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?

 

[Arilyn]

I can say that as a player, I don't care how the GM does any of that. As long as the world seems real and full of interesting stuff to do and it seems that my choices matter I'm good. I don't really care how the GM achieved it or whether some of my feelings are based on illusion. It doesn't really affect my subjective experience.

Every GM will have preferences, varying amounts of time and different comfort levels when it comes to designing and prepping. I'd prefer they lean into what excites them while doing this, as to me, that will help make for a better game. I'm pretty flexible as a player and as long as the railroading isn't stomping all over my choices, I don't really care either. I don't feel that quantum ogres, encounters, etc. are railroading unless the players have knowledge and deliberately avoid the encounter but the GM forces it.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Here's a relevant pic of a tweet cause I saw it on my phone

 

[Maxperson]

1) Older players with Real Lives: So one of the things I have noticed in my games as the years have gone on, as my players have gotten older, gotten jobs and families.... they just don't have the mental energy they once did. I have done "open sandbox" games with them, and what I find is that giving them a bevy of choices tends to create decision paralysis, infighting, and slows down the game. What normally happens is one player just makes a choice and everyone goes along with it.

conversely my most successful campaigns have been my "mission focused" ones. Ie the players are a part of some organization, they have a boss that goes "alright team, your mission is....". Aka I put them on a railroad, here is where you are going and what you are doing. And they love it, it removes any infighting, any debating, they just get right into the roleplaying and the action.

Player type makes a huge difference here. If you have proactive players, you don't even have to come up with a zillion choices. They will decide upon goals for their characters and then set about trying to achieve them. All a DM with those sorts of players has to do is react and work on things relating what they are doing, and perhaps a bit of tangential stuff. Improvisation also helps a lot.

It's still a sandbox world, since they players can pick and choose what they want to do, and change along the way, but the DM has to work far less on it than a traditional sandbox.

Passive players on the other hand, need to be led to things. They aren't going to come up with the idea to become the new sheriff in town, but if you present a problem in their town where the old sheriff is corrupt and there's no good replacement, a lot of passive players will happily decide to step into that role.

2) Limited DM time: Likewise as I've gotten older, my time and mental energy are limited as well. Now I can spend that time crafting a dozen options to try and account for player choices....each of which only get a small portion of my time and creativity, or I can focus my energies on 2-3 encounters I know they will encounter (because of the railroad), each of which will be much more involved and interesting because I've put my full mind to their creation.

And here again improvisation is key. I haven't crafted a dozen options, even a single option in decades. What I do is come up with a puzzle, problem or encounter and let the players come up with ways. They will almost always do so, and often in ways you wouldn't have crafted anyway. It's a waste of time coming up with options and trying to account for player choices when they're highly likely to come up with something you didn't think of anyway.

I'm not trying to say you are doing it wrong. I'm just present a different take on those situations.

 

[Thomas Shey]

• Planned encounters alterable up to the start of the session
• Planned encounters alterable up to the encounter occurs
• Planned encounters alterable while in progress if a miscalculation was done of the challenge level
• Planned encounters alterable while in progress if the luck is swinging abnormally against the players

This particular part has been a topic of controversy all the way back to near the beginning of the hobby. Though the terms don't seem to have survived, back in the day in a couple of influential APAs and other places in the day there was discussion of the validity of "softkeying" (making up encounters as you got to them) or "flexkeying" (changes encounters on the fly after they'd started to adjust difficulty) in contrast to "hardkeying" (encounters that were pre-set and only used as-is).

 

[Stalker0]

Player type makes a huge difference here. If you have proactive players, you don't even have to come up with a zillion choices. They will decide upon goals for their characters and then set about trying to achieve them. All a DM with those sorts of players has to do is react and work on things relating what they are doing, and perhaps a bit of tangential stuff. Improvisation also helps a lot.

It's still a sandbox world, since they players can pick and choose what they want to do, and change along the way, but the DM has to work far less on it than a traditional sandbox.

Passive players on the other hand, need to be led to things. They aren't going to come up with the idea to become the new sheriff in town, but if you present a problem in their town where the old sheriff is corrupt and there's no good replacement, a lot of passive players will happily decide to step into that role.

And here again improvisation is key. I haven't crafted a dozen options, even a single option in decades. What I do is come up with a puzzle, problem or encounter and let the players come up with ways. They will almost always do so, and often in ways you wouldn't have crafted anyway. It's a waste of time coming up with options and trying to account for player choices when they're highly likely to come up with something you didn't think of anyway.

I'm not trying to say you are doing it wrong. I'm just present a different take on those situations.

I'm very much in agreement with you, but I think that some people in the thread consider that "bad railroading". If your just coming up with something on the fly, than your not respecting player choice because you could have come up with that regardless of what the players do. The only "correct" way to do it (according to some) is to have everything laid out before the players choose, and then when they choose you just follow the path you already preplanned for without alteration. Anything less is railroading.

 

[Maxperson]

So what your saying is, the players are fine with certain choices not mattering (or mattering only as a minor story detail) as long as they get to where they ultimately want to go.

Choice is the key, not whether something matters or not. The players had the choice to chat up the NPC or not. If the NPCs doesn't have any information for them to go on and it ends with nothing mattering, their choice was still honored. They had agency.

Now, if while talking to the insignificant NPCs they discover that he's a farrier and one of the PCs has an aha! moment and says, "I need some horseshoes made of fairy steel for a magic item I'm going to have made, would you introduce me to the blacksmith?" and the DM says no in order to force the players back towards the plot that the DM wants them to engage with, THAT would be railroading. He's shutting down agency in order to see his own agenda done. If on the other hand he knows that the farrier really doesn't do favors for people and a diplomacy check fails and he says no, then it's not railroading for him to refuse that connection.

