When I talk about GMs railroading their players — and that you should never do that — I will occasionally have someone say, “But I have a player who wants to be railroaded!”
First, to be a little blunt, double-check yourself. Do they actually want to be railroaded, or have you just convinced yourself of that so that you don’t have to feel bad that you’ve been railroading them?
But let’s assume that you have a player who has actually said, “I want to be railroaded!”
Since “railroaded” is a word that means being forced to do something you DON’T want to do — and the RPG-specific usage of the word is only a specific version of that — players who say they want to be railroaded are not communicating useful information.
(Outside of BDSM, “I want to be forced to do something I don’t want to do” is simply paradoxical.)
So this generally falls into a couple of categories.
1. They had a GM who said, “I won’t railroad you,” and then the game was bad. Maybe it was bad because of how the GM chose to implement “not railroading” (e.g., gormless mush or featureless plains with nothing interesting to do). Maybe it was bad for some unrelated reason, but is still associated with “not railroading” in the player’s mind.
2. The player means something else when they say “railroaded.” Because there can be some confusion around the term “railroading” — in part created by people who want to justify their railroading by associating it with other techniques that don’t involve forcing people to do things they don’t want to do — this is not necessarily unusual. But it does mean that you’ll need to figure out what they’re actually looking for when they say “railroad”:
- A strong campaign premise?
- Clear, definitive hooks?
- Drama-based rulings to create big, meaningful moments?
- Aggressive scene-framing to “skip to the good bits”?
- To never be stabbed in the back by their patron?
The list goes on. Because even if we accept “I want to be forced to do things” at face value, it doesn’t really tell you anything about WHAT they want to be forced to do.
3. There are, semi-hypothetically, players who simply don’t want to make any choices. (This usually takes the form of wanting to show up and be pointed at something to stick their swords in, but not always.)
I say semi-hypothetically because, in my experience, such players are vanishingly rare. Slightly more common are players who simply aren’t interested in certain kinds of decisions. The good news is that these followers are usually just fine with other players making decisions for them.
In other words, these players “want to be railroaded” in the sense that they want someone else to make the decisions for them. But that doesn’t mean it has to be the GM.
In my experience, these players also tend to exist on a spectrum (rather than just occupying absolutist values of “makes decisions” or “doesn’t make decisions”).
(You could, even more hypothetically, end up with an entire group of players who are so utterly apathetic that literally no one wants to make a decision of any kind. That’s a truly awful experience, but that level of apathy probably indicates that there’s something more fundamental wrong with the group dynamic. In fact, in my one experience with anything remotely similar to this, it was because the whole group was suffering from abused gamer syndrome as a result of being ruthlessly railroaded: They were apathetic about making decisions because they had been taught that making decisions was pointless.)
4. More problematic are the (fortunately also incredibly rare, in my experience) players who not only don’t want to make decisions, but also aren’t happy that any of the other players want to make decisions. These players are, unfortunately, a sub-category of “players who don’t want to let other players have fun” and they’re poison.
ACTION ITEM
Here’s the key take-away: If someone tells you that they “want to be railroaded,” you need to dig deeper so that (a) you can figure what they actually want and (b) give it to them.
And if they really do want you to force them to do things they don’t want to do… make sure you have a safe word.
While I have never had a player tell me they wanted to be “railroaded”, I have had a player who refused to participate in my game because he wanted a game where the DM had a plot. In my mind that is practically the same thing.
I’ve definitely had a player who was type 3 primarily, with some aspects of type 2. He clearly wanted a fully linear campaign with clear, bright lines on where you were “supposed to” go and aggressive scene-framing, with the only responsibility he had being to quip about the scenery he was riding past and otherwise come up with good dialogue. (To be fair, he was good about that last part.) And yes, he did talk about “railroading” as desirable from his perspective. In the game from a decade and a half ago I describe as having ended because structurally one player wanted The Elder Scrolls, one wanted Shin Megami Tensei, and one wanted Final Fantasy, he’s the one I characterized as wanting Final Fantasy.
