Bad Advice at RPGNET - How to Run a Railroad

Over at RPGNET the bad advice continues in General "Do"s and "Don't"s the alleged expert says:

For Game Masters

• DON'T - Write a rigid, linear plot. If your story requires your players to go from A to B to C, it's pretty much guaranteed they'll head to X at the earliest opportunity.
• DO - Write interesting locations, and NPCs that you can drop in any location. That way, if the players go from A to X, you can just move your plot to X.

He starts off good saying don't write a rigid linear plot, but then instead of giving good advice and saying don't write any plot, allow the players to make their own decisions as they become acquainted with your world, he instead goes off the deep end with the worse advice you could give a new GM.

NO, he says " If your story requires your players to go from A to B to C,"  which is a gross violation of how to play an RPG because in saying "your story requires your players to" he tips his hand that he does not believe in old school sandbox play but in the new school railroad play where players are merely puppets in the GM's novel.

But it gets worse, much worse, he says "DO - Write interesting locations, and NPCs that you can drop in any location. That way, if the players go from A to X, you can just move your plot to X."

To be clear, what this fake expert is preaching is this, it doesn't matter where your players go or what decisions your players make, they are going to have the same encounter regardless. This is the mark of a complete incompetent new school GM, that is deserving of never having players for his game.

The correct way, yes Virginia there is a correct way, to run an RPG is that the players choice do matter and going different places encounters different things and different situations.

Bad Advice at RPGNET - The Starting Gate: New Player/GM Help Commentary Two

Bad Advice at RPGNET -  The Starting Gate: New Player/GM Help dispensing bad advice to newbies, it's what RPGNET does.

So let's go back to where I left off in my previous post, [Essay Section] Fundamentals Of Tabletop Roleplaying and in the next paragraph the moderator says this,

Now, we might not agree on just how tough your character is, or how sneaky, and those matter, so I get you to describe your dragon a bit more, and we figure some way of resolving it (rolling dice, say) so we don’t end up bickering. We’ll bias things in your favour if your dragon is good at sneaking and fighting, or against you if your dragon is bad at those things. In the interests of being fair, we’ll try to codify how we did it this time, and write it down, so that we can keep it in mind for the next time that character has to scout something out; it’s good to be consistent. And we’ll make up a few other rules to make it feel more like being a dragon.

You are the ref, why don't you just do a write up of the dragon character the way you want it to work in your campaign. Just go back to the basics, it is your campaign and the players can play anything they want but your job is to decide what it can do at level 1, level 2 and so on and so forth. And you know what makes it feel like a dragon, how the player plays the character not a bunch of extra rules. If the player is so lacking in imagination that he plays the dragon the same as his last 20 fighters or whatever he always plays then the rules are irrelevant, but if the player has imagination, what you get will be unique.

Then he goes on to,

As you might expect, the situations tend to get a lot more complex - a simple situation like the dragon hunters won’t last us long unless there's a lot more to it than it appears, and building more involved ones is a bit of a trick, but one that can be managed easily enough. 

Instead of letting play develop on its own as the players and the ref's characters interact and react, this guy wants to write it all out up front, so you know, he can keep everyone on the railroad. A game takes on a life of its own if you just play it and don't try to force it into specific preformulated paths, but allow it to find its own path, its own identity. Putting shackles on everything is not the way to have something worth remembering and talking about.

Some parts of the essay are pretty good or at least not bad, but here he goes off the deep end again,

Balancing The Game. Characters can often be specialized in very different activities. It’s important for a Guide to attempt to provide opportunities which will make the different kinds of characters that the players choose to play equally viable. Getting a good balance is all about providing opportunities for every character to enjoy their chosen traits and specialities; as a Guide, always keep this in mind – a “balanced engine” won't correct for it if all the challenges you throw out there are oriented to one or two specialities.

Balance has no place in the game, balance is about making sure that in every encounters everyone gets the same amount of face time and that everyone always wins and no one dies, it is about taking the challenge and risk out of things. Balance another way of saying guaranteed victory with the refs thumb firmly on the scale. Balance is for a murderhobo game, not for a game where players are expected to be able to think, reason and make decisions and hope they made the right one.

Again I am not claiming that coddling a bunch of murderhobo munchkins through victory after victory is bad wrong fun, not at all, if that floats you boat go for it, but to tell beginners that it is the only way to go is just ridiculous. You should present the game in all its open-ended glory and then if the newbies decide to dumb it down into a mindless murderhobo game then that is their decision based on full information instead of being told that is the default setting and don't change it.

