I wanna get back on the railroad

[tankschmidt]

It sounds like you're making a noble effort, and hopefully your players will adjust to this new style and come to enjoy it. The adjustment period is always hard for players, especially if they are used to being spoon fed.

1) I dropped hints about three different modules instead of railing them onto one. Result, they pick the hardest one first and almost die. And they do the first part of two different modules and don't get any treasure for two sessions. And they end up with four hours of roleplaying and no combat because I can't plan to drop in encounters for pacing when I don't know where they're going.

This is just part of the learning curve. The party picked a difficult quest to undertake without doing the proper research first. If they had asked around in town prior to setting out, maybe they would have met a couple adventurers -- who were clearly more experienced than they are -- still nursing their wounds after returning from that den of evil. Hopefully, next time your players learn from their mistake and don't rush in too quickly and end up over their heads in trouble.

Not getting any treasure for two sessions shouldn't be too much of a hardship. Soon the players will realize that this turn of events is not the result of your stinginess but is a consequence of their actions entirely. If they want treasure, they will have to plan expeditions to get some.

The pacing shouldn't be a big deal if you are using wandering monster tables. I assume your players are trekking through wilderness to reach some sort of dungeon. Generate a table for each wilderness (you really only need six or so entries), and set the level of these entries based on how dangerous your believe the terrain should be. If the route is dangerous, it's likely townsfolk will know, so the PCs should ask. Then roll a wandering monster check a couple times a day for wilderness exploration and every three or four turns of dungeon exploration. Feel free to play around with how often you roll checks, depending on how dangerous the location is.

One other point I'd like to make is that four hours of role-playing and no combat is a fine way to play D&D. There's no need to have combat in every session. And if the PCs want a fight, they can go looking for one, of course.

In my normal preparation style, the session would have started with the campaign and gone "roleplaying to persuade voters, quest to win over voting bloc, roleplaying to debate opponent, quest to prove worthiness..." and been a lot more balanced.

This is a good point here. One of the benefits of a sandbox campaign is that the DM doesn't know where the adventure will go on any given night. You should be as surprised as the PCs at what happens. What you definitely want to avoid is to have a constant "outline" of an adventure that stays more or less standard week after week.

3) The party is splitting up over individual motivations -- not fighting, just not the kind of smooth, fun teamwork we get when we just assume motivations and go kick butt. I can't use "you're the sheriff" for adventure hooks because the other two have no interest in being hired on as deputies.

There's no need to force adventure hooks in a sandbox game. If the PCs are looking for adventure, they will find it. Typically their options are to do some hexcrawling through the wilderness, dungeoncrawling through a known dungeon, or ask the townsfolk if they've heard anything going on. The first two options are entirely exploratory, and that's a good thing! It means the players are interested in the world you have created for them. Let them get out there, explore, fight some wandering monsters, investigate some monsters' lairs, and learn when to fight, run, or parley.

The third option is for when the players aren't interested in exploration. They'll ask around town or talk to their patron about what work needs to be done, or if there's anything interesting going on. For these sorts of occasions, you need to have a rumor table prepared. Include about twenty entries along the lines of "I heard the orcs to the north have discovered some sort of magical ore." When the PCs start talking to people, roll on the table. If you have several adventures prepared for the players, have several rumors direct the PCs towards each adventure. Once they have gathered some information, they'll probably set out without any further prodding.

Good luck and keep us updated!

 

[Noumenon]

Have the rats respond to what the PCs have done but didn't finish. Then the poor townsfolk have to deal with that and the PCs will come back to a situation they left undone and not it is worse then before.

Hey, that's a good idea. The only thing I could think to get the PCs back to the adventure was having the person who sent them nag them again and again -- and they pretty much all want to ignore her even though she's the mayor. But they do care about what happens to the town.

I do have to think about it a little, I mean they did kill the guy who was shifting people's souls into rats and sending them through the rat tunnels carrying stolen jewels, so I'd have to figure out who else could be recruited to do that... not that hard I guess.

 

[Remathilis]

The million dollar question: Are the players having fun?

Clearly ONE of them isn't, or he wouldn't have posted a thread about it here.

 

[Obryn]

There are some gamers who have stretched the term "Railroad" to an unreasonable degree. There's not even a continuum a lot of the time - if it's not a "sandbox," it's a "railroad." Or, at the least, "railroad-y."

I don't think this is helpful terminology at all.

In a railroad game, the players' choices don't matter. They couldn't decide to skip an adventure, their characters' reactions to NPCs would be scripted for them, and any deviation from the carefully-run tracks would be cause for punishment and/or boredom.

Simply having a guided campaign - or a campaign with an overarching plot arc - isn't a railroad. So long as you don't know the destination, or even know the precise details of the waystations, you're not railroading. You're running a player-driven, but prepared, game.

The most important part of gaming is that you and your players are having fun. Some groups have the most fun with a full-on sandbox. (Mine is not one of these, fwiw.) Some groups have fun with a player-driven campaign. Some have fun with adventure path-style campaigns. And yes, some have fun with clear railroads, tough as it is to imagine.

Nobody's fun is superior, and sandbox games are not inherently better, more pure, more advanced, or more fun than other kinds of campaigns. I think true railroading is bad DMing, but simply not-sandboxing is not necessarily railroading. Don't fall into this false dichotomy.

-O

 

[rogueattorney]

Clearly ONE of them isn't, or he wouldn't have posted a thread about it here.

Well, if the other players aren't having fun, there's no issue in changing up the game. If the other players are having fun, then the issue become whether he can change up his prep and gm-ing techniques such that he is having fun without spoiling it for the ones who are already having fun.

Whether you like the sandbox style of game or not, it's a relevant question.

