A patron asked me to explain what I mean when I say “nonsense railroad.” (Which is something I occasionally do in reviews and online discussions.)

Let’s start by laying some groundwork.

First, in The Railroading Manifesto I defined “railroading” in an RPG as:

Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

Technically, therefore, railroading can only happen at the actual game table. In practice, though, we’ll talk about “prepping a railroad” or “railroaded adventures,” by which we mean scenarios which require the PCs to make very specific choices, therefore forcing the GM to railroad the players into those choices to avoid having the scenario fall apart.

Tangentially, this is a pretty basic tip: Don’t prep what the PCs will do, because (a) that requires precognition and (b) deciding what the PCs are going to do is the players’ responsibility. Instead, prep interesting and provocative situations that create rich opportunities for the PCs to make decisions and give you, as the GM, the toys you need to actively play the world in response to those decisions.

But I digress.

Second, if you do want to design and run a railroad — (please don’t!) — then the secret to making it work even some of the time, as I describe in How a Railroad Works, is to make sure that every choice is obvious and appealing: You need the players to know what they need to do and you need them to want to do it.

A nonsense railroad is basically what you get when a railroaded adventure doesn’t do that. Instead, the actions mandated by the nonsense railroad are hidden, capricious, unlikely, and/or idiotic.

For example, imagine that the PCs are playing Triads locked in a gang war with another organized crime outfit. Then imagine an adventure in which, unprompted:

• The players have to decide that they should make peace with the rival gang at an arbitrary point in the gang war.
• The players have to propose that peace talks take place at the rival gang lord’s mansion.
• During dinner at their rivals’ mansion, one of the PCs needs to sneak away and break into the rival gang lord’s office.
• Once in the office, they need to take the time to search through all the file cabinets.
• This will not give them any information about the gang lord’s business affairs, but they will find one scrap of paper that says “something weird is happening at one of our warehouses at the docks.”
• They need to immediately leave the dinner and go down to the warehouse in order to interrupt the voodoo ritual being performed there.

And, again: All of this needs to happen unprompted. None of them are given a reason to be done, many of them are completely illogical, and quite a few are actually the opposite of motivated — they’re actively inimical to the PCs’ agenda.

This is not, bizarrely, an exaggerated example. I’ve seen much worse than this on countless occasions, including professionally published adventures. Strangely common varieties include:

• “I’ve mentioned some random object, why aren’t you stealing it?”
• “You’ve got rock solid evidence that So-and-So is guilty of the crime you’re investigating, but please don’t do anything with that evidence because the adventure will immediately break.”
• “I think we can all safely assume that the PCs will leave the pocket-sized object they’ve been sworn to protect unguarded in their hotel room while they go shopping. There’s absolutely no chance that they’ll take it with them or leave one of the PCs behind to keep an eye on it.”

And so forth.

If you’re familiar with the old computer adventure games, then you’ve likely encountered this same type of tortured logic in a different guise.

In short, a nonsense railroad is an adventure where the PCs are required to perform a predetermined sequence of specific actions, which they will certainly NOT take of their own volition because the actions make no sense, and — when they’re clumsily and overtly forced to take those actions — they will feel stupid doing so.

(Because, again, they make no sense.)

Railroads are bad and nonsense railroads are their nadir. They are overtly hostile to the players and, when published, an act of sabotage aimed at the unwitting GM.

On New Year’s Day 2023, many a brave soul embarked on an ambitious enterprise: To design one dungeon room each day, every day, for a full year!

On New Year’s Eve 2023, Dungeon Masterpiece decided to do the whole thing in ONE DAY!

Baron de Ropp invited a bunch of conspirators and collaborators to join him throughout the day, plowing through level after level of the megadungeon.

I was one of these collaborators, and you can see me join up at 4 hours and 47 minutes.

Join me on the RPGBOT.Podcast and Get Ready For Epic Sessions!

