One option is to have competing interests in your world. If you don't know who will come out on top, you will be less likely to subconsciously force your players to follow any singular path.
For example, in Princes of the Apocalypse, there are several cults all vying for power. The players choose who to prioritize and which dungeons to explore first, but whoever they visit last becomes the "BBEG" encounter.
The "Outline" of the adventure remains the same, but the specifics of the adventure changes meaningfully depending on player behavior.
Create the infrastructure of your world and story. The "history" of your world is mostly set in stone but you should only reveal what needs to be revealed at the time so that if you have better ideas later you can change them. This also allows you to adapt parts of your world's history to your players.
Never create a story expecting your players to follow a set path. Create scenarios, create what has ALREADY happened, but from there it is almost entirely improv based on your player's actions.
In any scenario where your players are present, don't say "the bad guy DOES a THING." It should always be "the bad guy ATTEMPTS to do a THING." This allows the players to respond, and decide if they want to try and stop the bad guy.
A railroad is called that because it’s on rails. It’s only going to go in one direction and end in one place. It doesn’t matter if everyone on the train wants to turn right, it will keep going straight. If you already decided how things are going to end, no matter what the players do, you are railroading. To not railroad means you let players off the rails and let them turn where and when they want. There will always be consequences (good and bad) for the choices they make, but they should be allowed meaningful choices.
For example, If you get to the point where the BBEG is going to conquer the continent in two weeks, and the players know that, you then let them decide what to do. Do they charge in right away, even though they are unprepared? Do they go first to collect the artifact that will give them a better chance at winning, but they may not be able to then get to the BBEG within those two weeks? Do they flee to a safer part of the world (to get their loved ones to safety, or to gather allies and come fight another day)? Do they go on a two week drinking bender? Do they decide to join up with the BBEG?
The idea is, you decide what’s generally going to happen, but let the PCs be a variable that wasn’t accounted for. If they do nothing x happens. When they arrive, they change things and now instead of x, you get some other result.
The question of railroading has always confused me. I've been an RP'r since the early 80's and played off and on, since. It was usually, "we're starting in ______ town, and you guys are starting out as ________." Then the DM starts the story and we were always just cool with it because we wanted to play.
I've just started playing 5e two years ago, and just recently started spending time online about it, and see these railroading discussions. The DM spends his time creating this vast world and story arc, and as a player you want to say, "I don't want to do the adventure you've set up. I just want to travel town to town playing my harp and wooing women, and if you say no, you're railroading us." This is the player that never gets another invite. Period.
When did railroading become a thing? I spoke to my group about it and they all looked at me like I'd just grown a second nose. They couldn't see what all the fuss was either. As players they expected me to come up with a story arc, that we would all enjoy. I give them a heads up of the starting situation at character creation so they have an opportunity to fine tune the character a bit, get into the character and the situation, and then we are off and running.
When did normal DM storytelling become a bad thing? Please illuminate me.
"Normal DM storytelling" as you described it isn't normal. It is one way to tell a story as a DM, not THE way.
It is a bad thing if your players don't like it. If your players never said anything, either they were fine with it or they didn't feel comfortable bringing it up with you.
My first DM told ok stories, but you always had to play his way. That kinda sucks for a lot of people after a while.
Some of your descriptions of how you DM are not exclusive to your idea of "normal DMing." You can start a more open-ended sandbox-style story in the same way you described.
Reducing player agency to "I wanna be a womanizing Bard" completely misses why many people hate railroading. Have you not looked up what railroading is at all? I'm not sure you even understand what you are arguing for or against here.
I understand railroading is forcing characters into a single pre-written story, with no other options. Sandbox style is when you provide a few adventure options for them to choose.
The way I see it, if you want sandbox style, go play WoW. It's your time to spend there. My group meets every other Sunday, for about 6 hours. My groups have always relied upon me to come up with cool stories and adventures, and with just a couple exceptions, I've not let them down. I have a main story arc, several side quests, and even manage to incorporate players backstories into the plot. I'm the Dungeon Master. I make the rules, create the world. I've never had a complaint though I am open to them. And my group knows this. I stay away from huge sweeping, two year long, epic stories or deep dungeon dives so that things stay fresh and don't become Groundhog Day every time we sit down.
Player agency - my players can do pretty much whatever they want within the story I've laid out. What I want to do, matters as much as what the players want. If they ask me to DM, I'd say they are okay with that.
I understand railroading is forcing characters into a single pre-written story, with no other options. Sandbox style is when you provide a few adventure options for them to choose.