 

[Noumenon]

What you cite as "railroading", I would just call "DMing"... this is a relative concept. Some people see the sandbox as being something like the Wilderlands+10 prepared adventures+massive DM improv. Others see it as (just) The Keep on the Borderlands.

The major things that make me feel like a railroader and not just a limited sandboxer are a) I want the party to stay in one town so I can develop the NPCs and b) I want them to fight things in the modules I have prepared and not go hunting pirates. Actually I'm not even comfortable with fights in taverns. I can never get around to having "group of random stooges" encounters prepped because I always want to improve my designed encounters instead.

 

[Cadfan]

The point of a sandbox game is to increase the amount of choices the players get to make. (there are other points, but that's a big one)

Its not the only method of accomplishing that goal.

Consider getting the players to make major decisions near the end of game sessions, particularly in ways that will irrevocably commit them for the next session. Then you can run the next session with preparation and direction as much as you like, and they still got to make the initial choice.

For example, lets say there's a hook out there about a cult in the city sewers, and a hook about the town watch needing to hire outside consultants for a secret mission. The players choose at the end of a game session which hook they're going to bite. Then, either by plot involvement (they mug a cultist press ganger, earning an enemy) or by blatant metagame agreement, they commit to following this plot thread next session. You get to plan things to the hilt, and they still got to make the initial choice. Its close to sandboxing; really, its just sandboxing with a metagame agreement on when to make major plot branching decisions in order to facilitate the DM's ability to prepare effectively before session.

Another option that's kind of a bad word around here is illusionism. This is the idea that the players make decisions that seem to branch the plot, and do in a way, but that the branches lead back together behind the scenes. Done poorly this can result in an obnoxious game environment. Done well its seamless and can really enrich your ability to prepare for a game session.

A poor example is something like, "You reach the end of the sewer tunnel. Do you go left or right?" And no matter what the PCs pick, they run into the same preplanned fight with a sewer crocodile.

A better example might be the two hooks I mentioned above. Suppose the secret mission the guard wanted to hire consultants for was to solve a kidnapping. And it turns out that the kidnapping in some way involves the sewer cult. Whichever path the players select, they get to discover the existence of the other path, and have new opportunities to engage with it. It can actually be quite rewarding- the moment when the PCs figure out that the cult they heard about last session was responsible for the kidnapping can be a really great one, particularly if you only hint at it indirectly and they connect the dots themselves.

Of course there's another possible problem that kind of gets in the way of either of these. Is the problem that the players simply don't want to bite the hooks you offer? It doesn't matter what neat DMing tricks you come up with if that's the case. If that's the problem, just ask them why they're not biting. Is there something else they'd rather be doing? Are they tired of the game? Was there something about the hooks that made them uninteresting?

If you need to, flat out ask them what hooks they'd like to find. Its ok if the players, in an entirely metagame act, tell you "we're tired of sewers and cults, we want to go fight... I dunno, in a war or a foreign country or something." Great! You've got a hook the players actually want! Next session there's a recruitment poster on the wall for the foreign legion, and off everyone goes.

 

[Remathilis]

Nobody's fun is superior, and sandbox games are not inherently better, more pure, more advanced, or more fun than other kinds of campaigns. I think true railroading is bad DMing, but simply not-sandboxing is not necessarily railroading. Don't fall into this false dichotomy.

XP given.

My players, having spoken with them, prefer a lightly-scripted game. My current Eberron game is scripted; they have an overarching quest (some the Lords of Dust from gathering shards of demon-glass to free the rajahs) but they are free to pursue side quests (looking for loved ones, giant-hunting in Xen'drik, becoming a Lord in Karnnath) and have flexibility in tactics (what order to hunt for the known glass shards, with some being harder challenges than others). Eventually, it will culminate in a major conflict and the game will end with epilogues for everyone still standing.

Its a railroad, but there are plenty of stop-offs, tourist attractions, and down-time to give the PCs a chance do their thing as well.

And they enjoy the setup; it gives them a goal to pursue but the flexibility to do their own stuff too. Win-win.

YMMV, but it works for us.

 

[tankschmidt]

A lot of posters mentioned talked about whether the players are having fun, but the DM is a player too - so make sure you are also having fun.

That said, shifting styles from the railroad (as Dave pointed out, this could be too harsh a word) format to a sandbox format is going to take a period of adjustment in which everyone has to recognize that a freestyle type of game involves a lot of different assumptions on the part of the both the players and the DM. The first several sessions after switching to a sandbox game were hard for my group as well. We had a lot of sitting around, staring at each other, and thinking "now what?" In the end, the idea of players having entirely free reign to decide the undertakings of their characters has resulted in a more enriching game for all of us.

So my advice is to give it a try. Play the game, abnd read some blogs and forums about sandboxing because there is a lot of advice out there. And if still no one is having fun in a couple months, call the experiment off and get back to the gaming you enjoy.

 

[Noumenon]

1.) PCs will have to learn what types of encounters they can handle and how to handle them without the "hand-holding" of the DM to determine if the encounter is balanced or not.

I definitely failed to warn the PCs they were going to the dangerous dungeon. I could have made sure they had a cohort to take along. The reason I didn't warn them is that the start of the dungeon was low-key, and the encounter that nearly killed them was potentially only half of a larger encounter, so I thought it was safe to let them go in without warning. But improved grab is, as always, a character killer.

Combat-hungry PCs often find ways to have combats, just have a local tavern full of people and watch the fun when they get bored of chit-chat.

Fights in town? I think it's hard to start one without being disruptive, unless you're talking a bare-knuckle-and-sleep spell tavern brawl. So you can get "stuck" without an acceptable outlet for combat unless the DM brings something in for you.