Looking for some recommended reading on running a game. Mainly storytelling, improv, railroad, and sandbox. I’ve been stuck on thinking about railroading versus sandbox. As a player I like the idea of sandbox but as a DM it is intimidating. Seems like making certain things up at the table could take longer or not be as well laid out, like a dungeon for example. Do DMs that sandbox have pregenerated blanks of things like dungeons or what have you? I guess if you know you’ll be playing with a group only once a railroaded one shot would be better than a sandbox? Maybe I’m thinking about this wrongly and too much 
How to DM, GM, Referee books for beginner
Anthony_C
#2
If you’re looking at how to run sandbox games, you N E E D to read The Alexandrian’s posts.
Here, start here and just… keep going. https://thealexandrian.net/?s=sandbox
urfaes
#4
I improv most of my sessions. It was tough letting go of the pre-planned games, but players will always surprise you at the table. The Big Two reads, in addition to The Alexandria listed above, that helped me were:
Play Unsafe, or a short treatise on how to say, “Yes, and…” a lot.
For example, a thief wants to check for traps. I immediately tell myself, “Yes, and…” have the player roll the dice. Why? Because he or she chose to play a thief. That’s his or her deal. If they want to roll, go for it. The best part is, if they fail, then you know it’s a trap. I didn’t say, “YOU check for traps.” You told me you wanted to.
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, or how to prep everything you want in a session on a 3x5 card.
When I said most of my session, I mean to say I look at what’s important to my players. I make one sentence notes, sketch or describe three set pieces then riff off the table when we start. This book asks you what’s important to you and your table. Create those then stop. Don’t make an entire world that may never be explored unless that’s your hobby. Focus on what matters.
Kreeba
#6
To take on board some of Hank’s advice.
Only prep the next session, otherwise you will get really bogged down. Spending days and days trying to work out what every aspect of the world is like is folly.
Keep prep time under an hour on the same day as game day, this stops you over prepping and means you are doing more things from memory.
You tend to be less attached to a particular set of ideas if you made them quickly, so don’t feel too negative is the players don’t do what you thought they would do.
At the end of every session I just ask the party where they were going to go next. So I know what to prep.
The best resource I have found us the RUNEHAMMER Patreon. $1 a month gives you access to all the mainframe talks on how to run your game.
Another piece of advice comes from the angry DM who basically says “you can only run the campaign you can run”, meaning don’t feel too had if you only have time to put in 2 hours a week and don’t have lots of money for minis and terrain or time to creat custom languages for every race or to map out the tectonic plate movements of the continents (yes, I have seen this). Just do what you can do.
Alex
#7
People get too caught up in this idea of “sandbox” versus “railroad,” and there’s always some negative view it seems if a game falls into the “railroad” camp, as if a DM prepping a night of gameplay in advance is a bad thing.
For me, I tend to subscribe to the “amusement park” method. Players can get on any ride they want, but once having picked a ride, it progresses, for the most part, on rails. The advantages to this method are that the world is still open with player choices mattering; it plays and feels like a sandbox world; but as a busy DM, I only have to prep a few sessions at a time, as each night of gameplay is set up in advance. The ride the players choose can be a short or long one (the orc camp or the dreaded dungeon of many levels), but my prep is never drudgery.
Finally, the one huge disadvantage to sandbox worlds is that the game can very quickly become aimless. Imagine your putting hours into crafting a map and tons of locations players could visit only to have this conversation unfold at the table:
DM: so, where to next?
Player 1: Um, I really don’t know.
Player 2: I guess we should check out that mine down south.
Player 3: Well, I want to go to town and find some arrows.
DM: So, the mine or town?
Player 1: Well, that one traveling salesman said the weather looked great, so I think that was a clue we should check out the coast.
Player 2: Uh… (fiddles with dice, looks down and doodles on sheet).
Player 3: hrmmm. Maybe we could check out the dwarven castle.
DM: …
And then imagine the clock ticking with no clear direction.
My advice is to put players in peril early; get them rolling dice as soon as possible; and then build in some hooks and dilemmas and let them tell you where they want to go PRIOR to the next session. Then just prep that tiny part of the world.
