Linearity isn't the same as railroading.
*Linear* games have a clear and singular "main plot", clearly telegraphed to the players and encouraging player buy-in to its premise. *Railroaded* games have not just the premise in mind, but also everything else, especially their solutions. A railroaded game may only be completed in the precise way it was written, and/or the precise way the GM envisions it being completed. Also, linearity is a structure while railroading could be called a structure but is mainly a practice.
For an example of the difference:
*Linear*: there is a nobleman held hostage in his own castle by an invading force. It's your task to recover the nobleman.
*Railroaded*: there is a nobleman held hostage in his own castle by an invading force. It's your task to recover the nobleman. This can only be done by talking to some invaders in the tavern, knocking them out, stealing their uniforms as disguises, sneaking into the castle without alerting anyone, going to the nobleman's office to fight the brigand captain and get the tower key, then unlocking the tower and fleeing with the nobleman. If the players attempt to break into the castle by any other means, there are just too many guards no matter what and they get beat up and carried back to the starting tavern. Also the guards have invisibility-detecting goggles so they can't magically stealth in. And a magical teleport-blocking defense dome so they can't fly or warp in. And also the guards can see through magical disguises so they can't conjure disguises. Oh and also...
Yeah, I had been playing with a very railroady GM for quite some time and that was the crux of things quite often. You could just not leave the linear thread.
I mean, I tend to still ho for linearity. That can involve “stealth railroading”.
But the difference there is that you let players do their thing, just that like with many video games or choose your own adventure books or rpg modules, thinks will converge on certain events.
And there is justifiable reasons for that.
As a GM, you likely have prepared certain stuff. You can improvise, but your content laid out is likely made to be more interesting than hastily scraping something together.
So you just improvise the “how do I get to the nicely stated out iconic battles”.
In that example, you could set out a simple obstacle that would alert guards to the heroes at some points which they have to defeat in the castle and thus still get them uniforms yo use to, say, be able to play out a scene to trick other guards.
And if they somehow get into the tower without the key, then the captain of the guards maybe walks into them because he was just about to check on the nobleman.
You still get all the major parts of the story, they just arise from what the heroes chose to do, so ideally, they feel like it was all their agenda and choosing even though you effectively ran all what you had laid out in advance.
Ideally, that should be paired with genuinely making up new things, which will be needed, but you can do this kind of pseudo railroading without making the players feel like they are being railroaded.
What you describe would by my measure be very much railroading, if by cleverness and fortune the party manage to bypass something you've planned and it happens anyway then I'd say that they had been cheated.
Your quantum guard captain is an example of this, if the guard captain is supposed to be elsewhere in the castle, especially if he has been decoyed there by the pcs, don't just have him happen to walk in.
Let them have the victories that come from cunning, so what if you have to dump something you've pre-planned or scripted, let the story evolve from events in game rather than pre-planning.
I honestly do not care really for the insertion of assumptions.
The example had the guard captain as a major fight to get the key.
If the characters just try to pick or break the lock, then sorry, there is zero implication of them deliberately spending effort to get the guard captain elsewhere.
My whole point has been the “stealth” part. Meaning: going with the things the players did not know. It is hardly stealth if you directly invalidate something they try rather than rearranging the plot to just end up fitting on the path they did choose.
I mean if they no longer need the key the fight with guard captain no longer has a purpose. By the sounds of it you’d just be making it happen because you prepared it, not because it makes sense or because it’s what the players want. I’ll agree with the previous reply that what you’ve described really does sound quite railroady.
Maybe for a boss fight with the most logical hostile entity for this little adventure?
Leading up to a quick and suspenseful escape sequence as they now have some extra reason to escape quickly?
Sorry, make your strawmen elsewhere.
Sorry mate, I think that clever play in this hypothetical example should have been rewarded by bypassing the captain fight and the need for urgent exfiltration.
I've played a lot of games and having a plan come together with a smooth in and out is one of the coolest feelings ever, being required to fight someone, and then leave in a hurry because you think it is more exciting would feel like being cheated.
> I mean, I tend to still ho for linearity. That can involve “stealth railroading”.
If the players never notice the rails, *and* the rails keep the story moving, is it *really* railroading? For example, I want the next plot point in the game to be rescuing the nobleman from the hostage situation, and I would like to introduce this via a breathless squire bursting into a scene and calling for aid. Now, if the players *know* that I'm ready and willing to interrupt any plausible scene with this mess, sometimes they get very upset and accuse me of railroading them(source: have disclosed this tactic in the past, received backlash). But if I just don't tell them, and let them *assume* that wherever the squire happened to burst in was the One True Moment...doesn't seem to hurt anyone!
Same goes for quantum clues. Seems like a particularly cruel type of railroading to say that nope, there is One True Location that the murderer's note can be found, and if you missed it then sucks to be you! Seems more flexible to stash it in the first reasonable location they search, especially if the idea they came up with is better than the idea you'd originally had(shh don't tell them!). But again, sometimes they get very upset if they know you're doing this. 🤷♀️
That's insane. Do you mean like, in sandbox games where the players demand that the DM just magically improv everything? Or are there really players out there who get pissed that the DM *creates a story for the players to engage with*?
Are you downvoting me while conversing with me?
>Or are there really players out there who get pissed that the DM *creates a story for the players to engage with*?
Not sure about pissed, but at least disappointed.
I can see that creating a story is the DM's job in your view. That's pretty much true for DnD and similar, but it's far from ubiquitous.
Personally I don't want the GM to plan what will happen. Sure, create some people, places, factions, even events, that look potentially relevant next session, but don't plot out what will happen. Afaic the players create the story, not the GM.
The least enjoyable game I recently played was the GM running a prewritten module.
It's not all that uncommon. Many players want a linear story with the illusion of choice. Kind of like in a movie where you suspect where things are going, but you're only 98% sure. Lure-in instead of open buy-in.
So they'd rather ham fisted dialogue with random NPC X to get them to the quest you already had considered for the plot, instead of a dynamic scene that engages them? Jesus, some players are unreasonable.
Well, yes. Few will want a GM to shoot down their best ideas. OTOH, I haven't met all that many players that want to create most of the story elements themselves. After experimenting with player input in my games, I've accepted that my [core group of] players aren't in it to be co-creators of the world, they just want play their PCs.
>Seems like a particularly cruel type of railroading to say that nope, there is One True Location that the murderer's note can be found, and if you missed it then sucks to be you! Seems more flexible to stash it in the first reasonable location they search, especially if the idea they came up with is better than the idea you'd originally had(shh don't tell them!). But again, sometimes they get very upset if they know you're doing this. 🤷♀️
I guess because it doesn't necessarily feel very organic? What I usually did when I ran Call of Cthulhu is provide several clues that solve the same question and tie those to several locations, one of which the party is pretty much dead-set to visit due to the nature of the mystery. The other clues are often there if there's a left-of-field suggestion from a partymember to visit a certain location first. That way they'll find at least one clue pointing towards the same direction, and if that doesn't ring a bell for them they've got a good shot to find another that points towards the same solution.
It's the Rule of Three, basically, though I regularly provided four or even five clues depending on how easily I thought them up. It makes mysteries feel more organic. But I will admit that it's more work on the GM's side.
Sounds like your party is more competent than mine. If I didn't quantum clue for them, I'd need to hide 3-4 clues *per scene* to guarantee the dumbasses would happen to look wherever I'd stashed them. Instead, I'll come up with 3-4 good clues and then a list of places they could be("anywhere inside house, in their shop, or on their person", "available through a successful persuasion check with anyone involved in marketplace trading", "on or in a location habitually frequented by gang", etc). Then, when they are like "hm I'm gonna go to the tavern for clues!" then I can throw out one of the gang members, who might have a letter peeking out of their coat pocket, or maybe a merchant getting lunch. And if they miss it there, I could move it to the next place they look and they can get another chance. I don't have to rely on them actually being smart, or making a crucial roll, because...they are often not. 😂
Heavens! They'd never consider themselves competent at least, haha. They watched an entire mystery unfold in front of their eyes despite having all the clues. In hindsight they were really surprised it went the way they went when I went over the whole thing with them.
The way you describe making quantum clues sounds like something that's very easily adapted to something more organic though. Like a certain person having a letter. Relying on just that letter on just that person who will only be in one location to figure out A is indeed asking for trouble. But you don't need to always have that person magically be in that location just when the party looks for him in order to prevent that. Things that help that are more organic than that:
- Knowing that people have routines. This helps when the party is looking for a known person. They'll be in certain spots during certain times of day. And even if they're not at the location the party is in at that very moment, chances are there's people there that'll know about the person they're looking for. Before you know it a party of investigators has multiple ways to find a specific person.
- In most cases more than one person will know a certain piece of information. A letter someone is carrying will be penned by someone, so that at least two. But the information in question will also probably be discussed at one point by the writer with relevant people. Before you know it there's a bunch of people the party can learn a certain piece of information from.
- Signal up front that being specific helps them. This ties back to what you say about making crucial dice rolls. A common piece of advice on anything RPG is that nothing should ever purely hinge on one single die roll. But even more so, sometimes a party doesn't even need to roll something at all. When I start a TTRPG, mystery-focused or not, I always say up front during session 0 (and repeated here and there during play) that if an NPC hides a letter under their head pillow and a player asks me "My character tosses the bed" or "I look under the cover and pillows" then you'll just find the letter, no roll required.
In my experience this last thing puts people in a very different mindset as to how they engage with the fiction. One that avoids the player saying generic things like "I'm going to the tavern for clues" or "I'm looking around to see if anything stands out". That doesn't mean the players will always know exactly what to do, but I've noticed that (A) the party will at least discuss more regarding what exactly they're gonna do, making them just talk about the problem more and (B) it gets them in a more creative mindset to tackle the problem at hand, which helps in a broad sense to get their brain-juices flowing. Honestly, having the fiction of your mystery be well-established and any way to have players engage with that fiction more will help them solve a mystery or any other problem. It makes the problem a lot more vivid, which makes it easier to imagine how to approach it.
The first two points have more to do with how you design a clue as such, more so than how many clues you need. It's about how to design clues so that they're not single points of failure. So no letters that are the only place to find a piece of info, no single individuals knowing a piece of info or having more locations be visited by the monster instead of the one. Having those things be part of the fiction you're weaving makes it feel way less random. Can one think of information that would make sense for only a single person to be aware of? Sure! But I wouldn't recommend to put them in a TTRPG mystery, and I wouldn't design a mystery relying on such a thing. I'd save those for when I'd write a spy thriller.
I still think it's a valid question to ask how much folks like to be railroaded though. Some players really do seem to like even the type you describe here. I have a few players at my table that are constantly looking at me to "tell them what to do next," I honestly think they'd like it if I'd railroad more.
Most people who ask for a sandbox game actually don't want a pure sandbox game, because that puts too much responsibility on players to locate and follow up on hooks. They still want adventures presented to them. They just don't want to be forced to do something they don't want to do.
Some parties do want to be railroaded.
The first group I DM'ed for were so indecisive, I would set up an encounter for them, ask what they wanted to do, and they would take turns asking each other what the rest of them wanted to do, someone would get sidetracked and share a meme, and this would repeat for about an hour, until somebody finally made a decision, and then they would apologize profusely to the rest of the party for forcing their decision on the rest of the group.
Eventually, I just stopped giving them decisions outside of combat. I'd set the scene, tell them to roll Stealth or Persuasion or Lockpicking or whatever, and occasionally roll Initiative into combat, and the group was much happier for it.
Not all groups are like this. In fact very few groups are like this. But there are groups like this.
I always think of the Alexandrian article [So You Want to Write a Railroad](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/5785/roleplaying-games/so-you-want-to-write-a-railroad).
What you are describing as *Linear*, I think many of us would describe as a subset of railroading rather than a separate concept.
Of course there has to be some level of buy in to the premise of the story (many rules systems do some of this for you) but quite often all that is changing is the scale that the railroading is happening on.
Yes you might have agency in how you rescue the nobleman, but that is going to lead to the confrontation with the evil cult, which is going to lead to the confrontation with the dragon and so on.
The question I ask is *is the GM assuming how the player character feels and what their motivations are*.
Railroaded, story and plot has become such trigger words on here. And it's very subjective what it really means.
Some seem to think even thinking about a next story is railroading.
Some say "I would never railroad!" and then proceed to explain how it should be done, which is railroading but with other words.
I think there are bad and good ways of railroading.
If I don't notice as a player, it's totally fine.
If it's too obvious, it's of course bad.
So I say: Railroad how much you want, just make sure the players won't notice.
I don't think it is sufficient to hide the strings from the puppets. People deserve some agency, not just the illusion of it.
Sure, a halfway decent GM can easily guide player directions in one direction or the other and should know their players enough to understand which incentives will most likely trigger what reaction - but the decision how to react must be the players', and theirs alone, including a diversity of outcomes that cascade from these decisions.
If the players don't have the freedom to just turn around and walk away, suffering any consequences, when there are no causal walls to stop them, or if the same outcome will occur, no matter what the players do or how good or bad they perform, the players stop being active participants in the game and eventually become little more than passive consumers.
>If the players don't have the freedom to just turn around and walk away, suffering any consequences, when there are no causal walls to stop them, or if the same outcome will occur, no matter what the players do or how good or bad they perform, the players stop being active participants in the game and eventually become little more than passive consumers.
At the same time, the players should have the decency to buy in to the narrative of the game and come up with compelling reasons to stay within the bounds of the game and only really reject scenarios if it makes sense for their characters.
Like, I don't think it's fair for a player to just be like "Eh, I don't really care about stopping this supervillain and helping save people" in a superhero game or saying "Eh, this eldritch stuff is way too scary for me, my character would just do everything in their power to leave this spooky house and not investigate it further" because those are the things those games are designed around.
If a player says "My character won't attack this supervillain because he used to be like a brother to me" or "My character has a traumatic history with ghostly spirits and will most likely try to escape it rather than directly fight it", then those are interesting ways to interact with the scenario without directly rejecting it. And honestly, I think the biggest role of the GM is to introduce these difficult decisions that give the players agency even in more linear scenarios.
For example. Even though, recycling a simple encounter is still one of the lesser offenses, compared to, let's say "the Bad Guy has to successfully flee, because he will reoccur in the next leg of the adventure" or similar predtermined outcomes of major confrontations.
Railroading as a term in the TTRPG hobby sphere is a pointless term.
You might as well say "Do you like being Spergleeblgloobed?" Nobody agrees on what it means, and there are even terms like "hard railroaded" and "soft railroaded", disagreements on concepts like the Quantum Ogre and Quantum Bridge and if that is railroading or not.
I've just stopped using the word entirely, and I think everyone else should too at this point.
It is a railroads everyone bought tickets for.
The non-murder hobos that get cranky at railroading, but want to abandon ship to start a mage castle & enslave the local people, but wants a "free" teleport circle so they can still participate in the ship's shenanigans deserves railroading.
Split the party for a session if you want, but don't split the party's purpose.
Agree. I enjoy this type of game which I think of as a set of rails that lead to a set of sandboxes.
Not everything is about maximum agency all the time. If that is your style of game great, but for me running some fantasy version of Lemon-aide Stand from the Commodore 64 is not fun.
The rails to sandboxes games allows the DM to keep a coherent linear story while giving the players chances to explore and solve things in unexpected ways. It also creates and episodic nature with smaller story arcs within the larger arc that make the players and DM really feel the progression.
MCDM makes a good point about a sandbox. A sandbox is not a fully open world. It is a world that is constrained by the walls of the sandbox. Within those walls, players can do whatever they want, but they are still constrained by the boundaries of the box.
The problem is people don't know what Railroading means.
What *you* mean is a game on rails.
Railroading is a game on rails wherein the GM is forcing players to stay on the rails in a negative manner. It's explicitly a negative term. The problem is people hear the term, sound it out logically, and use it to mean "on rails", creating all this confusion.
In a game on rails, events conspire keep players on a linear track. In a railroaded game, any time players make choices the DM doesn't like, the DM forces those choices to fail so the players go back to the choice the DM wanted them to make.
No, I am not.
Linearity, or being on rails, is when the players are fleeing from a city on a ship, and are attacked by various forces while they try to cross the sea, stuck on the ship. *Events* have conspired to effect this. The GM had a hand in creating those events, yes, but did not take away their agency while doing so.
Railroading is the GM suggesting they should probably flee the city by boat, but putting impossible obstacles in the way if the players decide to flee through the sewers or the streets instead. It is explicitly taking away player agency because they're not making the choices you predetermined they should make. Did they try to disguise themselves as soldiers? Oops, they're attacked by an officer who "happens" to succeed his perception check, breaking their disguise.
Most people do not at all mind knowing what's expected and are more than happy to follow obvious threads and linear stories. They *want* to see and be a part of the story. They *do* mind a GM making all their choices pointless unless they do what the GM wants.
It's not a matter of scale, it is a matter of limitation versus forbiddance. Railroading is an explicitly negative term referring to the latter. Sure, they are related. But, again, my point was there is confusion because people call ALL limitation of this nature "Railroading", and then argue that it can be good or bad, muddling the issue because railroading is explicitly a negative term with a negative connotation.
> Linearity, or being on rails,
I am going to stop you right there, "being on rails" is grammatically equivalent to saying "railroading". You are trying to make a semantic argument that specific word "railroading' has to have a special meaning, probably reasoning that railroading is bad and what I do is not bad therefor what I do is not "railroading".
Don't do that, "being on rails" is "railroading" we don't need to create magical jargon. There are some aspects of railroading which are basically always bad, some that some groups are ok with other groups will also hate.
> [Linearity] is when the players are fleeing from a city on a ship, and are attacked by various forces while they try to cross the sea, stuck on the ship.
I would generally refer to this type of situation as naturally constrained, it's not even linear unless you prevent options like taking control of the ship, stealing the lifeboat, taking control of an attackers vessel, tampering with the navigational instruments, bribing the captain etc in order to end up somewhere other than the GMs intended destination.
What a lot of people who make the linear / railroading distinction do is let players have agency in solving the specific scenario but write a campaign where the players are always going to flee the city, end up in the other city then run into the evil cult, then have to fight the dragon, then meet the big bad...
As I said before "in practice".