The way I see it, if you want sandbox style, go play WoW. It's your time to spend there. My group meets every other Sunday, for about 6 hours. My groups have always relied upon me to come up with cool stories and adventures, and with just a couple exceptions, I've not let them down. I have a main story arc, several side quests, and even manage to incorporate players backstories into the plot. I'm the Dungeon Master. I make the rules, create the world. I've never had a complaint though I am open to them. And my group knows this. I stay away from huge sweeping, two year long, epic stories or deep dungeon dives so that things stay fresh and don't become Groundhog Day every time we sit down.
Player agency - my players can do pretty much whatever they want within the story I've laid out. What I want to do, matters as much as what the players want. If they ask me to DM, I'd say they are okay with that.
A lot will depend on how you define a railroad.
To me, a railroad is more about having an end in mind than a beginning. There kind of needs to be a certain amount of railroading at the start of a campaign to get everyone in the same place and start working together. For the end, however, if you know specifically, that no matter what the players do, the villain will blow up the world. Then that's a railroad. If you know the villain will try to blow up the world, but the players have a (not guaranteed) way to stop them. That's where it stops being a railroad. Ideally, there's actually more than one way to stop the villain, and you leave open the option that the players may come up with an effective plan which hadn't even occurred to you, and that they can do that and stop the BBEG. If there is only one possible way, and its your way, no matter ho clever the player's idea is, now we're getting back to railroad territory.
It sounds like you played a lot like I did back in the 80s in my 1e and 2e days. Back then, it was more of the DMs job to find a reason to point the players at a target of the week and then start fighting. (At least it was for me and my middle school friends, others played differently.) The game was so lethal, (and we were so immature) that the idea of developing a character and allowing them some kind of narrative arc like in a book or a movie was unthinkable. Heck, I barely even bothered naming my characters until they hit 3rd level.
Now, the game has evolved into a more of a cooperative storytelling format. Character death is comparatively rare. And published adventures aren't called "modules" that can be slotted in to any sort of campaign, but are instead extended affairs that actually take characters through an entire storyline. The general expectation is that even people who are homebrewing will try to develop a long term story with a proper beginning, middle and end.
I'm not trying to say there's anything right or wrong with any kind of playstyle, here, just trying to explain the way the game has shifted. If you're having fun, you're doing it right.
To me, a railroad is more about having an end in mind than a beginning. There kind of needs to be a certain amount of railroading at the start of a campaign to get everyone in the same place and start working together. For the end, however, if you know specifically, that no matter what the players do, the villain will blow up the world. Then that's a railroad. If you know the villain will try to blow up the world, but the players have a (not guaranteed) way to stop them. That's where it stops being a railroad. Ideally, there's actually more than one way to stop the villain, and you leave open the option that the players may come up with an effective plan which hadn't even occurred to you, and that they can do that and stop the BBEG. If there is only one possible way, and its your way, no matter ho clever the player's idea is, now we're getting back to railroad territory.
Okay, now this I understand. Not my style at all. This is just a bad DM. I've known the type.
But it's made to sound in discussions like this, that if I've offered only one quest/adventure to start the group, it's considered railroading. That's not how I see it.
the idea of developing a character and allowing them some kind of narrative arc like in a book or a movie was unthinkable.
I actually think this is a fundamental problem with the way many players seem to have come to think about D&D -- A roleplaying game is not a book or a movie, and one should not expect to have an experience around the gaming table that reminds one of books or movies. Sure, there are certain elements in common with a narrative story such as a book: the DM provides descriptive passages, reminiscent of a novel's descriptive paragraphs; the characters engage in dialogue with each other, much as in a novel; there is an opening, a build-up, and a climax, much like in a novel (or a movie). But it is NOT a novel. Nor a movie. It is a game. There are fundamental differences between them, and I think one reason DMs get into traps is that they are trying to provide players who want the "I'm starring in my own movie" experience with a cinematic, rather than a gaming, experience.
The game has evolved into a more of a cooperative storytelling format.
RPGs have always been "cooperative storytelling" but they are not storytelling in the sense of building a novel. You are not all coming together to work on a novel around the table. You are coming together to play a game, in which dice play a roll, and none of you fully control the outcome. And the fun of it is supposed to be just this fact -- that unlike in a novel, in which there is a plot (and in a well-written novel, every scene is in some way related to that plot), in a roleplaying game, anything can happen. So my players can walk into the throne hall of the goblin chief and my level 2 sorcerer player can fire off a level 1 spell, crit with a nat 20, and roll max on all the dice, and one-shot the goblin chief. That was awesome, as a gaming moment. It would suck, as the climax of a novel. What, after 200 pages, they just walked in and one-shotted the guy? What's was the point of reading this novel?!
