We’re nearing the end of a campaign, having traced a gaggle of strange incidents in which historical events (or at least replicas of historical events) have erupted into the modern world back to an eery city on the border of the Dreamlands. As we explore the city, we discover that it seems to be somewhere between a palimpsest and a jigsaw puzzle, formed from jagged pieces of different cities around the world and drawn from different eras in history (not all of them apparently our history). The whole place is completely deserted, however, and a strange white mist drifts through the streets.
While we’re checking out the apartment that once belonged to one of the PCs, there’s a car crash outside. Rushing out into the street, we see a girl with stark white hair racing away from the accident. We recognize her: Although she had black hair last time we saw her, she was being kidnapped by some of the strange wraith-cultists who seem to be mixed up in (or maybe causing?) all of this weird stuff.
We give chase and she leads us to the British National Museum (or a copy of the British National Museum?), but then she runs into the room with the Parthenon Marbles and vanishes. Our archaeologist notes that the marble sculptures have been altered and appear to depict a map of the city. We take a rubbing and begin using the map to navigate, visiting a number of strange locations where we experience enigmatic things.
Then, abruptly, a bright white light suffuses everything.
And the world ends.
Huh.
In the post mortem, we discovered what happened: After the car crash, we were supposed to check the trunk of the car. If we’d done that, we would have found the girl — still with black hair — tied up in the back. She would have been able to lead us back to the Home Insurance Building (the world’s first skyscraper) and then… something something something. I don’t remember the details. The cities of the world had all been linked together in a ritual using key skyscrapers and the Girl With White Hair was the black-haired prodigy’s mirror-self from an anti-life dimension.
We didn’t check the trunk, though, and so the world ended.
“It was really exciting to run a sandbox!” the GM said.
THE RAILROADER’S FALLACY
The railroader’s fallacy is surprisingly common:
I ran a sandbox, but the players didn’t follow the one plot that was available!
This often results in the railroader saying things like, “Sandboxes don’t work.”
First, let’s understand the nature of the fallacy here.
A sandbox campaign is one in which the players can either choose or define what the next scenario is going to be. In other words, the experience of a sandbox is more or less defined by a multitude of scenarios. So as soon as you see someone use “sandbox” to describe a campaign in which there was only one scenario — or, even more absurdly, only one plot — it’s immediately obvious that something has gone horribly wrong.
So how does this happen? And why does it seem to happen so often?
Well, we need to start with the railroader. Checking out The Railroading Manifesto might be useful if you’re not familiar with it, but the short is that:
Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.
Railroading can happen for a lot of reasons, but a common one is that the railroader lacks the tools to build RPG scenarios and therefore defaults to the linear plots they see in videos, movies, books, graphic novels, and so forth. This linear sequence of predetermined outcomes is antithetical to the interactivity of an RPG, and so the GM has no choice but to railroad their players into the predetermined outcomes.
At some point, the railroader gets the message that Railroads Are Bad™. The ideal outcome would be that they learn some scenario structures and gain the tools they need to run dynamic, awesome scenarios. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen.
One common response is rejection of the premise: “I railroad. Railroading is bad. I don’t want to be bad. Therefore railroading isn’t bad.” (Which is, of course, a completely different fallacy.)
But the other possibility is that they hear about sandbox campaigns. They probably erroneously believe that sandboxes are the opposite of railroads. (They’re not.) But they definitely hear that, “In a sandbox, you can do anything!”
And they think to themselves, “Let the players do anything? I can do that!”
Unfortunately, they still don’t have the tools to prep anything other than a linear plot. So what do they prep?
A linear plot requiring a predetermined sequence of specific choices and outcomes.
The only difference is that the players can now “do anything” (sic), so the GM no longer forces the required choices and outcomes. In the most malignant form of the fallacy, they won’t even signpost the choices.
The end of the world is actually fairly dramatic as an outcome. It’s far more common for the players to miss one of these blind turns and just… discover there’s nothing to do. There is, after all, only the one plot; the one path. Leave the path and there’s simply nothing there: You can try to engage with characters or go to interesting places, but nothing happens. You can “do anything,” but nothing you do results in anything happening because the only thing that matters is still the GM’s plot.
“Sandboxes don’t work.”
THE SOLUTION
The solution, obviously, is: Don’t do that.
If you’re going to move away from railroading (and you absolutely should), then you need to actually abandon that broken structure, not just pretend it’s not there. Check out Game Structures and the Scenario Structure Challenge to start exploring fully functional structures for your adventure design.
