In the Railroading Manifesto I talk about how railroading warps player decision-making: “When you systematically strip meaningful choice from [the players], they stop making choices and instead start looking for the railroad tracks.”
Interestingly, GMs who habitually railroad rarely notice this effect, but it becomes glaringly obvious whenever the players they’ve screwed up come and play at my table: “Nothing is more incoherent than a player trying to figure out where the railroad is when there’s no railroad to be found.”
This is a very mild form of what bankuei calls Abused Gamer Syndrome. What these players have learned is that if they don’t preemptively look for the railroad and follow it, then they will be punished: They’ll be frustrated or have their character killed or be made to look stupid or have control of their character forcibly taken away from them or any number of other un-fun things that GMs do to force players back onto the rails.
So when these players are put into a situation where there IS no railroad, they will become increasingly desperate to find it, and they’ll interpret everything through the lens of, “Is this the railroad?” So if, for example, they’ve been trained to look for a GMPC who will tell them what to do and you put them into a scenario with a bunch of different factions who are all demanding that they do different things… it basically drives them nuts.
“We’re doing what the GM is TELLING us to do, but now the GM is telling us to do something completely different?! What the fuck?!”
They’re providing the input they’ve been trained to provide and expecting a certain outcome (a clear-cut track for them to follow), but are instead getting a completely different outcome. The more this happens, the more they flail about trying to find the “solution” that doesn’t actually exist. As their frustration mounts, it’s not unusual for them to feel as if the GM is just maliciously screwing with them (“We’re doing out best! Why is he punishing us?!”) and will begin acting out and even actively sabotaging the game.
In other cases, as we’ll discuss below, the player’s default response to the railroad is always to sabotage it in whatever small ways they can. Even though the railroad doesn’t exist, the disruptive behavior continues… and is probably even more successful because this GM, unlike the ones who railroaded them in the past, will let their actions have consequences!
All kinds of dysfunctional behavior can now result: Some players, feeling rewarded in their disruption and sabotage (because it’s been more successful and had a bigger impact on the game than anything else they’ve ever done!), will now double down. In other cases, GMs who follow where players lead them (because players generally know what they want to do) will lean into this disruptive behavior because it must be what the player wants, right? Except the player doesn’t actually want this! So nobody is happy. And because they’re not happy, the player will act out in the way they’ve been trained is the only viable method of expressing their dissatisfaction and become more disruptive, creating an ever-escalating cycle.
Because I spend a lot of time preaching about alternatives to railroading, it’s not unusual for people to come to me with reports of this type of behavior and say, “See? This doesn’t work! You have to railroad some players because it’s what they expect / it’s what they want / if you don’t they just sit there and don’t do anything!”
Which is, of course, the final trap. The GM is now exhibiting their own form of abused gamer syndrome, usually (but not always) self-inflicted through the medium of their players. (Of course, in some cases GMs saying this sort of thing are just looking to justify what they want to do.)
DESENSITIZATION
Let’s take a step back from these gamers being transferred into games running under different assumptions than the games they’re used to: The GM is running a railroad. The player has been trained to look for the tracks. That’s good, right?
Short answer: No.
Because it turns out that abused gamer syndrome creates other types of unwanted behavior.
DMDavid recently highlighted this on Twitter:
[There are] many places in Descent Into Avernus where the PCs must follow leads with no reason to believe the route brings them closer to their goal. The mod relies on, “We want to keep playing, and we’re told to go hither, so I guess…”
I see new players troubled by such moments more often than us longtime enthusiasts. We should be bothered too, but I wonder if we become a bit desensitized. (…) Do we grow accustomed to just following leads without question?
Instead of acting out or resisting the railroad, these players respond to it by becoming acquiescent. But that desensitization also means that they stop CARING: They don’t care about the NPCs or the lore or even what their objectives are supposed to be. These have all become bits of railroad track whose function is to point them at the next bit of railroad track. They have become divorced from their semantic content and now only serve a structural function.
GMs who relentlessly railroad their players will often crop up complaining that their players don’t care about their game world or their plot or their NPCs or whatever, but don’t understand why these behaviors emerge. They usually think the problem is with the players. (And since all they know how to do is railroad their players anyway, there’s nothing they can really do about it.)
Even more tragic is when this, too, becomes an escalating cycle: As the players stop caring about the semantic content of the game world, the GM also stops caring. The whole thing just becomes an empty loop.