 

[Stalker0]

Now, if while talking to the insignificant NPCs they discover that he's a farrier and one of the PCs has an aha! moment and says, "I need some horseshoes made of fairy steel for a magic item I'm going to have made, would you introduce me to the blacksmith?" and the DM says no in order to force the players back towards the plot that the DM wants them to engage with, THAT would be railroading.

However, what if while watching the scene, the DM sees the other players eyes start to roll, "oh here goes Bob again with one of his subplots". So the DM could let Bob go through this whole blacksmith scene, consuming the game time while the other players have to wait....or he could nudge Bob back on the main plot that all of his players are enjoying, and so now they get to participate. Remember that sometimes the DM has to step in when one player's agency can step on teh agency of others.

Again its never that black and white, which is my issue with this debate. I am willing to accept there are certain levels of railroading that are generally bad and excessive, but it seems like there are others that any amount of railroading is absolutely unacceptable. Those are incompatible viewpoints, with nothing in the middle to work towards agreement.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm very much in agreement with you, but I think that some people in the thread consider that "bad railroading". If your just coming up with something on the fly, than your not respecting player choice because you could have come up with that regardless of what the players do. The only "correct" way to do it (according to some) is to have everything laid out before the players choose, and then when they choose you just follow the path you already preplanned for without alteration. Anything less is railroading.

It's not railroading unless you enact it regardless of their choice.

If I come up with, the baron is sending a legion to impose martial law on the next town the players come to and then do it no matter what town they go to, that's a railroad of illusionism. Their choice of towns is not relevant. If on the other hand I come up with the idea that the baron is going to impose martial law on the town of Weneedorder and the players who are heading there decide instead to turn north to Thistownhasorder, because it's close to something else they want to do, then it's not railroading for me to have the baron impose martial law on Weneedorder. I have not invalidated their choice.

Similarly, if they decide to go into a town and no matter what they do or where the go I decide that they will be attacked by a street gang, that is railroading. But if instead they go into a town and decide to go to the local adventurer's guild and find out if there are any problems and I have to come up with one and come up with a street gang problem in the dock district, that is not railroading. I am honoring their choice and improvising a logical problem for the guild to be hired to take care of. The players are then free to take the job and clean up the gang, not take the job and clean of the gang, take a different job, or take no job at all and go do something else. They'll only be attacked by the gang if they go to the dock district. That's not railroading.

Improvisation isn't railroading. Forcing the players onto a path and denying them their agency is.

 

[Maxperson]

However, what if while watching the scene, the DM sees the other players eyes start to roll, "oh here goes Bob again with one of his subplots". So the DM could let Bob go through this whole blacksmith scene, consuming the game time while the other players have to wait....or he could nudge Bob back on the main plot that all of his players are enjoying, and so now they get to participate. Remember that sometimes the DM has to step in when one player's agency can step on teh agency of others.

Or I do what I do and pause the scene at the point that the farrier agrees to take Bob to the blacksmith and ask the other players what they would like to do. Then I can bounce back and forth between them making Bob happy, and the other players happy.

One of four things will happen in that situation.

1. The entire group will decide to go with Bob. If they choose to do this, I will honor their choice.
2. Bob will go alone and the group will do something else. Either together or individually. If they choose to do this I will honor their choice.
3. Bob will decide that he doesn't want to miss the main plot or whatever else the group decides to do and will put the blacksmith thing on the back burner. If Bob decides to do this I will honor his choice.
4. Some of the other group members will go with Bob and the others will go do something else. If they choose this I will honor their choice.

I don't need to force Bob towards the plot or the group towards Bob's side quest. Everyone can have fun doing their own things for a bit.

Again its never that black and white, which is my issue with this debate. I am willing to accept there are certain levels of railroading that are generally bad and excessive, but it seems like there are others that any amount of railroading is absolutely unacceptable. Those are incompatible viewpoints, with nothing in the middle to work towards agreement.

I'm in the latter camp. Any amount of removal of my agency by denying my character the ability to choose what he wants to do is bad. Railroading is bad. However, linear doesn't have to be. If a PC gets arrested for a crime and the party can't break him out, he's going on trial no matter what the players choose to do. That's a linear consequence of that PCs action, not a railroad. A leads to B.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But the thing is that outside these internet debates people do not consider stuff like "interesting thing happens when the PCs are around to see it" to be any sort of deception.

That's not the whole issue, however. Remember part of this discussion isn't just "should you do this?" but "should you do this while hiding the fact you ever even do it?" I think it can absolutely be defensible to do this. I'm a little less on board being coy about it when its spotted by people. But I absolutely think its bad practice to just go in assuming everyone will be okay with you do it without actually ever bringing it up. The latter is a violation of trust in the social contract and I don't think I'm being hyperbolic to state so.

(Caveat: there's some muddy ground involving a GM who thinks he knows his players well enough to be able to use it with a technique without consulting with them about it. I play with people who I've gamed with anywhere from 10 years to more than 40 at this point, and I think they're all pretty clear that I'll occasionally do things like this at this point so I don't need to have this discussion (helped by the fact its not a technique I like using (I usually consider it a failure state of set-up), so I use it rarely, and most of the ones who've known me for a time know that too). But I absolutely would not make that assumption with a new group of players or even a single player these days, and I don't really think anyone else should. Talk to them about it. If they're good, then its good.)

I am not opposed to discussing gaming practices, I'm doing that right now. But I think that in a DM centric game such as D&D it is the baseline assumption that the GM may choose and rearrange things behind the curtains in a manner they see fit, and if someone has a strong objection to that, it behoves them to bring it up.

This makes a massive assumption about more consistency in gaming cultures than I think is warranted.