An interesting thing I’ve noticed in the last few years is that another RPG term has been experiencing linguistic drift. I talked about this a little in the context of the term ‘heartbreaker’ a while back, and now the term that we’re seeing shift is ‘railroading’. At first I was thinking about this in terms of linguistic precision (and as such risking becoming an old man yelling at a metaphorical cloud), but the more I thought about it the more interesting I realized the implications were of the drift. When a term becomes broader, it means more is falling under that term’s umbrella; that’s perhaps obvious. But when the term is derisive, like railroading is, the cultural onus to push more game behaviors (or more specifically GMing behaviors) under the umbrella says something about how the culture is evolving.
Let me begin with the traditional definition of the term ‘railroading’. Railroading as a GM behavior is the practice of removing or invalidating player agency. The term came about because the GM was said to run a game like a train in a railroad, due to three core issues. First, you’re stuck on rails. There is generally one path from one encounter to the next, and attempts to go around or do something different either don’t work or take you to impossibly lethal countermeasures. Second, you only get off at the stations on the schedule. This is related to but transcends the ‘quantum ogre’ problem of transposing a prepared encounter, as no player plans give any possible way to sidestep or resolve an encounter besides the one that was prepped for. And third, the destination is set. Once you go down the tracks, stop at the stations, and get to the end, you’re at the place the GM knew you’d end up. You as a player had no choice in this matter, and character actions rarely matter beyond whether or not said character survives all the combats that make up many of the game’s ‘stations’. If you’re my age or older, you almost certainly had a friend GM like this at least once, because it’s difficult to improvise on the fly (especially with D&D with all those stat blocks) but also because a large number of the adventure modules we read were designed this way, maybe slightly better in terms of having branching paths to some degree. Once we got out of middle school and high school, it was more likely that we met (or became) a better GM who understood better how to work with the ‘play space’ of a tabletop RPG.
Nowadays, railroading as a term is slowly being diluted to mean any sort of linear storyline or adventure. There is a big difference here, one of social contract. You can absolutely have a game where you’re following a somewhat known storyline and have at least some idea where you’re going to end up. Hell, I’m still describing basically every D&D module being published, and that doesn’t even mean that all of them are bad! But, and this is important, this only works if everyone at the table sits down and says “Yes, let’s play Call of Cthulhu, look for a terrible secret and possibly die or lose our minds”. It is perfectly fine to play a game even when you know what the ending is, or know roughly what the plot is going to be. That said, if you don’t want that, that’s fine too, and getting it when you don’t want it can be fairly unpleasant.
And this brings me to my observation. It’s not like the original definition of railroading has lost relevance; the mental leap from telling a story to running a game is a crucial part of learning to GM and a railroaded game will always be a common misstep in that learning process. It’s also not exactly the case that a typical linear, single-plot adventure is losing prevalence; that still describes the vast corpus of D&D adventures and a good chunk of adventures written in the trad space overall. So if more broadly linear games are now being described as being ‘railroaded’, what it means is that we have a stronger reaction to those games which are still commonplace. More interesting, that reaction is coming from within trad spaces, not the places that have historically fielded those complaints.
The OSR and adventure design
The adventure, pre-written or otherwise, is core to the OSR play philosophy. As such, it comes as no surprise that designers and thinkers within the OSR movement and sub-movements spill a fair amount of ink on how to make and run good adventures. While not all of these thinkers agree, they have enabled some pretty incredible output; you have the vast ‘anti-canon’ sandbox of Ultraviolet Grasslands next to the fantastic setpiece dungeon of Gradient Descent and both of these are ultimately on the same shelf as the self-contained and highly engaging Mythic Bastionland. And I’m intentionally highlighting a whole setting, a single dungeon, and a standalone game all as different ways to provide a gaming group with the needed material to explore in a non-linear fashion.