Rethinking how not to "railroad" players
Dang! yet again, Alex, you lay down some eternal wisdom on us. i love the analogy of the Amusement Park method. You pick a ride, and go on it. you ride until its over then look for the next ride. why is having direction so frowned upon? i have tried to run sandbox games and you are totally right, no one wants to strap on their party leader boots and pick a direction. my brother literally told me, hey man, just give us something and let us roll with it. so i threw a scenario i was passionate about and they yes and’ed me fantastically. i didn’t box them in or take away their agency as players, i just reduced the available choices to get rid of the radio static and the analysis paralysis. once they had a small handful of options everyone’s actions became more confident and purposeful. it’s like choosing where to go to for dinner. when all the options are open no one wants to choose but when you say Tacos, Pizza, or Chinese tonight? everyone puts in their two cents. in essence, don’t over think yourself, do what feels right, give the players a strong opening scene and a few different paths from there and they will drive the rest of the way 
oh, also, don’t be afraid to ask some leading questions… also a great tip from watching Alex DM “is it the case that you are going to the swamp to meet with the bog witch?” bam! get a yes or no and move on. you won’t be making the decision for them, but you will give them the momentum they sometimes need to make a decision.
Alex
#9
That’s hardly great wisdom. I think I stole it from someone on Facebook — just paying it forward. On the other hand, your eating out analogy is original and spot on.
I’ll have to plagiarize that one too! 
TheWunderLich
#10
That is fair, well i suppose facebook wisdom sounds original since i haven’t had a facebook account since like 2012 lol. as always feel free to steal whatever, our RPG community is built on openly and recreationally shared knowledge 
Jeff
#11
I like the info given by The Angry GM. A bit long-winded and meandering at times but useful information.
urfaes
#12
That’s a different idea of railroad than I’m familiar with. For myself and most of my players, the railroad is going through a session on rails. Player choice has no impact. You go from A to B to C regardless of how you feel about it.
I have nothing against prep. I have a lot against prep where you’re telling the players where and when and why. I don’t run a game for MY story; I run a game to see what trouble they get themselves into.
Alex
#13
Sure. But for the record, I love being railroaded as a player. Railroad me all night long and twice on Sundays. I’ll happily show up, roll dice, and have fun with my friends. The fact that I don’t have to generate where and when and how or have a burden to keep the story moving as a player is actually a mental relief to me if the events are a natural progression. I also find that the game proceeds without ever stalling or getting aimless. Sometimes a ton of choice can be overwhelming. But I am sensitive to your point. It’s nice as a player to feel like your choice of where to go matters. I think it’s only ever a problem if a DM says, “no, you can’t go there.”
On the DM side, I have two points about sandbox worlds and prep. One, some DMs plunk down a map and then the players can literally go anywhere. These DMs don’t do a ton of prep session to session and improv the details or sometimes just improv everything on the fly. Personally, I think it is amazing anytime a DM can do that. However, there are some DMs who just aren’t that talented at improv (I am not that quick on my feet) and need to have something ready session to session. For those folks, I am saying, “it’s okay to have A to B to C” ready to go. It’s not a big deal. A classic dungeon crawl is a great railroad style series of nights.
Two, the other side of the sandbox world are those DMs who fill up notebooks planning out “the world.” They will create a world map and then write out details about every major location. Players can go wherever, but this DM has a section of notes ready to go. Sometimes you’ll hear these DMs talk about the world as “their world” or “their setting.” In this case, I humbly submit that the whole game is a total “railroad,” as although the players can go anywhere, the parameters of the world are totally locked in. These DMs sometimes like to tout the open sandbox nature of “their world,” but the whole time they have it all scripted out. It’s The Truman Show at its finest. But that’s not inherently “bad” either.
I am suggesting three things. One, it doesn’t matter which way you play. As long as you and your players are having fun, there’s no need to sweat it. People get too wrapped up in this topic, as if it matters. And if you prep content session to session for your players, don’t feel bad about it. A good railroad ride can be a ton of fun. Thunder Mountain is a good example, lol.