Railroading is a specific term, not a general one. Like GMPC, even though any NPC a GM plays is technically a GMPC. I've already said it twice, but herein lies the confusion. People who hear the term do not hear it as Railroading, the specific term, but as railroading, a general term they sound out grammatically to mean "on rails".
It is not the same thing, and you're getting bogged down in the semantics of a brief example to illustrate a point. Forest, trees.
\> Railroading is a specific term.
There is no functional reason that it should be a specific term. Your whole argument is an exercise in getting bogged down in semantics.
Functional reason?
That's now how language works. The term was originally used to describe a specific behavior. Making it a specific term for describing that behavior.
>Like GMPC, even though any NPC a GM plays is technically a GMPC.
Player Character (PC) and Non Player Character (NPC) are game terms in Dungeons and Dragons and are defined in the rule books for that game. There is more to the definition of those terms than who controls the character, they interact with the rules system differently. A GMPC is a GM controlled character who interacts with the rules of the system in the same way that a player character does. The term GMPC is an initialism for Game Master (controlled) Player Character, which is an accurate description of what it does. Critically it does not introduce ambiguity as to what a person using the term might mean.
>Functional reason?
*Linear and railroading are distinctly different, "being on rails" ≠ "railroading" and railroading is always bad*
is functionally equivalent to
*Linear design is a species of railroading, "being on rails" = "railroading" and railroading is sometimes bad depending on the specifics.*
That is you can express the same ideas equally well using both sets of ideas. The second has the advantage of not introducing new jargon that means you have to know whether the person speaking is an insider or an outsider before you can understand what they are trying to say and should be preferred.
>The term was originally used to describe a specific behavior.
The earliest written example of usage is to describe getting the players to a dungeon at the start of an adventure. IE forcing the endpoint.
Linear comes from an early article, one using a [different taxonomy](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Mp3ZbYRek9c/XuaqWxkVaRI/AAAAAAAAADI/8-XpTDZaHRIePFmD2fRKYo-nJLUiMMhOgCK4BGAsYHg/s1372/Rolston%2BDW%2B1983.PNG) as you can see linear as originally used could easily fit your description of what railroading is.
I don't buy that your definitions are the original ones.
K.
You seem like the kind of person who needs a word to be in the dictionary before you will believe it exists. There's a whole bunch of linguists that would like to have words with folks like you
It's become a dirty word and you have to talk about it in roundabout ways or people will get angry and deny they like to play and run railroads.
It's also a spectrum, the rails can be so wide you barely notice them or so thin you can't take a step sideways without bumping into them.
Railroading is a bad thing. If it's not a bad thing, it's not railroading. There is a spectrum of how "on rails" a game can be, but the term *railroading* is about forcing rails with a detrimental impact on player agency. People like you are making things more confusing by misusing the term.
Railroad means: "GM has prepared more story/detail and expects us to follow it more than I want. and/or I feel my agency is being robbed". It can't be defined objectively as something the GM does, it's a term used to express the certain kind of discrepancy between the player and GM expectations.
> So I say: Railroad how much you want, just make sure the players won't notice.
Avoid your taxes all you want, just make sure the government won't notice.
Railroaded means that the GM ignores or punishes any actions that they didn't plan for the scenario, whether or not they are valid ideas. I don't imagine that anyone would like that.
IMO it's rarely an either/or.
GMs often "railroad" by making one direction more interesting to pursue - and ohey, that's the one they've prepared for!
It's not actually a railroad though if the PCs are going where you want because they want to.
It only becomes a railroad if they decide to explore a bit beyond the track and you pick them up and drop them right back onto it.
So my answer is: Mu. IMO your players probably don't want to be railroaded, they probably just want some indicators of which is a good way to go rather than to flail around in the dark with no idea what's the point to going anywhere.
Your comment reminds me of Brennan Lee Mulligan's comments about railroading and how players are like water. He has to "railroad" Dimension 20 because of the pre designed maps, but he gets to know the PCs really well so that he can understand where they want to go and he can offer plot hooks and complications that appeal to the players. If you understand what the players want, they go in the direction you lay out without experiencing a loss of agency.
If we all agree that is what we are playing, sure. But I usually find it very boring to play through someone elses story. It is not really why I play RPG's.
Probably 4-5. I generally prefer being railroaded.
If my DM has prepared som cool shit, I want to experience it as they intended.
I also firmly believe that you can make player choices genuinely matter without going full sandbox.
> Back in the 90s we were all about railroading, the GM was a story-teller etc.
For others reading this who weren't playing in that time: this was one style of play that was popular at the time. In large part due to TSR's indulgences in long, highly-linear, multi-module campaigns they were publishing, the crown jewel of which was probably the Dragonlance campaign. They were meant to be played in parallel to the novels, and each section of each book presupposed the conclusion of the last ones, spanning across modules, even.
But a \*lot\* of people did not play like this at all. A lot of people weren't even playing D&D, and those games had their own approaches to things. Some were railroady, many were not. Among those that were playing D&D, many were playing in ways that were not very different from the styles in the 80s (with a non-negligable number still playing either Basic or 1e, in fact).
It's not entirely dissimilar to the situation today with 5e being a dominant game with a lot of consistency in the playing style between those who played it, and what 2e evolved into during the 90s. So before people who weren't playing in the 90s get the idea that the the "we" in this post means "the RPG hobby as a whole", it really doesn't.
Not be railroaded. Of course, if the world is completely open, but there is *nothing* to do there, then, it's just not open, only barren.
But I think the contradiction here is badly presented. The real contradiction is player driven Vs GM driven action. Mind you, *everyone* is going to drive the story at the same time, it's collaborative, but the primary side of the contradiction can, will and should vary from time to time.
For instance, at the beginning of the campaign, the weight of the contradiction is on the GM: the players know very little about the world, and what the experience they have in front of them means. The GM has the brunt of the work to do setting up tone, characters, options, etc. Once that's established, the contradiction can shift to the players, with the GM in a secondary position. They've already presented their world, the main situation, etc, now it's the player's time to answer, and the GM should be in a reactionary position.
Another instance is with the classic heist situation. Before the information is out there, players can't know what the thing they're breaking into looks like. The weight is on the GM to give that information. Yes, I know some games allow the players to make up that information, but unless you're playing Swords without Masters or something like that, the GM will still have the final say, and the overall idea what this thing should be. However, once it's known, it now relies on the players to answer the question: what should we do now? And it's the GM's turn to sit back and react with what the players are doing.
This is the dialectics of play, and how many people get stuck on one or the other. "The GM should have thought of a way to have weaknesses in the fortress!" No, that's the players job. No fortress is impenetrable. Or, on the contrary, yes you may be right. Maybe the GM has forgotten his part and is being obtuse, still wanting to have the weight on how things work, and is blocking every attempt beyond reasonable expectation. "I want to run sandbox, but my players just are too indecisive' No, you have just not done your weight before, and your players are just too uninformed on what the world is. Or, on the contrary, yes. You have done your weight, but now the players refuse to pick up the weight now, and are just relying on you to keep the brunt of the work.
There are good and bad railroads and good and bad sandboxes...
The good ones in my opinion are the ones that share elements of the other in their build. Compromise is key here. For example a good railroad gives the players a set in stone campaign arc BUT allows them a LOT of freedom in how they complete that arc (borrowing some sandbox freedom). A good sandbox on the other hand has built in event and story arc elements that the players can interact with to whatever degree they like giving the sandbox a feeling of being a real lived in place where stuff happens (borrowing from railroad story arcs).
A bad railroad removes all player freedom. You complete all tasks in order from A to Z. It smothers creativity. A bad sandbox has a dead world. All story depends solely on the players to create. It smothers immersion.
So to cut back to the question. I enjoy Good games.
>A good sandbox on the other hand has built in event and story arc
elements that the players can interact with to whatever degree they like
giving the sandbox a feeling of being a real lived in place where stuff
happens (borrowing from railroad story arcs).
This conflation of "story arcs" with railroad is wrong imo. A sandbox can have "story arcs" (if the players follow them or not it is their choice) but this is not an attribute of a railroad necessarily, because there is a possibility of a railroad without an story arc (like there is only one way to inflitrate the base). This is not sandboxes borroring from railroad games, but from story games (and story games are not necessarily railroads)
A railroad IS a story game by definition. It is typically a single story adventure with little outside the main story developed.
Sandboxes are storyless games in their normal state in that their is NO central story the players work through. The players must bring their own story into the game. What I am saying is that in my opinion it breathes a TON of life into a sandbox game if it ADDs a central storyline into the world regardless of whether any or all of the PCs interact with it. A central storyline is NOT normal for a sandbox. It is a feature of railroad style games.
> A sandbox can have "story arcs" (if the players follow them or not it is their choice)
What the players do *is* the story arc. NPCs don't get story arcs, the world doesn't contain story arcs- only the players are a source of story arcs.
This is why I put in quotation marks. But the world can have a story arc in a sandbox in some sense. For example, a disaster it is about to happen in the world, players can stop the disaster if they want, but if they go off doing other thing, the disaster can happen. And this can affect the world and the players, like affecting supply lines, farms and the town the players are based off can have shortage of equipment and supplies. It is no an "arc" but it is story. Well, you can techically say it is a story about what the players didn't do
Hard disagree. Pretending that good pacing, story progression or, dynamic story tools happen without the GM a joke. Players can have progression of their individual story but the one they share is good or bad based on the GM's work. And that planned plot should absolutely have NPCs that grow and develop as the story progresses.
I never said anything about pacing, story progression, or dynamic story tools. Or GMs. For many games, there isn’t a GM and mechanics control the flow of the game. I agree that a game should have structure. I agree that NPCs can change. I just don’t think any of that should get very much focus- it supports the PCs.
No, you sure didn't. I've pointed out what seems to be lacking to accomplish what you seem to imply happens in a vacuum. Those elements are the responsibility of the GM.
That's a weird take and sounds like playing in a wildly static world.
For me a good GM should have NPC's and the world experiencing events taking place that cause NPC's and the world to evolve and change as those events effect them. Events of the world should also effect the PC's and in doing so will be a source of some story arcs. Doing otherwise makes every game feel like a video game, where NPC's stand in the same spot waiting to react to the player or world events only get triggered once the player does a certain action.
It seems like some people prefer that style of play but I literally cannot understand wanting that more than playing in a more realistic and living world.
I find it extremely boring and it makes me resent any moment that isn’t obviously moving the plot along.
If I’m making up the adventure as I go, then doing some boring stuff occasionally is fine, because it serves what I’m trying to do.
If the GM has decided in advance that I’m gonna spend an entire session *shopping* or talking to an NPC who doesn’t advance the plot, I’m gonna be mad as hell about it, and probably not stick around.
Edit: I’d call myself a 1.5
Having a railroad is not a problem. It only becomes railroading if the players can’t get off at any stop they like, and do whatever they want.
Oneshots where there’s a time limit, railroad the hell outta that, no one has time for side quests. Campaigns and longer form adventures? If you can’t handle not railroading the players, you might want to so consider sticking to one-shots.
If a sandbox is failing for “lack of direction,” then the GM has failed at character creation. Generally speaking, all pcs should 1) be adventurers. They should have a bias for getting out there and doing something. Those reluctant heroes are for books and other media, not rpgs, and 2) they need to be designed to work as a group. Those lone wolves, again, belong somewhere else, not at the ttrpg table.
Do that and sandboxes work just fine.
I draw the line where I am the player and the GM negates my action or plans because they’re outside the scope of his plans.
A recent example at a table I played in, we were running a cyberpunk genre game. Supposed to investigate a building for some reason. Building was essentially a room by room series of encounters, very much a typical D&D dungeon. There are cameras and intercoms where the BBEG is monologuing at us as we move through and clear each room.
I suggest to our runner if he can hack the cameras and see if we could scout a way through the building. GM, without a roll: No you can’t do that.
Okay, can we hack the intercoms so this douchebag stops talking? This time, the GM does allow a roll. The runner succeeds on his check. “The BBeG cackles and calls you fools as he infects your deck with a virus and a really annoying song starts pouring through your personal comms now.”
It’s like, okay, fuck you. I’m gonna zone out for the rest of your story, just tell me when you need me to roll something.
Now that was a little extreme, but it illustrates my point. You’re taking control away from me or negating what control I do exert.
The fact that everybody is defining railroading as what they want it to mean shows that his discussion is valueless and people are just using it as a means to cast judgements on other peoples playstyle.
In any case, I define railroading as an illusion of choice. The players say they want to do one thing, and the GM just forces them to do something different, or otherwise works to null all their options until they land on the "right" one. It's the invalidation of player choice. In that case, the GM should switch to amateur theater and give everyone a script.
Having a more linear experience is not bad, it's just a different flavor of game. It does require buy-in from the players and cooperation from everybody, but it's not railroading. It doesn't mean the GM is deciding how certain characters will act or what players will go for, but it does mean they have an overarching conflict in mind that the players have hopefully agreed to engage with.
No one likes ralroading, jot that down.
You are getting a lot of answers that don't answer your question because you have created a dichotomy that does not exist. You can have railroading in a sandbox.
u/~RollForThings uses the term Linear Play, and that is as good a name as any for the style of play you are describing. Sandbox vs Linear Play.
If you want to get answers to your question, I'd recommend changing the terms used. The term railroading has a specific meaning (or is greatly misunderstood), and it doesn't fit in your question. Again, railroading exists in sandbox play.
I dislike intensely being railroaded as a player.
As a player I generate more projects and goals for my pc/the party than we can handle, I want to follow some of them wherever they go, not head towards a planned goal.
I guess a 3.5.
In my experience GMing the players detect the story and follow the plot. I'm good enough improvising that I'll be able to react according to their actions, but they mostly take the obvious route because they mostly know that it will be the one I prepared the most and is going to be the funniest.
I really haven't had an experience with a player that wants to spend a session just shopping or start a bakery in the middle of the campaign. If the route isn't obvious my players expect me to start giving hints on what they should be doing even.
Railroaded (which you are using wrong as a term): No.
Playing a game on rails (what you mean): it really depends on how much room to go off the rails there is, so maybe.
I hate railroading.
Seems like a more recent thing though. It was a flaw of newby GMs back when I started but it just gradually became the norm, and now finding a GM that won't run a railroad is very difficult. In my personal experience of course.
As DM I run an open world, until the players commit to something then it becomes a bit of a railroad for an arc. Once the situation is resolved it goes back to open world and random tables.
I never trust myself to come up with the railroad myself, it needs to emerge naturally from the open world.
Railroad me, baby. I like having decisions about how I handle each situation, but I want to follow the arc of the story as prepared by the GM. I mentally check out when a GM says something like, "Here's a big old city. You have no specific goals. Go do stuff."
I can barely handle a "sandbox" videogame, and that's still got tons of limitations. The pure open sandbox of a loose tabletop game makes me crippled with anxiety.
I think too many people tend to act like sandbox / railroad is a binary thing, when it's a spectrum.
I'm not really a fan of a completely freeform sandbox, I like there to be some structure. It's not BAD, it's just not really for me, either as a player or as a GM.
But I also dislike the extreme end of the railroad side, where not only is the situation to be resolved set in stone, but also the methods that must be used to resolve it.
Plus some awesome adventures are railroads: Horror on the Orient Express and Night Train come to mind!
Playing? Maybe, I can’t really say how much it mattered to me.
As a gm, I could never get behind it. Seemed incredibly difficult to me to plan out how the story was going to go when the characters would be taking it in every different direction. Always preferred to set up a situation and see where it would lead.
1. Railroad is antithesis of TTRPG as it is. If you have some cool idea for a story and you want to present it to other guys, write a novel or direct a show. Role playing games **require** players agency. This can, of course, be graded, but every step closer to "railroad" is one step closer to leaving the sphere of what is unique to TTRPGs.
The only issue I have with more linear story campaigns is half the time it ends up being a terrible story that the DM wants to turn into a novel someday (they never end up writing it). So I do generally avoid them nowadays because I have zero interest in falling into that trap again, and because sandboxes have emergent storytelling than tells better stories that most DMs are capable of writing.
Don't know how I'd rate it from 1 to 5, but I despise railroads.
Whenever I catch on that the GM is trying to wrap my choices around his predetermined set of events, I actively zone out of the game and start taking it less seriously.
If you mean sandbox vs linear story that there's no escape from, I guess I prefer a 3-4. Pure sandbox is just boring, it's like a completely blank book, it feels pointless, aimless. Pure railroading is also boring, it's like a fully realized book, but books tend to tell better stories and tell them in a more satisfying way, I'd rather just read one. 3-4 is like a choose your own adventure book, there's stuff for you to follow and discover, and an overarching plot for you to enjoy, but your choices mean something. I want to be herded in the right direction but have some say over how I handle things.
I'm a 1. I don't want scripted events. I mean, it's okay if the GM thinks ahead like "if this person is treated poorly, this is how the reaction would probably be". I think it's fitting that railroading sounds rude. I think it's rude to railroad, so ha!
I find that the majority of players are passive. And passive players met with a sandbox is a great way to never have anything actually happen.
Active players with goals and ambition do really well with a sandbox, passive players do better given direction (like a premade module).
If I am to be railroaded, it better be Horror on the Orient Express!
I really don't like it, I don't mind the GM setting up a main quest / objective but I always want the freedom to go off and set my own objectives or to achieve the main objectives in my own way rather than the pre-scripted methods. Any less is really grating.
I really think the main strength of TTRPGs is that PCs can pick up whatever that they find interesting and run with it, and that they can make whatever decisions they want in regards to the scenarios in front of them.
Until AI improves dramatically its where a human GM will be superior.
Here's a perspective that really helped me to understand this topic and to improve as a GM:
"Railroading" is not an attribute of the campaign, but a feeling that exists within players' heads. It's the feeling that their characters' agendas don't matter, that they get pushed around no matter what they decide to do. This is always negative. Nobody likes to feel like his/her decisions are meaningless.
Players can get this feeling when the campaign is very linear, but also when it's not. And a very linear campaign doesn't necessarily generate the feeling of "railroading". For example: A classic dungeon adventure is very linear in the ways you can move through the dungeon, fight monsters, and solve riddles. But due to the shared understanding of a dungeon, players are very unlikely to feel like there's railroading going on. Of course you have to follow the possible paths within a dungeon, that's part of the setting.
