João writes:
I don’t want to railroad my players. But how can I create a classic quest to destroy the Evil Thing™ without railroading?
The principle of “don’t prep plots, prep situations” can also be thought of as prepping toys and then letting the players either (a) figure out how they want to play with them and/or (b) how they’re going to react to you actively playing them.
So if you’re prepping an RPG version of The Lord of the Rings, don’t prep the journey to Mt. Doom. Instead, prep:
- the One Ring
- the villains interested in the Ring (Sauron & Saruman)
- the tools those villains can use against the PCs (Nazgul, crebain, orcs)
And so forth.
Let’s say that we’re in Rivendell and Elrond, et. al. have just explained the history of the Ring, that Sauron is seeking it, and that the only way to destroy it is by throwing it into Mt. Doom.
(You could also design this scenario without proscribing one method for destroying the Ring: It could be Mt. Doom or the fire of an Elder Dragon or the sunken forges of Beleriand. Or you could take one step further back and not make Sauron’s defeat or destruction dependent on the One Ring. But, for the sake of argument, let’s just focus on the McGuffin Delivery concept.)
So you’re in Rivendell. You have the One Ring. And the know the Ring has to go to Mt. Doom.
Add a map of Middle Earth showing where Rivendell and Mt. Doom are.
Now, let the players decide how they want to get to Mt. Doom.
And… that’s it.
Railroad averted.
ACROSS THE MAP
The players now have a vast array of options open to them: Go through Moria? Over Caradhras? Through the Gap of Rohan? Head straight down the coast and sail to Gondor? Escort Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain, call in old favors owed, and taken army of dwarves south?
This, of course, makes a “here’s a map of the whole world, plot a course for yourself” campaign like this incredibly daunting to prep in advance and basically impossible to do so without wasting a bunch of time prepping stuff that will never be used.
If this is for your home campaign, though, you don’t need to prep everything in advance. You can figure out what your players are planning to do and then prep specifically for that.
They’re heading over the mountains? Prep Caradhras.
They’re heading to the coast? Prep the Corsairs of Umbar.
So what DO you need to prep for the map?
You need a broad patina of the world so that the players have enough context to make their decisions regarding route. The map provides the structure here, and so your prep mostly boils down to being able to answer the question, “What’s here?” when the players point at the map and ask.
You don’t need a lot of detail for this. Just one to three sentences for each broad region.
“What’s here?”
“That’s the Lonely Mountain, a dwarven kingdom ruled by King Dain.”
Just drawing the map will honestly do 90% of the work here. (There’s mountains here, a kingdom called Rohan there, etc.)
DEFAULT TO YES, FLESH OUT THE WORLD
As the players begin making their plans, they’re going to propose routes you never even considered. When this happens, default to yes and flesh out the world.
Player 1: There are mountains here. Should we go around them to the north or south?
Player 2: What about climbing straight over them?
Player 3: What about under the mountains? Are there any dungeons we could go through?
DM: (thinking fast) There are two, actually. A system of caves in the north near Mirkwood, infested with goblins. And an abandoned dwarven city to the south.
The players decide that sounds too dangerous and they decide to head south instead.
But now, of course, we’ve established that the Mines of Moria exist…
PLAYING WITH YOUR TOYS
The other thing you’ve prepped, of course, are those toys we mentioned earlier. With the planning session complete, you can use these tools to flesh out your prep for the players’ intended route. For example, they’re heading towards the Gap of Rohan, so you pull out some crebain spies dispatched by Saruman and plan to have those followed up by Uruk-Hai patrols if the PCs get spotted.
But these toys are also designed for active play. When the players do something unexpected that you weren’t prepared for, the first thing to ask your self is: How can I use my scenario toys to respond to that?
The second thing is to see if you have any generic toys that can be plugged in. (The PCs have gotten spooked by the crebain and are heading to Caradhras now? Well, it’s a good thing you’ve got this Living Mountain write-up from the bestiary.)