Descent Into Avernus is actually a great example of this. There’s a bit in the adventure where the PCs are trying to help an NPC named Lulu recover her memories:
- They’re told that they need to go to a specific place and talk to some kenku. “Find the kenku! They knew Lulu back in Ye Olde Days! They’ll have valuable information and help reconstruct some of her lost memories!”
- The PCs go there. They find the kenku.
- The adventure says, “The kenku (…) instantly recognize Lulu, since they’ve met her previously.”
And then… nothing. Literally nothing. The kenku remembering Lulu is never mentioned again.
The problem is that the designers were no longer thinking of the game world as a real place. They weren’t thinking about what the players’ actual experience would be like — what they would be thinking, what they would want, etc. — because their players have stopped having that experience.
So the designers are thinking of the kenku strictly as another McGuffin in the long line of McGuffins that make up this campaign:
- They need a mechanism to move the PCs from Point A to Point B.
- The kenku were that device.
- The PCs are now at Point B.
- Therefore, the kenku are done.
And the kenku are thus immediately dropped.
The designers expect the players to directly transition to the next bit of railroad track without ever asking the kenku about the memories they were supposedly here to ask them about because the designers never actually cared about the ostensible reason the PCs were looking for the kenku. And they assume that the players won’t care either (probably because their players, suffering from abused gamer syndrome, don’t any more).
ACTS OF SABOTAGE
Of course, not all players respond to a railroad by acquiescing. Others will act out, seeking to sabotage the railroad (and the GM) as much as they can. Most of these players will learn that they can’t really stop the railroad from happening, but will still find small ways of declaring their independence and giving voice to their protests.
Examples are legion, honestly, but include stuff like:
- Killing NPCs (if you kill them before they railroad you, you’ll have carved out a small corner of freedom)
- Deliberately undermining whatever “objective” the PCs are supposed to be pursuing, ensuring its failure (the GM will usually negate this, but at least they made him work for it)
- Ignoring prompts until they’ve been forced down their throats
- Challenging illusionism by taking random, contradictory actions
- Provoking intra-party conflicts
And so forth. These behaviors will often be propped up by an array of secondary techniques. A common one is to create a half-crazed/anarchic character concept that can be used to “justify” whatever other actions the player is taking. (That way they can blame the character for “making” them play that way.)
SEEKING REFUGE
Instead of acting out, other players will identify the parts of the campaign where they do have freedom, seek to expand those elements of the game, and put their overwhelming focus on them.
A really common example of this is combat: Even lots of GMs who railroad everything else in their game will nevertheless “let the dice fall how they may” in combat. The rigid mechanical structure of combat paradoxically creates a zone of freedom where the players are free to choose their own actions and see those actions have meaningful consequences.
A similar impulse also drives a fair amount of rules lawyering: When you don’t trust the GM, the rules are seen as a way of either controlling outcomes or, just as frequently, providing the neutral arbiter that the GM should be.
Provoking intra-party conflicts, in addition to being a form of sabotage, can also be a way of seeking refuge, because PC-to-PC relationships is another area where otherwise railroady GMs will frequently become hands-off.
OTHER ABUSED GAMER SYNDROMES
I want to emphasize that these behaviors are usually not conscious choices. Players aren’t often literally thinking, “Well, if he’s going to railroad me, then I’m going to kill his NPCs.”
Railroading is also not the only negative behavior that can result in abused gamer syndrome. I’ve focused on it here because railroading is so common in RPG circles that it’s basically institutionalized gaslighting at this point, so it’s a touchstone almost everyone can grok, but there are definitely other behavior patterns that result from people’s bad experiences at gaming tables. (And behavior patterns that you’ll create if you’re creating those bad experiences.)
Another common one, for example, is the player who has been “trained” to just passively sit at the table and rarely contribute creatively because their previous tables (GMs and players alike) systemically rejected and ridiculed their ideas. I used to see A LOT of female gamers suffering from this problem because their entire gaming experience was with tables full of misogynists. (Thankfully, this seems to be less common now, although it obviously still happens.)
FIXING THE PROBLEM
So what should you do if you find a new player at your table exhibiting abused game syndrome?
Honestly, it mostly just boils down to having a frank discussion with them to reset expectations.
In extreme cases, however, this won’t work because they won’t believe you. Often they’ll have actually had GMs who said the same thing and then ruthlessly railroaded them, so why would you be any different?