I think the confusion arises from differing understandings of what “railroading” means. I have never considered it to mean forcing the players to do something they do t want to do. (I’m not sure anyone can force my players to do something they don’t want to do. They’d just leave the table.) My understanding of the term is is similar to PuzzleSecretary’s description of what their player wanted out of a game, or to put it another way the world has invisible walls from video games. A non-Jaquayed dungeon can be railroading (think Sunless Citadel). You do the rooms in order with little to no deviation and no choice on where to go next. Much like train tracks. There is no choice except forward or backwards. Another example are groups who exclusively play modules. Either you’re character goes on this adventure or you don’t play tonight. What you do inside the adventure is your choice, but you can’t make the decision to leave the adventure, unless you want to stop playing.
I think there’s also a type where the player assumes the GM has a planned story, and it would be mean to interfere with it. Or just that going along with the GM’s plot is part of the implicit social contract of RPGs.
Great piece. I’ve certainly seen issues 1 and 3, but the category that maybe deserves the most emphasis as a way forward is #2. Figure the players mean something else, probably one of those things like skip-to-the-good-bits and have a strong hook, and if communication alone can’t sort it out, experiment with them.
@ Avian Overlord: My group once included a player who for several years railroaded the party in a non-DM role for this exact reason: He would shoot down any attempt to ‘sequence break’ by bypassing an obstacle. Once I realized this the whole party dynamic shifted dramatically: I’d developed a reputation as a killer DM because I’d been creating challenges on an axis no party he was in could engage with.
@1 & 2: I suspect that there’s a significant number of players who — whether through CRPGs, bad GMing, or badly written adventures — have come to expect that there’s one “right” solution to any adventure, and that failing to find and follow the correct path will result in either the PCs being punished for making the “wrong” choice, or faffing about and getting nowhere. Therefore, when they say “I want to be railroaded,” what they mean is “Just point us in the right direction so that we can get to the next good bit without wasting time.”
If everyone at the table is having fun, there’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with this, but it’s sad that they don’t know what they’re missing out on. A “good” GM would, rather than just giving them what they think they want, offer them at least the *opportunity* to make alternative choices without being punished for it. It’s probably best to be straight with the players, and tell them up front: “There’s more than one way to solve this problem.”
(Just make sure that it’s true! A “false” choice can be worse than no choice at all. I played in one game where we were escorting a caravan and we had two options: cross a river in flood stage, or go the long way around through hostile territory. We choice the first option, and after a harrowing river crossing, we skipped to arriving at our destination and the adventure was abruptly over. We were “supposed” to take the detour.)
Having players that get anxious about making descisions is not a good reason to railroad the players. What you should be doing as GM is helping the players ease about those situations.
Let them talk about the forseable outcomes of their actions. They should feel empowered when they make a choice not feel that they are losing out on something else. This maybe a side-effect of the toxic design in many videogames nowadays (FOMO).
This is when as a GM you have to ask the players “What would YOUR characters DO?”.
FWIW, I’m seeing “railroaded” defined (in my dictionary!) as “being rushed or coerced into a decision”, which makes sense to me both generally and as an RPG concept – you’re not necessarily being forced to do something you *definitely* don’t want to do, you *might* have made that decision anyway – but you weren’t given the chance to decide for sure.
But, in common with previous commentators – I agree that it’s not a clear term. It certainly feels like when somebody describes a particular game/adventure/module/playstyle as a railroad, they often mean “the amount of freedom it gives the players is below an arbitrary cutoff point for me to consider it a railroad. Probably not the same arbitrary cutoff points as you might have.” Which, yeah, doesn’t convey very much.