The old modules that everyone thinks were dungeon crawls - and yes, we played them that way - did not have to be. I recall watching a review of module D2, which was a tournament module. The guy who ran the module in the tournament said he awarded the most points to players who got through the whole thing without killing anyone. It was possible but very hard to do. The fact that we as 8th and 9th graders just went through these dungeons didn't mean you had to mow everyone down. Old-school adventures just put a location in front of the players and the DM said, "Do what you want -- as long as you go into this dungeon." That is not a railroad. It is the definition of sandbox. It's just that many players today think that "as long as you go into this dungeon" is the railroad. It's not -- it's a concession to reality. That reality to which we are conceding is that the DM has limited time, and can't possibly produce enough dungeons for you to go anywhere you want, and you can't explore more than one of them at a time anyway, so you may as well do the one he actually prepared.
But of course, "going into a dungeon and doing stuff" isn't what they do in the movies or in a novel -- so players object because it is not "cinematic" enough. Again, D&D and other RPGs are games, not movies. It's like trying to play Monopoly and objecting that the goal is to get rich and buy property because "that's not what they do on Celebrity Apprentice."
Character death is comparatively rare.
Another term for this is "plot armor." The main characters in books and movies nearly always have it. Even if someone dies, the character dies usually at the end of the movie in a major climactic scene (e.g. Steve Trevor in the Wonder Woman movie), and not halfway through the second reel to a lucky shot from an arrow that was aimed at someone else and took a bad trajectory. Characters in novels don't die to nameless goblins in a pit somewhere. They die to a Balrog while standing on the bridge with a glowing sword declaring "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" or they die fighting a horde of orcs to save two little Hobbits, and only after their major character arc has completed and they have come out the other side of temptation and been redeemed. They die in significant, memorable, and important ways -- if the die at all (e.g., the guy who lost to the Balrog got a rez in the next adventure), not in random places against enemies of no particular interest or significance to the plot. So again, thinking of the game like a movie or a novel, you get the idea that your character shouldn't die except maybe to the BBEG or to save an entire town from a dragon or something. But certainly not to some kobolds with slings.
And published adventures aren't called "modules" that can be slotted in to any sort of campaign, but are instead extended affairs that actually take characters through an entire storyline. The general expectation is that even people who are homebrewing will try to develop a long term story with a proper beginning, middle and end.
Well, these are tow different things. A long-term story with a beginning, middle, and end, can be "You meet at a tavern and hear a rumor of the BBEG", followed by, "You fight a series of progressively harder battles against the minions of the BBEG," followed by "You killed the BBEG." Even the simplest old-school modules had that -- the ones everyone poo-poos these days.
Again I think the published adventure (no longer modules) of today definitely have taken their cues from movies and novels, and this further exacerbates the problem. RPGs are games, not movies.... and I think we'd be better off if people remembered that.
How do I not railroad? What is an outline, and what is a railroad?
A New DM up against the World
One option is to have competing interests in your world. If you don't know who will come out on top, you will be less likely to subconsciously force your players to follow any singular path.
For example, in Princes of the Apocalypse, there are several cults all vying for power. The players choose who to prioritize and which dungeons to explore first, but whoever they visit last becomes the "BBEG" encounter.
The "Outline" of the adventure remains the same, but the specifics of the adventure changes meaningfully depending on player behavior.
I really like this example of two campaign ideas of sandboxing vs railroading.
Create the infrastructure of your world and story. The "history" of your world is mostly set in stone but you should only reveal what needs to be revealed at the time so that if you have better ideas later you can change them. This also allows you to adapt parts of your world's history to your players.
Never create a story expecting your players to follow a set path. Create scenarios, create what has ALREADY happened, but from there it is almost entirely improv based on your player's actions.
In any scenario where your players are present, don't say "the bad guy DOES a THING." It should always be "the bad guy ATTEMPTS to do a THING." This allows the players to respond, and decide if they want to try and stop the bad guy.
A railroad is called that because it’s on rails. It’s only going to go in one direction and end in one place. It doesn’t matter if everyone on the train wants to turn right, it will keep going straight. If you already decided how things are going to end, no matter what the players do, you are railroading.