For more insight on how the scenario selection/creation dynamic at the heart of a sandbox campaign works, check out Advanced Gamemastery: Running the Sandbox. You might also find the extended practical example given in Icewind Dale: Running the Sandbox enlightening.
ADDENDUM
This post has been live for a couple of days, and I want to clear up a point of confusion:
The scenario described at the beginning of the essay is not a railroad. If it was a railroad, the GM would have enforced a preconceived outcome.
The scenario described at the beginning of the essay is what happens when a railroader preps a scenario that requires railroading to work (because that’s the only thing they know how to prep), but then doesn’t railroad.
This is why I’ve said that railroading is a broken technique attempting to fix a broken scenario.
The fallacy is believing that non-broken scenarios are impossible (or bad or impractical) because your broken scenario doesn’t work.
This reminds me of a really weird story that circled the internet a few times. At the start of the campaign, players were told about a lich army gathering. However, while being told about the kingdom, they decided to engage in political intrigue to make gay marriage legal. They had to make alliances and cloak and dagger deals and all of that sort of thing, and finally put a puppet king on the throne. Then the kingdom was wiped out by a lich army.
It’s basically a weird version of your scenario where players didn’t follow a hook and the world ended, but with a full campaign in the middle. In hindsight, it was kinda petty to run a whole campaign just to snub players for making the wrong choice at the end of it.
See to me, Andrew, that sounds like an unqualified success. The world existed and stuff happened, the players did stuff within the world, events eventuated.
Petty to have that culminate as it sounds like the GM did, but conceptually that’s exactly what should happen. This also assumes that greentexts actually happened, which is of course a tricky one.
In some ways, I think it was a mistake to describe RPGs as “telling a story together”, because for many people that only means plotted linear stories. Saying that an RPG is a game that generates a story through the actions of the players is more accurate, but then thoes same people may say 1) I don’t like games, or 2) that sounds like it will generate bad stories. And they may be right, but RPG emergent stories don’t need to be brilliant, they need to be fun for the players. Very different thing. So while your tips are spot on as usual, I think there may also be an expectations problem.
@TRay, if someone doesn’t like games, and is worried about spending time on stories that aren’t “good”, then maybe that person isn’t cut out for RPGs? Though I think I get what you’re saying, there’s a difference between “bad” and “not *great*”.
@Simulated Knave, what do you mean by greentexts?
@colin r: I think you’re right, but that’s not the way many modern RPGs have been sold. I think we all know the meme “my players only want to play 5E”, but no one questions why that is. I suspect at least pert of it is newer players wanting 5E to be a better storytelling engine and not being interested in other game exploration, which as a game player I find unusual. I’ll be very interested if someone ever develops a sotrytelling game (STG), as Mr. Alexander defines the term, that breaks out the way 5E did. And as for “not great” isn’t “bad”, Mr. Alexander has written wise words on how it no longer seems to be OK for anything to just be “fine”.
@TRay: I’m not sure what’s been said on the subject of whether it’s OK for things to be “fine”, but I think when it comes to 5e, the system is “fine” and that is sufficient for the average player. For tons of people, it takes quite a bit of effort to learn 5e, and then it takes quite a bit of time to exhaust what it can do, so why change?
@Tyler H: Mr. Alexander’s “just fine” comments have been about pop culture in general; e.g. not every movie needs to be GREAT!! I agree with your 5E comments, but as a game player, most other game players I knew when i was young iiked to seek out and play lots of games. I’m certainly not saying only wanting to play 5E is bad, because it’s not. What I am saying is that 5E has attracted the largest RPG fan base ever, and as such many sets of expectations likely do not alight, yet I have not seen much exploration of this beyond people mostly talking past each other online.
Specifically, I’d love to see a big market research study of “Why do you play 5E” with a long diverse list of possible reasons: e.g. I’ve always played D&D; I want to be part of a great story; I hate games but love to draw; I’m in it for the cosplay; I only like creating characters; etc. I think this would be fascinating but I doubt there is much incentive for anyone to do it.
TRay@7, Wizards does that kind of market research survey periodically, though of course they tend to keep the results to themselves.
https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2021/11/dd-takes-aim-at-settings-player-motivations-in-new-survey.html
I seem to recall they did publish some results back when 5e was in development, but can’t find a link now.
