I'm writing a campaign and I was wondering if there are any tips on making the players actions really matter in the whole of the story without uprooting the whole campaign?
My best advice would be to have multiple ways to get to the same conclusion.
I don't know what the different ways they would go though so or should I try and think what they would or when they do something different I just adjust it on the fly?
Write a campaign, not a story. A campaign has to change based on the PC’s actions.
How would I really do that?
I start by identifying the main conflict I want the campaign to be about. Then you seed the world with NPCs on both sides of the conflict. The high-ups on one side will be your big bads. Those on the other may be friendly NPCs or quest givers or allies or whatever.
You give both sides motivations and goals and then you just let them pursue their agendas as time passes. When the party does something, the NPCs in their sphere of influence react according to their goals and motivations. A "living" world takes more work upfront, but it can handle almost anything a party can throw at it. Building out two (or more) sides of the conflict means you could even handle the party switching allegiance.
No, the NPCs don’t “guide them back on track,” what scatterbraind is describing is a “sandbox” style campaign, one without “tracks.” Instead of writing a story with a beginning, middle, and end instead you write all of the characters and then let the players’ choices and their characters’ successes set the course of the adventure. I prefer those too, like scatter said, they take more work up front, but then the whole world seems more “living” so there’s no way for the PCs to derail anything and the PCs will automatically influence the course of the campaign.
Try to work morally awkward events into the story, where there is no clear cut good or bad, and you can show them the results of their choices. For example imagine two warring kingdoms, both righteous and good and both with valid claims against the other. Or perhaps some group wants to set off a natural disaster which will wipe out a town, but their reason is to destroy a monster den which will do even more damage if left alone.
The only story you should write is what has come before - what led to the current state of the world; the history of characters and towns, the reason the BBEG is Evil.
Then you need to make the plan for the BBEG - what they want to do, and would probably succeed at were it not for those meddling adventurers. What do they need in order to achieve their goals? Is it unique, or is it something which can be found in several places.
Make milestones for the BBEG, indicating the progress of their plot - EG, they need one of the 5 "Things of Power", which are scattered about the land. Then they need a Whatnot, which only a certain wizard has, and then they need to find a cave which only someone with a Thing of Power can find, and then take the Dooda from that cave to a population center (the more people the better) to sacrifice them and summon GribbleGrabble the Devourer.
The BBEG will follow their goals - if the party keeps them from getting the first Thing of Power, they will seek out the second, then the third, until they succeed. Then they will find the wizard with the Whatnot, and so on. The adventurers can affect the success of the BBEG's attempts, but cannot change their overall plan - only how they attempt to complete it. If the adventurers get all 5 Things of Power and destroy them, the BBEG will have to make a new plan for their evil goals - so if this is a possibility, then you will have to give them 2 or more methods by which to achieve their ends (see pirates of the Caribbean - Jack wants immortality, goes for isla de muerta, and that plan is set back again and again until the isla de muerta is claimed by the sea, wherein he starts looking for the fountain of youth instead - same goal, different plan).
This way the campaign will grow around the players naturally, instead of them feeling like no matter what they did, the same thing would have happened (an example being when the BBEG needs a single artefact, and after a massive fight, they escape with it anyway - the players know that was necessary to advance the plot, and so they know that it was going to happen whatever they did - thereby feeling that they didn't write the story, they just acted it).
I'm writing a campaign and I was wondering if there are any tips on making the players actions really matter in the whole of the story without uprooting the whole campaign?
If you aren't writing for publication, your best option is simply not trying to plan very far ahead in detail; there's no way to uproot plans you haven't yet made.
I second what DuckSlayer said... I wrote a backstory for my world, made up a BBEG, decided his goal and what he needed to achieve it, and wrote out a plan for him. It is a multi-step process, and he is going to proceed with each step (and succeed at each step, probably), unless and until the point when the party interferes. What happens after that, well... I have to wait and see.
Already the party did something (though he does not actually know it was them) that caused him to react and they actually saw the results of that reaction (though they aren't 100% sure exactly why he did it). I did not plan that reaction. They did something and I thought hm, what would the reaction to this be? And then I described what happened.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
A lot of newer DMs, and even veterans too, seem to think a campaign needs some "BBEG" out to "destroy the world" who "the players must stop"....