(Ironically, some of the worst GMs for this are those who honestly don’t want to run a railroad, but have no idea how to prep or run anything other than a railroad. They’ll say stuff like, “There’s a plot, but you’re free to do anything you want!” But because the plot is all they know how to prep, everywhere else the PCs go they just find blank walls and vast empty expanses of boringness. This still feels like punishment to the players. Worse yet, because the GM is trying to give them “freedom” to “do whatever they want,” he is no longer giving them the usual prompts and pressure to keep them on the rails, so these bad situations paradoxically become more common!)
At this point, all you can do is run your game honest and true.
Port mortems can also be useful, where you pull the curtain back a bit so that you and the players can chat about what happened in the game, why it happened, and how it could have gone differently.
You may also find it necessary to interject yourself more aggressively into the metagame in the middle of a session. For example, when a player begins openly talking about how they’re being railroaded or speculating about “what the GM wants us to do” you may need to step in and literally say, in that moment, “That’s not how this works.”
Similarly, if other bad behaviors are the problem, be prepared to step in and protect the players’ interests if other players are stepping on them. For example, saying stuff like, “I think Beth had an idea. What were you going to say, Beth?” (This doesn’t necessarily mean that the other player at your table is actually doing something wrong! But once a player has been conditioned to respond to certain stimuli, they can overreact to stuff that otherwise wouldn’t be a problem.)
Understand that this is about creating an environment of trust at your table and that trust can be tough for players who have been given no reason to trust in the past.
This becomes easier once you’ve already established this trust with a stable of players, because when a new player joins up and assumes the railroad or other bad behavior is happening, the other players will help push back on those assumptions.
WHAT IF YOU’RE THE PROBLEM?
We often talk about how the first step in solving a problem at your table is to have a frank discussion with your group about it, but first you have to (a) recognize that you have a problem and (b) identify what the root cause of that problem is. Even if you convince your players to stop creating wacky anarchist characters who disrupt the game, for example, if you haven’t addressed why they were creating those characters in the first place, then you’ve likely just moved the problem around. (That player will find a different way of responding to what they don’t like.)
So what if you’ve realized that you’re the one engaging in the bad behavior (railroading, for example) and you want to change the way your table works?
First, make sure you can actually get to the point where you can run your game honest and true. If all you’ve ever run or know how to run is a railroad, it can be hard to figure out how to do things differently. Check out Don’t Prep Plots, Node-Based Scenario Design, and Game Structures for some good places to start.
Second, it’s time to have that frank discussion: Tell your players that you want to change the way your game works. Be specific, not just with what you’re trying to do but also what it will mean for how they play the game. Remember that it’s not enough to just change your own behavior; you need to get your players to change their behavior, too.
I also recommend explicitly empowering your players to call out the bad behavior you’re trying to address. When they do, pause the game and have another frank discussion. Don’t feel attacked in this moment. If it’s happening, cop to it and figure out how to address it. If it’s not happening and the players are just being paranoid, pull the curtain back and explain what’s actually happening.
And, yup, that might disrupt a few sessions. But the long-term pay-offs as you collectively rebuild trust in each other is going to be worth it.
That is super spot on. It echoes my personal experience very well.
I’m not proud of it, but I definitely was the disruptive player. It hit me (pretty hard, actually) when my paladin attacked a demon while our party was exhausted, and my friend, another player, spontaneoulsy told me “hey! I want to keep playing this game!”
The GM, another friend, was railroading us without intending to (failing to make anything interesting if it was not planned, etc.) But that’s beside the point : I was being a dick to my friends.
I eventually changed how I approached the game : instead of being an occasion where I could « seriously » play a role and affect the game world, it was an occasion to spend time with my friends. I stopped caring about the game world, even about the game itself : I went from the guy noting everything down to the one blindly going along with whatever was put in front of me.
I basically went from disruptive to acquiescent, and it was an improvement (even if it was far from perfect). But the game, as a game, became (to me) pretty boring.
I don’t play with them anymore (I moved), but I had a discussion with the GM about his online game I dropped after two short sessions (the railroading appeared to be the same, but alone in front of my computer, I could not fall back to just spending time with friends.) He asked, and I eventually gave him examples of railroading to explain why I was not having much fun.