No more searching for ways to become a great Game Master! If you’ve ever wanted to unlock your potential to create unforgettable tabletop roleplaying games, then the new book So You Want to be a Game Master by ENnie Award-winning and USA Today Bestselling Author and game designer Justin Alexander is the perfect guide for you! With step-by-step tips, tricks, and strategies for running incredible sessions on any game system, this book is a must-have for aspiring Game Masters. On this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast we talk with Justin Alexander and learn about the secrets of crafting amazing encounters, battles, and dungeons.; and find out how you can make your gaming nights even more fun and memorable!

Spotify – Apple Podcasts – Amazon Music

At 2:00pm CT today, I’ll be making an attack with Roll for Combat! as we share tips for becoming the best GM you can be!

We sit down with award-winning author Justin Alexander from The Alexandrian, who just released a must-read book for all TTRPG players, So You Want To Be A Game Master, where he will give you tips and tricks on improving your TTRPG game!

If you can’t join us for the livestream, you can always check out the video later!

SAVE THE DATE!

Recently I’ve posted a few ultra-short scenarios that I’m referring to as quick shots. (You’ll find links to them down below.) I’ve had a few people express confusion over what the “point” of these scenarios was, so I wanted to take a moment to talk about that a bit.

Something I think about a lot is how to make RPGs more accessible as a hobby. We have a vision of what it means to play a roleplaying game in our heads: It’s a group of maybe a half dozen people sitting at a table for four to six hours. Maybe, if we’re feeling really ambitious and a little “rules light” about it, we imagine a “lightning-fast” two or three hour session instead. It’s more likely to go the other way, though, with the same group of people doing a long session once a week for several months or years. If you close your eyes, you can probably see them huddled around the table in your dining room or the corner of your local gaming store. Heck, they might be there right now! They’re probably having a great time!

But this is a vision — a preconception, if you will — that makes it hard to sell people on a new RPG. The typical RPG player is missing out on all kinds of awesome games that they would really love if they ever tried them, but they haven’t because trying a new RPG feels like a big commitment. This is even more true for people who have never played an RPG before!

Compare this to a typical board game, where the play time is rarely longer than a single evening. Many board games, in fact, can be played in less than an hour, providing an easy gateway for new and casual players to get hooked on the board game experience, thereby creating the next generation of gamers interested in longer and more complicated games. At a game store or convention, in fact, we even have an expectation that we can run or play short demos showcasing the basic gameplay of a game in just a few minutes.

If you’re interested in a board game (or board games in general), it’s easy to get a taste of it. If you’re a GM or a game store that wants to let people know about a cool new game, it’s easy to give them a taste of it.

How much is our vision of “how RPGs are played” getting in the way of actually discovering cool new RPGs? Can we change the way that we think about RPGs?

One solution to this problem, of course, is an open table, and I talk about that in the Open Table Manifesto.

But is there a way we could also give people a “casual dip” into an RPG? Is it possible to give them a taste of an RPG in twenty of thirty minutes?

Yes.

I’ve been working on these basic ideas for a few years now, and I’ve heavily playtested this concept in a variety of settings — at my home table, in game stores around the country, and at gaming conventions.

And it works.

SETTING THE SCENE

Since RPGs generally aren’t set up to support this kind of play, you will need to do a little prep.

RULES: If the players are already familiar with the rules, that’s great. If you’re planning to introduce new players to the game, though, you’ll probably have more success with relatively simple games. Or, with more complicated games, you’ll want to give some serious thought to how you can strip the game down to its most essential mechanics.

Either way, I recommend having a cheat sheet prepped for the game (and enough copies so that every player can have one).

It can be very effective to literally script and practice a 5-minute introduction to the game. For my introductory scripts, I’ll often prep a short outline with bullet points that I can easily run through.

CHARACTERS: If you’re using an RPG in which characters can be created even by completely new players in 5 to 10 minutes, then you can easily include that in your quick shot session. Examples of this include the original 1974 edition of D&D, Magical Kitties Save the Day, and Technoir.

