Crash’s Course Ep 03: Railroading

Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

This time I want to talk about the greatest of all DM or GM crimes: Railroading.

I get it, players. Railroading is evil. How dare the GM take away your agency? Your freedom of choice? Sure, they worked really hard on that battle map for Session 4, but retiring to run an in-game children’s theater is way more enjoyable!

I get it, GMs and DMs, how dare the players veer away from your cleverly and meticulously crafted plot line? Sure, they want to have some control over the destiny of their characters, but shouldn’t your hard work be able to be showcased?

As you might be able to tell, both sides have a point. The bigger point is that TTRPGs are COLLABORATIVE storytelling. There needs to be some level of cooperation between everyone involved for it to be FUN for everyone involved. Otherwise, you might as well just be writing a book or screenplay. Those are fun, too, but they aren’t TTRPGs.

In my own games I use a few strategies that for the sake of this recording I’ve named the following:

  1. Backstories, Expanded
  2. Moving Rooms
  3. Burned Bridges

1. Backstories, Expanded

You all start off in a tavern. Wait, that’s cliché. You start off dead. How did you die? Well, that’s tragic, but there’s this deity willing to bring you back if you’re willing to help them with a quest. You in?

This example starts off with a scenario that the players agree to if they’re joining the campaign. Snippets like this are how I’ll introduce a possible campaign to my circle of friends, to see if enough are interested. With that done, railroading is less necessary because the buy-in happened BEFORE the campaign even started, and it’s built into the characters’ backstories.

I’ll also peruse the characters’ more detailed backstories for snippets I can work into the plot to keep them interested in the main story line. Is the trusted henchman of the BBEG someone from your past? An opponent? A friend? A parent? Well, you’re a lot more engaged with the story now, aren’t you?

To be honest, half of my favorite NPCs to RP come from those backstories.

2. Moving Rooms

The players went left when your quest giver was to the right. You had a great RP moment set up in a room that everyone just … walked past. The players latched onto the character you named after a letter of the alphabet in a moment of panic while they actively tried to kill the one with 4 pages of backstory.

No matter, just decide that the quest giver was on the left hand side all along. That room? Actually, all its contents are in this other room they’ve already decided to go to. Cee the Kobold? Their backstory is now 90% of what Cedrick Maximilian Flanderhoot IV’s backstory was, with just a little tweaking.

Is this a little underhanded? Yeah, but the players can’t see your notes. From their perspective, if you do this right, that was the plot thread all along. It’s amazing how they always make the best choices.

3. Burned Bridges

I’d love to say that the first two strategies are all you need, but we all know better. Sometimes missed opportunities are truly lost, but that doesn’t mean they were a waste.

The work you put into those bypassed branches might have been hard work, but it was good practice for next time and GMing really is one of those things that gets easier with practice. Snippets of inspiration might still be harvested from the metaphorically burned husk of that waterway crossing as well. A name here, a line of dialogue there, heck, I’ve reused whole dungeon maps turned sideways with the labels scratched off.

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or all my D&D podcasts at aaronbsmith.com/cogwheel for future episodes.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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