Andrew’s story reminds me of Tracy Hickman’s story of how campaign background works. Basically, the PCs can do whatever they like – but the problem is that SO DO THE VILLAINS. Hickman calls these “bumpers”, not forcing the PCs towards a pre-ordained result but at the same time keeping them in the plot.
To paraphrase:
Bartender: There’s an orc army to the east, coming this way.
Players: We go west.
Refugees: We flee orcs from the east! Protect us!
Players: We go west.
General: I’m giving out bounties to join the Orc-hunter army.
Players: No thanks, we go west.
General: Since I still need soldiers, you’re drafted. We march east to fight the orcs!
Players: We desert and go west.
Fisherman: Welcome to the Western Ocean!
Players: We buy a boat and sail west.
Fisherman: The Navy has seized all our boats to fight the approaching orcs.
Players: Stop railroading us!
The point here is less that the only option is to fight the orcs – it’s that the orcs aren’t going to stop invading just because the players run away.
Re the orc invasion:
I think this is a problem that needs to be solved in session zero, namely make sure that the party, and each character in it has a stake in stopping the orc invasion. That is an agreement between players and GM: I will give you a story arc, you choose to engage with it. If not, we can run a different campaign.
With this pact in mind, the players are free to do as they wish. And so is the world, and the BBEG.
As a GM, I would also step out from behind the screen and explicitly warn the players when their choices (or lack thereof) are starting to jeopardize the quest. Something like: “the BBEG is now ammassing a great army, that will be dangerous in the future…” or “by marching west, you are leaving the settlement at the mercy of the orcs”, etc.
I, the GM, see the bigger picture. The characters, as inhabitants of the world, see the bigger picture. The players, might not have grasped it…
I gather the article may be a simplified example of the GM railroading to make it understandable, so this may be too simple a question, but if the GM just moved the black-haired girl to someplace else in the city, and she was found there by the PC’s when they did something clever, and that moved the story forward, would that have not solved the problem? Is it still railroading because it still is only solving a singular problem, even if it allows the players to solve it in their own manner and not in a preconceived manner?
I’m with AndreaGM@10 — there’s nothing technically wrong with Jennifer@9’s DM, except that it really sounds like the players and the DM don’t want to play the same game, or at the very least have failed to communicate that they’re playing different games. Which is kind of a problem.
I can imagine a version where conversations have taken place outside of what’s described, where everyone is fascinated by the story of a bunch of cowards who will eventually have to face up to consequences of their actions. In which case everything would be great, if that’s really what’s going on. But it doesn’t sound like it.
@Jason
Moving the body to where the PCs go is known as illusionism, which is another railroading technique… and quite possibly wouldn’t have made sense besides. That being said, they could probably stand to have run into some clues that the white-haired girl was *not* the black-haired girl and that she did *something* to the black-haired girl, pointing them back at the car crash to investigate. There, they’d either find the black-haired girl, or find shed black hairs and some signs of what happened to her next.
Even if you’re running a fairly linear game, you don’t want progress to depend on the players doing one specific thing, especially if that one thing isn’t particularly intuitive. The GM saying “You didn’t check the trunk, therefore the world ends” is both bad design and logically absurd. The players are running all over the world, following the map *you gave them*, and none of these sites contain *any* useful information? Ms. Blackhair is literally the *only* person on the planet who can point them in the right direction? There’s “railroading”, and then there’s the GM just not even trying.
@PuzzleSecretary
Thank you, that makes sense. I’m still pretty new so trying to get a balance between running the campaign that playing vs driving the PC’s in a direction, if that makes sense. Boy, that’s a pesky dragon on Icespire Peak vs you must kill dragon.
If I understand it better, having multiple clues for the PC’s to discover and then act on is more appropriate, as opposed to only being able to investigate the car after the crash. Can we also say there are other ways to save the world without the black-haired girl if the PC’s come up with something really good?
Having the world end without warning isn’t even really railroading — it’s failure to give the players a reasonable chance to be heroes, much in the same way as if you dropped them in a save-or-die trap without warning or foreshadowing. Total violation of the 3 clue rule.
Jason@15, if you’re new around here you really want to read Justin’s manifestoes on the subject of railroading,
The Three Clue Rule, https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule
Don’t Prep Plots, https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots
The Railroading Manifesto, https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36900/roleplaying-games/the-railroading-manifesto
In short, absolutely yes, you should support any reasonable plan the PCs come up with, and give them a fair shot to see if it works.
I think an important difference between Andrew@1’s story and the article, is that the players were explicitly informed about the lich army, but not the girl in the trunk nor the world ending ritual.
