How do you start a game where you don't rail road the players?

How do you start a game where you don't rail road the players?

I recently started a campaign I homebrewed, where the party starts off in prison ( their backstories merged together for the prisoner life), the party spends their way to the cells and every waking moment while in the cart casting some warlock spells to fuck with the guards, after a while they are finally tossed in their cell, i had a guard start off their introductions by noting down their information. I then had an NPC i made, help bring them out of prison if they swore to not harm the group he represented. The party swore and down into the sewers they went, one of the members walked into a cube, and fell unconscious because it took a while for the group to pull him out. There they had an encounter with a hydra, the party was too under leveled so the npc swagged down a potion and distracted them. the party ran outside, though they saw some gold on the way but they didn't want to pick it up, there was a small hallway where there was a ladder, to which they rode it out of the prison, revealing they were in a barren tundra, the party then got assaulted by wolves, 2 people went unconscious, and after a while the battle was over, and the party had won, the session ended there and there were a number of people complaining about the difficulty, then length ( it went on for 5 hours), and many said i railroaded hard.

How do i become a better DM?

Stop all the planning. Plan a point a "A" which was prison, and point "B", which is wizard tower or whatever.

Come up with some generic NPC tropes to plug as needed, and some generic combat setups that are flexible, like pirate raider/wood elf/bandit/merfolk/ogrekin who gives a shit because you only need hard stats and can fluff on the fly.

It's only railroading if you get caught.

At some point the party may just fail tremendously at finding the key/seducing the noble/picking the lock all at the same time, then what?

Fuck it, it's their job to figure out what to do next, and if they're to dumb for that just deus ex machina their collective assess.

It also helps pre-campaign to discuss with the party what they are looking for in the game, a session 0 if u will where you outline wants and needs

What I would suggest by reading all the planning you wanted to do is write a book/story instead. You clearly want your epic to happen, get that out of your system then remember that the players are here to interact with your world, not read the story.

It helps to get all those types of creative juices out to set up the universe, not fate.

Your a host to the party, not the commander. They make decisions and you try and facilitate, not make commands and expect them to obey

How do i deal with combat in terms of difficulty?

I don't want to just hand out wins to them, i actually just want them to fight.

don't make the monsters tougher instead make the situation harder. For example don't make the bandit attacks more dangerous by increasing the number of bandits or making them stronger but by having them attack in darkness or be firing arrows from a hard to reach location.

You can't out-think bigger numbers which leads to frustration and turns most fights into slug-fests. Start with something the players should be able to handily defeat them give it various situational advantages until it's more threatening.

A good mental exercise is to draw a map of your session, with each point representing a major decision for the party to make and the branches from that point representing their likely choices. If your map looks more or less like a straight line, maybe with some dead ends marked "go back and try again", then it's a railroad. If it's basically a gigantic spiderweb, you might be running a sandbox (or you're cheapening "major decisions").

Looking at your scenario, it seems like the party had very few big decisions. They start off utterly at the DM's mercy and from what you say about them pranking the guards your players weren't happy about it. Getting sprung by an NPC at the cost of swearing an oath seems like a non-choice (what was the alternative? rot?). The combat stuff in the sewers is a bit hard to judge, but it doesn't sound like they made any meaningful decisions. Then as soon as they're out into the open, you mug them.

>tl;dr You become a better DM by letting the players make meaningful decisions for their characters.

>There they had an encounter with a hydra, the party was too under leveled so the npc swagged down a potion and distracted them
Why were they randomly put up against something they were under leveled for?

there was a similar thread a few weeks back and they compiled a pdf, enjoy

Welcome to the woes of railroadless sandbox D&D. Seriously, this is the kind of stuff that prevents me from actually liking the system. A lot of what it does is poison for sandbox stuff, and I absolutely love sandbox stuff. You CAN make it work, but it's not exactly intuitive.

>How do you start a game where you don't rail road the players?
Take it from me,I had to learn this the hard way, the players' first adventure should be should have SOME tracks on it. Why? well you need to get them to a point where they are both familiar enough with the setting to function within it, as well as be invested enough in said setting to want to go and interact with it. The first adventure(s) needs to establish this and that may mean that a bit of hand-holding will be necessary. Just dropping them into the setting with no immediate goals, direction, or incentive, just "here's the setting, now go do stuff" will result in them just putting about whatever place you initially dumped them in accomplishing very little, if anything substantial, and you WILL get frustrated as time goes on.

I mean seriously ask yourself how many entire sessions of "PCs sit in various corners and brood" can you take before the monotony drives you mad? because That's what will happen.

