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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jynx_lucky_j" data-source="post: 6358380" data-attributes="member: 32333">I hate how people treat having a story planned out as automatically being a railroad. I may plan out a story but if the players don’t follow it exactly as I planned or even disregard it entirely they can. Although if the player’s decide they don’t care about saving the town/princess/kingdom/world then I’ve know I’ve failed somehow to make the characters care about the world they’re in.I’ve tried more traditional sand boxes in the past, but they don’t really work out for my group. For one, they want a story. Exploring and finding cool things scattered around or traditional dungeon delves don’t really do it for them. They want some kind of external motivation.  Goblins attacked the town, we need to go investigate. The Princess kidnapped the dragon, we have to go rescue it. The gate to hell has been breached; we have to go plug it up. When I tried a sandbox with story threads like that scattered around they would latch on to one at a time and see it through to completion before looking for another. So in effect it was no different that if I had just presented them with a single story one at a time.Now how exactly they go about say...tracking down the evil cult, and how they decide to deal with the trouble they caused, that stuff is all them. Even when I use a published adventure if they deviate from the path of the adventure by trying a different method I just run with it. I’ve almost never had the players just completely disregard an adventure laid before them. However, I almost always see them approach the adventure in their own way.Really the term railroad is a bit derogatory. And not really very accurate. A railroad implies that the players have no agency, that they can’t do anything not specifically laid out for them in the adventure. Adventure path really works better. A path can fork. You can leave the path and come back to it later. Yes you have an eventual destination, but what you do on the journey is completely up to you.</blockquote>

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