Most of the problems that arise from railroading are the direct result of negating the primary strength of the RPG as a medium: Player choice.
Exploring the full scope of how player choice acts as the elemental ingredient of the RPG is beyond the scope of this manifesto, but the short version looks like this: For narratives with predetermined outcomes, literally every other medium is better than the RPG. For interactive narratives that tightly constrain player choice, computer games are clearly superior (including graphics and soundtracks and smoother implementation of more complicated mechanical structures). Non-interactive mediums, on the other hand, benefit from the polish of tight creative control.
What tabletop RPGs have going for them is the alchemy of player agency. Of presenting a situation and seeing what happens when a unique set of players make a unique set of decisions and produce a unique set of outcomes. When you railroad your players, you specifically set yourself at odds with the very thing that makes playing an RPG worthwhile in the first place.
When they’re confronted with a railroad, players will often exclaim, “Gimme a ring when you finish writing your novel! I’ll enjoy it more!” And they’re not wrong.
But that’s not the only problem with railroading. Railroading creates a whole penumbra of problems.
When a GM predetermines what’s going to happen in the game, they become solely responsible for the entire experience. And that’s a ridiculously heavy burden to bear. Are your encounters balanced? Did you include enough “cool stuff” for every player to participate in? Did you incorporate enough elements from each PC’s back story? The list goes on and on.
This is how you end up with GMs stringing together precariously balanced My Precious Encounters™ in a desperate juggling act as they try to keep all of their players happy.
When you allow the players to make their own decisions, all of the pressure and responsibility melts away: They’ll choose the fights they can win. They’ll approach situations in ways that let them do cool stuff. If there’s not enough stuff from their back story seeking them out, then they’ll go looking for it.
There are a couple of potential speed bumps here:
First, the players might choose to do something you, as the GM, don’t enjoy doing. I generally haven’t found this to be a problem. Partly because, even without railroading, I still wield a lot of control over what activities are available in the campaign. Mostly because any RPG campaign inherently includes parameters that everybody explicitly or implicitly agrees to before playing: “Let’s all play starfighter pilots!” simply doesn’t result in the players saying, “Okay. Let’s all buy a moisture farm on Tatooine.”
(If this implausible hypothetical were to occur, I would talk to my players about the mismatch of expectations and try to figure out what sort of game they’re looking for in their new careers as moisture farmers. If that’s a game I want to run, then we’ll go for it. If not, then we’ll play something else. Railroading, you’ll notice, wouldn’t actually solve the problem of them wanting to do one thing and me wanting to do something completely different.)
Second, the players might choose to do something that they don’t enjoy doing. This seems outrageous, but it’s also something that happens frequently with groups who are used to being railroaded. (It’s one of the problems living in the railroad’s penumbra.) They’ve been “trained” to see a plot hook and bite it (because otherwise the plot hook will bite them), so when they see a plot hook rich environment they start biting at everything.
If you let them roam free for a bit, however, they’ll work it out of their system. And then you’re liberated, too: You don’t have to try to read their minds. You can just let them do whatever they want with the expectation that they’ll do what they want to.
RAILROADING AS GAME STRUCTURE
Another problem in the penumbra of railroading is the effect that it has on game design.
I’ve talked in the past about the way in which the RPG industry and hobby generally doesn’t appreciate the importance of game structures. RPGs are often designed with the assumption that they’re some kind of pure and unadulterated experience. You’ll hear people say things like, “The players tell me what their characters are doing and then we resolve it! They can do anything!”
Except, of course, that’s nonsense. And, as a result, the RPG hobby has mostly rolled along on the basis of the four major structures that were developed in the first half decade or so of the industry: Railroading, dungeoncrawling, mystery scenarios, and combat. (Recently hexcrawling, as a fifth structure, has been making a resurgence.)
And at most tables things are even more constrained. Many ostensible mystery scenarios are poorly designed and actually fall back into railroading structures. D&D’s communication of dungeoncrawling procedures became anorexic in 1989 and literally disappeared entirely from the 4th Edition rulebooks.
I suspect that the result is that the vast majority of RPG sessions are built around a core structure of railroading and combat.
