I am starting to think Railroading is the faux-satan of Roleplaying.
It is constantly made out to be this HORRID demon, this horrible beast! Yet... Outside niche groups most players prefer to be railroaded to a moderate extent and even more are completely lost if they are not even if they are given hints.
As soon as I stepped outside the hardcore roleplayer minority... BOOM! All of a sudden my player base wanted more direction, more story for them to explore along the way, and to simplify what they have to do. I was incredulous and it was kind of weird going from having my players being so hardcoded against railroading that they outright advocated against time advancing (YES REALLY! That if a evil overlord exists, they he must sit on his throne until the players are good and ready for him), to players actually saying "Hey, probably be best of you railroad for a bit. I need to catch my bearings".
I will say that there's a difference between giving direction and outright railroading, the difference between a suggestion and an imperative. But it can exist on a spectrum, and I will agree that some groups don't mind railroading and will feel lost if you ask them what they want to do. Though that's still more a difference between agency of motivation versus agency of action, in that many players have trouble coming up with goals, but most will probably object to you saying what they're trying to do won't work without giving a reasonable explanation of why.
Also, some players might feel, not exactly railroaded, but similarly think they're lacking in agency, when not presented with explicit options about what they can do, which may be a fault of the players not thinking enough, but it can just as easily be a fault of the DM for not giving them enough information to work with. I know that I personally have a problem with not providing much detail unless asked for it (mostly since I improvise most scenarios and environments. To compensate, I generally give a chance for things, such as furniture and light sources and gunpowder kegs, to be available if players ask for them and they would be in a place where it would make sense).
As for players wanting to be immune to time, doing so to my mind could also be seen as railroading in the favor of the players, which is not to say it's a bad thing. Having things happen as time passes is an aspect of portraying the world, which is one of the DM's jobs, though I'd say it's best to not have too many hard time pressures, since that's kind of like a video game where you have to beat it under a certain time or lose. It's better to have things that happen at a certain time not be a complete loss and/or have time pressure come up only when the players are dicking around too much.
Mostly unrelated to the above, last night I learned that sending enemies in waves, while good for keeping them from getting annihilated by AoE spells, can effectively turn an encounter into several smaller encounters with no rests between, which, while no walking the park, is much more survivable than a single encounter with all those enemies at once.
So, for context, the players in my group decided to infiltrate the local assassins' guild after following back to their headquarters, who had just seen the message they sent with the bodies of the last assassins sent after them (arranged into a star pattern in the town square, a black star being the symbol of the guild). They then went in disguised as guild members, and, for a brief moment, I had the naive hope that this was just meant to be a recon mission.
Then the bard gathered most of the assassins in the common area around him with a dice game (the headquarters was in an abandoned warehouse, with boxes arranged to form a type of fortifications in the interior, with a main open area in the middle and side rooms in the wall bits), and the wizard cast a fireball on them (evokers in 5e can be a pain with their ability to ignore friendly fire), and the situation quickly escalated.
They pretty quickly dispatched the people in the common room, and, since I didn't want to totally wipe them (and because D&D combat gets bogged down if you use too many enemies at once), I just sent out waves of reinforcements from the different rooms in turn to try to scare them into retreating. But they just kept fighting, even when some of them got knocked unconscious (but they were pretty quickly brought back with healing magic or potions). There was a point in the end when they seemed to be thinking about retreating, but then the bard said something about how heroes in the stories don't retreat, and so they stayed.
Eventually all the rooms were cleared out, so I had to grant them control of the building, since they earned it. In the end, they had killed 57 spies (the NPC type, which is CR 1) and 1 assassin (CR
. They were 5 level 7 PCs. According to the
Kobold Fight Club encounter builder, if that was all one encounter, not only would it be rated Deadly, but it would be deadly for any group of 5 PCs less than level 20.
Granted, there might have been some factors that mitigated the deadliness, such as the fact that the players kept hiding in rooms that had been cleared already, and I probably wasn't using the enemies' full abilities (spies can hide as a bonus action, which would have helped them get more rounds of ranged sneak attack, though I'm not really sure they had the longevity for that to be a problem), and I could have used the environment better (with enemies climbing on top of the walls to shoot from a more protected point), but, still, it was a pretty impressive battle on the players' part.
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Topic: Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: COBRA!!! (Read 854675 times)