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?

 

[Mort]

So I'll ask "what is wrong with railroading?" Other then you don't like it. And other then some moral high ground to say "all lies, deception and such are always wrong", because that is not true.

Railroading is the elimination of player choice. Generally added to the definition is that it is the unwilling or unknowing elimination of that choice (though not everyone, even in this thread, is adding the second bit).

It's bad because players like their choices, to the extent available, to matter. If their choices don't matter, why are they pretending to make them? They may as well sit back and allow the DM to narrate the story to them from beginning to end.

Now, pretty much all players accept SOME level of choice limitation. If you're playing a module/or published adventure the players generally agree to stay within the confines of the module. If the players are playing a pirate game/adventure they generally agree to stay within that genre.

Given that, many players expect that the choices they ARE given are real choices and that they can affect the outcome of the game in some meaningful way. Railroading means the players are not actually doing that. That, however it may appear, the DM has the story pre-planned and the player's choice doesn't factor in. The most extreme being, the DM has essentially written the entire story and the PCs are just being pushed through it with no agency whatever.

For many people, the point of gaming is to have the story EMERGE (be created) during play. The extreme end of railroading is that the story is set/fixed and the DM is merely REVEALING the story during play.

The later is anathema to players who want to shape the story, doubly so when they think they are helping shape it only to discover that it was, in fact, fixed.

 

[Maxperson]

But why? Beyond some vague "it's generically wrong".

Why is deceiving someone wrong? Do we really have to explain that?

For example, in order to surprise the players you have to hide things, be deceptive and such. They can only be surprised for real. You can't tell the players the supprie and then have it happen: it will fall flat. Real emotions are always better then fake emotions.

Hiding a fact until it is discovered is not the same as actively lying to the players by telling them their choices matter when they don't.

Except it's not. Even if I was the only pro Railroad poster, I alone would make it not universal. And I'm not alone.

Cool. There are a lot of people in the world who think that they have the right to steal from stores because they are evil corporations. That doesn't make them correct that theft is okay.

So I'll ask "what is wrong with railroading?" Other then you don't like it. And other then some moral high ground to say "all lies, deception and such are always wrong", because that is not true.

I've answered this literally a dozen+ times in specificity in this thread. You are taking away their agency and denying them any choice that matters. When you do it, they are not playing the game. Only you are.

 

[pemerton]

in order to surprise the players you have to hide things, be deceptive and such.

This isn't true at all.

When I GM, I surprise my players all the time. It doesn't require any hiding or deceiving. When I play, I find myself being surprised by my GM. Again, this doesn't require him hiding or deceiving.

For instance, the last time that I ran a session of my group's Traveller campaign, there was a surprise: one of the NPCs who travels with the PCs on their starship had been performing experiments, implanting Alien (TM) material into a NPC in the sick bay. The player of the relevant PC knew that this NPC was a medical scientist with an interest in bioweapons research; and knew that the other NPC was in the sick bay; and knew that the PCs had been encountering Aliens. Nevertheless, when an Alien started running amok in the starship, the player was caught by surprise!

No deception, no hiding, just framing.

Another example, this one from Burning Wheel: a PC's backstory included that he had trained as a sorcerer with his brother, in their tower in the Abor-Alz, before the tower had been sacked by Orcs and his brother possessed by a Balrog. In play, the PC returned to the tower for the first time since then. The player declared that his PC searched the ruins looking for a half-completed magic item his PC had been working on as an apprentice. The Scavenging check failed, and so the PC didn't find what he was looking for; rather, in the ruins of what had been his brother's private workroom, he found a stand of elf-slaying Black Arrows. This was a surprise to the player - and it hinted that perhaps his brother had succumbed to evil before he was possessed by the Balrog. But maybe someone else - perhaps an Orc - had created the arrows? So the player declared an Aura Reading check, to determine who created the arrows. The check failed, and so the PC didn't learn what he had hoped to - rather, the Aura Reading confirmed that it was indeed his brother who had crafted the arrows.

In this example of play, as in the first one, there is no deception and no hiding. There's just the narration of consequences of failed checks, where the stakes are transparent, being implicit in the situation as informed by the PC's backstory and goals.

D&D can be run in the same sort of fashion as I've described in this post: clear framing, clear stakes, clear consequences. And surprise is amply possible.

 

[bloodtide]

Railroading is the elimination of player choice.