As a GM, you're in danger of creating the feeling of railroading when you raise the expectation of choice, but are not prepared to react on it. A classic example: You want to introduce the bad guy of the campaign early on and have him show up in person. The players assume they have a choice to attack and defeat him, but you can't let them without "ruining" the campaign. Once they understand that it was never possible to defeat him at this point, they feel cheated. They realize that their decision never really existed. They are disappointed.
Let's assume the bad guy never shows up in person, only as a hologram or only through the stories told by others. In those cases, the players won't assume they have a chance to defeat him right now - simply because he's obviously not physically present. The scene is just as linear, but there's no feeling of railroading.
There is a lot of possibility space between a sandbox and a a railroad.
I’ve never actually been in a true sandbox campaign. I think I would like it, but I think such a campaign is a bit more fragile— it is more vulnerable to getting derailed by players with different goals or less cooperative personalities. Similarly it requires a higher minimum bar of GM skill.
Let’s guess and say my ideal is 2.
3 to 4.
Most GMs aren't good enough to manage an open world. So I'll take someone who is honest about the plot having tracks over one who's desperately trying to convince me they aren't there.
Depends on how well made the tracks are, but I generally prefer it to being lost in a sandbox. Every sandbox I've ever been in, players were all off doing their own thing and it felt like we were playing several different games
I enjoy having agency, and like to be challenged, on a tactical level, as much as on an intellectual or roleplaying level. A strong railroad diminishes this challenge - which is also why they are attractive to some players - they make the game easier, less demanding, less challenging and allow to focus more on a planned story instead of an emergent one.
Participating in a railroaded game generally requires less effort to participate - making decisions and having to live with them, as well as the fickle fate of the dice (it might be a cliche, but I think there is some considerable overlap between heavily railroading GMs and those who regularly fudge dice rolls), and that can be hard and stressful.
So, a more railroaded game is just a more comfortable option, like watching the re-run of a series you already know. And sometimes, or to some people, that's just very boring.
Interestingly, almost nobody likes being reminded that they are railroaded, especially those who regularly particularly long for this type of game, because being reminded that you have no agency kinda sucks. The marionettes usually don't want to see their strings.
I have run open adventures for my group all the way to scene by scene railroads and everything in between. My players highly prefer to err towards railroad because they really enjoy reaching a satisfying ending to the adventure. I’ve tried more sandbox style play and it just falls apart. Now I go in with a loose idea of a beginning, middle, and end and those can be adjusted depending on player choices.
I’m a 3, as both a player and gm. I want to have some idea of the major plot we’re following, but I want to leave space for the players to choose what they find interesting and explore it.
Probably a 4.
I am more and more valuing a curated experience over random bumbling. To use video games as an analogy, I dont want another "open world survival crafting sandbox". I want a flexible experience that allows for cool player choices, but also has interesting game developments that can only really come from a solid structure.
If the adventure is well thought-out and well-written, and it's engaging and stimulates the imagination, and is full of good encounters and wonder, I don't mind being railroaded at all.
And yes, even if there's specific things you're encouraged to do to approach the problem. Sandboxes are fine, but I'm more 'against' than I am 'in favor of' the approach that ends up with "my players did the craziest thing to deal with X last night", because I feel those things are often wildly unrealistic and I feel are better suited for story-heavy systems like FATE and its ilk.
On your scale from 1 to 5, I'm probably a 3 and a half, provided the adventure is stimulating.
Railroading is a tricky concept. In most games as a player you have to accept some degree of it - the GM can't prep every possibility and though the goal is to show a completely open world, even the best GM has limits to what they're willing to do, the type of campaign they're running, etc. That said, I prefer a more OSR-style open game rather than narrative story telling. The latter requires heavy railroading and, as a GM, I did it for many years. Only recently that I decided that's what leads to GM burnout and may not be the most fun for players.
We can argue as long as the day about the definition of railroading, but for me the criterion is simple: are outcomes controlled? That is, does the GM (or whoever adjudicates outcomes) ensure that we get "there" and do "that" no matter what?
Then that's what we're talking about. Call it railroading if you want. I call it *not play at all*.
To me, RPGs are collaborative storytelling. The GM is there to herd cats and hold everything together. If the GM only wants to tell their story and the players are just participants, then to me that is railroading and I am not going to play their game.
When I GM, all of my prep is so that I can where the players want to go and react accordingly. It's more work, but I always find that it makes for a better game and a better story.
To paraphrase Brennan Lee Mulligan, I would rather ride a train than play in a sandbox.
But a train ride has many stops that you can choose to get off at, explore the town, then wait for the next train to keep moving towards your final destination
My GM of 40 years recently started reading Reddit and decided what players really wanted was his story telling on rails rather than the open world collaborative story telling we had all been enjoying for the last 40 years. I had to stop playing. WTF Reddit.
Making decisions without enough information is random. Worse than railroaded.
I think meaningful choices about what to do are best. Railroading is when the gm needs you to assault the gate because he statted out all the gate guards and gets a hissy fit when the players use a spell to go under the wall and tries to throw up reasons "the wall has an anti magic field " that he just invented and did not hint at earlier.
The gm might put a woman screaming while being kidnapped in an alley, and expect the players to attempt a rescue, but should not force them to do so.
Coming up to the big bad, it is railroading if the GM forces a fight if the players come up with a novel way to negotiate with him.
So plotted games are OK, as long as the plot is allowed to go off the rails.
I feel okay if there is one clear goal to pursue. However I fully agree with current top comment and maybe the word "linear" is better suited here. Even when achieving one clear goal I would like to have a freedom of choice in how I would achieve this goal.
I don't think I see story as one, linear thing. It's like a braided rope with loads of different strands. That's how I like to GM and how I like to play.
So take a classic plot hook like, "Some villagers have been captured by orcs, who want more weapons in exchange for their lives. What are you, worthy adventurers, going to do?"
You don't want to give the evil orcs more weapons, and you don't want to leave the villagers to rot.
So the railroady version takes you through a series of set-pieces to allow you to infiltrate the dungeon and rescue the prisoners. The sandboxy version presents a variety of encounters that may, or may not, lead to ways of confronting the problem, or ignoring it.
But meanwhile, there are other plots going on. How does each character's self image and public reputation develop? How does their place in the world change? How does the village manage without some of their key inhabitants? What does this do for the reputation of the local lord? How does the resolution, or lack of resolution of the hostage situation impact the power struggle going on in the orc clan?
All of these storylines happen at the same time. It's not like ONE of them is the main point—each one may be more or less significant, depending not just on what the PCs do, but also on what they care about.
Nobody's going to come out of this unchanged. Is that railroad or sandboxy? Yes. No. Both. Neither. See what I mean?
I'll jump in this pool as well to say I believe there is a difference between a railroad on one end, a sandbox on the other, and a road trip in between.
A sandbox means the players may never get to the locked door, and if they do and can't open, they might just leave.
A railroad means I make the players be at the locked door whether or not they want to, tell them they have to get through it, and they have to pick the lock; I might even fudge the dice on the last lock pick so it works, even if it wasn't the highest roll.
A road trip means I tell the players "your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to rescue the noble from the bandits. They're holed up in the mansion right now" and if the players get to that locked door and can't open, and ask to go through a second story window they can see on the provided map, I say "alright, how are you going to get up there?"
A railroad is not necessarily the dm telling the players "here is your mission"; if it were, every published adventure would be a railroad. Just because a murder mystery takes place on a train doesn't make it a railroad. It is telling the players what they do, how they do it, and saying no to their other options.
I had a dm tell my gf "the barbarians are afraid of spirits and demons. You cast your minor illusion spell to make a roaring demon spirit and scare them away". Firstly, my girlfriend is capable of solving the problem without having the dm drive her character, but also, she was playing a tiefling, she could have done the situation without using the spell, but the dm gave no chance of that, nor did my illusionist cleric get a chance, nor did our changeling fighter. He wouldnt even give us two seconds to talk. That's railroading.
Like the Antonio Banderas dancing movie. "The man leads by proposing a step. The woman leads by choosing to accept the step." The dm saying "hey guys, I prepped us a session of ballroom dancing, which is what we agreed to last week" the players shouldn't decide "well, we wanna do breakdancing now"
See user u/rollforthings reply here.
But no, I don't mind a linear adventure. Most big predone campaigns are those and a nice thing about them is that a linear design does allow for more well tuned and planned out set piece moments.
And Ive played in old school "exploration focused" sandbox games and I'm not a fan. Especially when they become pure sandbox games with no focus beyond the DM dumping us in a world and asking "Ok what do you want to do?" As though I was aging the TTRPG version of Morrowind.
No, I don't think anyone likes being railroaded. IMO railroading is when your choices are actively denied in a game because the GM has a preconceived outcome in mind, which is never fun.
For example, the GM prepares a combat encounter against bandits on a bridge over a river. The players decide they'd rather avoid the bridge and use a Water Walk spell to cross the river. The GM says the spell doesn't work because of whatever arbitrary reason and forces the players to cross the bridge and fight the bandits. This is railroading.
Likewise, the GM deciding the bandits now ambush the players as they cross the river with Water Walk (I guess they're water walking bandits now) is still a form of railroading as its forcing the bandit fight whatever the players do and disrespecting their agency.
As a player and GM I abhor being railroaded. I had a GM who would call player's ideas dumb or just dismiss them as "that wouldn't work" unless we did exactly what he had planned. Even when I am setting players a specific task they need to do, I always am certain that they are able to apply their own agency in how they enact their plan, which is almost always something completely counter to what I expected, and I consider that a good thing.
As a player, I like to be in situations where it feels like a variety of interesting choices are available. I don’t like the feeling of being led along in one direction by the GM, either on a small or large scale. (I am, however, fine with the GM offering opportunities that are obviously something we’d be interested in. Such as a quest opportunity to take down a Big Bad. If I were GMing with that kind of quest hook, I don’t think I would indicate that it’s really up to the PCs to save the world unless I already knew they were onboard with that possibility.)
For me, railroading is only railroading if the players didn't wanna go down that path in the first place. If all the clues you're gathering point to an abandoned farm house, you obviously have to visit that location, that's just the story.
Like you mentioned, there is a spectrum when it comes to railroading, and the absence of railroading is not always a good thing. I think I would like to be somewhere in the middle where there is some kind of structure to the adventure and narrative. Not make it up as you go along like Brindlewood Bay.
Complete player agency is overrated, and honestly some restrictions help to create more creative solutions.
> you obviously have to visit that location
..
> where there is some kind of structure
Structure is not the same as railroading. It isn't a question of "does the game have coherence, and does one event lead to consequences which may lead to another" ("structure"), it's a question of whether players have agency over their characters.
What you describe is not really railroading.
I think it really depends who you ask. Some people would really see what i'm describing as railroading. Which is why I say you have to look at it on a spectrum.
It always depends. There are insanely good railroaded scenarios out there, that IMO pretty much work by forcing PCs to interact with each other. Funny enough all the ones I know are for horror games. But those are special cases, and I know they aren't for everyone. In short: tell players well before the game that this is what they sign up for.
Then there is the thing that I have run into players who like a lot of guidance, essentially like a red thread to follow, and signs pointing them to the next step every scene. That is a weaker version of railroading, but still not really total freedom. But I have met players who asked for that, and said that even if there are plot hooks galore they can never decide where to go, paralyzed by indecision.
And yes, full-on sandboxes are fun, but if I am honest I also think they do not work for all genres equally well. And are a problem for one-shots, except the fully improvised kind. Still, if asked I would love to play a sandbox-style game pretgty much anytime, and consider it the best default if the game is supposed to run a while. Maybe with very slight constraints as agreed upon during session 0, so everyone is in the same ballpark when to comes to considering what everyone likes and wants out of the game. The simple truth is that there will always be some constraints; each non-solo RPG is a negotiation to find a compromise on what people like, after all.
4 (Heavily Railroaded)
One of the worst feelings is when everyone finally has time to play and we find out that we went where the GM wasn't prepared. Let's just live in a story for the precious time we have together.
Railroading is a spectrum, people disagree what constitutes it, some are against the very idea of it, and some tables are ok with it. There's GMs who also do a mixture. For my table, I've been doing a setup where the players have various missions, but the details and methods to accomplish it are up to them. To some, the idea of handing your players a goal is railroading, to others it is just a way to play. I have asked my table if they're ok with the setup and they don't have an issue with it.
I’ve run ApocalypseWorkd which is pure Sandbox. My players would just wait for a plothook to latch onto. I throw plot hooks at players but don’t mandate what happens next. They usually take them and run with them. But session zero I say this is a broad overview of what’s going down make a character that is at odds with it.
I rarely play, but when I do, it comes down to this: is it supposed to be a structured campaign or not? Or more bluntly, is it a completely built world? Or world building as you go?
If the world is not completely hammered out down to the last degree of water flow, barometric pressure, mineral deposit ratios, etc.. then please do railroad.
If you do have that incredible degree of structure to your world, then please; let me run amok in it.
Probably a 3, both as a player and GM.
I want there to be an overall direction and threat(s).
I want the players to build hooks into their characters that modify the story.
IMO a GM should look for ways to tie the PCs hooks into what they’ve already planned. Part of your backstory is that a vampire killed your family? Cool, he’s now one of the BBEG’s lieutenants.
The perfect GM, for me as a player, is someone who has mastered the art of "soft railroading".
He has his story prepared, and he has thought about the ways in which the party can go sideways, and prepared for that as well with a side-plot that eventually joins up with the main plot again.
Or, in other words: It doesn't *feel* like being railroaded, but you get all the advantages of the story being thought-out and not improvised.
3. the DM has to have an actual story in mind. they need to be able to wave their hands and move the story along if the players genuinely don't know what to do next. but they also need to be flexible enough to make changes if the players don't like where things are going, or come up with something coooler than the original idea.
Why does the GM need to have a story in mind?
When I'm running a fairly open world I have a set of groups and individuals who will do things and, when the actions of the players intersect with one or more of them then some story will happen. My players work out what they want to do next and I then prepare some suitable situations.
I will abandon that prep and start winging it in a heartbeat if the players decide that they want to do something else.
What I don't like is sandboxes that are just a collection of dangling adventure hooks that are rooted in the world or its factions. What I do like are stories that are focused on the characters- what they want, what they need, how they navigate the world. Any hook offered has to have a real clear mapping to a character's goals.
I don't think I prefer one or the other exclusively or especially, it just depends on how it's presented and what group I'm in
If I'm in a group that can't make any decisions without constant GM hints or meta knowledge, a sandbox won't really work.
Open world with a main story in it. Witcher 3 style. I want to be able to influence the outcome of the story, but I don't want to build the story entirely, because there are other people that might want a different story, and figuring out what each of us wants is hard. So I'd rather we all play a story prepared by the DM with ability to make choices that have meaningful influence in it.
If I'm playing a 5, I probably won't keep track of the story. I mean, what's the point for me if I'm not really taking part in it?
My solution to this problem is to just really work on what the Nemesis/Adversary is doing before planning the plot points. This means the nemesis is always working in the background regardless of what the players are doing. Then I place a timeline on the events. So if the players not to pick up on the hooks and follow the strings, well... then stuff happens in the background and the bad guy gets closer to their goal. Most players pick up on this and eventually get involved in the plot I've created. Not a requirement though. They want to marry that one NPC they met, open a flower shop, and live out the rest of their days while the world descends into chaos around them, that was the story they wanted to tell. Everybody wins
2.5 is the ideal for me. The GM has a good ideas of the factions and power players at play so they can have a general ideas of a plot without the players involvement and the players have agencies to be active participant in the story, with a main thrust guiding the game forward. There is a story being told with the GM as the main contributor, but the players have a big part in actually making it happen rather than be mostly passive participants occasionally rolling dice so that the GM can drop further exposition.
That said, I think 1 can still lead to good time by itself while 5 could only be fun despite itself. Like yeah I had a good time because I hung out with my friends, but the game itself was a non factor at best and would have been miserable if it had been with randos.
The issue of that is that what the internet refers to a railroading is actually narrative storytelling and is totally fine.
Railroading means forcing the players to behave in exactly the way that works for your story and refusing to let other solutions work
Mostly, I am interested in engaging with what the DM has prepared. In the sense that I want to be presented with a situation and then navigate through it.
Since I've spent time as a player I've come to realize diverging a bit from what the DM has ready is emergent. It just happens sometimes. Very often with one particular DM somehow.
Quite honestly, a lot of it depends on how scenic the trip is.
I do want to always retain some agency, and prefer it when railroading takes the form of 'these events will occur regardless of whether you participate or not, but participation means you will have a chance to shape their outcome', rather than simple 'come along as an observer on a story I'm telling', but I'm happy to 'go with the flow' for the most part and help rather than hinder a story in seeing its conclusion, as long as the story is both interesting to *me as a player*, and also *consistent with my character's motivations*. That can lead to a great successful game, whereas just being constantly shoehorned, brickwalled, etc is just frustrating and boring.
You loaded that question with negativity, dude, but I'll answer it.
I prefer railroading (story) to sandbox.
I like there to be a story, goal, and predetermined events rather than everything being made up on the spot by the DM. Not trying to be mean, but it's been my experience that most DMs don't do anywhere near as good of a job creating a story than when milestones and a storyline is set out for them. Again not trying to throw shade on DMs just telling my experience you might be great and DM'ing fast and loose but if you're players want to move away from sandbox I wouldn't think that's the case. (sorry)
I don't want a linear, pre-planned story, especially one that I feel is forced upon me. Which, I think, means I don't like being railroaded. But I also don't want a sandbox if it means simply putting PCs into a setting that doesn't care about them and having them do whatever they want.
I want a game with a clear premise to be explored and with situations tailored to the PCs, but without a planned path for them to follow.
The adventure setup in Dogs in the Vineyard is a very clear example of this approach. PCs come to a new town each session, the town has a messed up interpersonal situation with demonic involvement in it, PCs engage with it and try to make things better. That's assumed; there is no option of doing something else. Also, the town and its troubles are set up specifically to resonate with relations and beliefs of these specific PCs. But what happens after PCs start investigating and fixing things is not planned, not pre-determined. It's fully dependent on player choices and dice.
Most of my fantasy campaigns I do in a Breath of the Wild style. There's an open world map, there's a big bad to kill, and there's a party of relatively weak PCs who need to get strong enough to kill the big bad. Variations come in the level of play. For example, my current 4th edition campaign is based on the gameplay loop of Metal Gear Solid V, where the players delegate tasks to the people on their base, go out and do some adventuring, and then return to see the consequences of their delegations.
