Rethinking how not to "railroad" players

[Unggoy]

I’ve been catching up on some Runehammer videos, and the Hard Suit recaps and especially this video https://youtu.be/_qit8j6Om6c struck me. I’ve also been reading some new books, bought EZD6 and OSE.

What I want your thoughts on is how to make players feel more free and less “railroaded” while also not being lost as a GM in some kind of “improv” world. I’m trying to internalize all these thoughts about “situations” and still haven’t fully made it a reality yet, as far as how that should actually make it to my notes and my table.

I’m very used to railroading as a means to keep things fast and exciting, because I’ve played in some pretty boring games, so I have always tried to make things almost “videogamey” in these “room designey” kind of ways.

Have any of you embraced a more open style of notetaking and GMing like Hank is talking about? How would you suggest doing that without being lost in space in a scary improv world where players start to doubt you actually have it together?

[Nicolas_Bohnenberger]

My main ‘let the players loose without losing it’ thing for campaigns is:

LEAVE DIRECTION DECISIONS FOR THE END OF THE GAME SESSION.

Sure, a cliffhanger is a GREAT session ender. I think no one would dispute that. But if that cliffhanger means you’re ending something 30 minutes into your next session and then the party has to make a decision and you’ll have to scramble with it, that’d not a good followup.

I leave the ends of my sessions most of the times for players to decide where they are going next, what they want to do given what they learned or accomplished in this session. That way they inform you, choosing their path, and you have time to prep it and make it awesome.

[Alex]

Not surprisingly, I have some thoughts about this topic. Here is a collection of three areas where I discuss the amusement park method and DM-driven versus Player-driven campaigns. In general, I advocate in favor of the amusement park method and DM-driven campaigns, only because you tend to have less problems overall keeping a campaign going with those practices (while not wearing yourself out week to week with prep).

How to DM, GM, Referee books for beginner

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 …

The Art of Building Short Scenes

Hey @glocke, great question. To frame my response, it helps to know that I use the “amusement park” method for my campaigns. Players can go anywhere within the park, but once they hop on a ride, that ride is on rails for a bit. When my players choose a ride (a hook, arc, or thread in the story), then I generally prep at least 3 rooms for that ride, which is approximately 3 hours of play. If you’re running an hour per room, I think you’re right in the sweet spot, and so I don’t think you have…

DM-Driven vs Player-Driven Games

For the TL/DR crowd, skip to the conclusion at the end. I see this debate from time to time about DM-Driven vs. Player-Driven games, and generally folks fall into one of the two camps and are opposed to the other. As Jason Scranton put it, there appears to be a tug-of-war between each approach. So, which is BETTER? For the record, let me say: there is nothing wrong with either way of playing. Please game the way you want to game, but as I set forth later on, you’re generally better off run…

[Kindred]

Maybe not surprised, but still glad to hear them as always, so please keep them coming! Lol

[nightswitch]

Everything is in some ways a railroad and in others a sandbox, so the truth is somewhere in between. What can be vast, open, and distant, and also immediate, chaotic, and powerful?

To paraphrase Brennan Lee Mulligan: the character is water that wants the shortest path downhill, while the player wants an intricate, satisfying journey. The GMs job is to form ‘downhill’ into an interesting shape with obstacles.

Remember the water.

Motive is everything. There should be a reason for things being where they are, and everyone should have a clear immediate goal, including the players. Each completed goal leads to the next in an unbroken chain…or stream.

The network of those possible goals is a river system. You start in what was once a placid backwater up in a mountain vale distant from the outside world, but then the dam broke and things got turbulent. Now, all water finds the sea, even if you don’t know where or what that is yet. The adventure narrows that down as you go, and the river gets bigger. The landscape varies, but it averages more broad and plain. The current of guidance from clues, NPCs, and cataclysms pulls you at various speeds, but always forward. Players should be free to find and navigate other tributaries, rapids, and lakes to their next goal. But they are always in the river system.

Different tables and players like different levels of prompting, so you have to find your climate and change the weather. But when things start to feel too dry, make it RAIN.