And this is why I think so many players like jumping into combat. Most combat systems feature robust mechanical systems with clear-cut win/loss conditions, which means that it’s the one place where most railroad GMs finally give their players the freedom to make meaningful choices.
This, in turn, is why the vast majority of RPGs are predominantly based around combat. And that will probably remain true until the industry collectively realizes that a universal mechanic doesn’t meaningfully equate to “You can do anything!” – particularly on the macro-level of scenario design.
THE OPPOSITE OF THE RAILROAD
… is not a sandbox.
That’s a common mistake, though, so let me unpack it a bit.
An RPG sandbox exists when the players can either choose or define what the next scenario is going to be. In other words, you get sandbox play when the entire world is designed as a situation, allowing the players to decide what their next adventure will be.
The opposite of a sandbox is saying, “I brought Keep on the Borderlands tonight, so that’s what we’re doing.” It’s the prototypical campaign where the GM comes prepared with a specific scenario for the game session and the players are expected to play through that scenario.
And this is where we run into the problem with treating “sandbox” as the opposite of “railroad”: Most people would consider “the GM has a scenario and the players are expected to play it” to be extremely light railroading (if they consider it railroading at all). In other words, I think the severity of a railroad is perceived to increase from the outside in: Predetermining that a particular scenario is going to be played is very light railroading. Predetermining the sequence of encounters is heavier railroading, but not as severe as predetermining the exact outcomes of those encounters ahead of time.
So when we cast “sandbox” and “railroad” as antonyms, we actually end up treating the lightest form of railroading as if it were the most extreme form of railroading. And, in response, the meaning of “sandbox” gets warped towards meaning “anything that isn’t linear”. Neither distortion is useful, with the former radicalizing our understanding of railroads and the latter eradicating the unique utility of the term “sandbox” by turning it into a synonym of “non-linear design”.
The opposite of the railroad is actually “default to yes”, which is a concept I’ll be discussing at more length in the Art of Rulings. Instead of defaulting to a rejection of everything proposed by the players, it’s the state in which players are free to make any choice and for the consequences of those choices to be fully explored.
I brought my old AD&D 2E stuff (1995 printing, french version) home in the holidays (they were in a box in the attic of my mothers since… I don’t know, probably 2000 when 3.0 got out?), and I skimmed the books. I started playing with this when I was twelve or thirteen (DMing, actually), so I kind of have a soft, nostalgic spot for it.
But you are so right about the anemic dungeoncrawling. Actually, the advice on how to run the game is pretty minimal and terrible. I never read anything else, and I honestly don’t know how one was supposed to learn how to effectively DM this without some form of tutoring. I don’t have many specific recollections, but I was probably a pretty shitty DM, and that surely followed me for a long, long time, well into 3.5E.
The situation today is much better. I recently skimmed Index Card RPG, and this game is mostly an applied class on how to DM (and prep) effectively. Dungeon World is also great in this regard. Stars Without Number (and all Sine Nomine books I read) is a treasure trove for the sandboxing DM, and other OSR are also great. This blog and others are alos super valuable. I have hope : the next generation of DM, raised on such good advice, will probably come up with great ideas.
Firstly I just wanted to say that I am working on getting into DMing for the first time and reading through your stuff is great!
Secondly I would love to hear your definition of the word penumbra. 😀
The key definition here is: “A surrounding or adjoining region in which something exists in a lesser degree.”
A common usage in this sense comes in American Constitutional scholarship, e.g. the “penumbra of the Bill of rights”. (This is almost certainly where I picked up the terminology.) If you google “in the penumbra”, however, you can find any number of examples.
I have been recently running my first campaign and come up with a few narrative arcs for my players to find and engage with. When it comes time to playing, I find it frustrating when they fail to engage with one of the narratives I came up with, so I’ve ended up making clues on the spot to try to get them to engage. I suppose this is what you define as light railroading.
My question is, how do I find the compromise between not railroading and not feeling like I wrote a bunch of material for nothing? Do I just need to come up with better clues/plot hooks for the narratives that my players don’t end up biting on?
@Owen: Check out Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design.
Multiple clues give multiple opportunities for the players to become engaged with material.