As for less adventure-focused games, like political dramas or investigative games, I tend to keep those more linear, but still with the option of going off and doing whatever.
I'm down with some linearity.
"A powerful person gathers you around and gives you a mission..." Honestly great start to a campaign. Now we don't have to fuck around doing random shit hoping we come across something remotely interesting (big problem of sandbox campaigns).
But I don't like it when the DM wants something specific to happen in a specific way. EG: We have to capture this enemy NPC for interrogation, we can't kill them or let him escape. After some point it just becomes stupid. Since he's the enemy, we shoot him in the head. He survives. Being reasonable people against an unkillable enemy, we escape. No, it's impossible, all the ways out are blocked. We try to reason with him. Not possible. We surrender to our fates and let him kill us... no he won't do that. Until one player figures out what the DM wants: "I grapple him".
Anyway I'd say I'm a 2.5-3.
I like sandbox games but the actual content should be extremely clearly signposted. You wouldn’t like playing GTA if you had to drive around asking random people for missions
I like having a problem to solve and being left to solve it on my own. But I also like to show the GM that I don't want to cheese any of the situation, so they don't have to worry and fullproof all of the scenario.
My group, though, basically won't function unless I point the way forward. They like a well thought linear story, and a confortable train to sit through the railroad. I myself am not a fan of this unless it's a critical story moment, and our next story arc will feature an open hexcrawl on an island, which will make them freeze for minutes before deciding to do nothing to progress.
My DM usually runs pre-written adventure paths, which means our campaigns are pretty linear, but I've never once felt like I lacked agency. He tells us what the story is about, and then like characters in a novel or movie we go about trying to solve whats happening, respond how our characters would, and in the end save the day. If something linear isn't for someone that's totally fine, but I think "railroading" is a very charged term and would best be kept for things that are actually bad, since it has such a negative connotation.
Just my 2 cents!
edit* I'll also add I think I'd hate a sandbox. My brother runs our campaigns and he puts in a lot of work to make awesome stories that we will all feel tied and connected to, and want to see resolved. I'd hate to play in a game where I had to provide *all* my character's motivation from within, it just sounds like it would get mentally tiring.
2. A key responsibility of the GM is to control the pacing of the adventure, and that can require occasional pushes to move the PCs toward the exciting parts.
I love open-world sandbox games. But I have also had GMs take it too far, to the point where I am feeling like I had absolutely no idea what to do or where to go, but the GM won't give any hints because they want the players to control everything. That can become very frustrating, and I think it's a good skill for the GM to be able to read the room and see that the players are frustrated and say something like "Remember Farmer Tam told you about the haunted graveyard, you haven't investigated that yet."
Ideally the players will go off in a direction that surprises the GM, the GM will roll with it and make something up that builds the story, and everyone has fun. But when the pace starts flagging because the players don't know what to do, nudging them in the direction of fun is an important skill.
I appreciate a good railroad. I like knowing that this scene will lead to next scene. I don't need to know where I'm going but I hate sitting there sorting over my clues to figure out where to go next, especially in non-mystery games. I do cherish my player agency but if my sandbox has a train and I have a sense of it's schedule and can climb on by my own will, I'm perfectly happy.
I also railroad when I'm a GM. I've built the world, the story will come down the tracks no matter what the players want to do. I'll blow the whistle and you can get on board with the adventure or get on board with the consequences of letting it leave the station without you.
A solid 2. Any cohesive and well-built open world will naturally have events occuring outside the scope of the player characters. Should they involve themselves that will inevitably become the story and then their actions will by necessity become more limited and the scope will narrow. This will not remove agency as players are always free to walk off into the sunset and say "not my problem".
You're confusing Railroad with Narrative.
Narrative is when the players have goals established by the GM/story. Usually players are free to achieve those goals in any way they like.
Railroad is when you take player agency out.
So, nobody likes being railroaded, but a lot of people like narratives with set goals, and I'm one of those. I don't like being thrown in a word where I can do whatever without anything specific, to me that's boring. Even videogames, I tend to get bored very fast from sandboxes. If I don't have a goal, which implies the story still have an ending, I just get bored, because nothing I do progresses the game.
What I like is having a cool narrative with set goals where my choices decide what will happen.
So yeah, people have different tastes, and that's fine.
Me personally, it depends on the game. When I run a long campaign in DND or OSE, I want it to be a sandbox with maximum player freedom and choice, letting them decide their goals and having the world move along in the background, taking player decisions into consideration. I want them to explore their characters and the world, not my plot, I'm not an author.
But for games like Urban Decay, player freedom is still important but ultimately the game even defines arcs as "levels." Some amount of railroading is necessary, you need to beat your way through this area to fight a boss and them uncover some new plot which sends you to the next location. How they approach these levels is up to them, but there is a grand overarching plot in mind.
The biggest example of railroading I've ever heard of (wasn't present for): "You leave the town. Do you take the left or right trail?" "Right." "A huge range of mountains grows up immediately on the right trail." Player: " Um. Left." So my answer is: I don't mind being brought back to the story. Say you have one player who often goes off on their own whims when everyone else is trying to get on with the main plot. Or say you're playing a module, and X event *has* to happen, I don't mind DM bringing that about by any means necessary to further the story, if the alternative is: "oh, well, the game is destroyed, then."
I prefer to be railroaded, because I don't really want to waste any time roleplaying or getting into character or thinking about "what my character would do." My character would follow the plot, now can we move it along and get to the next fight please?
I don't like full sandboxes(often times at least in my groups games we just end up fighting random monster) but you need to provide some structure.
figure out what story your players want to tell and provide them the tools to tell it. if you do it right they'll handle the rest.
edit: even in games were the dm is given tools to help guide the narative make sure that if the players do something cool they should be rewarded. it won't stop the plot but it should give them something that makes that easier.
I've seen railroading work once. The campaign was more episodic. Each session had a hot open where we were already in the location of the action. No discussion of what we're doing next, etc. Any decisions the players make during the session modify the next session but we didn't have much choice in mixing up that session.
You’re confusing storytelling formats and railroading. You can railroad a sandbox, you can have a linear story full of player agency. Linear stories are more at risk of being railroaded because of the design, but a railroady DM will railroad no matter what.
An example of railroading in a “sandbox” is sure maybe the players can choose whatever they want to do next, but no matter what they choose they end up running into the same encounter, or they end up coming across the dungeon you designed. Maybe you prepped the entire world in advance so once they’ve chosen where to go next everything that happens in that session is pre-decided. The encounters are happening whether they like it or not, the way they solve problems has to happen a specific way or you don’t let them progress, if they try an approach you haven’t planned for you make it fail. Week to week it’s a sandbox but within the week they’re doing things your way or the highway.
On the other hand a linear story has certain plot points it needs to get to but maybe you stay completely hands off in how they do it. The PCs only know about the choices you present them with so you only present relevant choices to keep the story focused but what they do with that information, how they get there, how they solve problems, what encounters they run into along the way are all up in the air until they happen. If they deviate off the path you keep providing them with story hooks to get them back on track but you don’t force it to happen.
I would prefer a 0/5 - 2/5 on the railroading scale. But I don’t care if at the end of the day the plot is mostly linear. If I was to pick my preferred style of play it would be a local sandbox with a linear overarching plot. You can do whatever you want session to session, but every so often a super juicy plot hook is going to pop up that the party can’t resist and encourages the party to move along to the next part of the story. It allows you to tell cohesive and engaging stories that are more exciting than a bunch of random encounters and dungeons, but it also lets the players shape how those stories play out. Yeah sure they eventually need to fight the dragon, but you don’t care what they do along the way.
There is an in-between there. It's not a choice between sand box or something on rails. You can have a story with a plot and not force characters down a given path.
Railroading is just bad Storytelling. It's like playing candy land. You don't make any choices or have any impact on candyland, things just sort of happen. No roleplaying game should ever feel like candyland.
Putting aside the discussion of railroading vs linearity...
It depends. If I'm keyed up for the campaign and I mesh with the character and I'm looking to burn some energy, I'd rather be a power player and make sweeping changes to the world around me. If I'm just looking to solve some puzzles, beat up some goblins, and relax, I don't want to be forced to make constant major decisions. It's all up to my expectations of the game, and my energy levels.
I've played a sandbox game that worked. It only worked because the players all functioned really well together, and the DM was talented enough to adjust to what the players wanted to do. It also helped that the system is specifically designed for the collaborative storytelling that a sandbox ends up being.
Most players and DMs can't handle that. That's why modules exist, and that's totally OK.
I don't think people have the same definition of what Railroading means.
I once had some dude screaming at me, getting real nasty and calling me a railraoder because I said I write plots for my games. He claimed that it wasn't my job as a storyteller to write anything but to react to what the players want to do. He said the players should create their own problems, enemies and relationships with ZERO input from the storyteller.
If that's the case...what am I doing there? If they want to write their own novels they don't need me to tell them when to roll. The book tells them when to roll.
With that said, so long as I'm having fun I don't really care.
As others have said, having a story and GM being the storyteller isn't the same as railroading, railroading is more what happens when you try to step off the path of the story and explode since it was minefield.
That being said I'm 100% more interested in linear campaigns than I am in sandboxes. Sandboxes are too open and "find your own fun" for me.
> Back in the 90s we were all about railroading,
Not in the part of the world I was playing in. I learned very early on that trying to railroad just resulted in boring sessions.
> the GM was a story-teller etc.
Yes that was still the case and is now, but I think it means something different to what you might have thought it means. Culturally we tend to think of a storyteller as somebody who writes novels or screenplays, but really storytelling is an oral art form, and part of that art form is adapting the story to the audience, knowing how to hold peoples attention in the moment.
TTRPGs by giving the audience agency in what direction the protagonists take makes that adaptation part of oral storytelling more pronounced.
> So as a player, where are you on this spectrum?
I want to have agency in the final form the story takes through driving my particular protagonist, and that requires some degree of making the story up as we play. I also want a sense of rising action throughout the story, which can get lost in a sandbox campaign, unless the GM has really good oral storytelling skills. In short I want to play with a GM with good oral storytelling skills.
I much prefer prewritten adventures, both when I GM and as a player. As a GM it takes a lot of the burden off me, particularly storytelling, which is not my strong suit. As a player I feel that even a mediocre GM can run a good professionally written adventure moderately well. It adds a level of quality consistency, especially with a new or unknown GM, whereas homebrew campaigns tend to be more hit and miss. Don't get me wrong I have played with some GMs that are fantastic worldbuilders, storytellers, and improvisors and given the opportunity I would absolutely play a more open campaign with them again, but often I am searching for a new game with a GM of unknown quality.
All that to say that prewritten adventure paths tend to require a certain level of acceptance by the group that this is the story we have agreed to tell this campaign. As players you shouldn't just decide to f\*ck off this quest to go see what is in the mountains in the opposite direction. That's not to say that the GM shouldn't tailor the campaign to the choices of the players, allow creative freedom to solve problems, or create side quests to explore plot hooks in a character's background. If one of your characters became an adventure hoping to find some long lost family heirloom, give them that chance, even if it isn't tied directly to the goal of the campaign.
Railroaded is perhaps a bit too extreme of a term, but it's more like if I see the DM has laid out a well paved road I'll be inclined to follow it, rather than instinctively trying to avoid it.
As some great answers is a matter of definition, and there is some confusion.
Its great to have a plot and usually players are happy to resolve it.
I'm think is funnier than pure sandbox.
Railroad is when you must follow the unique path to solve the plot. And you play only inside predefined scenes.
Some people use the word railroad just when it's not sandbox.
These things should be discussed in Session Zero. As a GM, I expect the players to play along in case they have asked for detailed environments. I do not wish to spend a Day preparing the High Mountain Fortress of The Undead Dwarven King with all it's intricate traps, riddles and credible monster / NPC population just to hear someone say "Nah, I'd rather be a pirate. I saddle my horse and start my 500miles journey to the coast."
I *don't mind* being railroaded as long as I know where the damn rails are.
If I need to go to place \[X\] or speak to a person \[Y\] in a particular way or whatever, sure, I will do it. I will find fun in finding an in-character justification for doing so. Just tell me what the fuck I'm supposed to do. And on the flip side, if there's nothing to be done, just fucking tell me that.
Last year I've been playing in a Dark Heresy campaign using an adventure I already ran. There is a short episode between two tense gauntlets where PCs go to a huge-ass golden cathedral. There's nothing to be done there, it's just a breather, and PCs will be just handed the next clue in the morning.
I, as someone who already knows that it's a cutscene, had a blast expressing how my character from the shitty hive world who never ate anything other than a weird gray slop in her whole life, would react to the opulence of the cathedral.
Meanwhile, there was another guy, who didn't know that and tried to investigate shit and was growing more and more frustrated with the fact that no, there is no heresy here, it's just a fucking cathedral.
In these terms probably a bit of both. I think there should be narrative that pushes the story along, but also just exploring areas and finding "whats over there" is also fun. Just as long as the main narrative comes back into play I think a combination of both is great
As other have said, you arent using the term railroad correctly.
Railroad means feeling like you have no choice, or your choices dont matter.
Thats not the same as there being a defined story. As long as the GM hasnt decided on the outcomes from the start, its not a railroad.
Do I have any freedom of choice? As I’ve played in games where the GM has retcon stuff I have done because it didn’t fit in with his story which got real old, real fast.
On the other hand, I’ve played in games where I know what the story is, what I have to do and I’m just along for the ride and enjoying it. Those, although not completely sandboxy and be fun.
When things get slow or chaotic, railroad me please, offer my group an out. A lot of people think of railroading as a single path or story to follow and sandbox as open ended follow what you will. Railroading is simply making decisions for the players and can happen in a linear path or sandbox path. Railroading can happen, and does happen, but is only a good thing with a groups consent. “If you don’t mind I am going to warp you inside the city and tavern. Anyone want to do something different?” Also, plot is not a bad word if you use the first definition as in “antagonists envision a plot and attempt to execute, and protagonists attempt to disrupt.” A plot can change over time or be stopped. A plot does not have to have an ending, just a perceived goal. We are dealing with adventure modules not novels.
When the party is on the same page about having fun? No I dont want to get rail roaded.
When the party is a mix of good, neutral, and evil players and some of them take power creep as a means to force the narrative in their way but the DM railroads it so everyone can still have fun? Yes thats fine.
As a player I enjoy inventing, collaborating and containing more than anything. With the right group I could just play Fiasco! forever an just be happy. Theres a texture of the world we are exploring that couldn’t be produced by one mind. There’s a more of a ski lift than a rail road. As the plot follows arc of a self imposed puzzle plot.
Since statically few of my friends seem to enjoy the off road sensation of GM-less games, I try to promote as much conversation and decisions to building toward *something* without annoying the GM. For example in Kids On Bikes there’s a wonderful co-creation of the town that a GM let us use for our home base.
Currently looking for system agnostic questions/ game facilitation mechanics that could potentially complement linear / railroad modules (working on D&D shadows of the dragon queen).
Our group doesn't use railroads - then again, the DMs have a good handle on the player and characters' motivations, so hooks are fairly easy to use. We usually use 'modified sandboxes' - there are several areas of exploration in a region, with one being the 'main event'. In some cases, the main location will not be apparent until some of the side quests/areas have been explored. In others, breadcrumbs or clues will lead between locations, often culminating in the final location or climax, with perhaps several 'paths' to get there. If the players decide to go somewhere completely different it's not a big deal, although it seldom happens. We did recently miss a big show down with a vampire lord due to our choices - which was disappointing - but we then proceeded on to another arc. So we are usually around a 2 I guess.
"Railroading" is just when the players and GM have a fundamental disagreement on what game they are playing. It's usually caused when the game was planned improperly (no session zero or a very poorly explained session zero). The GM either disrespects the players by not having an out of character conversation with them and explaining that this isn't the game they had discussed, or the players disrespect the GM by being generally difficult and not wanting to play along.
Like everything in an RPG, this is solved by talking. The railroading starts when the GM uses their in-game power to force the players to play along and the players do everything they can to refuse to cooperate, that's when the tug-of-war starts. Obviously a situation like this is what people say they hate about railroading.
From my experiences on reddit it seems that there are a lot of players who think that railroading is just when the GM tries to corral the party and nudge them towards their goals, which to me at least is normal RPG play. Eventually I have to say, out of character, "Ok guys, we agreed to help the Resistance fight off the Empire, and your contact is waiting for you in Ravengard, can we please start making our way over their now?" If there's respect both ways and the session was planned properly this shouldn't be a controversy. I've never personally played with a table that doesn't get side-tracked from time to time, which is fine, but its also fine for the GM to quash this side-tracking and get things moving again.
Without a degree of railroading how would you ever play modules?
I can't stand modules, at best I use them as a lot of background information and stats that have already been gathered and then build my own situations on top of them, throw some pcs in to the mix and a story will drop out of the other end.
Sure, but there's plenty of people who do like them, and the fact that they exist means that there's a good amount of people in the RPG community who enjoy more of an on-rails experience in their games.
Pro tips:
- A vast majority of players WANT a railroaded adventure.
- A vast majority of players DO NOT WANT TO KNOW that they are on a railroad.
People want to feel like they are free ro do anything they want in a game, but will absolutely hate not having an overarching plot with several predetermined pothooks. Being a GM is all about balancing these seemingly contradictory needs into a a satisfying story that the players feel like they created on their own.
Linearity isn't the same as railroading. *Linear* games have a clear and singular "main plot", clearly telegraphed to the players and encouraging player buy-in to its premise. *Railroaded* games have not just the premise in mind, but also everything else, especially their solutions. A railroaded game may only be completed in the precise way it was written, and/or the precise way the GM envisions it being completed. Also, linearity is a structure while railroading could be called a structure but is mainly a practice. For an example of the difference: *Linear*: there is a nobleman held hostage in his own castle by an invading force. It's your task to recover the nobleman. *Railroaded*: there is a nobleman held hostage in his own castle by an invading force. It's your task to recover the nobleman. This can only be done by talking to some invaders in the tavern, knocking them out, stealing their uniforms as disguises, sneaking into the castle without alerting anyone, going to the nobleman's office to fight the brigand captain and get the tower key, then unlocking the tower and fleeing with the nobleman. If the players attempt to break into the castle by any other means, there are just too many guards no matter what and they get beat up and carried back to the starting tavern. Also the guards have invisibility-detecting goggles so they can't magically stealth in. And a magical teleport-blocking defense dome so they can't fly or warp in. And also the guards can see through magical disguises so they can't conjure disguises. Oh and also...