[James_Horn]

Well you can’t control what the players are gonna do, but you do know what the villain’s plans are so that’s what you work with.

I like to apply the sly flourish lazy DM style

you make a list of 6-10 bullet points of events for the session with about 3 of them being your villain’s plan from beginning middle and end.

Example
The villain, lets call them Wolf, owes a lot of coin to a crime lord and has X days to pay up or else they gonna kill them. So Wolf is desperate and ends up meeting a cultist who offers a huge sum of coin for kidnapping children so they can raise the children to become cultists.

So Wolf and his gang of thugs travel the countryside looting and burning down farms, and kidnapping the children to bring to the cult who lives on top of a mountain.

so lets make some bullet points

1. One of the PCs learns that their family farm was raided and burned to the ground, everyone killed, except they can’t find their two younger siblings and could possibly still be alive. (Ages 5 and 8) WHERE ARE THEY?

2. Three men (Rat, Dirk, and Charming) were part of wolf’s gang but left, they didn’t feel good about kidnapping kids. They just thought they were robbing folk. They don’t know why Wolf wants the kids, but he wants them unharmed and is heading to WestTown. Wolf’s thugs got to keep whatever they looted as payment.

3. in West town, Wolf is at some casino to pay off his debts to the mob boss. He is paying in some kind of ancient gold coins nobody has seen before, but gold is gold. He already delivered the children to the cultists in the mountains.

4. Cultists are brain washing the children into worshiping their cult god/demon, for some reason the cultists can’t sire their own children and resort to stealing/buying other people’s children.

5. Bounty Hunters from a previous session are hunting one of the PCs and show up.

6. The Mob boss is settling a turf war with a rival Mob boss in town. Tonight they going to raid the rival’s base and blood will spill into the streets of West Town. Half the town will burn down if the heroes ignore this.

7. A wandering caravan shows up full of merchants and travelers looking to start a new life out west. They are good folk and are heading to West Town. They just spent their life savings buying a new shop in town.

8. Someone found a baby Monster, and the angry mother will show up in 1d2 rounds.

9. A group of wolf’s thugs is currently burning down a farm and looting the place, Two people are hanging from a tree and will die in 1d4 Rounds. Wolf isn’t here.

10. Some scumbag sold their child to the cultists and were paid in ancient gold coins. He is seen spending the money in front of the PCs and the merchant asks about where they got the strange coin.

So there, we have 10 bullet points for an adventure. Each one is vague enough where you can insert it where ever the players decide to go on their own. Just pick whatever fits for the situation and you have to go in knowing you’re not going to use every scene. You do not need to do them in any kind of order, except #1 that one kicks the whole adventure off.

This could easily be 2 maybe even 3 sessions of gameplay.

After each session just remove the events that aren’t needed anymore and replace them with new ones based off what the players did during the last session.

Did they piss off an NPC? Did they steal something? Did they help someone? Make up a few scenes related to those that you can sprinkle in.

The main idea here is the players decide what to do with the information you give them and you react to that.

Lets look at the bullet points once more.

1. make sure you say specifically that the two younger siblings could still be alive since no bodies were found. And let the players figure out how they going to search for the siblings. Make them ask questions and roll dice.

2. These 3 men’s sole purpose is to explain that the kids are alive and unharmed and are being brought to west town by a man named Wolf. Insert them anywhere the players are at while looking for the kids. They could be in a tavern getting drunk, sitting around a camp fire off the road, in the shop trying to sell their pillaged loot from the PC’s house to the shop keeper. It doesn’t matter, just let it unfold naturally to what the players do. The players can kill them, let them go, capture them and make them into guides, you have 0 idea what they are gonna do and it doesn’t matter, your job is done assuming they didn’t just kill them first and if they did, so what move on and try again in the next area with new NPCs named Snow, Grizzly, and Pip.

3. When they get to West Town, Wolf’s gang is there and the locals make a big deal that Wolf is back in town and everyone is talking about it Then just let the players run into wolf directly and have the mob boss mention the strange gold coins he paid his debt with. They can fight even kill wolf, question him about the kids, make him be their guide to the cultists. whatever. The whole point is to learn about the strange gold coins, and the cultists have the kids. let the players decide the rest. Hell they might not even go to West Town and you’ll never use this scene.