Bad Advice at RPGNET - The Starting Gate: New Player/GM Help Commentary One

Bad Advice at RPGNET -  The Starting Gate: New Player/GM Help dispensing bad advice to newbies, it's what RPGNET does.

Where should I start, there are so many places that I could, so how about this one,  [Essay Section] Fundamentals Of Tabletop Roleplaying. In the first post by a moderator the following advice is offered

Before we get into details, just imagine that we’re sitting at a table, and I say to you “So, you’re a dragon, and you're up on a mountaintop, looking around. You've just seen a group of people making their way towards your lair, and they look like dragon hunters. What do you do?” - and you respond “Well, I guess I'm going to try and figure out if I can beat them in a straight fight, first, so I'm going to slip down closer and scout them out”. I think about it, and tell you a couple of possible ways to slip down the mountain to get closer, and you pick one, and I respond with more stuff; and we’re playing. I’m the GM, and you’re the player. We have a fictional role (you're a dragon), and we’ve got a situation that works, one where you have a goal, some obstacles, stuff like that. So far, easy.

There is much wrong with this, but I am going to focus on the part that I placed in bold print. In the first post in this thread we immediately establish that this moderator doesn't know anything about refereeing D&D. The ref is clearly cheating when he tells the player how he could slip down the mountain and has the player pick the action presented by the ref. Is he going to rule against his own idea? Of course not, because in this style of play there is no risk and success is guaranteed. So lets break down what is happening here.

So you the player have decided to play a dragon (which means you are starting at first level not as an ancient powerful dragon) and you are in your lair on the mountain top and instead of you adventuring (possibly with other young dragons or other types of PCs) before you can even get started the ref throws a bunch of dragon hunters at you as the first encounter. REALLY! That is how you start the game off? So to continue the player says, “Well, I guess I'm going to try and figure out if I can beat them in a straight fight, first, so I'm going to slip down closer and scout them out”. 

Two things here, scouting them out, good idea if you can pull it off, but beat them straight up, not likely as a young dragon a first level dragon (I am assuming that this is the case, since the moderator did not label his advice for a "start at high level campaign").

At this point the player should tell the Ref, how he is going to try "to slip down closer and scout them out." That's right the player comes up with the ideas about how to perform the actions he wants to take. Even if you were playing with players with severe mental challenges you wouldn't spoon feed them, you would help them learn to think and to reason so that they could have fun and grow both in game and out of game from playing.

Now let;s go to another item in the paragraph above and focus on the parts placed in bold.

Before we get into details, just imagine that we’re sitting at a table, and I say to you “So, you’re a dragon, and you're up on a mountaintop, looking around. You've just seen a group of people making their way towards your lair, and they look like dragon hunters. What do you do?” - and you respond “Well, I guess I'm going to try and figure out if I can beat them in a straight fight, first, so I'm going to slip down closer and scout them out”. I think about it, and tell you a couple of possible ways to slip down the mountain to get closer, and you pick one, and I respond with more stuff; and we’re playing. I’m the GM, and you’re the player. We have a fictional role (you're a dragon), and we’ve got a situation that works, one where you have a goal, some obstacles, stuff like that. So far, easy.

So here we have a new player and the GM(or more correctly Ref) and what does this so called GM do? He mandates that the player is a dragon, instead of letting the player pick what he wants to play. That is bad advice item one. Then he says "we have a fictional role" and this is wrong on two levels, first we as in ref and player don't have a joint fictional role, the players has a character that he has created to play, the ref does not run or create the character that the player chooses to play and secondly by saying fictional role, he implies and in "new school" parlance he mandates that there is a pre-written "STORY" a script that the player is expected to follow. The player does not get to choose, the ref tells him what to do. Wow, sounds like fun, a player gets to be a puppet in the story the ref wrote. 

Now I accept that there are a lot of people lacking imagination and the ability to think, imagine and reason that probably enjoy playing railroaded scripts and if that floats your boat, then more power to you and have fun on that train. But I take exception to a whole forum that wants to teach newbies that that is all they can expect from a roleplaying game. I for one think it is wrong to limit what people can do from the get-go like this.

Why not at least allow an opposing viewpoint that espouses the original open-ended game without limits that OD&D was designed to be and is. I would be highly surprised if RPGNET allows any advice that deviates from the new school party line of RAILROADS, RAILROADS, RAILROADS, don't think for yourself, the ref will take care of that for you. Or the from the newest school party line, which has this viewpoint 

In some cases, the authority of the GM will be split up among the players in various ways.

That is, of course how a  RAILROAD becomes a real TRAIN WRECK.