Looking back at 1E Ad&d game modules for seed ideas, I started a conversation among a few older gaming friends about how D&D has changed over the decades.  

We remember that D&D felt far more like a sandbox game, particularly in the oldest versions of the game system.  If you recall, most of the printed modules required you to think and make critical decisions.  To us, most if not all of the new official modules are railroaded games that can only move in a single direction.

Are printed game modules designed to be more of a railroad game now?  Or are we simply misremembering?  

If we're right, when did it start?  I think it began trending in 3E, am I right or wrong?

It's always been there.  A lot of people will point to Dragonlance in 2E as the point at which it became an obvious published trend (though compared to today, only some of the DL stuff was that bad). But yeah, it's always been there.  

In fairness, a lot of people with busy schedules run games like I do:  Part sandbox, part railroad, depending on time to prepare.  I lean as much sandbox as I can, when I can.  I suspect most "hybrid" games are more of the "just enough sandbox to not make the rails too annoying".  In part, because pure sandbox requires players that are willing to do that.

I think modules always trended toward railroad. It is hard to write sandbox modules. Now that I have written some modules, I understand that better. I do try to inject sandbox elements but it's much easier to do that in my campaigns, where I don't  use modules. My modules are adventures I ran in my campaigns and they follow the "tracks" of the parties that played in them.

Railroading has been ubiquitous since at least the 1990s. The whole Story Now movement was a reaction against it.

Justin Alexander has a bunch of great anti-railroad articles, eg https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/5785/roleplaying-games/so-you-want-to-write-a-railroad

I recently ran Ghosts of Saltmarsh, a 5e collection that starts with the modernized Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. My 5e players, a fairly new group, had a bit of decision paralysis at the old school openness and then got into a TPK on the pirate ship because they thought it was going to be the typical 5e easy-breezy fight.

After that, I've switched to an Eberron campaign but still used some of the materials from that book in it.

I'd say that the 5e modules so far have had some pretty big flaws precisely because they tried to avoid being railroads.  They often leave things so open and underdeveloped in order to leave space for DMs and tables that there isn't enough support for the actual main story of the module.  Or cases like Tomb of Annihilation where they just give you so much stuff that getting to the deathtrap dungeon is actually a bit of a let down.

Quote from: Maelish;1143399Looking back at 1E Ad&d game modules for seed ideas, I started a conversation among a few older gaming friends about how D&D has changed over the decades.  

We remember that D&D felt far more like a sandbox game, particularly in the oldest versions of the game system.  If you recall, most of the printed modules required you to think and make critical decisions.  To us, most if not all of the new official modules are railroaded games that can only move in a single direction.

Are printed game modules designed to be more of a railroad game now?  Or are we simply misremembering?  

If we're right, when did it start?  I think it began trending in 3E, am I right or wrong?

The way I look at it, "railroading" really doesn't have anything to do with how a module is written (mostly), but more to do with the players and their motivations.  For example, a module that presents a clear motive for the players to follow the railroad (often leaving it to the players to decide where to go next, even though that place is obvious and planned by the module) often seems much less railroady than it actually is.

Part of it was the motivations in the early editions of D&D.  Gold equaled experience, experience equaled character improvement and advancement (including social advancement, titles, domains, etc.), so a player and characters' motivations were clear.  Find rich and powerful monsters; kill them and take their stuff.  So all the DM had to do was dangle some opportune targets in front of the players and, voila, "sandbox" games.  The real sandboxes were simply highly prepared DMs, who had created 5 locations for every one location the players might visit.  I had that kind of time when I was a teenager, but not so much now.

The best "sandbox" game I've run in the last 10 years was anything but.  I just made sure that the players had a clear motivation and clear goals, and they walked right into every prepared encounter, all the while believing that they chose their path completely.  In short summary, I stole some ideas from the old Curse of the Azure Bonds video game.  Had the players wake up with 5 connected tattoos (which they eventually found were the symbols of the wizards that had cursed them) on their arms.  Their first contract in starter-town was to wipe out some goblins, who then promptly dissolved into a treasure wagon and its guards while the players were patting themselves on the back for their victory.  Players get frozen (by the magic), the first of the wizards strolls in with henchmen to take the treasure, then taunts them that he'll be using them later.  From that point forward, the party tracked down the wizards one-by-one, and generally jumped from hoop to hoop without ever realizing they were being led by the nose.  Why?  Because every step they took was their own idea.  They had a strong motivation to free themselves, and took logical (and therefore, mostly predictable) steps to find and kill the wizards.  Were there some surprises? Sure, but a lot less than you (or I, at the time) would think.  And the players were convinced I was making the whole thing up on the fly, based on their choices!

