Railroading vs Sandbox

I like a circular railroad through a desert with walls in the distance

The ideal game is a sandbox that manages to build into a story without any being planned beforehand. This usually doesn't happen because either the GM or the Players are unprepared for the demands of the playstyle.

The format most likely to work well for everyone involved is a game where the GM has built the hooks and environments in such a way that they'll funnel the players towards wanting to pursue the planned goals themselves, without railroading them.

Pure railroads, even illusionist ones, usually lead to mediocre games, if not to protests from players.

There is such thing as one optimal ratio, there are many factors which can affect it, some GMs excel in certain bands, others will fail horribly at those ratios; some players care deeply for freedom, other care more about the story; even the system can shift the numbers, there are often assumptions built into the game which means it is best at certain levels of sandbox/railroad.

I thought one was supposed to be nearly as dirty a word around here as the other. Too little structure can be as bad as too much. The trick is to find the place in between that best suits your group.
Virtually anyone who plays RPGs (and isn't complete shit at them) will tell you the same, and it's sad that there's so few of them left on Veeky Forums that we're even having this discussion

Railroading isn't a "style", railroading is when the players want to take a reasonable course of action and the GM shuts them down because it isn't what he/she wants them to do.

Railroading is great if you want to play a video game

Sandbox is good if you actually want to fucking roleplay

By shitposting on tg

'railroad' is a loaded term, though.
You can have a pre-planned plot without it being a railroad, so long as the GM is prepared to adapt on the fly to what the players do.
It's railroading when the PCs are forced to do something and the GM blocks all attempts to do something they hadn't planned for. Setting up a consistant plot that happens is fine.
'Sandbox' implies an open, exploration-focussed game with no real direction to it. It's fun (and like water in the desert if you're used to being badly railroaded) but you can avoid a rr without going full open world sandbox.

kek

This is good.

I take a clockwork world approach. The world and adventures are set to trigger a certain way unless the players get in there and start pulling levers. I ran a vampire game, they decided to follow their personal vendettas instead of tracking down the blood theif, eventually a blood demon was summoned in the middle of Times Square and they ended up having to fight that.

I think a little railroading is fine at the beginning just to get the party together and pointed in the same direction.
From that point on, I'm in favour of emergent storytelling. Which doesn't have to mean going totally sandboxy, but it means not really having an overarching plot and being flexible enough to respond to the players and bring back NPCs they liked on occasion. I think this works best in conjunction with a process of bottom-up worldbuilding, in which you make your world one adventure area at a time.
So basically, I think the best approach is for your campaign to use many smallish, self-contained stories as its building blocks. Which sounds pretty obvious now that I word it like that.
Obviously, you want these stories to be flexible and for your players to feel like they're the ones initiating most of the action, so ideally you should have most of the plot of a given adventure be set in the past. That way, the PCs' bumbling can't fuck it up.

...

I mean honestly, both are not the best unless everyone at the table knows the type of game you're playing.

The best game imo is like a road. You can take the highway or the scenic route but you'll get there eventually and you can take road A B of C and you'll get experiences along the way that are different than the other roads you could have chosen.

Meanwhile a railroad is you will take1 route from A to B and you'll get there in an hour. A sandbox is akin to starting at A then exploring a jungle to find B if B even exists.

Whatever the players and DM both like.

Free will is a myth and there is only the illusion of choice. All GMing is railroading but the ones who can't hide it are truly terrible.

What said. Most games fall somewhere in between. What most of the people that object to railroading don't get is also that if the GM is at least halfway competent you won't even notice when you're being railroaded. I usually lean more towards a sandbox-type game myself, but if there's a scene that I fee must happen to progress the plot, I'll make sure it happens regardless of what the players choose to do.

Linguistic drift. Now it's sort of split into micro-railroading ("uh....little arms come out of the chest and steal all your lockpicks. Guess you'll have to do the Bishop's quest after all") and macro-railroading ("okay, do you feel up to tackling the cave dungeon yet or is there still things you'd like to do in town? We don't have to move on to the next chapter yet if you're not ready to.")

Micro is almost always shit and never necessary, since it's both an IC effort to fix an OOC problem *and* an obnoxious one at that. Macro, honestly, has its fans. Like the guy who said something along the lines of "sandbox players think its more fun to drive to the theme park than to ride the roller coaster."

I've run West Marches games, radial questing games, and chapter-by-chapter modules and had fun with all of them. It's just a matter of being open and honest about what kind of game people want to play in. Most players don't mind macro-rails if they go by some cool stuff.