To not railroad means you let players off the rails and let them turn where and when they want. There will always be consequences (good and bad) for the choices they make, but they should be allowed meaningful choices.
For example, If you get to the point where the BBEG is going to conquer the continent in two weeks, and the players know that, you then let them decide what to do. Do they charge in right away, even though they are unprepared? Do they go first to collect the artifact that will give them a better chance at winning, but they may not be able to then get to the BBEG within those two weeks? Do they flee to a safer part of the world (to get their loved ones to safety, or to gather allies and come fight another day)? Do they go on a two week drinking bender? Do they decide to join up with the BBEG?
The idea is, you decide what’s generally going to happen, but let the PCs be a variable that wasn’t accounted for. If they do nothing x happens. When they arrive, they change things and now instead of x, you get some other result.
Love this all
A New DM up against the World
The question of railroading has always confused me. I've been an RP'r since the early 80's and played off and on, since. It was usually, "we're starting in ______ town, and you guys are starting out as ________." Then the DM starts the story and we were always just cool with it because we wanted to play.
I've just started playing 5e two years ago, and just recently started spending time online about it, and see these railroading discussions. The DM spends his time creating this vast world and story arc, and as a player you want to say, "I don't want to do the adventure you've set up. I just want to travel town to town playing my harp and wooing women, and if you say no, you're railroading us." This is the player that never gets another invite. Period.
When did railroading become a thing? I spoke to my group about it and they all looked at me like I'd just grown a second nose. They couldn't see what all the fuss was either. As players they expected me to come up with a story arc, that we would all enjoy. I give them a heads up of the starting situation at character creation so they have an opportunity to fine tune the character a bit, get into the character and the situation, and then we are off and running.
When did normal DM storytelling become a bad thing? Please illuminate me.
"Normal DM storytelling" as you described it isn't normal. It is one way to tell a story as a DM, not THE way.
It is a bad thing if your players don't like it. If your players never said anything, either they were fine with it or they didn't feel comfortable bringing it up with you.
My first DM told ok stories, but you always had to play his way. That kinda sucks for a lot of people after a while.
Some of your descriptions of how you DM are not exclusive to your idea of "normal DMing." You can start a more open-ended sandbox-style story in the same way you described.
Reducing player agency to "I wanna be a womanizing Bard" completely misses why many people hate railroading. Have you not looked up what railroading is at all? I'm not sure you even understand what you are arguing for or against here.
I understand railroading is forcing characters into a single pre-written story, with no other options. Sandbox style is when you provide a few adventure options for them to choose.
The way I see it, if you want sandbox style, go play WoW. It's your time to spend there. My group meets every other Sunday, for about 6 hours. My groups have always relied upon me to come up with cool stories and adventures, and with just a couple exceptions, I've not let them down. I have a main story arc, several side quests, and even manage to incorporate players backstories into the plot. I'm the Dungeon Master. I make the rules, create the world. I've never had a complaint though I am open to them. And my group knows this. I stay away from huge sweeping, two year long, epic stories or deep dungeon dives so that things stay fresh and don't become Groundhog Day every time we sit down.
Player agency - my players can do pretty much whatever they want within the story I've laid out. What I want to do, matters as much as what the players want. If they ask me to DM, I'd say they are okay with that.
A lot will depend on how you define a railroad.
To me, a railroad is more about having an end in mind than a beginning. There kind of needs to be a certain amount of railroading at the start of a campaign to get everyone in the same place and start working together. For the end, however, if you know specifically, that no matter what the players do, the villain will blow up the world. Then that's a railroad. If you know the villain will try to blow up the world, but the players have a (not guaranteed) way to stop them. That's where it stops being a railroad. Ideally, there's actually more than one way to stop the villain, and you leave open the option that the players may come up with an effective plan which hadn't even occurred to you, and that they can do that and stop the BBEG. If there is only one possible way, and its your way, no matter ho clever the player's idea is, now we're getting back to railroad territory.
It sounds like you played a lot like I did back in the 80s in my 1e and 2e days. Back then, it was more of the DMs job to find a reason to point the players at a target of the week and then start fighting. (At least it was for me and my middle school friends, others played differently.) The game was so lethal, (and we were so immature) that the idea of developing a character and allowing them some kind of narrative arc like in a book or a movie was unthinkable. Heck, I barely even bothered naming my characters until they hit 3rd level.
Now, the game has evolved into a more of a cooperative storytelling format. Character death is comparatively rare. And published adventures aren't called "modules" that can be slotted in to any sort of campaign, but are instead extended affairs that actually take characters through an entire storyline. The general expectation is that even people who are homebrewing will try to develop a long term story with a proper beginning, middle and end.