Well, I see a lot pre made adventure always badwrongfun and an improv adventure is super cool. It also seems like the player "choice" seems to be all about the random "like real life" type games popular on line where a character just does normal stuff like shopping and laundry.

Why do players think that any of their choices are altering the game reality? At least 75% of them, like what road to take or door to open are way to mundane to matter. And even the "big choices" don't matter too much, as they again don't really alter the game reality.

I get there are other games that let players alter the game reality on a whim....but D&D is not one of those games.

It's hard to reply to all your jargon word salad though

I've answered this literally a dozen+ times in specificity in this thread. You are taking away their agency and denying them any choice that matters. When you do it, they are not playing the game. Only you are.

Taking away jargon word salad is never wrong.

I wonder how I can trick and lie to so many players and still they have fun and a good game and never even notice. They make dozes of choices during game play...none alter the game reality....but somehow they don't notice.

This isn't true at all.

When I GM, I surprise my players all the time. It doesn't require any hiding or deceiving. When I play, I find myself being surprised by my GM. Again, this doesn't require him hiding or deceiving.

For instance, the last time that I ran a session of my group's Traveller campaign, there was a surprise: one of the NPCs who travels with the PCs on their starship had been performing experiments, implanting Alien (TM) material into a NPC in the sick bay. The player of the relevant PC knew that this NPC was a medical scientist with an interest in bioweapons research; and knew that the other NPC was in the sick bay; and knew that the PCs had been encountering Aliens. Nevertheless, when an Alien started running amok in the starship, the player was caught by surprise!

Odd, I see a lie and lots of deception there. So a PC knew some vague information you carefully sculpted to hide what was going on? Notice how you BLATANTLY hit the part about the NPC doing experiments with the Alien(TM). Just let that part out? Just "randomly decided" that "somehow" the PCs did not know about it? And why did you not tell the PC? Was it to not ruin the surprise? DM: "oh the NPC in sick bay is doing dangerous reckless Alien(tm) experiments with no security protections."

I think for forgot the "surprise" part in the second story. Unless your saying the the "surprise" was the brother was evil? But that is only a surprise if the brother was never mentioned before and the player had no chance to learn anything about them.

 

[pemerton]

Odd, I see a lie and lots of deception there. So a PC knew some vague information you carefully sculpted to hide what was going on? Notice how you BLATANTLY hit the part about the NPC doing experiments with the Alien(TM). Just let that part out? Just "randomly decided" that "somehow" the PCs did not know about it? And why did you not tell the PC? Was it to not ruin the surprise? DM: "oh the NPC in sick bay is doing dangerous reckless Alien(tm) experiments with no security protections."

Huh?

We were all sitting around the table. The player of the starship owner had decided that the starship, with some of the PCs and some of their NPC entourage on board, was going to travel from Zinion to Novus. We resolve the checks for entering jump space etc.

Then I frame the scene: Buzz is walking past the sick bay door, and out bursts an Alien. Mayhem ensues. After the Alien has been dealt with, the medical scientist NPC explains to the ship owning PC that her experimentation had got out of control.

There's no hiding of anything! There's revelation, which is basically the opposite of hiding. (In Agon, John Harper sets out the cycle of play as reveal the situation, ask questions and build on the answers to drive the game forward towards conflict, and then judge those contests and resolve their outcomes into new situations. That's basically what has happened here: revelation of the Alien, asking questions that established who was where on the ship and what they did to respond to the threat, and then judging the results and resolving things into a new situation, namely, the revelation that the medical scientist NPC is still engaged in risky bioweapons research.)

If I had wanted to, I could have framed a different scene, such as the NPC mentioning to the PC the progress she is making on her research with Aliens. But I thought the one I framed was more exciting - in part that's because Traveller has more robust mechanics for resolving a fight with an Alien on a spaceship than for resolving an argument between friends. (That's not to say that Traveller doesn't have social mechanics - it does - but it has "thicker" combat mechanics.)

That wouldn't have involved hiding anything either.

I think for forgot the "surprise" part in the second story. Unless your saying the the "surprise" was the brother was evil? But that is only a surprise if the brother was never mentioned before and the player had no chance to learn anything about them.

I think you are not understanding how the resolution works.

The brother had been mentioned before. As I posted, the player had introduced the brother, possessed by a Balrog, as part of his PC's backstory. Freeing his brother from that possession was a key motivation for the PC. The possession as an explanation for his brother's evil was a key part of the PC's conception of his brother.