Equally important is to give DIFFERENT reasons for why people would want to get involved in a particular situation. Extra bang for your buck if you make this specific to the PCs and their interests. Check out Prepping Bangs.
Playing off the point you make over in “Death of the Wandering Monster”, it occurs to me that in D&D one of the penumbral issues of railroading is that it contributes to the meme that spellcasters in general, and wizards/clerics/druids in particular, are overpowered.
See, one of the big things about spellcasters in D&D is that they have limited options, that they have to choose how to invest their magic. Even spontaneous casters such as sorcerers only have limited spells known (so they have to guess which spells they are likely to want) and limited spell slots (so they have to decide whether to use their spells now and risk not having them later when they really need them). And preparatory casters like wizards and clerics have this even worse: they have an enormous array of possible spells, but must pick exactly which spells they are going to use each day in advance, and if they guess wrong then they have no way of changing their selection on-the-fly (at best they can leave some slots open to prep later, or swap out prepared spells, but that takes too long to do under any amount of time pressure). All of this is supposed to be a core weakness of spellcasters, a balancing factor against their powers.
But in a heavily railroaded game, you both cannot and don’t need to use non-combat spells to do anything interesting. You cannot use non-combat spells to go off the rails or do anything the storyteller doesn’t want you to do, and conversely there are never situations where you miss interesting content or are unable to advance without the correct utility spells.
So since the only spells that do anything are combat spells, spellcasters can simply dump all their resources into combat spells, negating or at least minimizing what is supposed to be one of their classes’ core limitations. Whereas if you abandon the My Precious Encounters model, suddenly spellcasters have to split their resources, invest spells known/prepared in exploration or utility magic and husband their resources more carefully in combat. It suddenly becomes logical for a wizard to leave a few spell slots unprepared so that he can take a fifteen-minute break to prep the perfect spell for bypassing that magically locked door that they can’t get through any other way, or divining the properties of the giant floating thinggummy hovering in the center of the room that might let them do something interesting if they understood it.
And though I specifically cited D&D here, I imagine this is a problem railroading produces in any game system, to varying degrees. Collapse the game to a single axis, and some classes/builds/archetypes benefit more than others.
Your “default to Yes” is, essentially, what “sandbox” means. I don’t think you are making a useful distinction here. You seem to relegate sandbox to meaning only a huge world in which players completely free to do absolutely anything.
But a “sandbox” is, after all, a box. It may be an extremely large box, or it might be a small box. The sandbox may also come pre-populated with toys(nodes, situations, tools…) other than the sand itself–toys which may strongly suggest, or even better, inspire, certain possible goals or win conditions.
But the point is, in a sandbox, you can do an try whatever you want, within reasonable boundaries, and deal with the consequences. Players are not constrained by to a particular goal or win condition, other than those they set for themselves.
If you are prepared to say “yes” to whatever the players wish to do (“yes” to the attempt, while leaving the outcome to common sense and the dice) then you are surely running a sandbox.
Taking the “Keep on the Borderlands” example, you can run that as a very small sandbox. You can just expressly ask your players to stay within borders of the map, which is not a big ask if, within that map, they are free to make whatever choices they wish, deal with the consequences, and see the impact they have on this little corner of the world.
It’s not that big a deal to ask players to make characters assuming something in the background of those characters motivates them to be in and stay in the particular sandbox that you have prepared.
Further thoughts: There is, of course, a spectrum between extreme “sandbox” and extreme “railroad”, but they are certainly the polar opposites in this discussion.
Playing what the GM has prepared for the session certainly is a light form of railroad at the macro or campaign level. But those individual scenarios may be sandboxes. I don’t think this creates any particular confusion about what either term means. Some people may draw the line between “sandbox” and “railroad” at different places along the spectrum, and use those labels to say “good” and “bad”, but we all still understand what the opposite ends of the spectrum look like. You can also carve out sections of the spectrum in the middle and label those something else, but it is still on the spectrum, and the extreme ends of the spectrum have not changed.
Scott wrote: You seem to relegate sandbox to meaning only a huge world in which players completely free to do absolutely anything.
“I know you wrote one thing, but let us instead work from the assumption that you said something completely different.”
Never gets old.