How do I avoid railroading my players?
How do I avoid railroading my players?
Bentley Gomez
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Colton Wood
...
Brayden Richardson
Stop running games.
Brandon Scott
Railroading can sometimes help. I'm in a game with 7 other people and it's fucking impossible to keep them all on task. Just spent 4 hours haggling with a shopkeep, only for one asshole to blow a Horn of Blasting (and trigger the explosion) and shatter everything of value. We had to run, but one party member wanted to stay and help clean up while vigorously claiming to not be associated with us.
Sometimes its okay to say "Alright, you're doing this now."
Ethan Long
Not entirely unhelpful, but doesnt answer OP's question. At all.
A lot of that advice runs counter to what OP wants.
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Ethan Kelly
No part of your post instills any respect for you, your shitty DM, or your slightly less shitty group.
Aaron Wilson
Illusion of choice. It's not railroading if your players think its their idea.
Josiah Phillips
>seven people
I think i found part of the problem, I have five and even that is difficult to track sometimes. Have you tried having a party caller like in old school large groups?
While i'm not fully onboard with aboves example, railroading can have (very limited) uses, especially in very open games. I find that starting the first session already part way into an adventure to kickstart the action and avoid the tedious tavern equivalent of introductions.
Henry Wright
1. Plan villains not situations. Get to know your baddies - what are their plans and backups? Who are their allies? How might they respond when the players foil their plots? If players dawdle, how might they take advantage of the extra time?
2. Decide where the geographical borders of the adventure are and tell the players that if they leave that area then the adventure is over and you will need to prepare a new one. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If they get bored it means they have an in-world way to say so - they just travel to another country/continent/whatever and you end the session and prep some new baddies in the new place.
If you follow this it is basically impossible to railroad players.
Dominic Turner
Not planning situations is the best way to do this i think
If you're playing open world games, have different situations you can throw against your players
There should be agreement that they can't leave the worldspace because you don't have any content there and then everything should be fine
Cameron Kelly
>tfw you realize that you're being quantum railroaded in a way that makes no sense
Jesus.
>escape the law, disguised as caravan guards to flee the country through a border fortress
>make it to a town, but it's been sacked by lizardmen tribes who banded together for some unknown but terrifying reason
>go to the next one and warn them
>the city after that gets sacked by lizardmen and we are forced to flee with our caravan(getting paid is nice)
>we retreat to the city we were supposed to be guarding the caravan to, and get our gold.
>party gets bored waiting, one of them decides to head to and explore an abandoned dwarven mine they heard about so the rest of the party goes with them because there's simply not much to do
>turns out the mine wasn't abandoned, the dwarves finished digging that section a while ago
>get to experience this wonderful dwarven kingdom with colorful characters and oh look oh fuck they're being attacked by lizardmen
>oh and an ancient evil dragon is leading them and the dwarves had imprisoned it and it hates dwarves now
>we fuck off far to the west, then the south
>get bored hiding out on the south coast and look for more adventure, because that resulted in such good things last time
>get told about some ancient abandoned city that is supposedly very dangerous
>head there, ambushed by duergar who definitely don't serve the dragon nope
>after clearing the city out, it turns out to have a teleportation circle installed and just happens to be right next to the people who made the original spells that sealed the dragon away
>teleport to dwarven kingdom to find it under attack & the dwarves in a safety shelter with huge doors
>get their remaining mages
>go back to this city, the mages work to prepare for the spells that had otherwise been lost to time
>defeat the dragon without ever even meeting it in person, become heroes of the realm because the lizardmen can't keep their wayward tribes together without their leader
Jordan Johnson
icing on the cake, we were told to bring evil / neutral characters and now we're big damn heroes.
Angel Lopez
When will people understand that railroading is good?
Christian Sullivan
You don't write a story for your players. They're writing a story together.
Brandon Wilson
This. I know lots of people here avoid railroading as the plague, but in my experience, a good railroading adventure is always much better than any sandbox campaign. Bad railroading occurs when the GM is unjust, biased, or when the plot is uninteresting. If done right, railroading campaigns are the most fun and rewarding type of game you could have.
Robert Hughes
>While i'm not fully onboard with aboves example
No part of the above example, not even the final line, was a railroad.
Denying players a choice =/= Ignoring player's choice
Adam Baker
I prefer direction, honestly. I'm bad at pulling shit out of my ass and I don't like people wasting time when most people can't do SoL dialogue, but if a DM is giving me a path I can play off that really well.
Carson King
>There should be agreement that they can't leave the worldspace because you don't have any content there and then everything should be fine
There are multiple ways to handle it in-universe, something as simple as
>you need a permit to cross the boarder
Will stop them
Gavin Bell
>railroading campaigns are the most fun and rewarding type of game you could have.
If you take my freedom in exchange for your shitty cliché plot then it won't be rewarding at all.
Write a book, nigga.
Brody Jones
Railroading is only an issue if you're trying to get your players to do something they don't want to. A highly linear campaign with a lot of direction as to their next steps can be fantastic, especially for newer players, especially especially players who've played 'RPGs' like Mass Effect and don't know how to deal with actual freedom yet.
Over-preparation is one of the biggest risks. If the GM has so much investment in a character or arc that they think is cool but the party has no interest in, it's hard to just let it go.
Ultimately, are your players able to make meaningful choices about what their characters do, and are there consequences (good or bad) to those choices?
Luke Martinez
You sound like a complete dick who would not even try another style of gaming and would ruin the fun for the others.
>muh freedom
Look, some people like something more objective and a more coherent story instead of a sequence of random encounters with no clear goal. You can't possible have the level of detail in a sandbox as you'd have in a good, well prepared linear adventure.
And yes, I am writing a book, by the way.
Hunter Lee
>and a more coherent story
boooring. Again, write a book, we are here to play games, not listen to the GM narrate us a a book filled with tropes.
Jace Butler
Again, you sound like a dick. And you presume too much. Just because games filled with tropes is all you have played, doesn't mean it has to be like that.
>we are here to play games
We? Or you? All my players are completely fine with my style of gaming and they even refused playing a sandbox adventure when I suggested it, because they like my stories so much, and they like to be part of that.
Josiah Gonzalez
>Just because games filled with tropes is all you have played, doesn't mean it has to be like that.
>I swear to you, user! I'm original!
I don't think so, Jimmy.
Your group is filled with fuckboys, user.