Railroading & participationism

"Railroading: Control of a player-character's decisions, or opportunities for decisions, by another person (not the player of the character) in any way which breaks the Social Contract for that group, in the eyes of the character's player. The term describes an interpretation of a social and creative outcome rather than any specific Technique."

-Ron Edwards, from "The Provisional Glossary"

I find this definition interesting because of the added detail "in any way which breaks the Social Contract for that group." So if was all sign up to be lead down a path (such as in so many published modules), then it is not railroading. ​

----

To which Ron Edwards Responded:

​RIght - we called the non-abusive form Participationist, +Mike Holmes' term, I think. It also raises the issue of the Black Curtain, which is to say, the convention to maintain that the controlling person isn't actually doing it. In Railroading, the Black Curtain is basically a lie; in Participationist play, it's a casual "why bother mentioning it" if it's there at all.

---

To which Mike Holmes responded:

Yeah, presumably in Participationism players aren't interested in making certain sorts of decisions, namely (or typically) the sorts that drive events you would call the plot. Not railroading per Ron's definition, since nobody minds.

The players usually still contribute something... like what their characters say, as the most common example we give. But it's often like, "Yes, let's merrily go down this one and only path that seems to be before us." The point being that what is considered the purview of the players and what is the purview of the GM can be any split of duties that is agreed to, and in fact this agreement happens in every game in some way.

What's more, clearly some of these things are agreed to entirely tacitly (we'll just do it the GM's way, in many cases), and are often renegotiated on the spot in many games. Sometimes the players suddenly decide that they DO want to take control of plot decisions, for instance, and drive play in a new way. The question then is whether or not they've broken a contract, and if the GM tries to get them back on track.

Put another way, often railroading comes about because the split isn't clear along these lines, with the GM assuming certain responsibilities for the majority of play, but with the players under the assumption that they can take responsibility and authority for making these decisions at any time... and are often chagrinned to find out that the GM feels otherwise and intends to use a big GM hammer to get that authority back.

It is good design to make player options clear, and thus delineate well where the lines exist. D&D does this quite well, for instance. The GM is charged with creating an "adventure" in which the players agree to participate, but within the scope of that adventure, they have full authority to make the tactical twists and turns of the adventure go as they see fit, with the GM responding with the world in as though it were a simulation of "What would happen if they did X?"

It was the tendency for such D&D play to not look much like a plot that caused designs to start emerging in the 80s that assumed that adventures would have plots, and the only way given to assure that the plot was followed/created (since this was not put on the players at all) was for the GM to pre-plan it all, and then use their authority to ensure it all happened as planned. Players used to having authority to make decisions during the course of play suddenly found themselves without many, if any, consequential decisions to make, and thus started to comment on this phenomenon of "railroading."