This is a bad way to GM, don't listen.
PCs are often concerned with their own needs and doing it this way pretty much devolves into you giving them a hand job one at a time while the rest wait and lose interest. Then when no one can get it up anymore so to speak you have to railroad them to move things along anyway.

There's nothing wrong with entertaining relevant inquiries and such, and believe it or not most people don't want useless NPC tropes. If they're there they need to be helpful or important somehow.

As for how things went along I have to ask if they had a foreseeable way around the hyrdra? That could make for a decent stealth encounter, with the right environment. Don't be afraid to throw hints like one of your guys just got dropped, it might be best to avoid a fight you don't have to take, etc.

If they complain about the difficulty reel it back a little bit, fudge some HP and such. But at the same time keep in mind that a game can get boring really quick when your encounters are insignificant or trivial.

Also not everything needs to be a creature encounter, there should've been traps or a patrol to sneak around or some treasure from a previous escapee along the way and such. An adventure needs more then go y, fight x over and over.

The issue is you made the party feel like the option you provide is the only option, and any choices they make don't matter. Sometimes this is necessary but it doesn't have to take 5 fucking hours for this to happen.

>Party is stuck in prison
all they can do is listen to your npc for a while
>one guy offers to free them if they do what he says
the only option here is to say yes
>the party encounters stuff way too strong
the only option is run, or run while your npc distracts them. Party still hasn't gotten to do shit
>They're in a barren tundra
cool, they finally got into the world and it's just an empty shitland with wolves biting their nuts off.

EVERY campaign needs the characters to be unified towards a goal to start it off, otherwise they're not a party. But they should be smart enough to follow the campaign hook, and if they arent you can just ask them before the game starts to follow it. It shouldn't take a 5 hour session before they can make any sort of meaningful choices.

It sounds like no matter what they tried to do this session, they would have ended up dead or in the exact spot they are now. Don't bother having them play if they aren't going to affect anything that happens.

You could have summed this whole thing up and started the campaign with the party already under the service of Fuckhead McGee of the Railroad Group, going to do whatever he wanted so they can be free and get on with their lives.

Any time you have to use the term "hint" your railroading. Making only 1 solution to the problem is going to exacerbate the situation. If your thief cannot actually succeed with "pick lock" by rolling a 1 after reading the tome that said "Sphinx riddle: pick the lock" then what?

Must they use the key? Must the door be the only point of egress? There is no way to dispel that magic? Maybe the riddle Ment something else.

Getting frustrated that the players didn't get your clever/subtle hint do therefore they cannot advance in your fictional world you have godlike control over is absolutely stupid. Just change the world at your whim.

How does the creator get frustrated with something they can change with a hand waive? Embrace your godhood and eliminate frustration with free will of the people.

When I was in high school, my friends and I were just learning D&D (it was the 90s, we played Rules Cyclopedia and AD&D 2nd edition), and we used the following terms COMPLETELY INTERCHANGEABLY:

>campaign
>game
>world
>setting
>plot

You see, we were young and stupid, and we were using D&D as a "tabletop Final Fantasy emulator", because we thought that that was what it was for. Whoever was DMing at the time, we would talk about playing "in their campaign", "in their plot", or "in their world" (and of course, the campaign world was never persistent; it was only to be used for the sake of that one campaign, that one plot, and once it was done, it would never be seen again; just like the setting of each Final Fantasy game up until that point had only ever been used for one game).

The Old-School Renaissance came along c.2006 or so, and now you actually had people on the internet (oh, yeah; now we had the internet!) dissecting the early editions of D&D and the modes of play that were built into them, and that's when it all started to make sense.

D&D does not work if you try to use it to run plots. But it's great for "sandboxes", which had no proper name until the video gaming industry game them that name — even though that's what D&D had been doing way back in the 70s.

In other words, to carry the video game metaphor a bit too far, D&D doesn't work if you try and make it emulate Final Fantasy, but it works like a fucking dream if you try and make it emulate The Elder Scrolls.

(cont'd)

…So here's what you do. Get yourself a good ol'-fashioned sheet of hex paper. Map a smallish-scale region. (I like to use 3 miles to the hex; you can go as small as 1 mile if you want the place really zoomed in.)

Put a town and a couple of villages kind of close together in a cluster — "civilization". Just a little bit of it.

Put a ruin or an old castle, something with a dungeon under it, within a day's hike of the town. At least three levels deep; you can go deeper if you want this first dungeon to be whole tentpole holding up the campaign, or you can just leave it at three levels or so and treat it as "babby's first dungeon", the campaign training-wheels. Its purpose is to give the players a chance to acclimate themselves to your campaign, your setting, your DMing style, and for them to have a place to explore, find treasure, die a couple of times, and get some characters worked up to level 3.