Tip: Something that will often trip you up here is buying equipment, which can turn into a huge time sink. I recommend prepping prebuilt equipment packages to simplify and speed up the choices being made. Of course, RPGs in which equipment is handwaved or can be handled through preparedness/load mechanics are also great.

What you’re often looking for here is a game in which characters are generated, rather than being built. These usually includes key decision-making by the player, which has the positive effect of getting them creatively invested in their character, but keep that decision-making focused through the generative elements.

If character creation in your system of choice isn’t lightning fast, you’ll want to have a stack of pregen characters that the players can choose from.

SCENARIO: In designing and running quick shot scenarios, what I’ve found works best is basically one complex scene with (a) a specific goal or problem, but (b) no prescribed solution for achieving that goal or solving that problem (so that the players have to engage in some creative problem-solving).

A micro-raid is often the perfect fit for this: A simple, secured location with multiple access points to choose from and a couple or three defensive measures that need to be confronted or overcome. Also take a peek at The Art of Pacing: Running Awesome Scenes for practical tips in structuring non-trivial scenes.

An easy trap to fall into here is just running one big combat scene, particularly in a system where the typical combat encounter takes 20 minutes to run. In practice, for a quick shot, this creates a very monotonous and unsatisfying experience. Combat can certainly be part of the equation (particularly in a system where it can be resolved quickly), but you’re going to get the best experience from a scenario that offers a more diverse range of options.

Finally, adding some sort of unexpected twist or surprise to the scenario goal is ideal, since it will help you nail the landing.

OTHER SUPPLIES

In addition to the rulebook, cheat sheets, character sheets, and scenario sheet, you’ll also want pencils, paper, and dice. I’ll keep all of these together in a file folder or small box, so that I can, for example, pull out my Over the Edge: Hijack Express pack as easily as I might snag a board game off the shelf.

DEMO GAMES

If you’re running a quick shot as a demo at a game store or convention, you’ll want to take a little extra effort to give the RPG an attractive, eye-catching display. This is something that often happens naturally with a board game when you lay out the board and other components, so it can be easy to overlook. But this is an approach I’ve had success with.

• Stand the book upright so that its cover art can do the selling for you.
• Lay out the character sheets, pencils, and dice in a well-organized way.
• Try to find some sort of graphical centerpiece to tie the whole thing together. Over the Edge, for example, features a poster map of the Edge that you can place in the center of your demo area. Monte Cook Games, on the other hand, has Numenera game mats you can use.
• The GM screen for a game is already designed to stand upright. I recommend not using the screen for a quick demo like this (as it cuts you off from the person you’re sharing the game with), but having it set off to one side is usually a great visual showcase.

If you can, create a standee for the game which clearly states the intended length of the demo. Something like, “Have an adventure in just 20 minutes!” (In our playtests, we found that if we just announced an “RPG Demo,” people’s preconceptions would assume a multi-hour commitment. Even verbally saying that it only takes twenty minutes seems less effective than displaying it in print.)

RUNNING THE QUICK SHOT

A quick shot is, quite obviously, a fraction of the length of a “typical” RPG session. To make the experience fun and worthwhile, you absolutely have to (a) hit the ground running and (b) keep the pace fast-and-furious.

The scenario goal should be big, bold, and clear, and it will help give both you and your players focus.

• Don’t dither — make, quick decisive rulings.
• Make big, bold choices.
• Push the players hard and, if possible, put them on the clock.
• Remember that there are no long-term consequences, so take big chances.

I also like to use a kitchen timer: Set it to 20 minutes and go, go, GO! It’ll keep you focused and help shape the pacing of the session. You might even find it effective to put this where the players can see it, reminding them that they’re literally on the clock.

Good gaming!

QUICK SHOTS
Magical Kitties Save the Day: The Witch’s Hut
Over the Edge: The Hijack Express