So, I think that sandbox has far more to do with player and character motivations (and understanding them) than it does with how modules are written.  Modern modules seem to have the weakest or least-convincing motivations, and therefore seem far more railroady.  Why do I care who the King of the Giants is (Storm King's Thunder)?  I'm following the railroad because the alternative is not to play.  Why should I care about saving the world for the 500th time?  I'm not even that fond of it (Forgotten Realms), and abstract ideas like "saving the world" are a lot harder to internalize than something simple, like getting rich.  The one thing that Hoard of the Dragon Queen did well (despite the fact that it is one of the weakest 5e adventures) was to have a character called out and get his ass kicked right at the beginning.  That player was hyper motivated by getting revenge for the first several chapters of that adventure.  Revenge is a good motivator, as long as it is for something the players (not the characters!) care about.

Thus endeth the rant...

If you have a zero-to-hero game like D&D, if you want a module (or series of modules such as an adventure path) which will encompass more than a level or so, you will invariably have to have at least a bit of a railroad unless you want to make 3-4x as much content as anyone will ever play. And no one is going to do that.

I mean, if you have a sandbox where the players could theoretically charge the dragon at level 3 - the GM should throw up a bunch of signs telling them that that's a BAD idea - in-effect railroading them into the semi-level-appropriate content.

I think that short modules, while not themselves sandbox, can often easily be worked into a somewhat sandbox-y game. For systems with less extreme leveling, you can theoretically make larger modules without sacrificing as much towards being rail-roady.

FWIW though, I don't like the pure sandbox games, as the couple I've played the GM tried to riff most of the game on the fly, which is never as good as prepped content. And it's not like they can prep everything. Therefore I prefer somewhere in the happy-medium.

My favorite trick when GMing to make it somewhat open is to have all of the major choices that the players make be done at the end of the session so that I have time to prep for it before the next session.

It really started up when the games became more complex. Very early D&D was so rules lite you could make stuff up as you went along and the GM could fill in the blanks without much effort. A random wilderness encounter with a green dragon was easy to DM on the spot. However as players wanted more and more mechanics for their toons, the NPCs also got way more complex. You have to be a fairly skilled GM to properly play a randomly tossed in dragon at the party in Pathfinder. So railroads that tightly control the encounters that present to the players became the norm. It's just less intimidating for GMs.

I have seen modern RPGs that shy away from that. Cypher is purposely rules lite for the GM so they can make stuff up on the fly much easier. "Narrative games" tend to be rules light for the same reason, though they wrap playing in a sandbox under a cloak of mystique.

Depends on one's expectations for "railroaded". You can't load infinite variables inside a book. In a way, there's only so much you can do within the illusion of infinite paths. There are lazy GMs out there who only want to read straight off the book without putting in any expected work of their own. It's a matter of perspective.

Well from playing early D&D dungeon crawl stuff the railroad has always been there... That's one of the reasons I always preferred WFRP (until the OSR).

But most games have scenarios that have it in one form or another.

Quote from: FelixGamingX1;1143440Depends on one's expectations for "railroaded". You can't load infinite variables inside a book. In a way, there's only so much you can do within the illusion of infinite paths. There are lazy GMs out there who only want to read straight off the book without putting in any expected work of their own. It's a matter of perspective.

This... A good GM can make even a boring module good (if they put the work in).

I've accidentally created decision paralysis with how sandbox my current campaign is, so having boundries and goals are needed.  As I mentioned in my Pathfinder reviews, it's clearly worse in some adventures than others.

Quote from: The Exploited.;1143446Well from playing early D&D dungeon crawl stuff the railroad has always been there... That's one of the reasons I always preferred WFRP (until the OSR).

But most games have scenarios that have it in one form or another.

Some of us never adopted those scenarios for D&D though, ...just 'sayin.   Also I haven't noticed the prevalence of railroad games and adventures, becuase I usually extract out the non-railroady stuff that is good in any fantasy book or supplement. Haven't noticed a marked change or increase in railroad style adventures or games lately, about the same ratio as it has always been.

Yes I would say that Railroad adventures definitely started in 3e with the Dragonlance 2e Adventures.