But don't stop with the dungeon. Fill the countryside around the village and beyond the ruin with terrain: hills, forests, rivers, lakes, swamps, mountains. And pepper the area with cool stuff. Monster lairs, bandit camps, forgotten shrines, fairy glades, abandoned fortresses, portals to pocket dimensions, toss in something weird like a crashed UFO in a really out of the way place, maybe some mines here, some caves there, a few mini-dungeons. You can also put a big mega-dungeon somewhere, but it's always best to keep one of those near a city where characters can retreat and resupply.

And then let the characters explore what you've made. Don't push them, don't plot for them. Your job is harder than that.

(cont'd)

You have to remember that your sandbox is also a living world, and while the PCs drive the action, there are also NPCs out there — villains, good guys, shelfish bastards — who all also have their own agendas and are DOING THINGS on their on. You have to keep track of all the major shit that might affec the PCs in their looting spree. Occasionally shake things up by dropping a natural disaster or an invasion on the region; but otherwise let the players drive. That's all it takes.

>Any time you have to use the term "hint" your railroading.
You do realize that there are several spells whose entire function either is, or a variation of: "GM must give the players a hint".

What's more they are not bad things. If the players get stuck either because they can't figure out what to do next, or they botched plan A and can't come up with a plan B, they will get frustrated and frustrated players tend to quickly devolve into murderhobos; and you don't want murderhobos in your campaign do you? I didn't think so.

I'm not seeing your argument here, how does your example even compare to mine? You're complaining about riddles while I'm talking about offering the PCs advice when they need it.

They knew they're escaping a prison, they knew they were no match for the hydra, and what fights they did take was challenging enough to drop them once or twice. It's a prison escape at that, not a dungeon crawl. Chances are they were short to butt-naked with improvised shanks, gear stolen from guards, and magic at their disposal at best. Obviously anything they needed to think a lot smarter and that kind of sums up their "meaningful choices".

>all they can do is listen to your npc for a while
>the only option here is to say yes
Or say no and use your own scheme, take a guard hostage, start a riot, etc.

>the only option is run, or run while your npc distracts them. Party still hasn't gotten to do shit
Sounds like they did, you're just trivializing it because all you have of the experience is a brief summary.

>cool, they finally got into the world and it's just an empty shitland with wolves biting their nuts off.
Because the prison should be located in a town with a tavern ready and waiting for escapees to come in? Makes sense.

That's sounds great for a single-player thing, All I'm seeing is the average 4 people looking at a lot of cool stuff to do and having their own agendas, leading to party splits, conflict of interest, and fighting over the reigns. Even in situations where the PCs can "take turns", and turns into what I said here: .

Keeping them together and forcing them to set aside their own agenda for another PC is the same thing as railroading.

Of course every character has their own agenda, but PCs band together in a party for safety and power.

I just DMed a game yesterday and the party rather idiotically split itself. While the mage was in town studying a new spell, the rest of the players decided that they didn't want to sit on their laurels; and so, instead of going back to the dungeon (which they've learned only to do as a whole party, with hired men-at-arms to boot), they figured that they'd follow up on some rumors about bandits marauding farms east of the main town.

Along the way, they first encountered a pumpkin-farm owned by a halfling, who said that he'd be grateful if the PCs could get rid of the bandits.

At this point, stupid thing #1 happened: the party's tinkerer/artificer asked the farmer if he could have some pumpkins and a cart, the former for filling with gunpowder and grapeshot, the latter to make into a catapult.

>ohchrist.jpg

So the tinker and the fighter stayed at the farm; while the other fighter and the halfling thief in the party said that they'd keep going and scout out the bandit camp.

A day's hike east of the farm, they get accosted by a few highwaymen and dispatch a few of them, sending the others running down the road even further; it turns out, another day's hike east of this place is an old abandoned kingsmen's fortress where there's a whole bandit gang holed up.

The two 3rd level characters decide to press on, alone, ostensibly to scout the place out. But instead, when they get there, they decide to try and sneak in and two-man solo the place.

>yourekidding.png

The fortress was occupied by 30 men and a 6th level fighter bandit chief; they were slain in about two minutes.

And now their players know not to go off on their own like idiots.

I don't know what to say...that sounds like an awful session.

The players who engage your quests get killed while the tinker/otherfighter/mage sit on their haunches the whole session...