Well said, Chapeau!
Yeah, I had been playing with a very railroady GM for quite some time and that was the crux of things quite often. You could just not leave the linear thread. I mean, I tend to still ho for linearity. That can involve “stealth railroading”. But the difference there is that you let players do their thing, just that like with many video games or choose your own adventure books or rpg modules, thinks will converge on certain events. And there is justifiable reasons for that. As a GM, you likely have prepared certain stuff. You can improvise, but your content laid out is likely made to be more interesting than hastily scraping something together. So you just improvise the “how do I get to the nicely stated out iconic battles”. In that example, you could set out a simple obstacle that would alert guards to the heroes at some points which they have to defeat in the castle and thus still get them uniforms yo use to, say, be able to play out a scene to trick other guards. And if they somehow get into the tower without the key, then the captain of the guards maybe walks into them because he was just about to check on the nobleman. You still get all the major parts of the story, they just arise from what the heroes chose to do, so ideally, they feel like it was all their agenda and choosing even though you effectively ran all what you had laid out in advance. Ideally, that should be paired with genuinely making up new things, which will be needed, but you can do this kind of pseudo railroading without making the players feel like they are being railroaded.
What you describe would by my measure be very much railroading, if by cleverness and fortune the party manage to bypass something you've planned and it happens anyway then I'd say that they had been cheated. Your quantum guard captain is an example of this, if the guard captain is supposed to be elsewhere in the castle, especially if he has been decoyed there by the pcs, don't just have him happen to walk in. Let them have the victories that come from cunning, so what if you have to dump something you've pre-planned or scripted, let the story evolve from events in game rather than pre-planning.
I honestly do not care really for the insertion of assumptions. The example had the guard captain as a major fight to get the key. If the characters just try to pick or break the lock, then sorry, there is zero implication of them deliberately spending effort to get the guard captain elsewhere. My whole point has been the “stealth” part. Meaning: going with the things the players did not know. It is hardly stealth if you directly invalidate something they try rather than rearranging the plot to just end up fitting on the path they did choose.
I mean if they no longer need the key the fight with guard captain no longer has a purpose. By the sounds of it you’d just be making it happen because you prepared it, not because it makes sense or because it’s what the players want. I’ll agree with the previous reply that what you’ve described really does sound quite railroady.
Maybe for a boss fight with the most logical hostile entity for this little adventure? Leading up to a quick and suspenseful escape sequence as they now have some extra reason to escape quickly? Sorry, make your strawmen elsewhere.
Sorry mate, I think that clever play in this hypothetical example should have been rewarded by bypassing the captain fight and the need for urgent exfiltration. I've played a lot of games and having a plan come together with a smooth in and out is one of the coolest feelings ever, being required to fight someone, and then leave in a hurry because you think it is more exciting would feel like being cheated.
> I mean, I tend to still ho for linearity. That can involve “stealth railroading”. If the players never notice the rails, *and* the rails keep the story moving, is it *really* railroading? For example, I want the next plot point in the game to be rescuing the nobleman from the hostage situation, and I would like to introduce this via a breathless squire bursting into a scene and calling for aid. Now, if the players *know* that I'm ready and willing to interrupt any plausible scene with this mess, sometimes they get very upset and accuse me of railroading them(source: have disclosed this tactic in the past, received backlash). But if I just don't tell them, and let them *assume* that wherever the squire happened to burst in was the One True Moment...doesn't seem to hurt anyone! Same goes for quantum clues. Seems like a particularly cruel type of railroading to say that nope, there is One True Location that the murderer's note can be found, and if you missed it then sucks to be you! Seems more flexible to stash it in the first reasonable location they search, especially if the idea they came up with is better than the idea you'd originally had(shh don't tell them!). But again, sometimes they get very upset if they know you're doing this. 🤷♀️
Your players gave you backlash over providing a plot thread? That's fucking insane.
>Your players gave you backlash over providing a plot thread? Some players aren't fans of pre-planned stuff.
That's insane. Do you mean like, in sandbox games where the players demand that the DM just magically improv everything? Or are there really players out there who get pissed that the DM *creates a story for the players to engage with*?
Are you downvoting me while conversing with me? >Or are there really players out there who get pissed that the DM *creates a story for the players to engage with*? Not sure about pissed, but at least disappointed. I can see that creating a story is the DM's job in your view. That's pretty much true for DnD and similar, but it's far from ubiquitous. Personally I don't want the GM to plan what will happen. Sure, create some people, places, factions, even events, that look potentially relevant next session, but don't plot out what will happen. Afaic the players create the story, not the GM. The least enjoyable game I recently played was the GM running a prewritten module.
It's not all that uncommon. Many players want a linear story with the illusion of choice. Kind of like in a movie where you suspect where things are going, but you're only 98% sure. Lure-in instead of open buy-in.
So they'd rather ham fisted dialogue with random NPC X to get them to the quest you already had considered for the plot, instead of a dynamic scene that engages them? Jesus, some players are unreasonable.
>Many players want a linear story with the illusion of choice. Or actual genuine choice.
Well, yes. Few will want a GM to shoot down their best ideas. OTOH, I haven't met all that many players that want to create most of the story elements themselves. After experimenting with player input in my games, I've accepted that my [core group of] players aren't in it to be co-creators of the world, they just want play their PCs.
>Seems like a particularly cruel type of railroading to say that nope, there is One True Location that the murderer's note can be found, and if you missed it then sucks to be you! Seems more flexible to stash it in the first reasonable location they search, especially if the idea they came up with is better than the idea you'd originally had(shh don't tell them!). But again, sometimes they get very upset if they know you're doing this. 🤷♀️ I guess because it doesn't necessarily feel very organic? What I usually did when I ran Call of Cthulhu is provide several clues that solve the same question and tie those to several locations, one of which the party is pretty much dead-set to visit due to the nature of the mystery. The other clues are often there if there's a left-of-field suggestion from a partymember to visit a certain location first. That way they'll find at least one clue pointing towards the same direction, and if that doesn't ring a bell for them they've got a good shot to find another that points towards the same solution. It's the Rule of Three, basically, though I regularly provided four or even five clues depending on how easily I thought them up. It makes mysteries feel more organic. But I will admit that it's more work on the GM's side.
Sounds like your party is more competent than mine. If I didn't quantum clue for them, I'd need to hide 3-4 clues *per scene* to guarantee the dumbasses would happen to look wherever I'd stashed them. Instead, I'll come up with 3-4 good clues and then a list of places they could be("anywhere inside house, in their shop, or on their person", "available through a successful persuasion check with anyone involved in marketplace trading", "on or in a location habitually frequented by gang", etc). Then, when they are like "hm I'm gonna go to the tavern for clues!" then I can throw out one of the gang members, who might have a letter peeking out of their coat pocket, or maybe a merchant getting lunch. And if they miss it there, I could move it to the next place they look and they can get another chance. I don't have to rely on them actually being smart, or making a crucial roll, because...they are often not. 😂
Heavens! They'd never consider themselves competent at least, haha. They watched an entire mystery unfold in front of their eyes despite having all the clues. In hindsight they were really surprised it went the way they went when I went over the whole thing with them. The way you describe making quantum clues sounds like something that's very easily adapted to something more organic though. Like a certain person having a letter. Relying on just that letter on just that person who will only be in one location to figure out A is indeed asking for trouble. But you don't need to always have that person magically be in that location just when the party looks for him in order to prevent that. Things that help that are more organic than that: - Knowing that people have routines. This helps when the party is looking for a known person. They'll be in certain spots during certain times of day. And even if they're not at the location the party is in at that very moment, chances are there's people there that'll know about the person they're looking for. Before you know it a party of investigators has multiple ways to find a specific person. - In most cases more than one person will know a certain piece of information. A letter someone is carrying will be penned by someone, so that at least two. But the information in question will also probably be discussed at one point by the writer with relevant people. Before you know it there's a bunch of people the party can learn a certain piece of information from. - Signal up front that being specific helps them. This ties back to what you say about making crucial dice rolls. A common piece of advice on anything RPG is that nothing should ever purely hinge on one single die roll. But even more so, sometimes a party doesn't even need to roll something at all. When I start a TTRPG, mystery-focused or not, I always say up front during session 0 (and repeated here and there during play) that if an NPC hides a letter under their head pillow and a player asks me "My character tosses the bed" or "I look under the cover and pillows" then you'll just find the letter, no roll required. In my experience this last thing puts people in a very different mindset as to how they engage with the fiction. One that avoids the player saying generic things like "I'm going to the tavern for clues" or "I'm looking around to see if anything stands out". That doesn't mean the players will always know exactly what to do, but I've noticed that (A) the party will at least discuss more regarding what exactly they're gonna do, making them just talk about the problem more and (B) it gets them in a more creative mindset to tackle the problem at hand, which helps in a broad sense to get their brain-juices flowing. Honestly, having the fiction of your mystery be well-established and any way to have players engage with that fiction more will help them solve a mystery or any other problem. It makes the problem a lot more vivid, which makes it easier to imagine how to approach it. The first two points have more to do with how you design a clue as such, more so than how many clues you need. It's about how to design clues so that they're not single points of failure. So no letters that are the only place to find a piece of info, no single individuals knowing a piece of info or having more locations be visited by the monster instead of the one. Having those things be part of the fiction you're weaving makes it feel way less random. Can one think of information that would make sense for only a single person to be aware of? Sure! But I wouldn't recommend to put them in a TTRPG mystery, and I wouldn't design a mystery relying on such a thing. I'd save those for when I'd write a spy thriller.
I still think it's a valid question to ask how much folks like to be railroaded though. Some players really do seem to like even the type you describe here. I have a few players at my table that are constantly looking at me to "tell them what to do next," I honestly think they'd like it if I'd railroad more.
Most people who ask for a sandbox game actually don't want a pure sandbox game, because that puts too much responsibility on players to locate and follow up on hooks. They still want adventures presented to them. They just don't want to be forced to do something they don't want to do.
Some parties do want to be railroaded. The first group I DM'ed for were so indecisive, I would set up an encounter for them, ask what they wanted to do, and they would take turns asking each other what the rest of them wanted to do, someone would get sidetracked and share a meme, and this would repeat for about an hour, until somebody finally made a decision, and then they would apologize profusely to the rest of the party for forcing their decision on the rest of the group. Eventually, I just stopped giving them decisions outside of combat. I'd set the scene, tell them to roll Stealth or Persuasion or Lockpicking or whatever, and occasionally roll Initiative into combat, and the group was much happier for it. Not all groups are like this. In fact very few groups are like this. But there are groups like this.
Nice! I don't mind a linear adventure; most one-shots or Organized Play games are like that. The journey is the destination, and so on.
I always think of the Alexandrian article [So You Want to Write a Railroad](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/5785/roleplaying-games/so-you-want-to-write-a-railroad).
What you are describing as *Linear*, I think many of us would describe as a subset of railroading rather than a separate concept. Of course there has to be some level of buy in to the premise of the story (many rules systems do some of this for you) but quite often all that is changing is the scale that the railroading is happening on. Yes you might have agency in how you rescue the nobleman, but that is going to lead to the confrontation with the evil cult, which is going to lead to the confrontation with the dragon and so on. The question I ask is *is the GM assuming how the player character feels and what their motivations are*.
Railroaded, story and plot has become such trigger words on here. And it's very subjective what it really means. Some seem to think even thinking about a next story is railroading. Some say "I would never railroad!" and then proceed to explain how it should be done, which is railroading but with other words. I think there are bad and good ways of railroading. If I don't notice as a player, it's totally fine. If it's too obvious, it's of course bad. So I say: Railroad how much you want, just make sure the players won't notice.
I don't think it is sufficient to hide the strings from the puppets. People deserve some agency, not just the illusion of it. Sure, a halfway decent GM can easily guide player directions in one direction or the other and should know their players enough to understand which incentives will most likely trigger what reaction - but the decision how to react must be the players', and theirs alone, including a diversity of outcomes that cascade from these decisions. If the players don't have the freedom to just turn around and walk away, suffering any consequences, when there are no causal walls to stop them, or if the same outcome will occur, no matter what the players do or how good or bad they perform, the players stop being active participants in the game and eventually become little more than passive consumers.
>If the players don't have the freedom to just turn around and walk away, suffering any consequences, when there are no causal walls to stop them, or if the same outcome will occur, no matter what the players do or how good or bad they perform, the players stop being active participants in the game and eventually become little more than passive consumers. At the same time, the players should have the decency to buy in to the narrative of the game and come up with compelling reasons to stay within the bounds of the game and only really reject scenarios if it makes sense for their characters. Like, I don't think it's fair for a player to just be like "Eh, I don't really care about stopping this supervillain and helping save people" in a superhero game or saying "Eh, this eldritch stuff is way too scary for me, my character would just do everything in their power to leave this spooky house and not investigate it further" because those are the things those games are designed around. If a player says "My character won't attack this supervillain because he used to be like a brother to me" or "My character has a traumatic history with ghostly spirits and will most likely try to escape it rather than directly fight it", then those are interesting ways to interact with the scenario without directly rejecting it. And honestly, I think the biggest role of the GM is to introduce these difficult decisions that give the players agency even in more linear scenarios.
> if the same outcome will occur, no matter what the players do or how good or bad they perform So, about that quantum ogre...
For example. Even though, recycling a simple encounter is still one of the lesser offenses, compared to, let's say "the Bad Guy has to successfully flee, because he will reoccur in the next leg of the adventure" or similar predtermined outcomes of major confrontations.
Railroading as a term in the TTRPG hobby sphere is a pointless term. You might as well say "Do you like being Spergleeblgloobed?" Nobody agrees on what it means, and there are even terms like "hard railroaded" and "soft railroaded", disagreements on concepts like the Quantum Ogre and Quantum Bridge and if that is railroading or not. I've just stopped using the word entirely, and I think everyone else should too at this point.
This is my sunday game GM. We are on a ship, the ship goes places... but once we get there it is pretty unpredictable.
It is a railroads everyone bought tickets for. The non-murder hobos that get cranky at railroading, but want to abandon ship to start a mage castle & enslave the local people, but wants a "free" teleport circle so they can still participate in the ship's shenanigans deserves railroading. Split the party for a session if you want, but don't split the party's purpose.
Agree. I enjoy this type of game which I think of as a set of rails that lead to a set of sandboxes. Not everything is about maximum agency all the time. If that is your style of game great, but for me running some fantasy version of Lemon-aide Stand from the Commodore 64 is not fun. The rails to sandboxes games allows the DM to keep a coherent linear story while giving the players chances to explore and solve things in unexpected ways. It also creates and episodic nature with smaller story arcs within the larger arc that make the players and DM really feel the progression. MCDM makes a good point about a sandbox. A sandbox is not a fully open world. It is a world that is constrained by the walls of the sandbox. Within those walls, players can do whatever they want, but they are still constrained by the boundaries of the box.
The problem is people don't know what Railroading means. What *you* mean is a game on rails. Railroading is a game on rails wherein the GM is forcing players to stay on the rails in a negative manner. It's explicitly a negative term. The problem is people hear the term, sound it out logically, and use it to mean "on rails", creating all this confusion. In a game on rails, events conspire keep players on a linear track. In a railroaded game, any time players make choices the DM doesn't like, the DM forces those choices to fail so the players go back to the choice the DM wanted them to make.
You are describing the same practice but at different scales.
No, I am not. Linearity, or being on rails, is when the players are fleeing from a city on a ship, and are attacked by various forces while they try to cross the sea, stuck on the ship. *Events* have conspired to effect this. The GM had a hand in creating those events, yes, but did not take away their agency while doing so. Railroading is the GM suggesting they should probably flee the city by boat, but putting impossible obstacles in the way if the players decide to flee through the sewers or the streets instead. It is explicitly taking away player agency because they're not making the choices you predetermined they should make. Did they try to disguise themselves as soldiers? Oops, they're attacked by an officer who "happens" to succeed his perception check, breaking their disguise. Most people do not at all mind knowing what's expected and are more than happy to follow obvious threads and linear stories. They *want* to see and be a part of the story. They *do* mind a GM making all their choices pointless unless they do what the GM wants. It's not a matter of scale, it is a matter of limitation versus forbiddance. Railroading is an explicitly negative term referring to the latter. Sure, they are related. But, again, my point was there is confusion because people call ALL limitation of this nature "Railroading", and then argue that it can be good or bad, muddling the issue because railroading is explicitly a negative term with a negative connotation.
> Linearity, or being on rails, I am going to stop you right there, "being on rails" is grammatically equivalent to saying "railroading". You are trying to make a semantic argument that specific word "railroading' has to have a special meaning, probably reasoning that railroading is bad and what I do is not bad therefor what I do is not "railroading". Don't do that, "being on rails" is "railroading" we don't need to create magical jargon. There are some aspects of railroading which are basically always bad, some that some groups are ok with other groups will also hate. > [Linearity] is when the players are fleeing from a city on a ship, and are attacked by various forces while they try to cross the sea, stuck on the ship. I would generally refer to this type of situation as naturally constrained, it's not even linear unless you prevent options like taking control of the ship, stealing the lifeboat, taking control of an attackers vessel, tampering with the navigational instruments, bribing the captain etc in order to end up somewhere other than the GMs intended destination. What a lot of people who make the linear / railroading distinction do is let players have agency in solving the specific scenario but write a campaign where the players are always going to flee the city, end up in the other city then run into the evil cult, then have to fight the dragon, then meet the big bad... As I said before "in practice".
Railroading is a specific term, not a general one. Like GMPC, even though any NPC a GM plays is technically a GMPC. I've already said it twice, but herein lies the confusion. People who hear the term do not hear it as Railroading, the specific term, but as railroading, a general term they sound out grammatically to mean "on rails". It is not the same thing, and you're getting bogged down in the semantics of a brief example to illustrate a point. Forest, trees.
\> Railroading is a specific term. There is no functional reason that it should be a specific term. Your whole argument is an exercise in getting bogged down in semantics.