4. If players question knowledgable NPCS like the mob boss, a mayor, the captain of the guard, a wise wizard who lives in a tower they might know about cultists buying children with ancient gold coins. Make them earn this information.

5. This is an example of something that happened in a previous session or two ago that is coming to bite them in the ass. Use this scene to add action/combat if things start to slow down.

6. This is a another example of a scene that could easily be skipped but its there incase you need it. If things start to slow down and you need action, suddenly the streets are a warzone. You could earn favor with the mob boss, the rival, or the caravan the players befriend who doesn’t want their shop to be burned down they just opened.

7. Use this if the party needs help. Did one of the players fall into a river and get separated from the party? the caravan could fish them out and nurse them back to health. They can be a shop, resting point, information hub out in the wilderness.

8. Again, if things slow down and you need some action. This is a good way to earn favor with NPCs like maybe their kid found the baby monster and you save the day, or maybe all the npcs die in the combat. Maybe the PCs got captured by wolf and his gang and when the mama monster shows up it gives them a chance to escape during all the commotion.

9. Pretty much another version of bullet number 2 to point the PCs in the right direction but can easily be here to add action when things slow down. Oh the players randomly want to find an alchemist? he lives on the edge of town? oh look his house is on fire.

10. This is pretty much another version of #3 incase wolf died before giving out the info and the players need a new lead to the kids and the cultists. Plus they’ll probably get to beat up a scumbag who sold their own kids.

Hope this helps as I seemed to of typed more than I planned lol

[Khan]

I do something along the lines of both @Alex and @James_Horn. Alex nailed the broad strokes and James filled in the blanks.

Our game is a mixture between GM-driven and Player-driven. None of my players want to find adventure on their own, so I’m the primary creative force behind the game. Having said that, I let them come up with things whenever the opportunity arises. I have a very broad arc in the campaign and fill in the blanks with what my players give me. If they fail to do that, I step in and steer them in the right direction.

Currently we play 5E and therefore everything is slow (even with combat automation), so I don’t need to map out 3-5 rooms a night. We are lucky if my players can go through 2 rooms/maps. This is also partly because we can only play 2.5-3 hours each session. Since combat is really slow in 5E, I tend to skip meaningless combats and usually go straight for the big fights, which take even longer than usual.

I sometimes have only one map prepared for a game night and sometimes it cannot be completed in a single session. If a session is cut short and I can’t yet ask my players what they want to do next, I’ll prepare some small notes regarding the campaign on the whole (like James said) just to be prepared (I prepare these notes whenever I need them, not only in this case).

Next session, when a room/map ends, and we find ourselves with time, I use this as an opportunity to let players do what they want. For this, we use downtime activities. I declare that each player has one action for a single game day (or any timeframe that makes sense for the current situation) and I ask each of them in turn what they want to do.

This approach has multiple benefits:

1. For a brief time, the game turns into Player-driven style. Players can try to improve their characters, explore the world, find new connections, earn side money, stumble upon the next quest… This allows players to bond with their characters and make them feel that their choices matter. Also sometimes some players want to do something completely different which they cannot do when the whole party is questing. In short, this lets them play their characters however they want, without any pressure put on them by me as the GM.

2. I don’t have to prep any maps or visual things, which take a lot of my time. I can skip all that and still have a productive and fun session.

3. The world comes alive because heroes are interacting with it in many different ways during downtime.

4. Next quest can be fleshed out during downtime, by player’s actions. There are helpful or detrimental consequences, depending on what they did and whether they succeeded or failed.

5. I see what they are truly interested in, so I can tune my quests better in accordance with their characters.

6. Players have the freedom to use their skills, loot and other abilities in creative ways to accomplish their downtime tasks. I sometimes require skill and other checks to keep the narrative engaging and entertaining just like combat, but much in a freeform style. This can be thought as a mini-combat; with a city map (or no map at all) with a couple of tokens and dice rolls.