The player chose to put those things at stake, first by searching the ruined tower, and then by Aura Reading the arrows. And the checks failed, and so the player loses the stakes. And so I narrate that he confirms that his brother made the Black Arrows.

I can assure you that that was a surprise, and an unwelcome one.

Had the player succeeded on his Aura Reading and learned that the Arrows had been made by an Orc, that would have been interesting (because of how it would have connected to other elements of the established fiction) but not very surprising.

 

[Mistwell]

I expected invisible railroad trains in this thread and instead all I found was a bunch of discussion about how to run a plot in an RPG.

 

[Mort]

Well, I see a lot pre made adventure always badwrongfun and an improv adventure is super cool.

Nope. Interesting how you completely ignored the part of my post where I say the exact opposite of that.

It also seems like the player "choice" seems to be all about the random "like real life" type games popular on line where a character just does normal stuff like shopping and laundry.

Again, nope. Most of the time, shopping and laundry is just fluff kind of a fun riffing exercise for some groups though not my thing (though I would like to see @iserith 's shopping adventure. That looks like a blast).

No, Player choice is exactly what it sounds like. Do we go eliminate the goblins or go rat catching. Do we stop the hermit building the world ending machine or the vampire in his castle. If we pick one over the other, hopefully that makes the story different. And it wasn't just preplanned where there was actually only one choice.

Why do players think that any of their choices are altering the game reality? At least 75% of them, like what road to take or door to open are way to mundane to matter. And even the "big choices" don't matter too much, as they again don't really alter the game reality.

I get there are other games that let players alter the game reality on a whim....but D&D is not one of those games.

Why not?

If you're playing a module then sure, the story is mostly written. But the players know that, have accepted it and are following along. Hopefully having fun because the module is good/being run well. Is that railroading, technically yes (though again I wouldn't say so because it's voluntary), but since it's accepted it's really just a linear, hopefully fun, path.

But not all D&D is run like that. It's not exactly hard to have a campaign where player choice drives the story along. It just means the DM doesn't have a fully pre owned path in mind

It's hard to reply to all your jargon word salad though

Jargon word salad?

Unwilling elimination of player choice. Please point out the jargon there. Or in the rest of the post for that matter, I really tried to be clear with no jargon other than, possibly, common gaming terms.

Edit: @bloodtide, what jargon did I use in the post you are referring to? The ONLY jargon I see is the term Railroading, and this is a thread about Railroading.

And word salad generally means impenetrable or incomprehensible nonsense. What part of my post qualifies as that?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sure. But the great truth is, communication is hard and some people really don't like doing it for various reasons.

If you aren't willing to communicate, you shouldn't be DMing. Full stop. Communication is absolutely essential to be a DM. It does not matter what style you favor, whether you like lots of DM force or no force at all or anything in-between. In order to do the task of DMing, you have to communicate what is going on to your players. It is not possible to DM in a way that does not involve communication to some extent.

This is like saying a person wants to perform Shakespeare, but doesn't want to memorize. You cannot do the former without doing the latter. It's not physically possible.

As such, a lot of things get done by assumption and guess that really probably shouldn't. Like I said, I've never had the discussion, but the majority of people I game with I've played with for 20 years or more. If the small amount of this I do was bothersome, I think I'd at least have gotten a hint by now.

Well, now that the topic has been broached, don't you think it is generally better to have a conversation about it, rather than to coast on presumptions, hoping that those presumptions are correct?

I'd be far less blase about this with someone new to my game. Even less so if they didn't play with other people who's game culture I was familiar with.

That's very good to hear. But, being perfectly honest, I still think it behooves you to communicate clearly and effectively with people you're very familiar with. Many, many, many, many, many problems in human relationships arise because people think that familiarity and/or past history (e.g. "it was never a problem before") obviate the need for communication.

Time for my regularly scheduled," I trust the DM will use their judgement to run the game well. They're empowered for a reason."

Thomas Shey already covered this, but here's my two bits: "Anyone who responds to concerns about presentation of false pretenses with 'just trust me!' is making things worse, not better."

But why? Beyond some vague "it's generically wrong".

I may not agree with Max about much, but he has the right of it. Deception is generically wrong. This is not an argument. This is a moral axiom.

For example, in order to surprise the players you have to hide things, be deceptive and such. They can only be surprised for real. You can't tell the players the supprie and then have it happen: it will fall flat. Real emotions are always better then fake emotions.