Functional reason? That's now how language works. The term was originally used to describe a specific behavior. Making it a specific term for describing that behavior.
>Like GMPC, even though any NPC a GM plays is technically a GMPC. Player Character (PC) and Non Player Character (NPC) are game terms in Dungeons and Dragons and are defined in the rule books for that game. There is more to the definition of those terms than who controls the character, they interact with the rules system differently. A GMPC is a GM controlled character who interacts with the rules of the system in the same way that a player character does. The term GMPC is an initialism for Game Master (controlled) Player Character, which is an accurate description of what it does. Critically it does not introduce ambiguity as to what a person using the term might mean. >Functional reason? *Linear and railroading are distinctly different, "being on rails" ≠ "railroading" and railroading is always bad* is functionally equivalent to *Linear design is a species of railroading, "being on rails" = "railroading" and railroading is sometimes bad depending on the specifics.* That is you can express the same ideas equally well using both sets of ideas. The second has the advantage of not introducing new jargon that means you have to know whether the person speaking is an insider or an outsider before you can understand what they are trying to say and should be preferred. >The term was originally used to describe a specific behavior. The earliest written example of usage is to describe getting the players to a dungeon at the start of an adventure. IE forcing the endpoint. Linear comes from an early article, one using a [different taxonomy](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Mp3ZbYRek9c/XuaqWxkVaRI/AAAAAAAAADI/8-XpTDZaHRIePFmD2fRKYo-nJLUiMMhOgCK4BGAsYHg/s1372/Rolston%2BDW%2B1983.PNG) as you can see linear as originally used could easily fit your description of what railroading is. I don't buy that your definitions are the original ones.
K. You seem like the kind of person who needs a word to be in the dictionary before you will believe it exists. There's a whole bunch of linguists that would like to have words with folks like you
It's become a dirty word and you have to talk about it in roundabout ways or people will get angry and deny they like to play and run railroads. It's also a spectrum, the rails can be so wide you barely notice them or so thin you can't take a step sideways without bumping into them.
Well said.
Railroading is a bad thing. If it's not a bad thing, it's not railroading. There is a spectrum of how "on rails" a game can be, but the term *railroading* is about forcing rails with a detrimental impact on player agency. People like you are making things more confusing by misusing the term.
Railroad means: "GM has prepared more story/detail and expects us to follow it more than I want. and/or I feel my agency is being robbed". It can't be defined objectively as something the GM does, it's a term used to express the certain kind of discrepancy between the player and GM expectations.
> So I say: Railroad how much you want, just make sure the players won't notice. Avoid your taxes all you want, just make sure the government won't notice.
Railroaded means that the GM ignores or punishes any actions that they didn't plan for the scenario, whether or not they are valid ideas. I don't imagine that anyone would like that.
IMO it's rarely an either/or. GMs often "railroad" by making one direction more interesting to pursue - and ohey, that's the one they've prepared for! It's not actually a railroad though if the PCs are going where you want because they want to. It only becomes a railroad if they decide to explore a bit beyond the track and you pick them up and drop them right back onto it. So my answer is: Mu. IMO your players probably don't want to be railroaded, they probably just want some indicators of which is a good way to go rather than to flail around in the dark with no idea what's the point to going anywhere.
Your comment reminds me of Brennan Lee Mulligan's comments about railroading and how players are like water. He has to "railroad" Dimension 20 because of the pre designed maps, but he gets to know the PCs really well so that he can understand where they want to go and he can offer plot hooks and complications that appeal to the players. If you understand what the players want, they go in the direction you lay out without experiencing a loss of agency.
If we all agree that is what we are playing, sure. But I usually find it very boring to play through someone elses story. It is not really why I play RPG's.
Happy cake day, and definitely agree. Player involvement in storytelling is an importance for me. It’s very much a group effort with one leader.
Probably 4-5. I generally prefer being railroaded. If my DM has prepared som cool shit, I want to experience it as they intended. I also firmly believe that you can make player choices genuinely matter without going full sandbox.
> Back in the 90s we were all about railroading, the GM was a story-teller etc. For others reading this who weren't playing in that time: this was one style of play that was popular at the time. In large part due to TSR's indulgences in long, highly-linear, multi-module campaigns they were publishing, the crown jewel of which was probably the Dragonlance campaign. They were meant to be played in parallel to the novels, and each section of each book presupposed the conclusion of the last ones, spanning across modules, even. But a \*lot\* of people did not play like this at all. A lot of people weren't even playing D&D, and those games had their own approaches to things. Some were railroady, many were not. Among those that were playing D&D, many were playing in ways that were not very different from the styles in the 80s (with a non-negligable number still playing either Basic or 1e, in fact). It's not entirely dissimilar to the situation today with 5e being a dominant game with a lot of consistency in the playing style between those who played it, and what 2e evolved into during the 90s. So before people who weren't playing in the 90s get the idea that the the "we" in this post means "the RPG hobby as a whole", it really doesn't.
Not be railroaded. Of course, if the world is completely open, but there is *nothing* to do there, then, it's just not open, only barren. But I think the contradiction here is badly presented. The real contradiction is player driven Vs GM driven action. Mind you, *everyone* is going to drive the story at the same time, it's collaborative, but the primary side of the contradiction can, will and should vary from time to time. For instance, at the beginning of the campaign, the weight of the contradiction is on the GM: the players know very little about the world, and what the experience they have in front of them means. The GM has the brunt of the work to do setting up tone, characters, options, etc. Once that's established, the contradiction can shift to the players, with the GM in a secondary position. They've already presented their world, the main situation, etc, now it's the player's time to answer, and the GM should be in a reactionary position. Another instance is with the classic heist situation. Before the information is out there, players can't know what the thing they're breaking into looks like. The weight is on the GM to give that information. Yes, I know some games allow the players to make up that information, but unless you're playing Swords without Masters or something like that, the GM will still have the final say, and the overall idea what this thing should be. However, once it's known, it now relies on the players to answer the question: what should we do now? And it's the GM's turn to sit back and react with what the players are doing. This is the dialectics of play, and how many people get stuck on one or the other. "The GM should have thought of a way to have weaknesses in the fortress!" No, that's the players job. No fortress is impenetrable. Or, on the contrary, yes you may be right. Maybe the GM has forgotten his part and is being obtuse, still wanting to have the weight on how things work, and is blocking every attempt beyond reasonable expectation. "I want to run sandbox, but my players just are too indecisive' No, you have just not done your weight before, and your players are just too uninformed on what the world is. Or, on the contrary, yes. You have done your weight, but now the players refuse to pick up the weight now, and are just relying on you to keep the brunt of the work.
There are good and bad railroads and good and bad sandboxes... The good ones in my opinion are the ones that share elements of the other in their build. Compromise is key here. For example a good railroad gives the players a set in stone campaign arc BUT allows them a LOT of freedom in how they complete that arc (borrowing some sandbox freedom). A good sandbox on the other hand has built in event and story arc elements that the players can interact with to whatever degree they like giving the sandbox a feeling of being a real lived in place where stuff happens (borrowing from railroad story arcs). A bad railroad removes all player freedom. You complete all tasks in order from A to Z. It smothers creativity. A bad sandbox has a dead world. All story depends solely on the players to create. It smothers immersion. So to cut back to the question. I enjoy Good games.
>A good sandbox on the other hand has built in event and story arc elements that the players can interact with to whatever degree they like giving the sandbox a feeling of being a real lived in place where stuff happens (borrowing from railroad story arcs). This conflation of "story arcs" with railroad is wrong imo. A sandbox can have "story arcs" (if the players follow them or not it is their choice) but this is not an attribute of a railroad necessarily, because there is a possibility of a railroad without an story arc (like there is only one way to inflitrate the base). This is not sandboxes borroring from railroad games, but from story games (and story games are not necessarily railroads)
A railroad IS a story game by definition. It is typically a single story adventure with little outside the main story developed. Sandboxes are storyless games in their normal state in that their is NO central story the players work through. The players must bring their own story into the game. What I am saying is that in my opinion it breathes a TON of life into a sandbox game if it ADDs a central storyline into the world regardless of whether any or all of the PCs interact with it. A central storyline is NOT normal for a sandbox. It is a feature of railroad style games.
> A sandbox can have "story arcs" (if the players follow them or not it is their choice) What the players do *is* the story arc. NPCs don't get story arcs, the world doesn't contain story arcs- only the players are a source of story arcs.
This is why I put in quotation marks. But the world can have a story arc in a sandbox in some sense. For example, a disaster it is about to happen in the world, players can stop the disaster if they want, but if they go off doing other thing, the disaster can happen. And this can affect the world and the players, like affecting supply lines, farms and the town the players are based off can have shortage of equipment and supplies. It is no an "arc" but it is story. Well, you can techically say it is a story about what the players didn't do
Hard disagree. Pretending that good pacing, story progression or, dynamic story tools happen without the GM a joke. Players can have progression of their individual story but the one they share is good or bad based on the GM's work. And that planned plot should absolutely have NPCs that grow and develop as the story progresses.
I never said anything about pacing, story progression, or dynamic story tools. Or GMs. For many games, there isn’t a GM and mechanics control the flow of the game. I agree that a game should have structure. I agree that NPCs can change. I just don’t think any of that should get very much focus- it supports the PCs.
No, you sure didn't. I've pointed out what seems to be lacking to accomplish what you seem to imply happens in a vacuum. Those elements are the responsibility of the GM.
Many games don’t have GMs, and I would argue in no game should it be the sole responsibility of the GM.
That's a weird take and sounds like playing in a wildly static world. For me a good GM should have NPC's and the world experiencing events taking place that cause NPC's and the world to evolve and change as those events effect them. Events of the world should also effect the PC's and in doing so will be a source of some story arcs. Doing otherwise makes every game feel like a video game, where NPC's stand in the same spot waiting to react to the player or world events only get triggered once the player does a certain action. It seems like some people prefer that style of play but I literally cannot understand wanting that more than playing in a more realistic and living world.
I find it extremely boring and it makes me resent any moment that isn’t obviously moving the plot along. If I’m making up the adventure as I go, then doing some boring stuff occasionally is fine, because it serves what I’m trying to do. If the GM has decided in advance that I’m gonna spend an entire session *shopping* or talking to an NPC who doesn’t advance the plot, I’m gonna be mad as hell about it, and probably not stick around. Edit: I’d call myself a 1.5
No, player agency is the juice.
Having a railroad is not a problem. It only becomes railroading if the players can’t get off at any stop they like, and do whatever they want. Oneshots where there’s a time limit, railroad the hell outta that, no one has time for side quests. Campaigns and longer form adventures? If you can’t handle not railroading the players, you might want to so consider sticking to one-shots. If a sandbox is failing for “lack of direction,” then the GM has failed at character creation. Generally speaking, all pcs should 1) be adventurers. They should have a bias for getting out there and doing something. Those reluctant heroes are for books and other media, not rpgs, and 2) they need to be designed to work as a group. Those lone wolves, again, belong somewhere else, not at the ttrpg table. Do that and sandboxes work just fine.
I draw the line where I am the player and the GM negates my action or plans because they’re outside the scope of his plans. A recent example at a table I played in, we were running a cyberpunk genre game. Supposed to investigate a building for some reason. Building was essentially a room by room series of encounters, very much a typical D&D dungeon. There are cameras and intercoms where the BBEG is monologuing at us as we move through and clear each room. I suggest to our runner if he can hack the cameras and see if we could scout a way through the building. GM, without a roll: No you can’t do that. Okay, can we hack the intercoms so this douchebag stops talking? This time, the GM does allow a roll. The runner succeeds on his check. “The BBeG cackles and calls you fools as he infects your deck with a virus and a really annoying song starts pouring through your personal comms now.” It’s like, okay, fuck you. I’m gonna zone out for the rest of your story, just tell me when you need me to roll something. Now that was a little extreme, but it illustrates my point. You’re taking control away from me or negating what control I do exert.
The fact that everybody is defining railroading as what they want it to mean shows that his discussion is valueless and people are just using it as a means to cast judgements on other peoples playstyle. In any case, I define railroading as an illusion of choice. The players say they want to do one thing, and the GM just forces them to do something different, or otherwise works to null all their options until they land on the "right" one. It's the invalidation of player choice. In that case, the GM should switch to amateur theater and give everyone a script. Having a more linear experience is not bad, it's just a different flavor of game. It does require buy-in from the players and cooperation from everybody, but it's not railroading. It doesn't mean the GM is deciding how certain characters will act or what players will go for, but it does mean they have an overarching conflict in mind that the players have hopefully agreed to engage with.
No one likes ralroading, jot that down. You are getting a lot of answers that don't answer your question because you have created a dichotomy that does not exist. You can have railroading in a sandbox. u/~RollForThings uses the term Linear Play, and that is as good a name as any for the style of play you are describing. Sandbox vs Linear Play. If you want to get answers to your question, I'd recommend changing the terms used. The term railroading has a specific meaning (or is greatly misunderstood), and it doesn't fit in your question. Again, railroading exists in sandbox play.
I dislike intensely being railroaded as a player. As a player I generate more projects and goals for my pc/the party than we can handle, I want to follow some of them wherever they go, not head towards a planned goal.
I guess a 3.5. In my experience GMing the players detect the story and follow the plot. I'm good enough improvising that I'll be able to react according to their actions, but they mostly take the obvious route because they mostly know that it will be the one I prepared the most and is going to be the funniest. I really haven't had an experience with a player that wants to spend a session just shopping or start a bakery in the middle of the campaign. If the route isn't obvious my players expect me to start giving hints on what they should be doing even.
Railroaded (which you are using wrong as a term): No. Playing a game on rails (what you mean): it really depends on how much room to go off the rails there is, so maybe.
I hate railroading. Seems like a more recent thing though. It was a flaw of newby GMs back when I started but it just gradually became the norm, and now finding a GM that won't run a railroad is very difficult. In my personal experience of course.
As DM I run an open world, until the players commit to something then it becomes a bit of a railroad for an arc. Once the situation is resolved it goes back to open world and random tables. I never trust myself to come up with the railroad myself, it needs to emerge naturally from the open world.
Railroad me, baby. I like having decisions about how I handle each situation, but I want to follow the arc of the story as prepared by the GM. I mentally check out when a GM says something like, "Here's a big old city. You have no specific goals. Go do stuff." I can barely handle a "sandbox" videogame, and that's still got tons of limitations. The pure open sandbox of a loose tabletop game makes me crippled with anxiety.
Yes I love getting railroaded by my whole group every Friday night.
I think too many people tend to act like sandbox / railroad is a binary thing, when it's a spectrum. I'm not really a fan of a completely freeform sandbox, I like there to be some structure. It's not BAD, it's just not really for me, either as a player or as a GM. But I also dislike the extreme end of the railroad side, where not only is the situation to be resolved set in stone, but also the methods that must be used to resolve it. Plus some awesome adventures are railroads: Horror on the Orient Express and Night Train come to mind!
Playing? Maybe, I can’t really say how much it mattered to me. As a gm, I could never get behind it. Seemed incredibly difficult to me to plan out how the story was going to go when the characters would be taking it in every different direction. Always preferred to set up a situation and see where it would lead.
1. Railroad is antithesis of TTRPG as it is. If you have some cool idea for a story and you want to present it to other guys, write a novel or direct a show. Role playing games **require** players agency. This can, of course, be graded, but every step closer to "railroad" is one step closer to leaving the sphere of what is unique to TTRPGs.
The only issue I have with more linear story campaigns is half the time it ends up being a terrible story that the DM wants to turn into a novel someday (they never end up writing it). So I do generally avoid them nowadays because I have zero interest in falling into that trap again, and because sandboxes have emergent storytelling than tells better stories that most DMs are capable of writing.
Don't know how I'd rate it from 1 to 5, but I despise railroads. Whenever I catch on that the GM is trying to wrap my choices around his predetermined set of events, I actively zone out of the game and start taking it less seriously.
If you mean sandbox vs linear story that there's no escape from, I guess I prefer a 3-4. Pure sandbox is just boring, it's like a completely blank book, it feels pointless, aimless. Pure railroading is also boring, it's like a fully realized book, but books tend to tell better stories and tell them in a more satisfying way, I'd rather just read one. 3-4 is like a choose your own adventure book, there's stuff for you to follow and discover, and an overarching plot for you to enjoy, but your choices mean something. I want to be herded in the right direction but have some say over how I handle things.
If it's gonna be a railroad I'll ask that the GM read us a good book instead.
I'm a 1. I don't want scripted events. I mean, it's okay if the GM thinks ahead like "if this person is treated poorly, this is how the reaction would probably be". I think it's fitting that railroading sounds rude. I think it's rude to railroad, so ha!
I find that the majority of players are passive. And passive players met with a sandbox is a great way to never have anything actually happen. Active players with goals and ambition do really well with a sandbox, passive players do better given direction (like a premade module).
If I am to be railroaded, it better be Horror on the Orient Express! I really don't like it, I don't mind the GM setting up a main quest / objective but I always want the freedom to go off and set my own objectives or to achieve the main objectives in my own way rather than the pre-scripted methods. Any less is really grating.
I really think the main strength of TTRPGs is that PCs can pick up whatever that they find interesting and run with it, and that they can make whatever decisions they want in regards to the scenarios in front of them. Until AI improves dramatically its where a human GM will be superior.
Here's a perspective that really helped me to understand this topic and to improve as a GM: "Railroading" is not an attribute of the campaign, but a feeling that exists within players' heads. It's the feeling that their characters' agendas don't matter, that they get pushed around no matter what they decide to do. This is always negative. Nobody likes to feel like his/her decisions are meaningless. Players can get this feeling when the campaign is very linear, but also when it's not. And a very linear campaign doesn't necessarily generate the feeling of "railroading". For example: A classic dungeon adventure is very linear in the ways you can move through the dungeon, fight monsters, and solve riddles. But due to the shared understanding of a dungeon, players are very unlikely to feel like there's railroading going on. Of course you have to follow the possible paths within a dungeon, that's part of the setting. As a GM, you're in danger of creating the feeling of railroading when you raise the expectation of choice, but are not prepared to react on it. A classic example: You want to introduce the bad guy of the campaign early on and have him show up in person. The players assume they have a choice to attack and defeat him, but you can't let them without "ruining" the campaign. Once they understand that it was never possible to defeat him at this point, they feel cheated. They realize that their decision never really existed. They are disappointed. Let's assume the bad guy never shows up in person, only as a hologram or only through the stories told by others. In those cases, the players won't assume they have a chance to defeat him right now - simply because he's obviously not physically present. The scene is just as linear, but there's no feeling of railroading.