Absolutely not true at all.
THAT... is a matter of taste.
Guy ("Great GM") a few months back did a video describing the 4 types of campaigns and pointing out that not every GM is equally good at running all 4 types. Among this type, one is the Epic Campaign (which is basically what you describe). Epic Campaigns have a BBEG out to destroy the world, kingdom, what have you, and PCs are trying to save the world/plane/universe/whatever.
One is what I would call "episodic," where each adventure is its own kind of "short story" and the campaign is a "short story collection" -- the campaign is just what happened to this group of players, but the individual events are not connected to each other in any specific way otherwise.
One was what he called "player oriented" though I would call it "character oriented," which is all about the characters and their backstories.
And then the 4th one, I'm not sure I would really have added, but I would call the "after the fact" campaign. You never meant to run a game for this long with the same people, but all the same people showed up each week and so you look back over the last year and realize that quite without intending to do so, you have a campaign. IMO, this is not that different from "episodic" except that in one case you intended to run for a long time and in the other you didn't.
His point, though, was that some people excel at one or two types of campaigns and few people excel at all of them. He went on to say that he usually does epic or episodic and had never tried character driven, but he wanted to do that his next time out.
For me... I am like him, best at epic or episodic. The only long-term campaign I ever ran (in Champions) ended in a "Crisis on Infinite Earths" type of save the universe situation with all the heroes in the world vs. Darkseid. My current campaign is also epic in scope. That's the type of campaign I like to run.
No, you don't have to run a game like that. But that is my strength (making it so that it all fits together and the players at the end look back and realize that all the adventures they were on that seemed disconnected had something to do with this final battle they are now facing). I could run the other ways, probably, but I would not do as good a job as GM, compared to running epic games. You'd be better off asking a different person to DM an "accidental" game or a "character-focused" game than asking me to do it. Just like I'm better off at adventure, dungeon, wilderness stuff, than at faction conflict in an urban setting.
If you're new, you should certainly try all these out. But if you know you have strengths, my advice would be play to your strengths. It's much better to run a 9.5/10 quality epic game, than run a 3.5/10 pc-focused game. Explain it all in session 0, of course... make sure the players want the type of game you want to run. (I gave my players a choice between epic and episodic and they picked epic.) But don't try to run a style of game that is not in your comfort zone... and don't feel ashamed that you have a comfort zone or are good at one type of game over another. It's better to be great at one thing, and do that, than mediocre at many things.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Lots of good ideas here. My take is that a lot of this depends on the level or Tier of the party AND the experience and interests of the players. newer player with T1 characters aren't really in a position to take on a near-godlike entity directly, right? but they could be involved in some tendril of the conflict where they can get a whiff of some larger plot or a glimpse of a shadow of a higher up. Now take the scenario of well experienced players with Tier 3 characters who might be right in the thick of some world shaping endeavor, either instigating it or trying to prevent it. As stated well by others, its about giving them agency but within the bounds of something they can handle.
I like the “episodic,” although I put in work to link things together in some ways. Usually, either the Players or their PCs will make enemies during their adventures who I can use for recurring plot lines which keeps continuity among the episodes. If they don’t then I can provide some cross encounters, but I usually don’t have to with them. They’ll almost inevitably end up hating or aggravating some NPCs on principle
On making a campaign one of my methods is to have multiple conclusions be possible. One way I do that is by using Chekhov’s Gun.
What is Chekhov’s Gun? It’s a story element where if the author describes a gun in a room, eventually someone is going to use it. How does it work in DnD?
By using the tropes we are familiar with. For example, if my players end up in an inn and I describe the serving girl as polite, pretty and friendly, and then the half orc at the next table gropes her until she cries, that’s gonna start a bar fight.
The serving girl in this case is Chekhov’s Gun and since they’re a good aligned party I don’t expect them to ignore it.
I expect them to come to her aid in some way, not necessarily combat, and by doing so they’ll find out something about either her or the half orc that leads them further into the campaign I have planned.
For instance, say they help the girl by casting charm person on the Half Orc who then relates to them that he’s part of a scouting party counting guards in the village and there’s a warband of orcs waiting to storm the walls. Or they knock him out and see that he has orc tribal tattoos under his clothes and a small, crude map of the city with hash marks for indicating city guards on it.