I'm not trying to say there's anything right or wrong with any kind of playstyle, here, just trying to explain the way the game has shifted. If you're having fun, you're doing it right.
Okay, now this I understand. Not my style at all. This is just a bad DM. I've known the type.
But it's made to sound in discussions like this, that if I've offered only one quest/adventure to start the group, it's considered railroading. That's not how I see it.
I actually think this is a fundamental problem with the way many players seem to have come to think about D&D -- A roleplaying game is not a book or a movie, and one should not expect to have an experience around the gaming table that reminds one of books or movies. Sure, there are certain elements in common with a narrative story such as a book: the DM provides descriptive passages, reminiscent of a novel's descriptive paragraphs; the characters engage in dialogue with each other, much as in a novel; there is an opening, a build-up, and a climax, much like in a novel (or a movie). But it is NOT a novel. Nor a movie. It is a game. There are fundamental differences between them, and I think one reason DMs get into traps is that they are trying to provide players who want the "I'm starring in my own movie" experience with a cinematic, rather than a gaming, experience.
RPGs have always been "cooperative storytelling" but they are not storytelling in the sense of building a novel. You are not all coming together to work on a novel around the table. You are coming together to play a game, in which dice play a roll, and none of you fully control the outcome. And the fun of it is supposed to be just this fact -- that unlike in a novel, in which there is a plot (and in a well-written novel, every scene is in some way related to that plot), in a roleplaying game, anything can happen. So my players can walk into the throne hall of the goblin chief and my level 2 sorcerer player can fire off a level 1 spell, crit with a nat 20, and roll max on all the dice, and one-shot the goblin chief. That was awesome, as a gaming moment. It would suck, as the climax of a novel. What, after 200 pages, they just walked in and one-shotted the guy? What's was the point of reading this novel?!
The old modules that everyone thinks were dungeon crawls - and yes, we played them that way - did not have to be. I recall watching a review of module D2, which was a tournament module. The guy who ran the module in the tournament said he awarded the most points to players who got through the whole thing without killing anyone. It was possible but very hard to do. The fact that we as 8th and 9th graders just went through these dungeons didn't mean you had to mow everyone down. Old-school adventures just put a location in front of the players and the DM said, "Do what you want -- as long as you go into this dungeon." That is not a railroad. It is the definition of sandbox. It's just that many players today think that "as long as you go into this dungeon" is the railroad. It's not -- it's a concession to reality. That reality to which we are conceding is that the DM has limited time, and can't possibly produce enough dungeons for you to go anywhere you want, and you can't explore more than one of them at a time anyway, so you may as well do the one he actually prepared.
But of course, "going into a dungeon and doing stuff" isn't what they do in the movies or in a novel -- so players object because it is not "cinematic" enough. Again, D&D and other RPGs are games, not movies. It's like trying to play Monopoly and objecting that the goal is to get rich and buy property because "that's not what they do on Celebrity Apprentice."
Another term for this is "plot armor." The main characters in books and movies nearly always have it. Even if someone dies, the character dies usually at the end of the movie in a major climactic scene (e.g. Steve Trevor in the Wonder Woman movie), and not halfway through the second reel to a lucky shot from an arrow that was aimed at someone else and took a bad trajectory. Characters in novels don't die to nameless goblins in a pit somewhere. They die to a Balrog while standing on the bridge with a glowing sword declaring "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" or they die fighting a horde of orcs to save two little Hobbits, and only after their major character arc has completed and they have come out the other side of temptation and been redeemed. They die in significant, memorable, and important ways -- if the die at all (e.g., the guy who lost to the Balrog got a rez in the next adventure), not in random places against enemies of no particular interest or significance to the plot. So again, thinking of the game like a movie or a novel, you get the idea that your character shouldn't die except maybe to the BBEG or to save an entire town from a dragon or something. But certainly not to some kobolds with slings.
Well, these are tow different things. A long-term story with a beginning, middle, and end, can be "You meet at a tavern and hear a rumor of the BBEG", followed by, "You fight a series of progressively harder battles against the minions of the BBEG," followed by "You killed the BBEG." Even the simplest old-school modules had that -- the ones everyone poo-poos these days.
Again I think the published adventure (no longer modules) of today definitely have taken their cues from movies and novels, and this further exacerbates the problem. RPGs are games, not movies.... and I think we'd be better off if people remembered that.
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.