That’s a very tough discussion to have, for two reasons. First, however you phrase it, it’s going to be pretty personal : at best, it all comes down to “I think those judgements you made as a GM are bad”. But second, and more importantly : some players enjoy the game as it is, railroading and all. I’d even say that some players enjoy the game *more* this way, because it lets them enjoy the ride without having to invest a lot of mental energy to the game.
This made me think about the pigeon experiment of Skinner. He first conditioned pigeons to do specific things to get food (pulling a lever or pecking a button when there’s a light or sound or whatever) so they learnt they need to do something in order to get food. Then, he decoupled food release from any other trigger and started randomly giving food to pigeons. They started developing “superstitions” or started doing crazy stuff to get food, like if they happened to flap a specific wing before food dropped, they tried that to get food again but next random food release came at a time when it was doing something else entirely so the birds got confused and went crazy.
Even though I always loved RPG, I’m not an experienced player or GM. Back in high school there was nobody who knew about these, in university I managed to make some friends who are into this as well but after graduation everybody started getting jobs in different cities so I haven’t been able to play ever since (it’s been 15 years I guess) so I’m left with 2 campaigns as player and 1 as GM. I want to share my GMing experience here because even the problem wasn’t exactly railroading, it was similar.
The adventure I planned was quite open-world and the opposite of railroaded. There was the main, world altering quest that would be the main arc, but every session was a single sidequest with some clues about the main arc scattered around. Back then there weren’t as many resources online but there still were a few, and I adopted 5-6 single shot adventures to my setting and kept in the back pocket whenever they wanted to wander a specific direction. So, it was never empty nothingness and clues were scattered here and there, but there was no railroading to anywhere. I give myself a A- on that aspect.
However, there was one friend who just moved to our city whom I know from work and we were his only friends in the city so he wanted to spend time with us (and us with him) but the problem is, he was never enthusiastic about RPG and wanted us all to instead play multiplayer pro evolution soccer on the console. Since we all wanted RPG, he reluctantly created his first ever character (I contributed more then himself on his own character, but I just thought he lacked game knowledge and not enthusiasm so I thought I was just helping him out) who’s a dwarf fighter.
During the game though, he kept doing stupid decisions. Since I wasn’t railroading and didn’t fudge die rolls (GM to player honesty is good) he got himself killed. At that time I thought he was just bad at grasping the game mechanics, but probably just didn’t want to play. The party also thought he wanted to play but just was bad at it, wanted to revive him. So I pulled another side quest from my ass in which they raced against time to bring his corpse before it decomposed badly to the undermountain dwarf capital of the region and convince the clerics there to bring him back. They did so during the dead dwarf’s player was watching some sitcom reruns on TV and it was even an enjoyable side quest for them and they gained some xp etc.
What happened later was, when they were returning from their side-side-quest to side-quest, the dwarf was this time visibly reluctant and after some time they first started arguing and then infighting and as a result the dwarf got himself killed. This time there was no revival, he went to console and we continued the game without him. I thought here, problem solved. I couldn’t be more wrong. Since they saw the depths I went to keep the party alive and together, even though I don’t fudge die rolls or railroad them somewhere, some still got the expectation to be never allowed to die. Especially one started to act like he’s immortal or their actions would never have serious consequences.
Then there was the second catalyst. We were playing on Friday evenings after work, and they all wanted to have a beer or two during game. Normally I’m against this, but I didn’t want to be a prude and a killjoy so didn’t forbid it. What followed a few sessions later was, one of the 3 PCs was trying to jump in an endless chasm thinking they’ll find something there or at least gain some XP. One was trying to restrain him calmly but the last one was furiously angry at him for being so stupid. They had a huge IRL argument there and the campaign was completely over there and then unfortunately.
I know this has been long, but I have no friends to share this kind of stories with, and I feel it’s relevant to railroading. TLDR is, even if a GM doesn’t railroad or otherwise use the God’s hand to course-correct like fudging die rolls; a seemingly innocent desire to help less experienced players by trying to add a narrative to reverse their death might still cause all the negative things because innocent looking may it look like, it’s still a form of railroading, I guess.
I miss RPG.
A good point. I think one thing that has given rise to the heavy railroad is organized play societies. The meta rules say everyone who plays a scenario must have the same experience. DMs are given a pre-planned experience and no planning is put in for how to deal with PCs that do not want to play the style that has been given.
