All Aboard the Invisible Railroad!

What if I told you it was possible to lock your players on a tight railroad, but make them think every decision they made mattered?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

While this may sound like the evil GM speaking, I have my reasons. Firstly, not every GM has time to craft a massive campaign. There are also plenty of GMs who are daunted at the prospect of having to figure out every eventuality. So, this advice is offered to help people scale down the pressure of being a GM and give them options to reuse and recycle their ideas and channel players through an exciting adventure that just doesn’t have as many options as they thought it did. All I’m suggesting here is a way to make sure every choice the players make takes them to an awesome encounter, which is surly no bad thing.

A Caveat​

I should add that used too often this system can have the opposite effect. The important thing here is not to take away their feeling of agency. If players realise nothing they do changes the story, then the adventure will quickly lose its allure. But as long as they don’t realise what is happening they will think every choice matters and the story is entirely in their hands. However, I should add that some players are used to being led around by the nose, or even prefer it, so as long as no one points out the “emperor has no clothes” everyone will have a great game.

You See Three Doors…​

This is the most basic use of the invisible railroad: you offer a choice and whichever choice they pick it is the same result. Now, this only works if they don’t get to check out the other doors. So this sort of choice needs to only allow one option and no take backs. This might be that the players know certain death is behind the other two doors ("Phew, thank gods we picked the correct one there!"). The other option is for a monotone voice to announce “the choice has been made” and for the other doors to lock or disappear.

If you use this too often the players will start to realise what is going on. To a degree you are limiting their agency by making them unable to backtrack. So only lock out the other options if it looks likely they will check them out. If they never go and check then you don’t need to stop them doing so.

The Ten Room Dungeon​

This variant on the idea above works with any dungeon, although it might also apply to a village or any place with separate encounters. Essentially, you create ten encounters/rooms and whichever door the player character’s open leads to the next one on your list. You can create as complex a dungeon map as you like, and the player characters can try any door in any order. But whatever door they open after room four will always lead to room five.

In this way the players will think there is a whole complex they may have missed, and if they backtrack you always have a new room ready for them, it’s just the next one on the list. The downside is that all the rooms will need to fit to roughly the same dimensions if someone is mapping. But if no one is keeping track you can just go crazy.

Now, this may go against the noble art of dungeon design, but it does offer less wastage. There are also some GMs who create dungeons that force you to try every room, which is basically just visible railroading. This way the players can pick any door and still visit every encounter.

This idea also works for any area the player characters are wandering about randomly. You might populate a whole village with only ten NPCs because unless the characters are looking for someone specific that will just find the next one of your preset NPCs regardless of which door they knock on.

What Path Do You Take in the Wilderness?​

When you take away doors and corridors it might seem more complex, but actually it makes the invisible railroad a lot easier. The player characters can pick any direction (although they may still pick a physical path). However, it is unlikely they will cross into another environmental region even after a day’s walk. So as long as your encounters are not specific to a forest or mountain they should all suit “the next encounter.”

So, whichever direction the players decide to go, however strange and off the beaten path, they will encounter the same monster or ruins as if they went in any other direction. Essentially a wilderness is automatically a ‘ten room dungeon’ just with fewer walls.

As with any encounter you can keep things generic and add an environmentally appropriate skin depending on where you find it. So it might be forest trolls or mountain trolls depending on where they are found, but either way its trolls. When it comes to traps and ruins it’s even easier as pretty much anything can be built anywhere and either become iced up or overgrown depending on the environment.

Before You Leave the Village…​

Sometimes the easiest choice is no choice at all. If the player characters have done all they need to do in “the village” (or whatever area they are in) they will have to move on to the next one. So while they might procrastinate, explore, do some shopping, you know which major plot beat they are going to follow next. Anything they do beforehand will just be a side encounter you can probably improvise or draw from your backstock of generic ones. You need not spend too long on these as even the players know these are not important. The next piece of the “proper adventure” is whenever they leave the village so they won’t expect anything beyond short and sweet. In fact, the less detailed the encounters the more the GM will be assumed to be intimating it is time to move on.

Following the Clues​

Finally we come to the most common invisible railroad that isn’t ever considered railroading (ironically). Investigative adventures usually live and breathe by allowing the player characters to uncover clues that lead to other clues. Such adventures are actually openly railroading as each clue leads to another on a proscribed path. The players aren’t forced to follow the clues, but what else are they going to do? The players are making a point of following the railroad in the knowledge it will take them to the denouement of the adventure. What makes this type of railroading entertaining is that the players feel clever for having found the clues that lead them along the path. So if they start to divert too much the GM can put another clue on their path or let them find the next one a little easier and you are back on track.