Universal determination is a myth and there is only the practical postulate of a causally closed universe without a means to confirm such metaphysical statements in the science they are made.

is basically correct.
Railroading at its extreme leaves your players generally uninvested because they don't feel like they have a choice, or their choices don't affect anything because of the masterplan.
The sandbox at its extreme leaves players not being invested in the world because they have no clear purpose, and have no direction in how to achieve that goal. And once again, their choices have very little impact on the world because everything around them is happening without input.

The key is having a balance, somewhere in the middle is the optimum level of railroading and sandbox that fits your group. Me and my players prefer more open world campaigns, but struggle with figuring out what to do most of the time. Whereas the other group i'm playing in are perfectly happy being railroaded, but the choice exists solely to how we solve the problem even if it isn't my taste

I will openly, freely, and shamelessly admit that I am as railroady a GM as is possible, and an incorrigible control freak. My storylines are heavily structured. Few and far between are the scenes, solutions to in-game problems, and major plot points that have not been premeditated by me in advance. I do not even bother presenting an illusion of choice; there is no choice, much of the time. Rare are the moments when my players actually surprise me with a plan. Generally, the only genuine opportunities for branching paths in the storyline in my games involve the party being defeated in combat and subsequently getting thrown on a wild ride (like being polygamously shotgun-wed to a fluffy-tailed devil), but even then, that is temporary and leads back to the regularly-scheduled railroad.

It seems to pan out all the same though, or at least, it has worked out more aptly than my less-structured and more sandbox-like attempts at campaigns.

In fact, according to my post-session evaluation surveys, my single most well-received session recently has been a purely linear session with absolutely no meaningful choices whatsoever to be made from the players. The first scene involved talking to a single NPC, the second scene entailed talking to a second NPC, and the rest of the scenes revolved around physically finding and then talking to a third NPC, but there was only one possible outcome in each of those scenes. The players still seemed to like it.

Why could this be the case?

What about westmarch playstyle?

It's only railroading if the players realize they're on a track.

You just won, one brownie point

Soft railroading is the GM giving the players a choice, and making the game incredibly difficult or effectively impossible to continue if the players don't choose the predestined choice of the GM.

Hard railroading is the GM telling the players what their characters do.

Example, soft railroading: The players need to escape a room. There is a locked door, and also a magical rod on a pedastal.
Above the rod is a sign saying "press the rod on the door to sound the alarm and summon hostile guards, and open the door."

The players can take any action they want within their capabilities, but nothing the players do work, and the only option is to summon guards to get out of the room and get in a fight.

Hard railroading: The players need to escape a room. The GM says "you press the magic rod on the door, and hostile guards appear and the door opens. You need to fight the guards."

of course, this soft railroad becomes obnoxious if the following exchange takes place:
>Player: I cast disintigrate on the door
>GM: It's disintigrate-proof
>Player: OK the thief picks the lock
>GM: (doesn't bother rolling) the lock breaks his lockpicks
>Player: OK I turn into a wasp, crawl under the door's crack, and open it from the other side
>GM: There isn't room
>Player: So what, will anything work?
>GM: You could do the thing I want you to
If the GM let's the lock-picking/polymorph/disintegrate or whatever work and circumvent the magic rod, then it's fine. If the choice is 'do the rod thing, or sit here doing nothing forever', then it's shitty GMing.

Railroading is bad because it, by definition, is about shutting down player inventiveness.

Railroading is the active & apparent conduct of the GM to further 'his/her' story. Not every insertion/appearance of story elements is automatically railroading.

Sandboxing is an ill-fitting term, if not simply wrong, when used in context of ttrpgs. There is only so much stupid stuff you can do before you bore out, piss off your group members or piss off the GM.

players don't know any better would be my guess

sandbox in a tabletop context largely means 'here is a setting with various adventure hooks, explore it however you like'. Hexcrawl and megadungeon campaigns are examples of sandboxes.

Railroad is an easy way to have a simpler and more cohesive campaign. Plus railroading is a good way not to drown in useless noted and details as long as your players don't catch on it.

Sandbox on the other hand is only really viable if your group is already cohesive and has purpose in their actions. Otherwise they will wander aimlessly through a wide space of nothing only superficially exploring their surroundings before going somewhere else and completely forget about anything they did prior to that.
Tbqh sandbox campaigns are just a recent meme that came up with the boom of open world videogames. For your average group of players, slight railroad is better 9 times out of 10

railroading in ttrpg should be renamed steamrolling to get at the actual complaint

keeping a game 'on the rails' is perfectly fine and almost mandatory if your players aren't that inventive. can't really shut down player creativity if there isn't too much of it to begin with

also, fading to black or switching the focus of the camera is within the gm's purview, it doesn't happen nearly as often as it should due to all of this faggotry regarding >muh railroad

sandbox can be okay if you have a bunch of self starters with a rapport already established. if they've never played together before, unless they're veteran players i wouldn't recommend it

Ok, railroading threads are officially shitposting flavour of the month.