Players choosing to ignore a threat and then dealing with the repercussions is how agency is supposed to work.
As an anecdote, I ran a game where the players decided not to fight the necromancer building the army in the forest because rogues don’t get sneak attack against undead in that edition, so they started a bar fight instead. This escalated to them killing the guards sent to arrest them, burning down half the town while hunting guard patrols from the rooftops, and eventually deciding the sherrif was too well defended, so they killed the mayor and framed the sheriff for his murder. Then the undead army showed up and the party ran away.
I thought it was a failure at the time, but have been told multiple times in the subsequent decades that it was the best campaign I’ve run.
I think the problem with Jennifer’s example is that the GM isn’t letting the players do anything other than react to the orcish invasion. There are no plot hooks or scenarios provided other than “go fight the orcs”, even though the players keep going looking for something else to do. Surely even with the orcs invading there will be random undead that need to be put to rest, or bandits looking for farmhouses to raid, or thief guilds looking for new members, or other stuff of that sort.
Whereas in Andrew’s case, the PCs were able to go off and do their entire sidequest campaign, even though the lich army still showed up in the end because they hadn’t dealt with it.
Part of the means of solving this is to have NPCs with goals and motivations of their own.
My current campaign had a young girl from the lowest caste of society who was robbing people via the use of a trained monkey. Her goal was to amass enough money that she could leave and set up a new life elsewhere, presenting herself as a member of the merchant class.
So if the PCs ignore it? Eventually she just leaves town. Everyone is happy, more or less. At least the thefts have stopped.
What happened was the PCs tracked down some information, confronted her, suspected the monkey way connected and… took the monkey into custody while leaving the girl alone. Presumably they thought she was unaware. So she fled that very night with what she had, but with fury in her heart for the PCs who had taken and, she assumed, surely murdered her friend. She set herself up in a new city, saved up the money from her newly increased status, and hired an assassin to get revenge.
Now, the PCs could have intervened at nearly any point there. They could have sought out the loot, recognized that she might try to flee, tried to track her down after she had clearly vanished when they came back to return the monkey a few weeks later, or any number of other things. But they didn’t, so her new goal went into effect.
Even then, the world isn’t going to end. They might have to fight an assassin. Maybe she’ll send more if the first fails. But if they keep deciding they don’t care, it’s going to resolve to a new status quo while the PCs get to continue having the adventures they want.
When your stakes are so big that they cannot be ignored, that’s just a different type of railroading. Sooner or later you’re going to force the PCs to engage with your plot. Now, having the orcs take over and having to live under orcish rule, that’s an interesting and realistic outcome driven by player agency.
You’ve already talked about this in a past article (the anti-railroading manifesto, I think) but this example really nails how it works.
Reminds me of how much I hate the term “the GM’s story”.
Coming to this a bit (almost a full year!) late, but…
The problem with Jennifer’s scenario in comment #9 is that it is ABSOLUTELY railroading to make the threat inescapable. If the Orcish threat just going to keep growing until the characters deal with it personally, you aren’t really giving them any choice at all as to what to do.
This is one of the reasons why I profoundly dislike campaign plots that involve a World-Ending Menace: they leave no room for anything else. Players may want their PCs to pursue personal goals, and may even be able to do so in a small way; but in the end, none of that matters unless they defeat the World-Ending Menace. It subsumes everything else, because everything else is simply less important.
If you insist on making a WEM the focus of your campaign, you should darn well get player buy-in during your Session Zero.
If you don’t get that agreement, then consider alternatives.
For example, if they refuse the town’s call for adventurers to fight the orcs, the town must appeal to the King for help instead. The King sends a large army as a garrison – which deters the Orcs from attacking, but changes the character of the town. It now grows and gains importance as a center of commerce; but that also means more oversight from the central government. Instead of a straightforward kill-the-Orcish-invaders campaign, you now have a campaign with more scope for intrigue and social activity… which may be what your players wanted all along.
(Strangely, when I proposed this as an example in a social media group, some people completely lost their composure. They just couldn’t deal with the idea of having NPCs deal with the threat; some even said it was “idiotic” to think a kingdom would actually use the army to defend that kingdom. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
ANYWAY, the point is that if you want to have an overarching direction for your campaign, you should make that clear in Session Zero; otherwise, be ready to roll with the punches and explore alternatives, even if they’re completely different from what you had in mind.
Who knows; you may even enjoy the unanticipated campaign more!