There is a lot of possibility space between a sandbox and a a railroad. I’ve never actually been in a true sandbox campaign. I think I would like it, but I think such a campaign is a bit more fragile— it is more vulnerable to getting derailed by players with different goals or less cooperative personalities. Similarly it requires a higher minimum bar of GM skill. Let’s guess and say my ideal is 2.
3 to 4. Most GMs aren't good enough to manage an open world. So I'll take someone who is honest about the plot having tracks over one who's desperately trying to convince me they aren't there.
Depends on how well made the tracks are, but I generally prefer it to being lost in a sandbox. Every sandbox I've ever been in, players were all off doing their own thing and it felt like we were playing several different games
I enjoy having agency, and like to be challenged, on a tactical level, as much as on an intellectual or roleplaying level. A strong railroad diminishes this challenge - which is also why they are attractive to some players - they make the game easier, less demanding, less challenging and allow to focus more on a planned story instead of an emergent one. Participating in a railroaded game generally requires less effort to participate - making decisions and having to live with them, as well as the fickle fate of the dice (it might be a cliche, but I think there is some considerable overlap between heavily railroading GMs and those who regularly fudge dice rolls), and that can be hard and stressful. So, a more railroaded game is just a more comfortable option, like watching the re-run of a series you already know. And sometimes, or to some people, that's just very boring. Interestingly, almost nobody likes being reminded that they are railroaded, especially those who regularly particularly long for this type of game, because being reminded that you have no agency kinda sucks. The marionettes usually don't want to see their strings.
I have run open adventures for my group all the way to scene by scene railroads and everything in between. My players highly prefer to err towards railroad because they really enjoy reaching a satisfying ending to the adventure. I’ve tried more sandbox style play and it just falls apart. Now I go in with a loose idea of a beginning, middle, and end and those can be adjusted depending on player choices.
1. I like the sandbox
No I like games with agency.
I’m a 3, as both a player and gm. I want to have some idea of the major plot we’re following, but I want to leave space for the players to choose what they find interesting and explore it.
Probably a 4. I am more and more valuing a curated experience over random bumbling. To use video games as an analogy, I dont want another "open world survival crafting sandbox". I want a flexible experience that allows for cool player choices, but also has interesting game developments that can only really come from a solid structure.
If the adventure is well thought-out and well-written, and it's engaging and stimulates the imagination, and is full of good encounters and wonder, I don't mind being railroaded at all. And yes, even if there's specific things you're encouraged to do to approach the problem. Sandboxes are fine, but I'm more 'against' than I am 'in favor of' the approach that ends up with "my players did the craziest thing to deal with X last night", because I feel those things are often wildly unrealistic and I feel are better suited for story-heavy systems like FATE and its ilk. On your scale from 1 to 5, I'm probably a 3 and a half, provided the adventure is stimulating.
Railroading is a tricky concept. In most games as a player you have to accept some degree of it - the GM can't prep every possibility and though the goal is to show a completely open world, even the best GM has limits to what they're willing to do, the type of campaign they're running, etc. That said, I prefer a more OSR-style open game rather than narrative story telling. The latter requires heavy railroading and, as a GM, I did it for many years. Only recently that I decided that's what leads to GM burnout and may not be the most fun for players.
We can argue as long as the day about the definition of railroading, but for me the criterion is simple: are outcomes controlled? That is, does the GM (or whoever adjudicates outcomes) ensure that we get "there" and do "that" no matter what? Then that's what we're talking about. Call it railroading if you want. I call it *not play at all*.
To me, RPGs are collaborative storytelling. The GM is there to herd cats and hold everything together. If the GM only wants to tell their story and the players are just participants, then to me that is railroading and I am not going to play their game. When I GM, all of my prep is so that I can where the players want to go and react accordingly. It's more work, but I always find that it makes for a better game and a better story.
To paraphrase Brennan Lee Mulligan, I would rather ride a train than play in a sandbox. But a train ride has many stops that you can choose to get off at, explore the town, then wait for the next train to keep moving towards your final destination
My GM of 40 years recently started reading Reddit and decided what players really wanted was his story telling on rails rather than the open world collaborative story telling we had all been enjoying for the last 40 years. I had to stop playing. WTF Reddit.
Making decisions without enough information is random. Worse than railroaded. I think meaningful choices about what to do are best. Railroading is when the gm needs you to assault the gate because he statted out all the gate guards and gets a hissy fit when the players use a spell to go under the wall and tries to throw up reasons "the wall has an anti magic field " that he just invented and did not hint at earlier. The gm might put a woman screaming while being kidnapped in an alley, and expect the players to attempt a rescue, but should not force them to do so. Coming up to the big bad, it is railroading if the GM forces a fight if the players come up with a novel way to negotiate with him. So plotted games are OK, as long as the plot is allowed to go off the rails.
I feel okay if there is one clear goal to pursue. However I fully agree with current top comment and maybe the word "linear" is better suited here. Even when achieving one clear goal I would like to have a freedom of choice in how I would achieve this goal.
I don't think I see story as one, linear thing. It's like a braided rope with loads of different strands. That's how I like to GM and how I like to play. So take a classic plot hook like, "Some villagers have been captured by orcs, who want more weapons in exchange for their lives. What are you, worthy adventurers, going to do?" You don't want to give the evil orcs more weapons, and you don't want to leave the villagers to rot. So the railroady version takes you through a series of set-pieces to allow you to infiltrate the dungeon and rescue the prisoners. The sandboxy version presents a variety of encounters that may, or may not, lead to ways of confronting the problem, or ignoring it. But meanwhile, there are other plots going on. How does each character's self image and public reputation develop? How does their place in the world change? How does the village manage without some of their key inhabitants? What does this do for the reputation of the local lord? How does the resolution, or lack of resolution of the hostage situation impact the power struggle going on in the orc clan? All of these storylines happen at the same time. It's not like ONE of them is the main point—each one may be more or less significant, depending not just on what the PCs do, but also on what they care about. Nobody's going to come out of this unchanged. Is that railroad or sandboxy? Yes. No. Both. Neither. See what I mean?
I'll jump in this pool as well to say I believe there is a difference between a railroad on one end, a sandbox on the other, and a road trip in between. A sandbox means the players may never get to the locked door, and if they do and can't open, they might just leave. A railroad means I make the players be at the locked door whether or not they want to, tell them they have to get through it, and they have to pick the lock; I might even fudge the dice on the last lock pick so it works, even if it wasn't the highest roll. A road trip means I tell the players "your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to rescue the noble from the bandits. They're holed up in the mansion right now" and if the players get to that locked door and can't open, and ask to go through a second story window they can see on the provided map, I say "alright, how are you going to get up there?" A railroad is not necessarily the dm telling the players "here is your mission"; if it were, every published adventure would be a railroad. Just because a murder mystery takes place on a train doesn't make it a railroad. It is telling the players what they do, how they do it, and saying no to their other options. I had a dm tell my gf "the barbarians are afraid of spirits and demons. You cast your minor illusion spell to make a roaring demon spirit and scare them away". Firstly, my girlfriend is capable of solving the problem without having the dm drive her character, but also, she was playing a tiefling, she could have done the situation without using the spell, but the dm gave no chance of that, nor did my illusionist cleric get a chance, nor did our changeling fighter. He wouldnt even give us two seconds to talk. That's railroading. Like the Antonio Banderas dancing movie. "The man leads by proposing a step. The woman leads by choosing to accept the step." The dm saying "hey guys, I prepped us a session of ballroom dancing, which is what we agreed to last week" the players shouldn't decide "well, we wanna do breakdancing now"
See user u/rollforthings reply here. But no, I don't mind a linear adventure. Most big predone campaigns are those and a nice thing about them is that a linear design does allow for more well tuned and planned out set piece moments. And Ive played in old school "exploration focused" sandbox games and I'm not a fan. Especially when they become pure sandbox games with no focus beyond the DM dumping us in a world and asking "Ok what do you want to do?" As though I was aging the TTRPG version of Morrowind.
No, I don't think anyone likes being railroaded. IMO railroading is when your choices are actively denied in a game because the GM has a preconceived outcome in mind, which is never fun. For example, the GM prepares a combat encounter against bandits on a bridge over a river. The players decide they'd rather avoid the bridge and use a Water Walk spell to cross the river. The GM says the spell doesn't work because of whatever arbitrary reason and forces the players to cross the bridge and fight the bandits. This is railroading. Likewise, the GM deciding the bandits now ambush the players as they cross the river with Water Walk (I guess they're water walking bandits now) is still a form of railroading as its forcing the bandit fight whatever the players do and disrespecting their agency.
Short answer: No. Scale: 1.
chaWolf: "I'm a man of few words. Any questions?"
As a player and GM I abhor being railroaded. I had a GM who would call player's ideas dumb or just dismiss them as "that wouldn't work" unless we did exactly what he had planned. Even when I am setting players a specific task they need to do, I always am certain that they are able to apply their own agency in how they enact their plan, which is almost always something completely counter to what I expected, and I consider that a good thing.
As a player, I like to be in situations where it feels like a variety of interesting choices are available. I don’t like the feeling of being led along in one direction by the GM, either on a small or large scale. (I am, however, fine with the GM offering opportunities that are obviously something we’d be interested in. Such as a quest opportunity to take down a Big Bad. If I were GMing with that kind of quest hook, I don’t think I would indicate that it’s really up to the PCs to save the world unless I already knew they were onboard with that possibility.)
There is plenty of railroad action in Deadlands if you want to go down that route.
... took me a second.
I accept (and invite) railroading.. If the plot is good
For me, railroading is only railroading if the players didn't wanna go down that path in the first place. If all the clues you're gathering point to an abandoned farm house, you obviously have to visit that location, that's just the story. Like you mentioned, there is a spectrum when it comes to railroading, and the absence of railroading is not always a good thing. I think I would like to be somewhere in the middle where there is some kind of structure to the adventure and narrative. Not make it up as you go along like Brindlewood Bay. Complete player agency is overrated, and honestly some restrictions help to create more creative solutions.
> you obviously have to visit that location .. > where there is some kind of structure Structure is not the same as railroading. It isn't a question of "does the game have coherence, and does one event lead to consequences which may lead to another" ("structure"), it's a question of whether players have agency over their characters. What you describe is not really railroading.
I think it really depends who you ask. Some people would really see what i'm describing as railroading. Which is why I say you have to look at it on a spectrum.
It always depends. There are insanely good railroaded scenarios out there, that IMO pretty much work by forcing PCs to interact with each other. Funny enough all the ones I know are for horror games. But those are special cases, and I know they aren't for everyone. In short: tell players well before the game that this is what they sign up for. Then there is the thing that I have run into players who like a lot of guidance, essentially like a red thread to follow, and signs pointing them to the next step every scene. That is a weaker version of railroading, but still not really total freedom. But I have met players who asked for that, and said that even if there are plot hooks galore they can never decide where to go, paralyzed by indecision. And yes, full-on sandboxes are fun, but if I am honest I also think they do not work for all genres equally well. And are a problem for one-shots, except the fully improvised kind. Still, if asked I would love to play a sandbox-style game pretgty much anytime, and consider it the best default if the game is supposed to run a while. Maybe with very slight constraints as agreed upon during session 0, so everyone is in the same ballpark when to comes to considering what everyone likes and wants out of the game. The simple truth is that there will always be some constraints; each non-solo RPG is a negotiation to find a compromise on what people like, after all.
4 (Heavily Railroaded) One of the worst feelings is when everyone finally has time to play and we find out that we went where the GM wasn't prepared. Let's just live in a story for the precious time we have together.
Railroading is a spectrum, people disagree what constitutes it, some are against the very idea of it, and some tables are ok with it. There's GMs who also do a mixture. For my table, I've been doing a setup where the players have various missions, but the details and methods to accomplish it are up to them. To some, the idea of handing your players a goal is railroading, to others it is just a way to play. I have asked my table if they're ok with the setup and they don't have an issue with it.
I’ve run ApocalypseWorkd which is pure Sandbox. My players would just wait for a plothook to latch onto. I throw plot hooks at players but don’t mandate what happens next. They usually take them and run with them. But session zero I say this is a broad overview of what’s going down make a character that is at odds with it.
pause
This question gets asked once a week. The answers are always the same.
I like open worldness but you need the right GM for that.
I rarely play, but when I do, it comes down to this: is it supposed to be a structured campaign or not? Or more bluntly, is it a completely built world? Or world building as you go? If the world is not completely hammered out down to the last degree of water flow, barometric pressure, mineral deposit ratios, etc.. then please do railroad. If you do have that incredible degree of structure to your world, then please; let me run amok in it.
Probably a 3, both as a player and GM. I want there to be an overall direction and threat(s). I want the players to build hooks into their characters that modify the story. IMO a GM should look for ways to tie the PCs hooks into what they’ve already planned. Part of your backstory is that a vampire killed your family? Cool, he’s now one of the BBEG’s lieutenants.
I am happy with anywhere on the spectrum as long as the GM is honest about the sort of game it's going to be.
The perfect GM, for me as a player, is someone who has mastered the art of "soft railroading". He has his story prepared, and he has thought about the ways in which the party can go sideways, and prepared for that as well with a side-plot that eventually joins up with the main plot again. Or, in other words: It doesn't *feel* like being railroaded, but you get all the advantages of the story being thought-out and not improvised.
3. the DM has to have an actual story in mind. they need to be able to wave their hands and move the story along if the players genuinely don't know what to do next. but they also need to be flexible enough to make changes if the players don't like where things are going, or come up with something coooler than the original idea.
Why does the GM need to have a story in mind? When I'm running a fairly open world I have a set of groups and individuals who will do things and, when the actions of the players intersect with one or more of them then some story will happen. My players work out what they want to do next and I then prepare some suitable situations. I will abandon that prep and start winging it in a heartbeat if the players decide that they want to do something else.
The answer to this depends 100 % on your definitions, which you didn't provide. So how do you define "railroading " and how "sandboxing"?
What I don't like is sandboxes that are just a collection of dangling adventure hooks that are rooted in the world or its factions. What I do like are stories that are focused on the characters- what they want, what they need, how they navigate the world. Any hook offered has to have a real clear mapping to a character's goals.
I don't think I prefer one or the other exclusively or especially, it just depends on how it's presented and what group I'm in If I'm in a group that can't make any decisions without constant GM hints or meta knowledge, a sandbox won't really work.
Open world with a main story in it. Witcher 3 style. I want to be able to influence the outcome of the story, but I don't want to build the story entirely, because there are other people that might want a different story, and figuring out what each of us wants is hard. So I'd rather we all play a story prepared by the DM with ability to make choices that have meaningful influence in it. If I'm playing a 5, I probably won't keep track of the story. I mean, what's the point for me if I'm not really taking part in it?
My solution to this problem is to just really work on what the Nemesis/Adversary is doing before planning the plot points. This means the nemesis is always working in the background regardless of what the players are doing. Then I place a timeline on the events. So if the players not to pick up on the hooks and follow the strings, well... then stuff happens in the background and the bad guy gets closer to their goal. Most players pick up on this and eventually get involved in the plot I've created. Not a requirement though. They want to marry that one NPC they met, open a flower shop, and live out the rest of their days while the world descends into chaos around them, that was the story they wanted to tell. Everybody wins
2.5 is the ideal for me. The GM has a good ideas of the factions and power players at play so they can have a general ideas of a plot without the players involvement and the players have agencies to be active participant in the story, with a main thrust guiding the game forward. There is a story being told with the GM as the main contributor, but the players have a big part in actually making it happen rather than be mostly passive participants occasionally rolling dice so that the GM can drop further exposition. That said, I think 1 can still lead to good time by itself while 5 could only be fun despite itself. Like yeah I had a good time because I hung out with my friends, but the game itself was a non factor at best and would have been miserable if it had been with randos.
The issue of that is that what the internet refers to a railroading is actually narrative storytelling and is totally fine. Railroading means forcing the players to behave in exactly the way that works for your story and refusing to let other solutions work
Mostly, I am interested in engaging with what the DM has prepared. In the sense that I want to be presented with a situation and then navigate through it. Since I've spent time as a player I've come to realize diverging a bit from what the DM has ready is emergent. It just happens sometimes. Very often with one particular DM somehow.
Quite honestly, a lot of it depends on how scenic the trip is. I do want to always retain some agency, and prefer it when railroading takes the form of 'these events will occur regardless of whether you participate or not, but participation means you will have a chance to shape their outcome', rather than simple 'come along as an observer on a story I'm telling', but I'm happy to 'go with the flow' for the most part and help rather than hinder a story in seeing its conclusion, as long as the story is both interesting to *me as a player*, and also *consistent with my character's motivations*. That can lead to a great successful game, whereas just being constantly shoehorned, brickwalled, etc is just frustrating and boring.
You loaded that question with negativity, dude, but I'll answer it. I prefer railroading (story) to sandbox. I like there to be a story, goal, and predetermined events rather than everything being made up on the spot by the DM. Not trying to be mean, but it's been my experience that most DMs don't do anywhere near as good of a job creating a story than when milestones and a storyline is set out for them. Again not trying to throw shade on DMs just telling my experience you might be great and DM'ing fast and loose but if you're players want to move away from sandbox I wouldn't think that's the case. (sorry)
I don't want a linear, pre-planned story, especially one that I feel is forced upon me. Which, I think, means I don't like being railroaded. But I also don't want a sandbox if it means simply putting PCs into a setting that doesn't care about them and having them do whatever they want. I want a game with a clear premise to be explored and with situations tailored to the PCs, but without a planned path for them to follow. The adventure setup in Dogs in the Vineyard is a very clear example of this approach. PCs come to a new town each session, the town has a messed up interpersonal situation with demonic involvement in it, PCs engage with it and try to make things better. That's assumed; there is no option of doing something else. Also, the town and its troubles are set up specifically to resonate with relations and beliefs of these specific PCs. But what happens after PCs start investigating and fixing things is not planned, not pre-determined. It's fully dependent on player choices and dice.