Two, I am proposing a middle ground between sandbox and full railroad that folks don’t always appreciate. Personally, I think the “amusement park” analogy a truer “sandbox” method than the above example. It also allows DMs who need to have some prep not have to do a ton of worldbuilding or other heavy lift session to session or prior to kicking off a campaign. Sometimes the thought of having a setting ready to go can be a real barrier to just doing the hobby.
Finally, the only time “railroading” is bad, imho, is when the ”outcome” is predetermined. When random chance of the dice are taken away, for example, then it stops being a game. Or if players say they want to do something (“we want to go after the lich king”), and the DM says something like, “oh, you’d never survive that” or “you’re just not powerful enough yet,” or “you can’t go over there,” or “sure, you go there and you all die, the end.” To me, that is bad bad bad. But it’s totally okay to say, “Oh! I didn’t think we’d go in that direction, so I don’t have anything prepped tonight in that vein; let’s explore that next week and see what happens,” and then for the DM to go prep that arc.
urfaes
#14
Totally.
Using your amusement park analogy, I think of a few rides I’d like my players to try, but I only lightly hold on to that idea. If they’d rather go somewhere else, cool. Do they have to do it in order? No, I try to slot its location when it feels right.
Major NPCs are the barkers or ticket takers. If you choose to ride A, C might start disliking you. C’s ride becomes a bit more dangerous. Go ride with A again, and C might take it personal. In the mean time, B is still doing its thing, either attracting attention or just quietly mulling things over as the attraction prepares for some strange surprise.
But, totally agree, being told, “You can’t do that,” or, "Well, this happens anyway,’ leaves me feeling like I just wasted my character’s time. An important distinction because I may have still had fun, but we might have had more fun if we did something else.
Alex
#15
Brilliantly put and great advice, especially for running a game with intrigue or plot twists. I’ll be using this analogy too. 
FractalMythology
#16
I’ve read some of the The Alexandrian’s posts and it sounds similar to what you’re saying Alex.
I’m curious, lets say the players have just arrived at the “amusement park”, how many rides, and how much of each ride do you prep?
Alex
#17
I just finished a campaign, and it went something like this. I was in the mood to DM some dark fantasy, so I already knew that the “park” or world would have that tone. I also knew that the opening ride or rides would also have to strongly convey that tone. I asked if the players were interested in dark fantasy, and once securing their approval for that type of game, I planned the first couple of rides.
Like Disneyland, players don’t really have a choice on the first couple of rides they select. Everyone has to ride either the monorail or the ferry just to get into the park. In my case, I planned the first two nights of adventure, knowing that I wanted to run A Burning in New Haven and The Vault of Duke Herald (two Runehammer adventures), which equated to about six rooms or discrete areas (3 rooms per night). So, I had about that much prepped.
But after that, I had no clue where the game would go. I dropped some clues, though, to potential events. The players were having trouble sleeping. They all kept having the same dream of a well-dressed but impossibly skinny creature. The countryside was full of rumors about a darkness growing in the south. It had been raining nonstop for days. Children and good folk were going missing. And there were reports of dark loping things in the forest. Plus, the first ride, the town of New Haven, was a town in seeming distress. But beyond the last part, I didn’t know what any of that meant. Was it vampires? Werewolves? Witches? Some dark lich or necromancer? I somewhat thought Duke Herald might be part of a coven of witches, but I wasn’t entirely certain. I let the players speculate and then paid really close attention to what they said, letting some of their fears drive where we took things next.
Outside of that small bit of prep, I knew that the biggest ride in the park, the towering 400’ coaster waaaay in the back, was the big bad. My idea for the world was, “What if the snakeman, Sarvas, was actually successful in bringing back his god, Sett? What would that be like?” So, I knew the final ride was Sett and his snakeman underling, Sarvas. It would take players a while to get there.
But what would they ride in the meantime? I had no clue.