The biggest point of adjustment for me when GMing for players I’m not familiar with is getting on the same page about assumptions and expectations. I’ve taken to having a session or two of “getting to know each other” adventures where I’m mindful of explaining my judgments and thoughts during postmortem review. It’s useful both for working through baggage from past GMs (or other games/media, for players new to TTRPGs) and for getting a clearer idea of what kind of content each person is interested in.
@Jordan: Your last point is quite true; some people prefer to relax, hang out with some friends, and (ideally) enjoy having something cool happen without needing extra effort/investment. My own tastes clash pretty badly with that, and it can certainly be uncomfortable to say “I don’t think we’d enjoy playing this together”, but it’s almost always better than the alternative of feeling stressed or dissatisfied about not enjoying the game as much as you’d like to.
@Emrah: Thank you for sharing those stories.
@Ash Yes, you are probably right. Thanks!
I grew up with computer RPGs as my gateway to the genre, rather than tabletop games — so my perspective may be a little different. My group are all of the same age and gaming background, and I see the World of Warcraft/Mass Effect style of RPG “quest” gameplay having an enormous influence on people’s expectations for tabletop games.
It’s hard to move people away from railroading, and I’d say harder still when said railroading is the default for every RPG anyone has ever played on a computer or console.
@Justin: Thanks indeed for this excellent site. I take out my 15 year old game notes and go all sad nostalgic about them whenever I read a piece here.
One aspect of these epic hardcover 5e adventures that I think keeps contributing to running railroads is the breakneck leveling pace that’s expected to get the characters from first to tenth or fifteenth level over the course of the book. Here’s a sprawling landscape with ten or more nodes to explore, but the system expects me to gain a level after each node, and the nodes are each tuned to a different level. so if I just start bopping around from place to place, I can easier end up ten levels out of my depth. If the leveling pace could just be slowed down a bit, it would be easier to approach the nodes in different permutations.
Another approach, which I haven’t seen explored, is to provide the areas in these adventures with difficulty scaling guidelines as is done for Adventurers League modules. A fifth level and tenth level party visiting Bel’s Forge would find very different things there. My initial reaction is to recoil at this kind of video-gamesque dynamic difficult calibration, but maybe there’s a way to make it work.
@Emrah: If you’re looking to share more RPG stories, there are a ton of gaming communities on reddit, including r/rpghorrorstories. Great for purging your guilt while also feeling a lot better about yourself. And some of those reddits could lead to online gaming opportunities, although rpghorrorstories has lots of stories about those, too.
Silberman: Yeah, I’m playing 5e campaign right now, and the XP system was replaced with “gain one level per session”. It was frankly kind of nutty – none of us had a clue what our characters can do, so combat bogged down like crazy. One mid-sized fight – not even a super-challenging one! – took most of a session. And then we promptly levelled at the end of it, naturally. (Add to this the fact that it’s an online campaign, because coronavirus, a few of us are new to the system, it’s a party of up to 7 PCs depending who shows up, and it’s a first-time DM)
Once we hit 5th, he dropped the pace to one level every 4 sessions. And TBH, it should have been this from the get-go – start us at 4th or 5th, run it at a slower pace, and let us get used to our characters.
So yeah, pre-built encounters combined with leveling makes a big difference. Even with 5e’s relatively weak level scaling(compared to other editions), it’s still not practical to have a 5th level party take on a 10th level fight.
@Marc Thanks for the suggestion!
@Erik: That’s one of the main hurdles I run into with players coming to TTRPGs from video games. It’s both funny and sad compared to my experiences with complete gaming newbies, who’re generally a lot more willing to approach things like a real situation instead of trying to pick out quest flags and who tend to think/respond openly to “what are you doing?” instead of searching their character sheet for an answer.
@Silberman/@Alsadius: Your points about the impracticality of 5th level party vs. “10th level” encounter are part of why I’ve turned to older editions. While it’s still unlikely for a 5th level party to overcome, say, an OD&D vampire in straight combat, having PCs with 5d6 HP dealing 1d6 damage against an entity with 8d6 HP dealing 1d6+energy drain damage(*) gives them more of a chance to assess the situation and break off before being reduced to paste, and keeping monster HP on a reasonable scale makes it more likely for players to find ways of leveraging creativity and force of numbers to still find ways of prevailing (which helps reinforce that human settlements can survive despite how squishy the average person is compared to the terrible monsters out there).
(*): Yes, I know OD&D vampires are better off using their crazy summoning more than their own attacks, but that falls into the same situation of presenting an indication of threat that doesn’t rely on just increasing damage per attack in a way that PCs of “too low level” simply can’t withstand.