Thats an example of two ways to get to the same bit of knowledge, or nugget of adventure.
either way, experiment, try stuff, you’ll figure it out.
A lot of newer DMs, and even veterans too, seem to think a campaign needs some "BBEG" out to "destroy the world" who "the players must stop"....
Absolutely not true at all.
THAT... is a matter of taste.
Guy ("Great GM") a few months back did a video describing the 4 types of campaigns and pointing out that not every GM is equally good at running all 4 types. Among this type, one is the Epic Campaign (which is basically what you describe). Epic Campaigns have a BBEG out to destroy the world, kingdom, what have you, and PCs are trying to save the world/plane/universe/whatever.
One is what I would call "episodic," where each adventure is its own kind of "short story" and the campaign is a "short story collection" -- the campaign is just what happened to this group of players, but the individual events are not connected to each other in any specific way otherwise.
One was what he called "player oriented" though I would call it "character oriented," which is all about the characters and their backstories.
And then the 4th one, I'm not sure I would really have added, but I would call the "after the fact" campaign. You never meant to run a game for this long with the same people, but all the same people showed up each week and so you look back over the last year and realize that quite without intending to do so, you have a campaign. IMO, this is not that different from "episodic" except that in one case you intended to run for a long time and in the other you didn't.
His point, though, was that some people excel at one or two types of campaigns and few people excel at all of them. He went on to say that he usually does epic or episodic and had never tried character driven, but he wanted to do that his next time out.
For me... I am like him, best at epic or episodic. The only long-term campaign I ever ran (in Champions) ended in a "Crisis on Infinite Earths" type of save the universe situation with all the heroes in the world vs. Darkseid. My current campaign is also epic in scope. That's the type of campaign I like to run.
No, you don't have to run a game like that. But that is my strength (making it so that it all fits together and the players at the end look back and realize that all the adventures they were on that seemed disconnected had something to do with this final battle they are now facing). I could run the other ways, probably, but I would not do as good a job as GM, compared to running epic games. You'd be better off asking a different person to DM an "accidental" game or a "character-focused" game than asking me to do it. Just like I'm better off at adventure, dungeon, wilderness stuff, than at faction conflict in an urban setting.
If you're new, you should certainly try all these out. But if you know you have strengths, my advice would be play to your strengths. It's much better to run a 9.5/10 quality epic game, than run a 3.5/10 pc-focused game. Explain it all in session 0, of course... make sure the players want the type of game you want to run. (I gave my players a choice between epic and episodic and they picked epic.) But don't try to run a style of game that is not in your comfort zone... and don't feel ashamed that you have a comfort zone or are good at one type of game over another. It's better to be great at one thing, and do that, than mediocre at many things.
Good description of GM styles. Thinking about it this way, episodic is definitely my style. It works good if you logically connect the episodes together that build towards the present situation, while letting each episode be largely driven by player freedom.
My problem with the epic is that the players lose freedom because they are completely railroaded into chasing around this overwhelming bad guy. That’s just my impression, feel free to disagree. And is not that you can’t make bad guys for an episodic, they just aren’t RAARR WORLD END bad guys. Just regular bad guys: PCs can fight them, ignore them, or even deal with or help them, all of which has consequences on future episodes.
The PC driven style I don’t like either because it kind of railroads the DM it seems... DM is just catering to the PC backstories and little else? Am I wrong? Maybe, I haven’t tried it. Seems like the DMs creativity is a bit constrained by PC demands.
I do try to splash some backstory elements when it makes sense, but never let it tie me down or feel like I need to do so.
My problem with the epic is that the players lose freedom because they are completely railroaded into chasing around this overwhelming bad guy. That’s just my impression, feel free to disagree.
First of all, I think railroads are unnecessarily viewed as a dirty word in relation to "sandbox." I listened to a podcast a week or so ago when they talked about sandbox vs., not railroad, but rollercoaster. They talked about how rollercoasters are completely on rails but they can be super exciting, and so can a story with a more-or-less linear plot.
That said, some of us ask our players what they want. In my case, I gave mine a choice between episodic and epic (though I did not call them that) and they chose epic. They chose a world in which an active storyline with an epic bad guy is going on, and they get to see it and maybe interfere with it. They preferred that to a world where we would "discover" the story together. No, they said, we want the story to be there and we uncover it (rather than me making it up as we go along). So that's what I gave them.