Much of the OSR’s adventure design sensibility is in reaction to what happened in D&D, both a reaction against narrow and linear design as well as an embrace of interesting, non-linear design when it happened (embracing designers like Jennell Jaquays who consistently approached dungeons with a more critical eye). The reason this is important to the broader discussion of railroading is that the OSR is likely providing the loudest dissenting voice to the adventure design reflected in materials published for 5e, especially as more OSR games like Shadowdark are being successfully mainstreamed. It could be said (though I have no actual proof of this) that OSR play philosophies more consistently bubbling up in mainstream spaces like Reddit, ENWorld, and Facebook groups may in fact be driving the expansion of derisive ‘railroading’ accusations.
Be that as it may, the OSR has been around for 20 years and the vocabulary change I’m observing is likely coming from the last several, maybe 2-3. There’s certainly some time for evolution, but I think there are other factors in mainstream gaming which have pushed player preferences in the way they’re going.
Actual Play and the RPG consumer
The explosion of popularity for Actual Play is likely shaping player preferences, but perhaps not in the way you think. While many have gnashed their teeth at the sort of playstyle Actual Play portrays, I instead think that the fact Actual Play exists at all may be a notable driver away from linear play. This has little to do with the particulars of Actual Play, to be clear, I’m more observing that thanks to dozens if not hundreds of AP troupes, large and small, famous and not, there is now a wealth of material for RPG fans to listen to and engage with. All this material is, somewhat obviously, linear. I’m not saying anything about the games being Actually Played, rather I’m simply saying that the listener consumes this media passively, taking in the story and the action like they would any other narrative media. When it comes time for them to take this engagement back to a home table, there are two things that happen. First, there is more of a demand for character centricity and agency. If this player wanted to simply play along a linear story, they may decide to watch or listen to an AP series instead! Being at the table demands something different. The second thing that happens is an extension of the first, but is more aligned with the content of Actual Play, especially good Actual Play. In good AP, the characters do things that matter, and they change the story. Listeners, obviously, want that experience at home. They want to play the sorts of characters that change the world, or at least have the world change them. As such, Actual Play pushes against linear games in two ways: First, it provides a wealth of worked examples that games can be better, more reactive, and more open, and second it provides hours of linear entertainment that is easier to access than a game which feels like just playing along with a story.
I don’t know that I can say definitively that the hobby is losing patience for more linear, predetermined experiences, but their decline from their former popularity seems to indicate this is a reasonable hypothesis. The 90s were full of games that hinged on metaplot; important people and organizations acted at a level above the influence of player characters, allowing the designers to put out supplements and adventures that told a broader story of the world changing without leaving any latitude for home groups or their actions. White Wolf and the World of Darkness was obviously the prime example most Millennial and Gen-X gamers think back to, but many other product lines did the same thing; Cyberpunk’s Firestorm mini-series is a good example of this outside the White Wolf sphere. And while I’m not going to outright say this was a bad thing, it’s certainly a less popular thing in terms of how supplement lines are structured nowadays. The term ‘anti-canon’, used to describe settings which deliberately leave ambiguities to be shaped and molded by each group that uses the setting, was coined and then developed in part as a reaction to strong, seemingly untouchable settings, be they like the World of Darkness or broader licenses like Star Wars.
So when you can trace about three years worth of Reddit posts using the term ‘railroading’ increasingly broadly, it does seem to align with similar trends in design spaces to move away from limited-engagement, limited-outcome adventure design. Even if D&D is still the driving game of most of the hobby, it’s clear that both “prep situations, not plots” from over in the old-school sphere and “play to find out what happens” from over in the indie sphere are being heard. At a certain level, if the broader cries of ‘railroading’ really do indicate that gamers are fed up with linearity, then other trends are going to need to change to keep up with that. One reason linear adventures are so popular in 5e is that it’s really difficult to prep anything else, what with the hypothetically useful challenge ratings and the half-page stat blocks. Maybe, then, the push against linearity is a push against the limitations of 5e more than anything else.
No matter the cause, I hope that seeing the term ‘railroading’ being used broadly means that more gamers are trying to push for the gaming that they truly want. And, while this is probably unlikely, I do hold out hope that the term returns to its original, more constrained definition as linear RPGs fall away from being the default and become a playstyle engaged with only by people who actually want it.
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