My arc is more unless a railroad unless the players objectively try to avoid it. If the McGuffin is in area A and they refuse to go there that's fine I can ad lib for a session.

But if I'm not clear in a hint or something and they think McGuffin is in area B then it's in area B, or if they have real good reasoning on why an NPC is behind something when they aren't then the NPC is involved.

The major problem I have with sandboxes is death by choice, there is so much to do from the start that newer players don't know where to beine.

>Let me guess, you're a fence-sitting centrist?
Yes?

>Pick a side or fuck off, Bitch.
Shouldn't you be getting your horseshoes replaced?

probably you don't quite want to commit to either extreme.

I'd disagree. Without getting into personal opinions, there are clear variables where you could see different opinions - how far along the woman is, or the circumstances of impregnation, for example.
It's like how owning kitchen knives, Swiss army knives, and xacto knives are legal, but many places in America forbid switchblades of some variety. They're all knives, but they're not all legal or illegal.

I unashamedly railroad.

My players are aware of this and as a result they hound the plot at every turn on their own to have more of a say on how things turn out rather than let me decide.

On the other hand, if we are between story arks or during downtime, or I feel its basically impossible to not approach the objective at this point I just let them knock themselves out.

fa/tg/uys frequently confuse "railroading" for "linear". They are not the same thing.

A linear game is one where a single theme or conflict is central, and every player decision is a step along the way to dealing with it. Example: any PFS adventure path

A railroading game is one where events progress along a predetermined course, regardless of the players' attempts to intervene. Example: any That DM story involving a Mary Sue DMPC

perma-players are like moody toddlers, so you have to give them the illusion of freedom or they'll start screaming and breaking shit

classic trick: give them the option of going to one of three different dungeons, all of which share the same map

>trick
careful, that's good advice

What happens if they decide to go to more than one of the dungeons?

I'm a fan of a clockwork sandbox with a push. Some initial event or goal gives an initial "in" to the region and some initial reason to overcome the inertia of choice paralysis. It can be as broad and vague as "You need to find out who has been selling arms to the Afghan forces" or as concrete and direct as " Your caravan was attacked by local rebels and your stuff looted. Get it back", but its enough to give them a goal and a reason to pursue it. Beyond that I like to let things tick along with or without PC influence. I'm an autistic GM so I have timetables for every major faction and charts for different events depending on how stable/unstable the region is

In the past 5~ish years of dm'ing I found that the easiest way without overprepping is a moderate railroad at the first session, and then open it up to more of a sandbox after. The players will let you indirectly know what and where they're interested if you pay attention.
I'm sure there's plenty of ways to do it, anyhow.
for 1shots, just knock the entire fuckin train off the rails at the start

>Hard railroading: The players need to escape a room. The GM says "you press the magic rod on the door, and hostile guards appear and the door opens. You need to fight the guards."

Ever railroad my character like that, I'll reach over and punch the shit out of you!

Assume those variables are known. Can you still not make a binary decision? That's fence-sitting. Wanting more information is distinct from sitting on the fence, and neither is an answer which changes based on the conditions.

I think sandbox and railroad are both unfitting for that.
How about sailing instead ?
The players interests are the wind and their motivation is the sea. As long as you keep an eye out what they like and what not you can progress smoothly.
If you decide to go against the wind you will end up in bad Waters and the story will get shaky. But as a good Capitan you know how to navigate to still end up where (at the plot points) you wanted to be.
So you players just bought a magical steam train ?
That's really great !
Instead of fighting the necromancer's army as adventures, they will do it as merchant-adventurers and you get to add GHOST TRAINS on top of that, this is even better.

I agree. People keep arguing the wrong things. It shouldn't be Railroading vs Sandbox. It should be Story Based vs Sandbox. Railroading is a type of GMing, not a type of game. Railroading can happen in both Story Based *and* Sandbox games when the GM forces a decision on the players.