I'm not sure if they've felt "railroaded," but I haven't forced them to do anything. The BBEG is trying to take down the Roman Empire. At first they didn't even know who he was and were doing (what they thought were) unrelated adventures. Only just the last session someone looked back at a note signed by "M" from the very first adventure, which seemed to have nothing to do with all the stuff they've uncovered since level 5, and noticed that "M" -- which they then connected to the name of the guy they think is behind all this, whose name also starts with "M." Perhaps significantly, I have neither confirmed nor denied this either as DM to the players, nor yet in-game. My point though is that they have not had to do anything. They could say "screw the Romans let's go on some other adventure" if they want.
Another example of it not being a "railroad" is that they have found a map to 16 places. They think there are some clues about what is going on in some or all of the places. But THEY are deciding what to do about the map. THEY have chosen what order to visit those places in. (Hint: it is not the order I would have chosen, but it is up to them.)
No DM can just give you "run of the world, do anything you want." Absent that, then all adventures or campaigns will have parameters. I've tried to make mine as open-ended as possible, while still having an epic storyline going on... Mind you, at level 7, a storyline they are not 100% even sure of yet (although they are getting closer with the hints I've dropped).
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
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I'm writing a campaign and I was wondering if there are any tips on making the players actions really matter in the whole of the story without uprooting the whole campaign?
My best advice would be to have multiple ways to get to the same conclusion.
Write a campaign, not a story. A campaign has to change based on the PC’s actions.
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How would I really do that?
I don't know what the different ways they would go though so or should I try and think what they would or when they do something different I just adjust it on the fly?
I start by identifying the main conflict I want the campaign to be about. Then you seed the world with NPCs on both sides of the conflict. The high-ups on one side will be your big bads. Those on the other may be friendly NPCs or quest givers or allies or whatever.
You give both sides motivations and goals and then you just let them pursue their agendas as time passes. When the party does something, the NPCs in their sphere of influence react according to their goals and motivations. A "living" world takes more work upfront, but it can handle almost anything a party can throw at it. Building out two (or more) sides of the conflict means you could even handle the party switching allegiance.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
So basically if the party goes of track the NPC's guide them back on?
No, the NPCs don’t “guide them back on track,” what scatterbraind is describing is a “sandbox” style campaign, one without “tracks.” Instead of writing a story with a beginning, middle, and end instead you write all of the characters and then let the players’ choices and their characters’ successes set the course of the adventure. I prefer those too, like scatter said, they take more work up front, but then the whole world seems more “living” so there’s no way for the PCs to derail anything and the PCs will automatically influence the course of the campaign.
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ok thanks for these ideas
Try to work morally awkward events into the story, where there is no clear cut good or bad, and you can show them the results of their choices. For example imagine two warring kingdoms, both righteous and good and both with valid claims against the other. Or perhaps some group wants to set off a natural disaster which will wipe out a town, but their reason is to destroy a monster den which will do even more damage if left alone.
The only story you should write is what has come before - what led to the current state of the world; the history of characters and towns, the reason the BBEG is Evil.
Then you need to make the plan for the BBEG - what they want to do, and would probably succeed at were it not for those meddling adventurers. What do they need in order to achieve their goals? Is it unique, or is it something which can be found in several places.
Make milestones for the BBEG, indicating the progress of their plot - EG, they need one of the 5 "Things of Power", which are scattered about the land. Then they need a Whatnot, which only a certain wizard has, and then they need to find a cave which only someone with a Thing of Power can find, and then take the Dooda from that cave to a population center (the more people the better) to sacrifice them and summon GribbleGrabble the Devourer.
The BBEG will follow their goals - if the party keeps them from getting the first Thing of Power, they will seek out the second, then the third, until they succeed. Then they will find the wizard with the Whatnot, and so on. The adventurers can affect the success of the BBEG's attempts, but cannot change their overall plan - only how they attempt to complete it. If the adventurers get all 5 Things of Power and destroy them, the BBEG will have to make a new plan for their evil goals - so if this is a possibility, then you will have to give them 2 or more methods by which to achieve their ends (see pirates of the Caribbean - Jack wants immortality, goes for isla de muerta, and that plan is set back again and again until the isla de muerta is claimed by the sea, wherein he starts looking for the fountain of youth instead - same goal, different plan).