And the third thing is to say (when the players fail the extended skill check on Caradhras and are forced to turn aside to Moria), “Reaching the top of the stone steps, you look down upon the Walls of Moria. There the Gate stood once upon a time, the Elven Door at the end of the road from Hollin by which you have come… Okay, well this seems like a good place to wrap things up for this week.”
That should give you plenty of time to prep a legendary dungeon.
(Double check your challenge ratings, though. Otherwise someone might die in there.
I respectfully observe that this is STILL a railroad, just one offering multiple routes. Perhaps a more non-RR plan would be to offer three to six plot hooks. Players opt for one but the remaining five “problems” continue in motion. To use your example let’s assume the party opts instead to aid the Elves in their treacherous journey. What happens over time in Mordor? In Gondor? In The Shire? In a sandbox actions have consequences. In a railroad actions merely dictate which route is taken.
@Bob: The assumption here is that the PCs have, Frodo-style, said, “I’ll do it. I’ll take the Ring to Mordor.” It’s certainly possible to have a different campaign where Frodo was like, “Fuck this noise, I’m heading to the Blue Mountains and exploring dwarf ruins,” and Gandalf dealt with the One Ring in some other way.
But that’s not a campaign where you’re prepping a McGuffin Quest.
Note that several alternatives are discussed at the beginning of the article.
The setup as presented still allows the party to head North to the Iron Hills. Unless all options are closed off it is not a railroad.
To put it another way, a campaign premise is not a railroad. If the campaign pitch is “you will try to find a way to stop the greatest evil of the Third Age from overcoming the land” and the players signed up for that campaign, it’s expected that they will engage with the premise. If the premise is “role-playing in the Third Age of Middle-Earth” and the players decide they want no part of this suicidal “somehow defeat Sauron” nonsense, but you force them to engage with it anyway, you’re railroading them.
Nothing wrong with showing the effects of the Shadow’s growing influence over the land as they knock about the Bree-land, though. They might decide maybe they ought to get involved after all.
Bob Kile@1: The above could be railroady if it’s DM’s idea “you must destroy the Ring” and players say “but we’d rather stay home and protect the Shire” and the DM says “too bad get with the program.” It’s all about freedom of choice. If the players say, “hey, in the next campaign, we want to save the world by throwing some shit into a volcano,” and you as the DM are on board with that, now it’s your problem to figure out how to prep that without turning it into a railroad.
I believe Justin here is responding to people who think: “if we’re going to do a big cross-continent quest, I have to prep locations before the PCs get there. And I can’t possibly prep every location they might go to, so to avoid wasting my prep I have to force the PCs to follow the rails from one Location to the next.” The answer to that is, no you don’t, see above.
@Leland J. Tarkersley: Very well put.
When I was running for a multi-player group I always ended the session by asking “What do you think the PCs will do next?” It was understood that the players might not know, or might be dead wrong; but at least I had something to go on. And there was an understanding that if they said they were going to Moria and then made a sudden turn to Mirkwood, well, we might go out to dinner early that night.
I do less of this now because I live with my player, so I can ask him later. But I always do ask. The player(s) have a ton of valuable information that can make your prep easier.
Just don’t abuse your foreknowledge. We had issues once playing with a GM who believed “no plan survives contact with the enemy” and would take steps to make sure that it was true. After a while we started planning out of session and lying about it, so it looked like glorious improvisation even though it wasn’t. Our success rate with our plans went up a *lot*. This struck me as both unfair and irritating.
@Leland: Yup.
These types of adventures can also arise organically through sandbox play. (And the stakes may be considerably less than “destroy the Ring, save the world” if the idea of PCs doing important things is against your personal sandbox ethos for some reason.) The premise here is that the PCs have decided to take the Ring to Mordor: Does that choice force you to railroad them?
No. Nor do you need to kill yourself with overprep.