Combine all of this with what Alex and James said and you can infer my GM style.

Hope this is helpful.

[thwright]

The basics of the railroad are that you have a single line, it goes one place no matter what. These are the invisible walls of a video game. Granted, a TTRPG has to have some “invisible walls”, unless you are playing a PbtA/PbtA-like game. These should be determined by the fiction of the story and the characters. (Even PbtA should limit you by the fiction.) Someone’s character may like to go off on their own adventure, but the fiction forces them to stick to the adventure at hand. Downtime between sessions or at specified downtime intervals is when their character can gallivant around. The GM should help the player to roleplay within the fiction rather than fight it.

The basic way around this is to give your players options. A goal should be achievable through multiple means or paths. A dungeon should not have a single entrance or failure point. Based on your players’ decisions, they should either be able to skip material by finding a more efficient way, or they should be able to miss material for not doing more.

You make this valuable to the players by attaching their character’s goals to the problem and enabling their talents to solve a problem. Don’t give a problem that requires Dimension Door if your players don’t have it; or if you must, then give them a means to acquire Dimension Door.

The bullet point system in ICRPG helps with this simply because it doesn’t forcibly prescribe a solution, it just states the problem. Using zones instead of 5ft² maps helps with this, too, as we stop caring quite so much about exact miniature movement.

[BlazingPolyhedron]

The answer is a mix of Schrödinger’s cat and Chekov’s gun: something in the setting or in the game doesn’t exist until you shed your GM lamp on it. You want to expose your players to these concepts before they can or have to interact with them. They need to be able to make informed decisions. Informed decisions are meaningful decisions. You need to empower your players with knowledge that is consistent and build encounters around what they know.

Keep a list of everything you’ve setup and invoke hints and warnings of those things throughout the session when it is appropriate to do so. When your players engage with those hints, simply play out your setups. Make it your gameplay loop.

Your players will often remember and act in accordance with their motives and the information. They will be vaguely aware of the cycle so don’t shatter their expectations unless you know what you’re doing and have a really good reason to do so. Otherwise you will be seen as inconsistent and it is to be avoided at all cost.

By doing this, you are essentially prepping during the game! What do you think? Cheers!

[Unggoy]

This seems consistent with this other idea of not keeping secrets too long. I know from experience I need to do that.
In my current game we just started, I actually didn’t pre-determine a lot at all, and it’s going just fine. If I just have a few key “clues” and give them to players, it doesn’t matter if I know the answers now or not, I’ll know by the time we get there. They have a name and a location, and a mysterious item which was determined by a roll on bizarre loot table, so basically the story is being randomized and players are making the patterns out of it. It’s going pretty well so far. Much easier than setting a whole world in stone and having them ignore it anyways. I am “railroading” but we are laying the tracks together.

[thwright]

I am “railroading” but we are laying the tracks together.

Great quote. That’s all.

[Deathbare]

Great thoughts in here,

My two Drachma;

To prevent the railroad:

1. Start small - start it off in a base/village/keep
2. Know the immediate problems of that place - they can lead to bigger things later
3. Know the area around the place, the three or four landmarks that are less than a day from the base
4. Know what tensions exist that influence the base (think trade, economy, government)
5. Expand as the characters grow

See the Legendary Iradrum post I made to see a decent starting template, then laser down into one of the small towns, that area is the starting point.

Railroad happens if you as the DM/GM/REF force the players to do something - this can be as subtle as saying there is no other approach but through this encounter fight I prepped - or as hard as dictating how the game resolves despite the players actions.

My only other advice to avoid the railroad is to remember the players make the story - not you. The GM/DM/REF only provides a fair challenge based on your knowledge of the game world, and should not have any idea how to resolve it.

Closing thought - be mindful of preconceived scenes in a game. Obviously its okay to know in this dungeon there is a big alter to an Elder God, but how it is discovered, approached, interacted with, and to a degree who is there should be based on the players actions - not yours. If you find yourself dictating those things - you are likely railroading your players.

• Deathbare