This way the campaign will grow around the players naturally, instead of them feeling like no matter what they did, the same thing would have happened (an example being when the BBEG needs a single artefact, and after a massive fight, they escape with it anyway - the players know that was necessary to advance the plot, and so they know that it was going to happen whatever they did - thereby feeling that they didn't write the story, they just acted it).
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If you aren't writing for publication, your best option is simply not trying to plan very far ahead in detail; there's no way to uproot plans you haven't yet made.
I second what DuckSlayer said... I wrote a backstory for my world, made up a BBEG, decided his goal and what he needed to achieve it, and wrote out a plan for him. It is a multi-step process, and he is going to proceed with each step (and succeed at each step, probably), unless and until the point when the party interferes. What happens after that, well... I have to wait and see.
Already the party did something (though he does not actually know it was them) that caused him to react and they actually saw the results of that reaction (though they aren't 100% sure exactly why he did it). I did not plan that reaction. They did something and I thought hm, what would the reaction to this be? And then I described what happened.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
A lot of newer DMs, and even veterans too, seem to think a campaign needs some "BBEG" out to "destroy the world" who "the players must stop"....
Absolutely not true at all.
THAT... is a matter of taste.
Guy ("Great GM") a few months back did a video describing the 4 types of campaigns and pointing out that not every GM is equally good at running all 4 types. Among this type, one is the Epic Campaign (which is basically what you describe). Epic Campaigns have a BBEG out to destroy the world, kingdom, what have you, and PCs are trying to save the world/plane/universe/whatever.
One is what I would call "episodic," where each adventure is its own kind of "short story" and the campaign is a "short story collection" -- the campaign is just what happened to this group of players, but the individual events are not connected to each other in any specific way otherwise.
One was what he called "player oriented" though I would call it "character oriented," which is all about the characters and their backstories.
And then the 4th one, I'm not sure I would really have added, but I would call the "after the fact" campaign. You never meant to run a game for this long with the same people, but all the same people showed up each week and so you look back over the last year and realize that quite without intending to do so, you have a campaign. IMO, this is not that different from "episodic" except that in one case you intended to run for a long time and in the other you didn't.
His point, though, was that some people excel at one or two types of campaigns and few people excel at all of them. He went on to say that he usually does epic or episodic and had never tried character driven, but he wanted to do that his next time out.
For me... I am like him, best at epic or episodic. The only long-term campaign I ever ran (in Champions) ended in a "Crisis on Infinite Earths" type of save the universe situation with all the heroes in the world vs. Darkseid. My current campaign is also epic in scope. That's the type of campaign I like to run.
No, you don't have to run a game like that. But that is my strength (making it so that it all fits together and the players at the end look back and realize that all the adventures they were on that seemed disconnected had something to do with this final battle they are now facing). I could run the other ways, probably, but I would not do as good a job as GM, compared to running epic games. You'd be better off asking a different person to DM an "accidental" game or a "character-focused" game than asking me to do it. Just like I'm better off at adventure, dungeon, wilderness stuff, than at faction conflict in an urban setting.
If you're new, you should certainly try all these out. But if you know you have strengths, my advice would be play to your strengths. It's much better to run a 9.5/10 quality epic game, than run a 3.5/10 pc-focused game. Explain it all in session 0, of course... make sure the players want the type of game you want to run. (I gave my players a choice between epic and episodic and they picked epic.) But don't try to run a style of game that is not in your comfort zone... and don't feel ashamed that you have a comfort zone or are good at one type of game over another. It's better to be great at one thing, and do that, than mediocre at many things.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Lots of good ideas here. My take is that a lot of this depends on the level or Tier of the party AND the experience and interests of the players. newer player with T1 characters aren't really in a position to take on a near-godlike entity directly, right? but they could be involved in some tendril of the conflict where they can get a whiff of some larger plot or a glimpse of a shadow of a higher up. Now take the scenario of well experienced players with Tier 3 characters who might be right in the thick of some world shaping endeavor, either instigating it or trying to prevent it. As stated well by others, its about giving them agency but within the bounds of something they can handle.