@Emrah: You’re very welcome! I found this site through the Dragon Heist reddit, and I’m glad I did.
@Silberman Perhaps a way to allow different-level parties to engage with the same location without simply scaling the creatures there, is to have multiple distinct things or approaches at the same location.
It’s going to depend a lot on the specifics of a location, and it would take more work to write, but it seems like a published adventure could try to give opportunities for parties who are below the location’s nominal level to engage around the periphery of the main challenge of the location… learn more about the place and its inhabitants, or learn about other locations they might go, or perhaps even achieve small things that would be beneath the attention of a higher-level party.
In a game of the Pathfinder adventure “Kingmaker” that I’m running, I made some changes to try to tone down something which, as written, actively encourages the party to hurry to a bandit fort they’re unlikely to be high enough level for: a password that expires in a week. Despite me changing how the password worked, my players still made a bee-line for the fort. I was quite nervous, but they turned up, gave the password, handed over some loot as their “dues”, looked around the place, ate some lunch with other bandits in the common room, got to meet the bandit lieutenants and the bandit lord (the module’s big bad), got the new password, and headed out again. They gathered some valuable intelligence about the layout of the fort and the people inside, and I got a chance to show-case the politics going on in the fort and foreshadow the big bad – it was a win all around. I also made sure that the loot they’d paid was added to the fort when they returned to deal with it more violently several levels later.
Great article, as always. Going to share with my group. I think my group often struggles with wanting a clear idea of what their options are for a next move, but also want the freedom to explore whatever shiny object they see off in the distance no matter how urgent their task is.
Open question: Are the 5e adventures uniquely bad at connecting the dots between plot points and providing the DM with sufficient detail to show the PCs what their available options are, or is this problem endemic to all longer modules? I get that some amount of railroading is going to happen in a published campaign, but many of the 5e adventures are flat out lazy about how the PCs get from one point to the other.
My own perspective is that while 5e seems to be pushing these big campaign books more so than any other edition, they don’t seem to put much effort into making them simple for a DM to pick up and run. Princes of the Apocalypse, Dragon Heist, Out of the Abyss, and now Descent into Avernus all seem to suffer from the lack of connective tissue between adventure sites, which forces the DM to figure out how to make logical sense of the story they’re trying to tell. And if the DM is confused, you can bet the PCs will be too.
I didn’t play any of the 4e adventures aside from Keep on the Shadowfell, but the few I saw from 3rd edition seemed to put a lot of stock in keeping the DM informed on what the PCs need to know at certain parts of the adventure, and how to manage things if they don’t. I might be biased because the 3e adventures i’m most familiar with have stood the test of time, and I didn’t play the ones that never got put online.
To be blunt, many of the 5e modules feel like they’re to be read and not played. That’s a criticism that has been levied at a lot of other RPG products, and it kinda sucks that it seems to fit the bill for the flagship system for our hobby. Or maybe i’m just being hyperbolic.
Very good article and very on point. I have definitely experienced that other non-railroad-related example of Abused Gamer Syndrome, when I DMed for my friends, and my friend’s girlfriend joined the game for a while. She had clever ideas for defeating invisible enemies and thought with the world, not her character sheet. Meanwhile the other players overshadowed her with damage builds and spells that solved everything, while the spell she chose rarely had much effect. I partially blame the system but also the other players for not really letting her get involved. The system made her ideas not useless but rather obsolete, and each idea was often accompanied by a vomit of rules-related garbage from the other players. Perhaps playing a retroclone would allow her to shine, but for the time being she has stopped playing with us.
Gosh, that made me introspect a lot.
I think I’ve had this problem as a player. If the GM says, “look, just trust [NPC name]” or “its your job to have a character motivation supporting X” then I’m happy to agree. But I kept having conversations like:
GM: The NPC tells you to go to X.
Me: I can’t tell from your description, is that something we’re supposed to go along with, or are we supposed to decide for ourselves how much to follow this?
GM: Look, you can be difficult if you want to be, but the game will be a lot more fun if you actually play it.
Me: [long apology] [uh I still can’t tell but I think you’re telling me to just believe this although I still can’t see why you can’t say so]
Like, if I’m playing with an inexperienced GM, I can usually guess what they’re hoping we’ll take on faith although and try to go along with it, although I still find it really hard to let them do things that feel “unfair” like deciding when my character would touch a statue. But I was playing with a very good GM and couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, until I realised the adventure spent literally no effort on telling the players what they should care about, just having an NPC tell them a thing and assuming they’re robotically follow it. And if I realise, I can do that, although I’m still not as fond.