Hypothetical scenario.
The DM creates a marginally fleshed out world, no blank edges of the map but plenty of holes in the middle to be filled in as needed. Using the Asgardian pantheon from Deities and Demigods, the DM decides that the Loki has already been imprisoned, and that Balder will die in 20 years.
The DM then uses a small introductory quest as pretext to get the party together, then sets them loose in the world to adventure. the party survives and thrives, achieving whatever goals they set for themselves, and 20 years pass. the DM then begins Ragnarok in accordance with the setting. the DM does not force the players to volunteer, or be conscripted, to aid in one side or the other in the coming conflict, but in accordance with the setting, the world will either be destroyed or renewed without some heroic intervention. Is this railroading?

>muh horseshoe theory

Either you respect player agency or you don't

What do you think about ?
Because I as a GM are a player to.
And I'm cool with Steve being a not-paladin again.
And I'm cool with Toby wanting to play an hacker in space opera game.
And if Rick wants to play a psion, even tho I don't think that they are a good addition, I also can't say that they are not, so I'm cool with that.

Then I can get to involve some goddamn alien space pirates where their leader gets to monologue for five minutes at the climatic showdown, because I am a player too

The core issue is meaningfully different outcomes from player choices. If you Quantum Ogre, you are in my mind, railroading.

Well, as long as it's in your mind I can live with that.

the party, for unimportant reasons, is attempting to pass by a tower in which lives a wizard. This wizard is hostile to the party either because of previous interactions or plot contrivance, and has dominated many of the more powerful monsters and goblinoid chieftans in the area, and periodically scrys upon them all through his crystal ball. the party makes their way through the area, encountering and defeating assorted monsters. the wizard may notice that the his minions have been dying, and may tangentially scry on the party during any combat encounter with a dominated creature which lasts longer than 5 rounds. Following such an event, he may teleport or dispatch through other means an ogre to intercept and kill the interloping party, scrying on the party (as he has now seen them and is in possession of a scrying shard, MIC) to guide the ogre to its prey with nearly perfect accuracy.
is this ogre a quantum ogre?

Let me try to shorten it.
If player agency is kept and the narrative isn't broken, does it matter what the GM thinks?

the question is, i believe, more contingent on player perspective. does the player believe that the ogre was unavoidable? does player agency matter if the illusion of choice is presented and remains unbroken?

Sorry, it's like 3 in the morning over here and I didn't plan to go full Socrates here.

But I don't think it matters as long as the player think they matter, independently of they matter or not.

pyccкий?

There is a difference between framing it as an algorithm (albeit a bad one for interactivity) that you spin like a top and let go, and the dishonest quantum ogre. Your ogre is a railroaded encounter because of its inevitability, but it's not a quantum ogre.

> player agency matter if the illusion of choice is presented and remains unbroken?

You are lying to your players. When they recognize your tell, the world becomes less immersive and they will see their choices resulting from fiat rather than player choices. Coincidentally, this is why you shouldn't fudge either. Narrative games get around this by having meta currency, but that's a whole new can of worms.

>You are lying to your players
if i use exclusively random encounters roll 1d100 on table every 2d6 days with the exception of specific BBEGs, would you say that this is sandboxy enough to not be railroading?
if i build a dungeon, each of its rooms populated, the walls of specific elements which can be for instance passed with passwall or adamantium weapons but not by shape stone, the party may bypass certain rooms by use of certain methods, but otherwise must progress by one or more of certain predefined paths. is this railroading?
in the wizard's ogre example, if the wizard were to instead make use of his previously described defenses and instead of sending the ogre and guiding it via the methods he has at his disposal, prefers to teleport into range, hidden by invisibility and flight, and summons a Bebillith before teleporting away, is this a quantum Bebillith? to reiterate, the party is attempting to pass this wizard's tower for unimportant reasons, possibly but not necessarily of their own volition and for their own reasons. Is this not simply a more complex encounter, and not a railroad? no constraints lie on the party - they can choose to flee, they can choose to avoid encounters via stealth and thus not be seen by the wizard's scrying. It seems to me that you have chosen a standard for "railroading" that would seem to me to be more akin to a sandbox game in which the NPCs simply act reasonably, within predetermined routines and habits. Would you object to a player casting Dominate Monster on an ogre, and guiding it, aided by scrying, to attack one of their enemies? If no, then I can hardly see an argument against an NPC using the same tactic. If yes, then you, user, are the one railroading.

>if i build a dungeon, each of its rooms populated, the walls of specific elements which can be for instance passed with passwall or adamantium weapons but not by shape stone, the party may bypass certain rooms by use of certain methods, but otherwise must progress by one or more of certain predefined paths. is this railroading?

No, unless in the larger frame of things, if you were to reduce your dungeon into a directed graph, they all ended up at the same place. Now, a linear dungeon is nowhere near as immersion breaking as a quantum ogre imho.