I’m honestly not sure it’s possible to use the term very usefully – either positively *or* negatively. Which, yes, certainly supports the point that you need to find out what somebody actually means should they bring it up! You want to be railroaded? Be more specific! In what ways? You think adventure X is a railroad? Sounds like you don’t like it, but be more specific – because surely there are some people out there who like it for exactly the reasons you dislike it…
One reading of “I want to be railroaded” I feel should be touched on too, that I only alluded to in my previous comment: “I don’t want to take any responsibility for the game; that’s the GM’s job.” In other words, not just thinking of the game in terms of passive entertainment instead of a collaborative activity, but thinking of games in general as a low-responsibility (or worse, no-responsibility) zone. Taking anything into their own hands would be “work”, and they shouldn’t be “working”, they should be “playing”! This same attitude also leads to scheduling nightmares.
For me it is much more clear now. When I first saw the term I thought it was the same as a linear adventure opposing to an open world one. It is not.
My players tend to like linear structures, a clear mission, to kill the evil lord, to steel the magic thing, etc. But even to destroy the One Ring you can put the sense of choice in the game. As Justin once awnsered me on twitter, you can go through Moria, up the mountains, around rohan or another complete different path. The choise should be the players.
In the linear adventures we play, we usually have a wolrd or city map with the feeling you can go wherever, but having the mission very clear, players rarelly do go north when they have to go south. And we have lots of decisions nevertheless. How to ambush a monster? Do we sleep now in the woods or risky walking more to find a safer cave? When they get to a dungeon, make it a Jaquayed one. Give them a little money and a lot of arsenal options, what are they buying? And so on.
If every single player just dont want to choose anything, maybe they are in the wrong game.
There have been discussions about desirable aspects of railroading in the Swedish TTRPG scene. Most of the reasons why players might want to have a “railroaded” role playing experience are similar to what PuzzleSecretary exemplified above with the Final Fantasy type player; players desire a clear path forward in a story so they can react to all of it in-character. If they know that the “story” will push them along they can solely concentrate on their immersion in their characters and the characters’ reactions and internalizations of what is happening in the campaign. Sure, their characters might react so heavily to situations in-game that they might divert the train in some way, but if the GM is the one developing the larger content of the story and the game world, the players do not need to do much “meta gaming” and can stay in-character as much as possible. This is how it has been explained to me at least.
What @João Luiz describes is what I’d call the middle ground, which unfortunately doesn’t have a common term attached to it that I’ve noticed; “mission-based” is closest. To my own mind, what makes a railroad isn’t just specifying what needs doing, but how. In my own experience, someone who “wants to be railroaded” is typically someone who for one reason or another recoils at the freedom of approach @João Luiz describes. They may assume that there are “trap” choices due to abused gamer syndrome, they may complain about being forced to make choices at all when they just came to be told a story and contribute dialogue to it, or they may just want an excuse plot for engaging with the combat system.
In his article about different kinds of fun players can get from games, the AngryGM mentions what he calls “abnegation seekers”, players who enjoy disengaging their brain and losing themselves in something that doesn’t require too much thought. When these players say they want to be railroaded, what they are (probably) trying to convey is that they want a relatively simple plot with obvious choices so that they don’t have to expend too much effort trying to figure out what’s going on.
On a similar note, you can also have players who enjoy min-maxing, combos, miniature tactics, and generally “winning” the mechanical portions of the game, and who view the plot as nothing more than an excuse for why they’re getting to unleash their awesome combos against whoever the DM points them at. For these players, any time above the bare minimum spent “roleplaying” or making character-based decisions is a waste, a distraction from the mechanical awesomeness and tactical and strategic challenge that is what they want out of their games.
Please understand that I’m not trying to say that either of these types of player are necessarily “doing it wrong”. They want to do what they find interesting, and that’s only a problem if their desires to get it interfere with letting *other* players do what *they* find interesting.
I think the video game comparison is the most apt. A lot of these players seem to want a game that feels more like a fairly linear video game. You don’t really make choices about what to do, you just keep moving forward following the explicit tasks that are given to you. As long as you do that you’re making “progress” towards some pre-planned ending.
This post and its many excellent comments are swirling around what I think might be the underlying issue: that many newer players don’t actually want to play an RPG, but rather want to be the hero of an epic story. But like reading a book or watching a movie, they want the story to happen to them, with their input limited to a highly customized character and witty or dramatic cut scenes.
