectly okay, and in fact often a good idea, to plan out the broad strokes of your story in advance, you need to plan something and you can’t plan for everything - so having a good idea of what’s coming is usually the right move - it’s only bad if you refuse to let the story go to other places.
Yesterday, I had a bad session, and I wish to have a second opinion.
There is railroading, a concept that you talked a lot about, and I wish to present to your wisdom this new concept that I will call : gagging.
Gagging is when a DM… talks to much. Maybe it’s describing every single action and consequence, maybe it’s overdescripting areas and people, maybe it’s not letting the players talk enough when it’s their time, it’s something in between these 3 and more.
Every player know not to interrupt the DM. So that also means that as the DM, you might want to consider if what you are saying matters enough, interests the players, is required or not, and if your players are receptive to it to some degree.
I think it’s a bigger problem whenever a DM is following a module… badly. By badly, I mean they want to convey everything the module tells them to convey, but they also try to put their spin on it, making them talk more hesitantly, slower, with more pauses. If they would just read the descriptions aloud, it would be smoother and faster. If it were their creation, they probably could give details and descriptions easier since it’s theirs. But when DMs try to go in between and don’t prepare enough, it makes every description a crawl that you stop listening to midpoint because you know it won’t really matter enough to force yourself to listen to it.
The main point of gagging as a concept to me is not so much to force players down a specific path without their input, as railroading is more or less that but with nuances, but more a way to keep the players from talking and inputing their choices, dialog or interactions into the game.
Since DMs have the mike when they talk, and since interrupting them is taboo (which I fully agree with), it then becomes very important to weight what they say and how they say it in a way that don’t turn players off.
And yes, yesterday I had what I would call a gagging DM. It wasn’t the first session with them, but probably the last, as I lost complete interest in the campaign. Not only because of the gagging of course. But it fucking sucks for me to leave a campaign in which I had some amount of fun, but not enough to stick around.
Generally speaking, if the style of a table just isn’t right for you, and you’re not having fun, it’s better to drop than it is to just carry on attending and feel miserable about it.
However, you may not want to drop in some instances - maybe the DM is a close friend and you want to support them, maybe you don’t have any other options for campaigns to join, maybe you’ve got sunk costs and you’re near the end and you just want to see it out, etc…
In that case you could try talking to the DM about it to help them improve… Not in a “hey you suck” kind of way, but in a “Can we talk? I’ve got some suggestions that might help make the game better” kind of way.
If it’s a close group of friends you could try running a side campaign or a mini-campaign yourself, and, provide the group examples where the game runs a little better (not in a “you’re doing it wrong let me show you” kind of way, just in a “hey I have a mini-campaign I’d like to run” kind of way.)
Remember that no DM is perfect, and everyone is learning and improving all the time, and that the primary purpose of playing together is to have fun.