I’ve introspected a lot on how to run a good game but haven’t actually run or played that many, so am still learning some of this…
And I think I’ve had related problems with some of the players in games I’ve run. Most have played a bit but not had that much experience where I’m honestly happier with them getting excited about doing their thing and only having to rein them in if it doesn’t fit. But a few didn’t really engage, and it felt like, partly I didn’t provide enough hooks which engaged them (I made too much moral ambiguity), but partly maybe, they expected to just be told what their hooks were…
Unrelated to the above, my latest two ideas for what can work well when I GM are:
One is to borrow the idea from various places of a “reputation” track, where progress is measured in terms of how much, when NPCs meet you, they treat you as a famous wizard/scary badass/etc/etc. Or how much your standing with your personal god, or patron organisation, etc rises and how much support and lattitude they’re willing to give you. Since having responsibility is fun, but only when it feels real.
The other is, that in order for players to relax and have fun, they have to be able to go into fights clowning about and it not being a big deal if they lose. Be able to play their character and have the scared one and the CHARGE one, etc, etc. But you only really get to that point if they can try things out and see what happens. Which is POSSIBLE if you have a “beaten up but victorious” mode (i.e. a big buffer of healing potions always). But maybe easier if you assume that losing means “embarrassingly driven back” or at worst “left for dead” not “throat slit”. So I think I should try building that in from the start, both in terms of plot (i.e. have most enemies have a reason to skirmish and retreat, and fighting for a goal which can be lost without dying), and in terms of mechanics (i.e. make dying default to ‘knocked out’ not ‘dead’, and make more forgiving healing, but be more ready to provide informal consequences for losing, like just acting like it was a failure.)
I really appreciate the thought you put into this!
I don’t know if I’d call it player abuse. I do think you are right that there is a lot more going on between participants in a game than appears on the surface. Railroading is a part of that, for sure.
Maybe I have been lucky to have good groups, when I have had them. I am sure, though, I’ve railroaded players when I ran pre-designed published modules (especially for Call of Cthulhu). A lot of those are very definitely railroad excursions. I think of Horror on the Orient Express as one of them that was literally a railroad adventure in both senses. It’s just so damn beautiful in its design.
These days, I use my own sandboxes. My kids love them, but sometimes they practically ask for a railroad, because not knowing where to go scares them. They are young. But that’s part of why I put them in these game situations!
[…] month ago, this post at the Alexandrian rolled through my […]
One particular kind of Abused Gamer Syndrome which has always particularly stood out to me (possibly because I’ve been lucky enough to play under GMs who mostly avoided this particular trap) is the player who’s been taught “any backstory element I provide the GM, anything I let my character care about, will always and only be used as a weapon against me”. These gamers have learned that if they give their characters friends or family or any other connection to the world, those connections will either be threatened to prod them into taking actions they don’t want to or destroyed offscreen in a cheap attempt to generate drama and make them hate a villain. So they defend themselves by creating “murderhobo” characters, orphans without any connections or loyalty to anything.
As mentioned above, I’ve mostly been lucky enough to avoid GMs who would pull this kind of dross. Instead, the campaigns where I felt like the GM really integrated my character into the world were the ones where I felt like my backstory was giving me new options, unlocking rewards I would not have otherwise had access to. For example, in one campaign my character was the bastard child of a high-ranking noblewoman, cast out by my grandfather after my father’s death, and as part of this is was decided that I had been childhood friends with the crown princess of my kingdom. Well, during the campaign I was informed that my cousin (the heir apparent to my mother’s house) had died, leaving me with a legitimate claim to the heirship. That prompted me to pursue several missions, accumulating favors and signs of divine blessing to shore up my claim. Similarly, the princess showed up in a couple of places, asking me and the rest of the party to undertake some sensitive and highly rewarding missions for her since she knew I could be trusted.
Short version, I think an important thing for GMs to keep in mind is that backstory elements should be used as a positive thing, not just a weapon against the players, if you want your players to continue to provide backstories.
Reading through this made me reflect on my own stint as a problem player, where I got so sick of our PC’s home bases being infiltrated and our guys constantly shown up that I murdered NPCs to have some form of agency.