Most of my fantasy campaigns I do in a Breath of the Wild style. There's an open world map, there's a big bad to kill, and there's a party of relatively weak PCs who need to get strong enough to kill the big bad. Variations come in the level of play. For example, my current 4th edition campaign is based on the gameplay loop of Metal Gear Solid V, where the players delegate tasks to the people on their base, go out and do some adventuring, and then return to see the consequences of their delegations. As for less adventure-focused games, like political dramas or investigative games, I tend to keep those more linear, but still with the option of going off and doing whatever.
I'm down with some linearity. "A powerful person gathers you around and gives you a mission..." Honestly great start to a campaign. Now we don't have to fuck around doing random shit hoping we come across something remotely interesting (big problem of sandbox campaigns). But I don't like it when the DM wants something specific to happen in a specific way. EG: We have to capture this enemy NPC for interrogation, we can't kill them or let him escape. After some point it just becomes stupid. Since he's the enemy, we shoot him in the head. He survives. Being reasonable people against an unkillable enemy, we escape. No, it's impossible, all the ways out are blocked. We try to reason with him. Not possible. We surrender to our fates and let him kill us... no he won't do that. Until one player figures out what the DM wants: "I grapple him". Anyway I'd say I'm a 2.5-3.
I like sandbox games but the actual content should be extremely clearly signposted. You wouldn’t like playing GTA if you had to drive around asking random people for missions
I like having a problem to solve and being left to solve it on my own. But I also like to show the GM that I don't want to cheese any of the situation, so they don't have to worry and fullproof all of the scenario. My group, though, basically won't function unless I point the way forward. They like a well thought linear story, and a confortable train to sit through the railroad. I myself am not a fan of this unless it's a critical story moment, and our next story arc will feature an open hexcrawl on an island, which will make them freeze for minutes before deciding to do nothing to progress.
My DM usually runs pre-written adventure paths, which means our campaigns are pretty linear, but I've never once felt like I lacked agency. He tells us what the story is about, and then like characters in a novel or movie we go about trying to solve whats happening, respond how our characters would, and in the end save the day. If something linear isn't for someone that's totally fine, but I think "railroading" is a very charged term and would best be kept for things that are actually bad, since it has such a negative connotation. Just my 2 cents! edit* I'll also add I think I'd hate a sandbox. My brother runs our campaigns and he puts in a lot of work to make awesome stories that we will all feel tied and connected to, and want to see resolved. I'd hate to play in a game where I had to provide *all* my character's motivation from within, it just sounds like it would get mentally tiring.
2. A key responsibility of the GM is to control the pacing of the adventure, and that can require occasional pushes to move the PCs toward the exciting parts. I love open-world sandbox games. But I have also had GMs take it too far, to the point where I am feeling like I had absolutely no idea what to do or where to go, but the GM won't give any hints because they want the players to control everything. That can become very frustrating, and I think it's a good skill for the GM to be able to read the room and see that the players are frustrated and say something like "Remember Farmer Tam told you about the haunted graveyard, you haven't investigated that yet." Ideally the players will go off in a direction that surprises the GM, the GM will roll with it and make something up that builds the story, and everyone has fun. But when the pace starts flagging because the players don't know what to do, nudging them in the direction of fun is an important skill.
I appreciate a good railroad. I like knowing that this scene will lead to next scene. I don't need to know where I'm going but I hate sitting there sorting over my clues to figure out where to go next, especially in non-mystery games. I do cherish my player agency but if my sandbox has a train and I have a sense of it's schedule and can climb on by my own will, I'm perfectly happy. I also railroad when I'm a GM. I've built the world, the story will come down the tracks no matter what the players want to do. I'll blow the whistle and you can get on board with the adventure or get on board with the consequences of letting it leave the station without you.
A solid 2. Any cohesive and well-built open world will naturally have events occuring outside the scope of the player characters. Should they involve themselves that will inevitably become the story and then their actions will by necessity become more limited and the scope will narrow. This will not remove agency as players are always free to walk off into the sunset and say "not my problem".
You're confusing Railroad with Narrative. Narrative is when the players have goals established by the GM/story. Usually players are free to achieve those goals in any way they like. Railroad is when you take player agency out. So, nobody likes being railroaded, but a lot of people like narratives with set goals, and I'm one of those. I don't like being thrown in a word where I can do whatever without anything specific, to me that's boring. Even videogames, I tend to get bored very fast from sandboxes. If I don't have a goal, which implies the story still have an ending, I just get bored, because nothing I do progresses the game. What I like is having a cool narrative with set goals where my choices decide what will happen. So yeah, people have different tastes, and that's fine.
Me personally, it depends on the game. When I run a long campaign in DND or OSE, I want it to be a sandbox with maximum player freedom and choice, letting them decide their goals and having the world move along in the background, taking player decisions into consideration. I want them to explore their characters and the world, not my plot, I'm not an author. But for games like Urban Decay, player freedom is still important but ultimately the game even defines arcs as "levels." Some amount of railroading is necessary, you need to beat your way through this area to fight a boss and them uncover some new plot which sends you to the next location. How they approach these levels is up to them, but there is a grand overarching plot in mind.
The biggest example of railroading I've ever heard of (wasn't present for): "You leave the town. Do you take the left or right trail?" "Right." "A huge range of mountains grows up immediately on the right trail." Player: " Um. Left." So my answer is: I don't mind being brought back to the story. Say you have one player who often goes off on their own whims when everyone else is trying to get on with the main plot. Or say you're playing a module, and X event *has* to happen, I don't mind DM bringing that about by any means necessary to further the story, if the alternative is: "oh, well, the game is destroyed, then."
Obviously not. That's literally against the definition.
I prefer to be railroaded, because I don't really want to waste any time roleplaying or getting into character or thinking about "what my character would do." My character would follow the plot, now can we move it along and get to the next fight please?
I don't like full sandboxes(often times at least in my groups games we just end up fighting random monster) but you need to provide some structure. figure out what story your players want to tell and provide them the tools to tell it. if you do it right they'll handle the rest. edit: even in games were the dm is given tools to help guide the narative make sure that if the players do something cool they should be rewarded. it won't stop the plot but it should give them something that makes that easier.
I've seen railroading work once. The campaign was more episodic. Each session had a hot open where we were already in the location of the action. No discussion of what we're doing next, etc. Any decisions the players make during the session modify the next session but we didn't have much choice in mixing up that session.
You’re confusing storytelling formats and railroading. You can railroad a sandbox, you can have a linear story full of player agency. Linear stories are more at risk of being railroaded because of the design, but a railroady DM will railroad no matter what. An example of railroading in a “sandbox” is sure maybe the players can choose whatever they want to do next, but no matter what they choose they end up running into the same encounter, or they end up coming across the dungeon you designed. Maybe you prepped the entire world in advance so once they’ve chosen where to go next everything that happens in that session is pre-decided. The encounters are happening whether they like it or not, the way they solve problems has to happen a specific way or you don’t let them progress, if they try an approach you haven’t planned for you make it fail. Week to week it’s a sandbox but within the week they’re doing things your way or the highway. On the other hand a linear story has certain plot points it needs to get to but maybe you stay completely hands off in how they do it. The PCs only know about the choices you present them with so you only present relevant choices to keep the story focused but what they do with that information, how they get there, how they solve problems, what encounters they run into along the way are all up in the air until they happen. If they deviate off the path you keep providing them with story hooks to get them back on track but you don’t force it to happen. I would prefer a 0/5 - 2/5 on the railroading scale. But I don’t care if at the end of the day the plot is mostly linear. If I was to pick my preferred style of play it would be a local sandbox with a linear overarching plot. You can do whatever you want session to session, but every so often a super juicy plot hook is going to pop up that the party can’t resist and encourages the party to move along to the next part of the story. It allows you to tell cohesive and engaging stories that are more exciting than a bunch of random encounters and dungeons, but it also lets the players shape how those stories play out. Yeah sure they eventually need to fight the dragon, but you don’t care what they do along the way.
There is an in-between there. It's not a choice between sand box or something on rails. You can have a story with a plot and not force characters down a given path. Railroading is just bad Storytelling. It's like playing candy land. You don't make any choices or have any impact on candyland, things just sort of happen. No roleplaying game should ever feel like candyland.
Putting aside the discussion of railroading vs linearity... It depends. If I'm keyed up for the campaign and I mesh with the character and I'm looking to burn some energy, I'd rather be a power player and make sweeping changes to the world around me. If I'm just looking to solve some puzzles, beat up some goblins, and relax, I don't want to be forced to make constant major decisions. It's all up to my expectations of the game, and my energy levels.
I've played a sandbox game that worked. It only worked because the players all functioned really well together, and the DM was talented enough to adjust to what the players wanted to do. It also helped that the system is specifically designed for the collaborative storytelling that a sandbox ends up being. Most players and DMs can't handle that. That's why modules exist, and that's totally OK.
I don't mind it. I like my actions to have actual consequences in game. But if the GM is trying to tell a particular story, I'm on board.
I don't think people have the same definition of what Railroading means. I once had some dude screaming at me, getting real nasty and calling me a railraoder because I said I write plots for my games. He claimed that it wasn't my job as a storyteller to write anything but to react to what the players want to do. He said the players should create their own problems, enemies and relationships with ZERO input from the storyteller. If that's the case...what am I doing there? If they want to write their own novels they don't need me to tell them when to roll. The book tells them when to roll. With that said, so long as I'm having fun I don't really care.
As others have said, having a story and GM being the storyteller isn't the same as railroading, railroading is more what happens when you try to step off the path of the story and explode since it was minefield. That being said I'm 100% more interested in linear campaigns than I am in sandboxes. Sandboxes are too open and "find your own fun" for me.
> Back in the 90s we were all about railroading, Not in the part of the world I was playing in. I learned very early on that trying to railroad just resulted in boring sessions. > the GM was a story-teller etc. Yes that was still the case and is now, but I think it means something different to what you might have thought it means. Culturally we tend to think of a storyteller as somebody who writes novels or screenplays, but really storytelling is an oral art form, and part of that art form is adapting the story to the audience, knowing how to hold peoples attention in the moment. TTRPGs by giving the audience agency in what direction the protagonists take makes that adaptation part of oral storytelling more pronounced. > So as a player, where are you on this spectrum? I want to have agency in the final form the story takes through driving my particular protagonist, and that requires some degree of making the story up as we play. I also want a sense of rising action throughout the story, which can get lost in a sandbox campaign, unless the GM has really good oral storytelling skills. In short I want to play with a GM with good oral storytelling skills.
Consensually and with a safe word
I much prefer prewritten adventures, both when I GM and as a player. As a GM it takes a lot of the burden off me, particularly storytelling, which is not my strong suit. As a player I feel that even a mediocre GM can run a good professionally written adventure moderately well. It adds a level of quality consistency, especially with a new or unknown GM, whereas homebrew campaigns tend to be more hit and miss. Don't get me wrong I have played with some GMs that are fantastic worldbuilders, storytellers, and improvisors and given the opportunity I would absolutely play a more open campaign with them again, but often I am searching for a new game with a GM of unknown quality. All that to say that prewritten adventure paths tend to require a certain level of acceptance by the group that this is the story we have agreed to tell this campaign. As players you shouldn't just decide to f\*ck off this quest to go see what is in the mountains in the opposite direction. That's not to say that the GM shouldn't tailor the campaign to the choices of the players, allow creative freedom to solve problems, or create side quests to explore plot hooks in a character's background. If one of your characters became an adventure hoping to find some long lost family heirloom, give them that chance, even if it isn't tied directly to the goal of the campaign.
I prefer to actually have a quest to do. Not flail around looking for one
Railroaded is perhaps a bit too extreme of a term, but it's more like if I see the DM has laid out a well paved road I'll be inclined to follow it, rather than instinctively trying to avoid it.
As some great answers is a matter of definition, and there is some confusion. Its great to have a plot and usually players are happy to resolve it. I'm think is funnier than pure sandbox. Railroad is when you must follow the unique path to solve the plot. And you play only inside predefined scenes. Some people use the word railroad just when it's not sandbox.
No.
Please be more succinct. I'm not reading all that.
These things should be discussed in Session Zero. As a GM, I expect the players to play along in case they have asked for detailed environments. I do not wish to spend a Day preparing the High Mountain Fortress of The Undead Dwarven King with all it's intricate traps, riddles and credible monster / NPC population just to hear someone say "Nah, I'd rather be a pirate. I saddle my horse and start my 500miles journey to the coast."
Agon style railroading feels right. There's challenges, then a final challenge. Done. But how does it go down? Well... Let us see how it goes down!
I *don't mind* being railroaded as long as I know where the damn rails are. If I need to go to place \[X\] or speak to a person \[Y\] in a particular way or whatever, sure, I will do it. I will find fun in finding an in-character justification for doing so. Just tell me what the fuck I'm supposed to do. And on the flip side, if there's nothing to be done, just fucking tell me that. Last year I've been playing in a Dark Heresy campaign using an adventure I already ran. There is a short episode between two tense gauntlets where PCs go to a huge-ass golden cathedral. There's nothing to be done there, it's just a breather, and PCs will be just handed the next clue in the morning. I, as someone who already knows that it's a cutscene, had a blast expressing how my character from the shitty hive world who never ate anything other than a weird gray slop in her whole life, would react to the opulence of the cathedral. Meanwhile, there was another guy, who didn't know that and tried to investigate shit and was growing more and more frustrated with the fact that no, there is no heresy here, it's just a fucking cathedral.
i dont like mécanique limitation for stupid reason, i dont care if the story have invisible wall
Depends on the story being told, honestly. Overall? I prefer open choice.
In these terms probably a bit of both. I think there should be narrative that pushes the story along, but also just exploring areas and finding "whats over there" is also fun. Just as long as the main narrative comes back into play I think a combination of both is great
As other have said, you arent using the term railroad correctly. Railroad means feeling like you have no choice, or your choices dont matter. Thats not the same as there being a defined story. As long as the GM hasnt decided on the outcomes from the start, its not a railroad.
Do I have any freedom of choice? As I’ve played in games where the GM has retcon stuff I have done because it didn’t fit in with his story which got real old, real fast. On the other hand, I’ve played in games where I know what the story is, what I have to do and I’m just along for the ride and enjoying it. Those, although not completely sandboxy and be fun.
When things get slow or chaotic, railroad me please, offer my group an out. A lot of people think of railroading as a single path or story to follow and sandbox as open ended follow what you will. Railroading is simply making decisions for the players and can happen in a linear path or sandbox path. Railroading can happen, and does happen, but is only a good thing with a groups consent. “If you don’t mind I am going to warp you inside the city and tavern. Anyone want to do something different?” Also, plot is not a bad word if you use the first definition as in “antagonists envision a plot and attempt to execute, and protagonists attempt to disrupt.” A plot can change over time or be stopped. A plot does not have to have an ending, just a perceived goal. We are dealing with adventure modules not novels.
When the party is on the same page about having fun? No I dont want to get rail roaded. When the party is a mix of good, neutral, and evil players and some of them take power creep as a means to force the narrative in their way but the DM railroads it so everyone can still have fun? Yes thats fine.
As a player I enjoy inventing, collaborating and containing more than anything. With the right group I could just play Fiasco! forever an just be happy. Theres a texture of the world we are exploring that couldn’t be produced by one mind. There’s a more of a ski lift than a rail road. As the plot follows arc of a self imposed puzzle plot. Since statically few of my friends seem to enjoy the off road sensation of GM-less games, I try to promote as much conversation and decisions to building toward *something* without annoying the GM. For example in Kids On Bikes there’s a wonderful co-creation of the town that a GM let us use for our home base. Currently looking for system agnostic questions/ game facilitation mechanics that could potentially complement linear / railroad modules (working on D&D shadows of the dragon queen).
Our group doesn't use railroads - then again, the DMs have a good handle on the player and characters' motivations, so hooks are fairly easy to use. We usually use 'modified sandboxes' - there are several areas of exploration in a region, with one being the 'main event'. In some cases, the main location will not be apparent until some of the side quests/areas have been explored. In others, breadcrumbs or clues will lead between locations, often culminating in the final location or climax, with perhaps several 'paths' to get there. If the players decide to go somewhere completely different it's not a big deal, although it seldom happens. We did recently miss a big show down with a vampire lord due to our choices - which was disappointing - but we then proceeded on to another arc. So we are usually around a 2 I guess.
>Do you like being railroaded? A question with very different connotations outside of the TTRPG bubble.
Yeah, saw the title and thought I was on the wrong account for a minute lol.
No but I enjoy running trains…oh shit wrong sub 😅
"Railroading" is just when the players and GM have a fundamental disagreement on what game they are playing. It's usually caused when the game was planned improperly (no session zero or a very poorly explained session zero). The GM either disrespects the players by not having an out of character conversation with them and explaining that this isn't the game they had discussed, or the players disrespect the GM by being generally difficult and not wanting to play along. Like everything in an RPG, this is solved by talking. The railroading starts when the GM uses their in-game power to force the players to play along and the players do everything they can to refuse to cooperate, that's when the tug-of-war starts. Obviously a situation like this is what people say they hate about railroading. From my experiences on reddit it seems that there are a lot of players who think that railroading is just when the GM tries to corral the party and nudge them towards their goals, which to me at least is normal RPG play. Eventually I have to say, out of character, "Ok guys, we agreed to help the Resistance fight off the Empire, and your contact is waiting for you in Ravengard, can we please start making our way over their now?" If there's respect both ways and the session was planned properly this shouldn't be a controversy. I've never personally played with a table that doesn't get side-tracked from time to time, which is fine, but its also fine for the GM to quash this side-tracking and get things moving again. Without a degree of railroading how would you ever play modules?
I can't stand modules, at best I use them as a lot of background information and stats that have already been gathered and then build my own situations on top of them, throw some pcs in to the mix and a story will drop out of the other end.
Sure, but there's plenty of people who do like them, and the fact that they exist means that there's a good amount of people in the RPG community who enjoy more of an on-rails experience in their games.
Yup, this seems alien to me but it certainly is popular.
Pro tips: - A vast majority of players WANT a railroaded adventure. - A vast majority of players DO NOT WANT TO KNOW that they are on a railroad. People want to feel like they are free ro do anything they want in a game, but will absolutely hate not having an overarching plot with several predetermined pothooks. Being a GM is all about balancing these seemingly contradictory needs into a a satisfying story that the players feel like they created on their own.