Without being a video game, this would be more like dramatic karaoke or a pre-packaged table-read adventure. As noted, the closest we have right now is highly plotted modules or one-shots. Ultimately, what is desired is the Star Trek holo-novel (and written by a professional writer to boot). Mr. Alexander, with your acting background, you might have more to say about this.
I think this point of view really needs to be considered. It’s not mine, but I suspect many more people would like something like this versus the current market for all hobbyist gaming excluding video games. Who wouldn’t want to be the hero of the story? But that’s not at all equivalent to “I want to play an RPG.”
>There are, semi-hypothetically, players who simply don’t want to make any choices.
One of my players once said: “I don’t like your modules that much, it’s too much thinking, I’d better fight some goblins”.
I think that is quite an example of what you say – that player doesn’t want to make choices, he wants a clearly defined approach – go to the forest, meet some goblins, the goblins are bad, you kill’em, gain loot and XP, repeat.
I can think of an eloquent way to look at this is for one to become the support for all transport (players) carrying all the weight of many. To be the one who knows the way to destiny that of which all seek making an easy travel for all those so trusting in his path.
But obviously the track doesn’t move with the train and thus he gets ran the f over so everyone else can reach their destiny.
Smply means to be ran over by the train; & be the loser of the game.
Railroaded over like a penny.
How about being derailed: while coasting through the game at your best, nothing can stop you from winning as everything is going so perfect than wham, an unseen player, or a player you hadnt expected had just derailed your glory ride by killing your character for no reason but to derail you.
Or being derailed by a parent who pressed the power button without giving a chance to first save.
As a player, I want to participate in, be caught up in, the story. But I do not want to write the story. I’m not a good writer. But I’m a decent reader.
It’s the same way that I enjoy books, movies, television, video games, plays, even songs that take me on a journey from beginning to end.
At the same time, I don’t want it to FEEL like I don’t have any agency. I want the illusion of choice but prefer that the author (heavens! not me!) knows where the story is going.
Or even, I want agency within the scene, but I’m super uncomfortable with a lot beyond that.
@Sean, I don’t think you are alone in what you said. I believe I have some players in my group that seem to be thinking in a similar vein. The concern I have with that is that if my players are content to have just have the story come to them and react, it doesn’t feel like they are really engaged with the story … just passively along for the ride. The more passive they become, the harder I find it to keep motivated to set up new things for them.
The GM is just another player at the table. Their role is to set scenes, run all the non-protagonist cast, and providing the players with what their characters perceive within this world. While a GM can have larger things in motion (see Justin’s Shadow of the Spire as a wonderful example), the GM shouldn’t want to dictate how the story plays out — that’s the role of everyone at the table, not just the GM.
The fun in the game, at least for me, is seeing how it all unfolds. “How are they going to deal with this?” is one of my favorite questions to ask for a game I am running. As long as I ensure there are multiple plausible paths to success and failure, let’s see how it all goes. If I feel that there has to be a particular outcome for a scene, I really feel like I failed as a GM because now I’m telling a story as opposed to collectively all exploring one together.
Just my two cents from some of my experiences. As long as you and your friends are having fun during the games, it is all good.
We’ve been discussing similar issues over on the Alexandrian Discord.
Some of this seems to fall back into the false dichotomy where the opposite of a railroad is believed to be a sandbox (it isn’t). It gets further complicated by some bad ideas about what a sandbox is.
So there’s a belief that if you’re not playing a railroad, then the only alternative is a blank slate where the GM sits back and waits for the players to “write the story.”
IOW, the false belief that a sandbox is the opposite of a railroad — that these are a spectrum — ends up boxing out every other form of running campaigns and adventure. Which is a shame, because these other structures are often exactly what many players would enjoy most.
You can, in fact, have agency without needing to become an author. You can have a structured experience without the GM needing to lie to you.
A player once told me he wanted to be railroaded because prep would be less work for me (the DM) if players wouldn’t have choices.
He then proceeded to play a disruptive joke character. -_-