So, the players played the first couple of nights. They learned that Duke Herald had been sacrificing little girls to try to stay immortal. They killed him, but he had been partially successful, so they now had to contend with his dark spirit. In a crazy twist for the third night (like a wild twist at the end of a ride), I made his spirit inhabit his home, like Monster House, and they fought the structure of the house. Inside the house, they found a diary linking Duke Herald to a dark cult and a meeting to the south, which tied in with my earlier clue that maybe there was some darkness brewing at Ynsmuth. They also learned of The Duchess, Swan Grady, going missing to the east. And they may have learned of this weird steel being pumped out of the desert to the west. They blew up the house and saved the town from darkness. That was the end of the first ride, and that’s all I knew. After that first few nights, they all wanted to explore the swamps to the south. So, that’s where we went next.
Because they wanted to go there, I prepped a couple of nights in the swamp. They fought the the loping creatures I hinted at earlier (I settled on ghouls), and their masters, these thin well-dressed creatures that stopped all magic. They realized more human organs were being collected for a darker ritual, and there was some type of evil device at work. They also learned more about dark weapons being manufactured in the desert to the west.
But they continued to push south, toward a “meeting,” which ended up being a major dark ritual involving some of the land’s heroes. They fought their first snakeman, a clue that snakeman were part of bigger rides to come. The snakeman chose to flee to his home in the desert to the west, and the party followed. Once in the desert, they had a choice to head toward a small town or a set of ruins on a hill. They party chose the ruins. Their wizard had a flashback about Sett, and they found a staircase leading down under the ruins.
There, they learned about humanity becoming enslaved by snakeman. They learned the source of the dark weapons funding a war to take over the surface by the snakeman. The tunnels lead to the snakeman home. After taking the fight to the snakeman burrow (a dungeon crawl, really), they found the black pyramid, the home of Sarvas and Sett. And then I built the final encounter with Sett.
That arc was at least 17 weeks and over 40 rooms. It sounds like I had some major plan, but it all started with just a few rooms to set the tone, some clues that I didn’t have fleshed out, and a short idea about the big bad and what his goals might be. If you’re interested in the campaign, you can watch it play out on the Roll for Effort channel, so you can see the key moments. I managed to tie it together in a nice bow at the end, but I had no real clue when we started how it would all come together. The players drove that piece. If they had chosen going east to rescue Swan Grady, who knows where it would have gone. It still probably would have ended with Sett, but they may have fought him somewhere else.
Anthony_C
#18
Great rundown of your work, Alex! I wanted to give you special +5 Kuddos of Awesome for using Sarvas. I feel an odd, nerdly tingly feeling when something I helped do ends up in someone else’s game in any form.
I have a slightly different process when it comes to your “theme park rides” metaphor, which I love by the way. In my case, I try to give players 2-4 rides they can choose from. But, they can’t ride all of them at the same time, and a sort of world timer is ticking in the background. Maybe it’s a D8, and at x-interval, something happens in one of the other rides/storylines. Maybe at “3” plot b progresses to the next step, at “5” plot c finishes, etc.
Anyways, they’re free to choose what coaster to ride, but there are other things happening on the other rides. There are “other people in line” (other people who want to impose their will on the situation), rides “malfunction” (something terrible happens over there), or maybe the ride gets “shut down” (plot finishes).
The big thing for me is, running a lot of sandbox games, I only ever plot environments. I can populate, and repopulate, them with creatures anytime I want. Since I usually know where players will go after a few sessions, whatever their goal is, I prep that in it’s entirety for a session of play. The others tend to be only thematic in nature until needed. If the players go somewhere I didn’t expect, I ask them to take a 10 minute snack break while I roll on one of my many Random Encounter tables to populate the dungeon/ruin/etc. with all the things I need. The rooms/scenes are already done (that’s 99% of my prep between sessions, locations). Anyway, maybe some of that will be of use to you.
Alex
#20
Haha! For sure! But, they also could have gone to help the burning village, but they didn’t. That choice cost them. When they finally rescued imprisoned desert people in the caves below the ruins, they were shocked to discover that the chained miners were only men, asking for news of their women and children.
As @Anthony_C suggested, while the heroes were taking ride A, ride B kept barreling along, and none of the women and children survived the snakeman. It was a definite low point for the heroes, as they didn’t have an answer for “please tell me you helped our village!?!?”