The problem with your ogre isn't that the players don't have tools to deal with the ogre, it is that they inevitably must deal with ogre until it is unable to pursue them. That's where it infringes on player agency imo. However, I wouldn't consider it a quantum ogre if there were some sort of limit in its algorithm. If the players could get out of the ogres territory and it would turn back (which could be made into an interesting minigame), that would not be a quantum ogre because they have a meaningful option - which, once that behavior is realized, makes the world feel more real. They will feel smart for having noticed this.

not the case, hitler.
as laid out, the wizard only dispatches the ogre if he becomes aware of intruders in his valley, and can only guide the ogre to the party via scrying if he has seen the party
> the wizard may notice that the his minions have been dying, and may tangentially scry on the party during any combat encounter with a dominated creature which lasts longer than 5 rounds
if the party passes through the area with stealth, or eliminates enemies in under 5 rounds each combat, the wizard will be unable to effectively employ the ogre as a tactic. player agency remains, the ogre only becomes an inevitability if the party undertakes certain choices.

The only choice is play sandbox in a set area with a strong session zero where the players have an understanding of the DM's expectations and the DM has an understanding of the player's expectations.

Everyone knows the play area. Everyone knows the objective.

Now delete this thread.

...

Side quests
Side quests
Side quests

Oh, and side quests

That gif is on point with your point.

*clap*

Railroad disguised as a sandbox

I think it depends on the personality of the DM.

If the DM is a person who enjoys a deep, sensible narrative with well written characters and events, he'll probably want to railroad more.
If the DM is a person who enjoys seeing creative minds come together, who enjoys the challenge of adapting on the spot and creating new twists in a story, he'll prefer a sandbox style campaign.

Ultimately it's a collaborative game, and whatever makes you all happy is good. There is no right or wrong

Pure railroading is only "good" if the players are drones with no idea on what to do themselves, but still want to have fun. Usually very new players.
Pure sandbox however, is also shite for most groups. You usually have to aim somewhere in the middle. Where exactly depending on your and your group's personal preferences

My favourite quote on that topic is 'A sandbox with no borders isn't a sandbox, it's the beach'.

No it's not, it's just the world logically progressing independently of the player's actions and there is nothing wrong with that as long as the GM somehow clearly let the players know that bad shit will happen and they better prepare for it however they see fit, instead of just pulling it out of the ass because they didn't do what he wanted.

The advantage of the railroad is that the GM knows where the tracks lead, and can have a good level of prep work done for the stops along the way. If you decide to fuck off in a random direction he has to try and do everything on the fly. The railroad should present a gilded cage at least.

The advantage of the sandbox is that you, the player, have real agency in where things go from moment to moment. When the NPCs offer you option 1, 2 and 3; you can tell them 'Get to fuck with your shitty ass options.' amd carve your own lane. If you don't like Quest Givers mission you can toss it, and that's ok, whereas if you toss Quest Givers quest on the railroad then the GM is completely lost with nothing written for that possibility.

There's no end of shades of grey between sandbox and railroaded adventuring, the position of optimum fun depending on you, your group, and your GM. The real wisdom is in playing both styles and finding out what you like with a view to pushing that for your future games. Don't let Veeky Forums's objectively superior opinions get in the way of good times.

Pure sandbox games can be summed up as the GM saying "come up with the plot yourself, I'm not going to bother" and unless you have one or two really experienced players with a bunch of autistic hanger-ons it's not gonna work.

you can't make me

>Everyone knows the objective.

Wait, isn't the thing with a sandbox that there is no set objective?

If we're talking pure sandbox, yeah
But games with a premise of "there is a rather loose set goal and plot, but basically you can say fuck it, ignore them and do whatever if you feel like it" are often considered sandbox as well.

Well in that case let me rephrase my original post ITT Railroads a shit, non-pure sandbox is where it's at.

by not going into absolutes

>implying that players will be able to clear a dungeon in one session

A good DM railroads their players but make them think they are sandboxing

you just need to make them think that it was their idea

>You are lying to your players.
I mean, that's pretty self evident. You're all playing pretend, you're obviously lying to your players and they accept the lies for the purpose of enjoyment. If the DM does his job correctly you experience an adventure through a living breathing world when really you just walked through an incredibly tight tunnel that tricked you into thinking it didn't have bounds. If the world was truly fully simulatable there would be no need for a DM. Every encounter in a game is a quantum ogre because the dm decides that it exists upon you encountering it. He may write the dungeon down on graph paper but nothing's stopping him from changing the walls and encounters after the fact, and as a player you would never notice.