We have to remember the Principles of Using Linear Mediums as RPG Examples. LOTR is not an RPG session; we’re just using the content as a useful touchstone (you know what that map is, you know what the Corsairs of Umbar are, etc.).
As such we can imagine the events of the hypothetical LOTR RPG session as emerging naturally from player choices (you can choose any route; each has challenges; you just happened to fail the skill challenge on Caradhras and then chose to turn back) or as the DM railroading the players (thou shalt enter Moria and I will prevent you from taking any other route).
@Mary: I’m not 100% sure if you’re the same Mary Kuhner I knew from Usenet, but, if so, it warms my heart to know you’re here. You have been a major influence on me as a gamer and as a creator. Thank you.
If not, I’m still glad you’re here. Just differently. 😉
My take on this is to prep with a few side quests that are not obviously side-quests and throw them in on the way to the next milestone, whichever way the party goes. That will take care of whatever is going on today, and I will have time to prep for whatever they are going for, but there they will face new choices, so I will need new side-quests. On the side-quest side: usually, what happens is that the players find a logical connection with the main quest, and I roll with it, although it was not part of my original setting at all, but well, anything for a more cohesive campaign. Even if I roll randomly for a sidequest item, I will make sure it will be important in the next steps, so it gives this feeling of “how lucky we went this way, not the other way.” Just as long as this is not terribly obvious. It is much easier to make a minor item/event to be very important than controlling the play for a major one not to break the game.
Who says railroading is a bad thing? The real trick is to hide the fact that the players are on rails: make every decision seem like a logical consequence of their past play, or an inevitable result of factors they themselves have created. The tricks of psychological manipulation that you use to create a sense of tension or attachment can also be used to shepherd players. It’s challenging, but it’s an essential skill for creating memorable and long-term play.
Railroading is a broken technique seeking to fix a broken scenario.
Another important element here is that the players not taking a certain action is likely to have consequences, but it should never be used as a club to badger them into following the plot you have in mind.
When this theoretical Frodo says “Screw that, old man!” and refuses the call to that particular adventure, it’s completely reasonable to let the world become a bit darker. But the players don’t have to be the only possible heroes of this story. Perhaps the story becomes about how Boromir and Faramir patch up their differences and go on to destroy the ring together. Or maybe nobody does catch that serial killer on the loose, so they murder several more people and then… vanish. Decades from now people will still be puzzling over who they actually were. Not every problem is a legendary threat to the entire world.
If you do take that approach, you’re pushing the PCs onto the railroad. It’s “I thought I was out, but they keep pulling me back in”, and that’s generally not fun unless it’s chosen by player agency. The scenario hook is the instigating event. Your old partner turns up dead and it looks like the work of that guy you put away ten years ago. But you’re more than welcome to say “I’m too old for this shit, and I’d rather deal with these human traffickers right now. Let some new hot-shot homicide detectives handle it.”
You can play the villain with a grudge angle on occasion, but it’s dangerous. Did you drop his brother off a building 5 years ago in the game? Well… that makes sense. The game is responding to your actions and as long as you don’t make it feel like a punishment for not resolving the scenario the way the GM wanted, it’s likely to further player engagement. But when you fire your opening shot across the bow and the players respond with a shrug, it’s probably best to let it go.
Actions should have consequences so player choice matters, but don’t let it turn into the GM punishing the players for not biting at the plot hooks. That’s just railroading at gunpoint.
I think it’s worth pointing out that even in The Lord Of The Rings, most of the party actually abandoned the “Escort Frodo to Mt. Doom so he can destroy the Ring” quest, and ended up “playing” through the “Liberate Rohan” and “Siege of Minas Tirith” questlines.
Even if the only way to defeat Sauron is to destroy the Ring, the players are still free to fight Sauron on other fronts, to keep Sauron’s attacks from wreaking havoc before the Ring can be destroyed or to draw off his forces to give the Ringbearer a clearer shot.