I like the “episodic,” although I put in work to link things together in some ways. Usually, either the Players or their PCs will make enemies during their adventures who I can use for recurring plot lines which keeps continuity among the episodes. If they don’t then I can provide some cross encounters, but I usually don’t have to with them. They’ll almost inevitably end up hating or aggravating some NPCs on principle
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On making a campaign one of my methods is to have multiple conclusions be possible. One way I do that is by using Chekhov’s Gun.
What is Chekhov’s Gun? It’s a story element where if the author describes a gun in a room, eventually someone is going to use it. How does it work in DnD?
By using the tropes we are familiar with. For example, if my players end up in an inn and I describe the serving girl as polite, pretty and friendly, and then the half orc at the next table gropes her until she cries, that’s gonna start a bar fight.
The serving girl in this case is Chekhov’s Gun and since they’re a good aligned party I don’t expect them to ignore it.
I expect them to come to her aid in some way, not necessarily combat, and by doing so they’ll find out something about either her or the half orc that leads them further into the campaign I have planned.
For instance, say they help the girl by casting charm person on the Half Orc who then relates to them that he’s part of a scouting party counting guards in the village and there’s a warband of orcs waiting to storm the walls. Or they knock him out and see that he has orc tribal tattoos under his clothes and a small, crude map of the city with hash marks for indicating city guards on it.
Thats an example of two ways to get to the same bit of knowledge, or nugget of adventure.
either way, experiment, try stuff, you’ll figure it out.
Good description of GM styles. Thinking about it this way, episodic is definitely my style. It works good if you logically connect the episodes together that build towards the present situation, while letting each episode be largely driven by player freedom.
My problem with the epic is that the players lose freedom because they are completely railroaded into chasing around this overwhelming bad guy. That’s just my impression, feel free to disagree. And is not that you can’t make bad guys for an episodic, they just aren’t RAARR WORLD END bad guys. Just regular bad guys: PCs can fight them, ignore them, or even deal with or help them, all of which has consequences on future episodes.
The PC driven style I don’t like either because it kind of railroads the DM it seems... DM is just catering to the PC backstories and little else? Am I wrong? Maybe, I haven’t tried it. Seems like the DMs creativity is a bit constrained by PC demands.
I do try to splash some backstory elements when it makes sense, but never let it tie me down or feel like I need to do so.
First of all, I think railroads are unnecessarily viewed as a dirty word in relation to "sandbox." I listened to a podcast a week or so ago when they talked about sandbox vs., not railroad, but rollercoaster. They talked about how rollercoasters are completely on rails but they can be super exciting, and so can a story with a more-or-less linear plot.
That said, some of us ask our players what they want. In my case, I gave mine a choice between episodic and epic (though I did not call them that) and they chose epic. They chose a world in which an active storyline with an epic bad guy is going on, and they get to see it and maybe interfere with it. They preferred that to a world where we would "discover" the story together. No, they said, we want the story to be there and we uncover it (rather than me making it up as we go along). So that's what I gave them.
I'm not sure if they've felt "railroaded," but I haven't forced them to do anything. The BBEG is trying to take down the Roman Empire. At first they didn't even know who he was and were doing (what they thought were) unrelated adventures. Only just the last session someone looked back at a note signed by "M" from the very first adventure, which seemed to have nothing to do with all the stuff they've uncovered since level 5, and noticed that "M" -- which they then connected to the name of the guy they think is behind all this, whose name also starts with "M." Perhaps significantly, I have neither confirmed nor denied this either as DM to the players, nor yet in-game. My point though is that they have not had to do anything. They could say "screw the Romans let's go on some other adventure" if they want.
Another example of it not being a "railroad" is that they have found a map to 16 places. They think there are some clues about what is going on in some or all of the places. But THEY are deciding what to do about the map. THEY have chosen what order to visit those places in. (Hint: it is not the order I would have chosen, but it is up to them.)
No DM can just give you "run of the world, do anything you want." Absent that, then all adventures or campaigns will have parameters. I've tried to make mine as open-ended as possible, while still having an epic storyline going on... Mind you, at level 7, a storyline they are not 100% even sure of yet (although they are getting closer with the hints I've dropped).
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.