The "Good" Kind of Railroading​

Now, all this may all seem a little manipulative, but modifying events in reaction to what the players do is a part of many GM’s tools. Any trick you use is usually okay as long as you do it to serve the story and the player’s enjoyment.

That said, never take away player agency so you can ensure the story plays out the way you want it to. This sort of railroading should only be used just to make the game more manageable and free up the GM to concentrate on running a good game instead of desperately trying to create contingencies. So, remember that you must never restrict the choices and agency of the players, at least knowingly. But it is fine to make sure every road goes where you want it to, as long as that is to somewhere amazing.

Your Turn: How do you use railroading in your games?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And going down that rabbit hole to me leads to madness. I mean if we are at that point, then your saying the only acceptable world in dnd is a hugely rich constructed world where hundreds of npcs have to have their schedules completely laid out, because I can't just drop a random encounter or an NPC on my party without it being fully immersed in the world and completely logical to the world's schedule or else its a railroad. Oh you decided to go to the blacksmith on tuesday? Well let me consult my npc chart to see if Mary the jester would be near by that day.... oh no that's her poker night. Oh but what about marigold the flower lady, wait did you go at 4:30 or going at 4:35? she only walks that area exactly at 4:30 so I need to time that roleplay encounter to check if whether you missed or not.

Right. This to me also seems to be the logical outcome of the stance some people are espousing, yet I doubt they actually do it like this.

The notion of "plot convenience" happens in dnd all the time. The party "just happens" to meet an npc that could be helpful to them on their mission...even though the chance of that happening in real life could be less than 1 in 10,000. The party rescuses a woman who happens to be the old flame of one of the pcs....because its cool and dramatic (even though the odds are astronomical) Dms do this all the time, because tracking every minute of every day is just ludicrous, and we want our players to be heroes and to have interesting and dramatic things happen to them.

Right. At least in small scale this is utterly basic stuff.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

So I do want to codify something, as the "Railroad is always bad" camp has used the common argument that "there is no benefit to railroading, you could always just not do it".

The fundamental benefit of Railroad is.... DM time savings. If I make one combat encounter that the party will encounter if they go down any of 3 paths, versus crafting a different encounter for each of those paths....I have saved a good amount of my time. Maybe that's time I spend enhancing another part of the game, maybe its time I spend working on the garage at home. But that is a benefit.

Now you can argue that you would rather spend more time on your game and not railroad, and that is your choice. But it doesn't invalidate that there is an inherent benefit to railroading for the DM, and not railroading has a cost.

i just want to say I have hammers and screw drivers in my tool box... but sometimes i need a hex wrench or a monkey wrench. very rarely I need a hack saw or a heat gun. Railroad is a tool in the DM tool box, if used carefully and not that often it is great. But it shouldn't be your go to tool

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My point is that people coming into a game aren't even going to know what a DMG says in many cases (and that's assuming the characterization of it telling GMs to lie to their players is correct, that if true is a pretty retrograde thing for a modern incarnation to be doing, but I'm not a 5e person so I wouldn't know--its certainly not something I've often seen other games do). So, really, I do consider this part of kind of a basic checklist of things (along with certain common trigger topics) that should be gone over in session zero.

One certainly could and should discuss the GMing style. The issue really is with the extreme interpretation some people have with the "lie."
I would never in million years consider "Can GM make interesting stuff happen when the PCs happen to around" to be part of the basic checklist for D&D.

Whereas I think a lot of GMs are still carrying over baggage from the beginning of the hobby that I don't think were great ideas even then and have less excuse now, and I absolutely won't hesitate to tell people so. Especially when it carries the odor of the usual top-down-GM-is-right-no-matter-what-the-players-think view about it.

I'm really not talking about Viking-hat-GM-style, merely about the division of labour. As a GM, I am open to discuss thing, take suggestions and listen criticism. But I also don't think that I need to explain every detail of my invisible decision making process. But if the end result is not for the players liking, then complaining about that is absolutely fair. But ultimately I want to have the freedom to attempt to achieve satisfactory results in manner that seems most natural to me. And as player I extent that same courtesy to any GM I'm playing with.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yes! This! Exactly this!

Why is, "Communicate with your players and get them on the same page" such a bad thing? Why does it make me an evil absolutist that I want DMs to either communicate, or be scrupulous?