You do not need to be deceptive to create surprise. Others, like @pemerton, have shown examples. Further, as I have repeatedly said, there is a difference between fooling the characters (which results in players being surprised due to incongruity in their understanding of the fictional context) and fooling the players (which results in players believing things about the kind of game they're playing which are not true.)

I am 110% in favor of reasonable situations where you fool the characters. I am fully opposed to situations where you fool the players.

Except it's not. Even if I was the only pro Railroad poster, I alone would make it not universal. And I'm not alone.

Coercing someone into believing something false, so that they will be happier than they would be if they knew the true state of affairs. That is what is universally negative. Again, all that is required to avoid this is to tell people, at the outset, that you do this stuff. Something like:

"Hey, some of the time, I may fudge rolls or present you with choices that seem to make a difference and seem to put you in control of the story, even though they won't or don't. I won't tell you when I'm doing this, but it's going to happen now and then, and you should basically never be able to tell that I've done it. I genuinely believe that doing this is going to produce a better, fuller, more enjoyable experience than if I chose not to do this. I won't do it very often, because I understand that people value consistent rules and the feeling that the story responds to them. As long as you're okay with me doing that with the purpose of improving the overall experience, we should all have a good time."

And no, "Just trust me, I'm the DM!" does not cut it for covering the above.

So I'll ask "what is wrong with railroading?" Other then you don't like it. And other then some moral high ground to say "all lies, deception and such are always wrong", because that is not true.

Because, in order for it to be "railroading," you must have intentionally NOT said the paragraph above. You must intentionally be using invisible rails. It's not railroading if you tell your players you're running a premade module or AP, because they know the rails are there. It's not railroading if you tell your players in advance that you may, sometimes, give them situations that LOOK like choices that really matter and really give them control, but in practice don't at all, merely giving the illusion of agency and control. There, they can't see the rails directly, but they know there are rails and they will be kept to those rails without comment.

Passing off a pre-written module as though it were an organic campaign, on the other hand, is railroading--and quite clearly wrong (particularly because you add in a lovely dash of plagiarism, passing off the module author's work as your own.)

And for my "I trust a GM's intentions explicity or I won't play with them, but I don't trust any GM's judgment unlimitedly, and don't see any necessity to do so."

For my part, it's the "explicitly" that's at issue. I can't trust someone explicitly unless they've been explicit with me. They need to get me on board with what they're doing. That requires telling me that they will tacitly ignore the rules (which, for me, is an instant disqualifier for a serious game) or that they will tacitly subvert player choice (which is not quite an instant disqualifier, but it's pretty close.) A DM that is honest enough to tell me they do this will absolutely have my respect, but I either definitely (for tacit rule-breaking) or probably (for tacit DM force) will not actually play with them unless it's a completely casual, usually humorous game. I won't raise a stink, I'll just depart, because the game being offered isn't one I'm interested in playing, no different from connecting up with a group to play a "sci-fi" game and finding out that that means "xenomorph body horror"--I'm not interested in playing that, so I won't stick around.

Given that, many players expect that the choices they ARE given are real choices and that they can affect the outcome of the game in some meaningful way. Railroading means the players are not actually doing that. That, however it may appear, the DM has the story pre-planned and the player's choice doesn't factor in. The most extreme being, the DM has essentially written the entire story and the PCs are just being pushed through it with no agency whatever.

This is an excellent way of phrasing it, thank you! Exactly on point: with all the myriad choices we already know to be irrelevant most of the time (such as the color of one's clothes or the town in which you were born etc.), when a choice is specifically called out for us to make, that automatically elevates it. If it didn't matter, it would either be handwaved or wouldn't be brought up in the first place, because game time is precious and wasting it on irrelevancies is...well, wasteful. Hence why a blanket statement in advance is so important; it allows the DM to preserve the in-the-moment tension (by not calling attention to their sleight-of-hand) while still respecting the players' agency because they have already consented to such situations.

 

[Maxperson]

It's hard to reply to all your jargon word salad though

Taking away jargon word salad is never wrong.

This is the umpteenth time you've said this. Hate to break it to you, but if you have resort to blatant evasions instead of responding to the argument, you have no position worth defending. You've lost.

There is no "jargon salad" there. Either respond to my argument or admit that you have no valid response.

 

[Maxperson]

Jargon word salad?

Unwilling elimination of player choice. Please point out the jargon there. Or in the rest of the post for that matter, I really tried to be clear with no jargon other than, possibly, common gaming terms.

He likely has no counter argument worth bringing up, so he evades by insulting the arguments we put forth.