Why is this so hard?!

because people here on enworld are bearly speaking the same language... just look there are people that say railroading only counts if you lie to your players and others that say anytime you create a world and narrate the consequences of the success or fail THAT is railroading.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I’ll note that DMs who are so strongly opposed to “illusionism” are usually fine with random generation. So, given that it just isn’t possible to plan everything to such a degree of detail, I think the more realistic logical extreme of this position (that is to say, the one you’re arguing against) is a world that is entirely procedurally generated.

And there are various other tools at hand, too. I've absolutely used random encounter mechanics a fair bit in some kinds of campaigns (mostly fantasy or post-apocalypse) over the years, but its somewhat dependent on having enough enemy samples (or being able to pull them out very easily on the fly) to work. In games where almost every encounter is likely to be a custom set of opponents (as is the case in the Fragged Empire game I'm running) this sort of thing is far less practical, though I'll still use some random material for system generation and the like.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One certainly could and should discuss the GMing style. The issue really is with the extreme interpretation some people have with the "lie."
I would never in million years consider "Can GM make interesting stuff happen when the PCs happen to around" to be part of the basic checklist for D&D.

That isn't the issue from my point of view. The issue is, should the GM act like its something he had preplanned for days? I've never been coy about the degree of making-things-up-on-the-fly I do, and when asked about it, I've freely admitted when a given encounter (in some cases a pretty complex one) was made up on the fly. Some people may not want to know, but then, they don't have to ask, but I won't play games implying I did things two days before or that false choice are real choices (if I present something as a choice, there will be at least some difference in outcome depending on how they make it).

Its not the improvisation I'm objecting to; its the illusionism, and even worse, the assumption that everyone is supposed to be okay with the illusionism.

I'm really not talking about Viking-hat-GM-style, merely about the division of labour. As a GM, I am open to discuss thing, take suggestions and listen criticism. But I also don't think that I need to explain every detail of my invisible decision making process. But if the end result is not for the players liking, then complaining about that is absolutely fair. But ultimately I want to have the freedom to attempt to achieve satisfactory results in manner that seems most natural to me. And as player I extent that same courtesy to any GM I'm playing with.

Note there have absolutely been people in this thread that indicated it would be outrageous if someone found out and was soggy about it, though. Like I said, different people are going to find different things its worth discussing in session 0, but if you miss an important one to someone, then I don't think you get to get put upon that they don't like it and make that pretty clear.

I mean, as a vague parallel, let's say I don't think to ask a new player about their triggers, and accidentally drop one in the game because I'm old and don't always think about such things. If they react strongly, my reaction is going to be "Oh. Should have thought to ask about problems here. Let's see if I can minimize use of that in the future, and lets kind of elide around it here." Not get annoyed at them for feeling that way and expressing it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That isn't the issue from my point of view. The issue is, should the GM act like its something he had preplanned for days? I've never been coy about the degree of making-things-up-on-the-fly I do, and when asked about it, I've freely admitted when a given encounter (in some cases a pretty complex one) was made up on the fly. Some people may not want to know, but then, they don't have to ask, but I won't play games implying I did things two days before or that false choice are real choices (if I present something as a choice, there will be at least some difference in outcome depending on how they make it).

I mean I see no particular reason to not answer if asked, though I don't understand why anyone would ask or care. But ultimately I don't think it is the players business how the content is generated, so if the GM doesn't want to reveal that information, that seems fine to me.

As for choices, I agree in the context where the stakes are clearly presented, but games are full of choices that are not like that.

Its not the improvisation I'm objecting to; its the illusionism, and even worse, the assumption that everyone is supposed to be okay with the illusionism.

No one can even agree what it means. Thus I could no promise to not to do it even if I wanted to.

Note there have absolutely been people in this thread that indicated it would be outrageous if someone found out and was soggy about it, though. Like I said, different people are going to find different things its worth discussing in session 0, but if you miss an important one to someone, then I don't think you get to get put upon that they don't like it and make that pretty clear.

I mean, as a vague parallel, let's say I don't think to ask a new player about their triggers, and accidentally drop one in the game because I'm old and don't always think about such things. If they react strongly, my reaction is going to be "Oh. Should have thought to ask about problems here. Let's see if I can minimize use of that in the future, and lets kind of elide around it here." Not get annoyed at them for feeling that way and expressing it.

I don't see need to be a jerk about it, but also I don't think comparing someone's gaming preferences to trauma triggers is perhaps the best idea. These are not a similar thing and comparing them seems to me dismissive of actual psychological harm.

 

[Remathilis]

Depends on whether or not you define what is described in the essay as "fun." A lot of us don't.

Yup. I don't consider rolling up characters (ability scores, HP, gold, spells) fun either, but when I suggest the people who do so are bad and wrong, I'm the bad guy.

Funny what works for one group doesn't always from another.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I mean I see no particular reason to not answer if asked, though I don't understand why anyone would ask or care. But ultimately I don't think it is the players business how the content is generated, so if the GM doesn't want to reveal that information, that seems fine to me.

let me tell you both why I might ask but why I have been asked...learning.

As a group FULL of DMs my normal group talks about "what gave you that idea?" or "How hard was it to plan that?" all the time. It helps all of us run better games. Now does everything get asked... no, and I would not want to waste my time by asking "Was that bandit REALLY always in the north" or "How did we just happen to be in town in the market when the sabretooth tiger got free?"

some things I have resently beens asked:
"wait was the vampire lord really based on the god emperor of dune all the time... back game 3 or 4 when we found out about his foresight did you have all this planned"
my answer "Yeah, game 0 I had this twist coming... but the way I had him always be 1 step ahead of everyone did change a few times to keep up... but he saw it coming even if I couldn't"

"Um, what class was she, that was an awesome combo you pulled off"
"Well she wasn't, I took the knight and gave it both the rogue cunning action and the fighter action surge, changed out dex for str and changed the equipment and gave her mage hand as a bonus action as part of her cunning action. So you could say she was a fighter/rogue but she didn't have either as a full suit of abilities"

and one I asked just this week.
"Dude, where did you pull a monster that has perm hp damage, str damage, fatigue as damage AND a bane ability as a legendary from? did you make it yourself?"
the answer was mixing a third party undead with a shadow...

As for choices, I agree in the context where the stakes are clearly presented, but games are full of choices that are not like that.

yeah just like real life. Sometimes you get to make a clear choice with the consequences weighed out... and sometimes those unforeseen consequences kick your but.

I had a second editon game (actually one I ran in 2,3,and a retro clone and may still in 5) where there is a good killer (long before Gor from the THor story) and I had 0 intention of making a movie quote nor did I think that anyone else would. The PCs were collecting 5 magic items, and they knew a legendary 'monster' may awaken... there were also clues (some they missed some they got) that the 'monster' was just a man so strong and smart he could and did fight and kill gods before he was locked away.
When they got to the 3rd item they saw a giant gem prison that was cracked and a tall thin man with a thin long sword and peicemail broken armor... they instantly put togather THAT was the monster... they then assumed that they could take this 3rd one and it would not break (nope) they took the 3rd item the crystal shattered and Praxton the God killer stood before them... they KNEW that it took an army and high level characters just to weaken him and all 5 artifacts to lock him away so they stood no chance... what they didn't know was this was just (in my mind) flavor for later issues... so I had him fall out tired and weak and look up and ask "Are you gods?"
and 2 of my 5 players said 'No' 2 of them just looked at me in shock, and 1 said "Yes," and when one of the 'no' players said "WTF" he said "Ray if someone asks you if you are a god you say YES"
I told him that was a funny ghost buster reference but I would let him take it back if he wanted... he didn't so we rolled initiative. I killed him in the 2nd round of combat, and then walked off ignoring the others complaining "Liar... you were not worthy of my time"

If Ross had paid attention he could have pieced together this guy wanted to kill all the gods. (although everyone put that together then and said in retrospect it made sense) but in the moment he had a choice... say yes, say no, say nothing... 2 of those choices had a threat made to face level 25+ PCs and be a hard fight walk away, one had him throw down with 5th-7th level PCs... he made his choice. It wasn't really an informed choice because he not only didn't put it together in game what the guy's goals were, but when warned with the DM "are you sure you say that?" doubled down... and he lost his character

 

[Charlaquin]

I have no interest in illusionistic techniques. Nor am I into procedural generation. Nor the sort of planning/prep/notes that @Stalker0 describes in the post you quoted.

Those are not the only alternatives to illusionism. Open scene-framing, and "say 'yes' or roll the dice", based around player-stipulated stakes - basically, what the 4e rulebooks advocate - is an alternative. And as the 4e books illustrate, entirely compatible with D&D.

No, I don’t think those are the only options either, I was saying the heavy use of procedural generation is the alternative to the heavy use of prep that the extreme anti-illusionism folks find acceptable.