It takes away your ability to choose, which is part of the draw of the game. Without choice, it's impossible to create your own fun or have stakes in the story or decide how to use your abilities. If the players can't make choices for themselves about these things, are they really playing?
Ah, but you've heard these arguments before. They're the obvious retort to railroading, and while they're broadly convincing, they don't target the heart of what causes railroading. Railroading is born of a belief that the GM's story is the most important thing, and therefore, it's worth sacrificing a little player agency to make sure that story is experienced to full effect. And that's the idea that I want to contest with something different from the usual argument.
Let's talk about a video game called Spec Ops: The Line. I wrote and spoke at panels about this game frequently during my collegiate career because it does something very interesting narratively speaking. It plays with player guilt. In an early level, for instance, this third-person modern war shooter allows the player to control a small airship which fires deadly white phosphorous attacks on enemy soldiers below. Just beyond the battlefield is a small building marked by an infrared camera as full of soldiers, and the level progresses when the player destroys the building, killing the people within. But as the player leaves the area, they find that the building was full of civilians, including women and children, who they are responsible for killing. This likely leads the player of the game to feel guilt as the main character does.
The first time I played Spec Ops: The Line, I remember the feeling of guilt that I had. I had been so excited to drop that white phosphorous, a chemical weapon. I had seen all those blips on the infrared camera and gotten excited for so many kills. I even thought about whether I would get an achievement for so many kills at once. That high, that aggression, brought low by the realization that I'd gotten excited to commit a massive war crime--it was very affecting. It made me rethink my relationship with shooter video games.
Railroaders: you want your story to be at its best. But if your players are disengaged, you're telling that story to yourself. If you want them to enjoy the story as much as possible, they need to have stakes in the story, and that means some control. In the example from Spec Ops, the player is given the tools and the situation and left to do the rest themselves. The result is a fair amount of ownership over the action, which leads to a strong feeling when the story responds to that action. You can have that if you grant your players some agency to affect things.
It's also worth noting that some players (myself largely included) who only enjoy the game with some agency. I'm the kind of player who writes considerable backstories for my players, who roleplays heavily, and who likes to see the consequences of my characters' actions. None of that is possible without some meaningful choice being granted to the players.
But more to the point, choice is required for narrative buy-in. Your story is nothing but a long list of words to your players if they're on the sidelines. They want to be heroes! They want to have fun! They want to engage with your world! Let them.
So you have seen the light. How do you bring yourself to share your delicate, perfect world with your clumsy players? The truth is, they're going to make a mess. They're going to stick a wrench in the cogs of your canon machine. They're not going to recognize that some important NPC matters and isn't some random NPC and harass or kill them. All kinds of things are going to go wrong. Accept that.
To help you accept it, let's think about the point of all this. We're playing tabletop games. The goal is not to create the most perfect or interesting or classic or unique world. The goal is to allow the players to have fun. And they can't have fun on rails. That would be a sightseeing tour.
Let me tell you about a GM I know. To this GM, their world is sacrosanct. Every historical NPC is precious to them, every homebrew city a sanctuary, every world event a meaningful action. I have played in this GM's world. It is a sightseeing tour of their favorite places and NPCs. I didn't realize I was being railroaded at first since it was done well, but it was railroading. We were escorted from NPC with worldbuilding information to NPC with worldbuilding information with occasional roleplaying opportunities between. I had a good time, but outside the scope of the story. The story was something that ended up not really involving my character, and I just did my own thing until the campaign wrapped up.
If you, like this GM, decide that your world is special like this, you will only ever try to "protect" it from your players. But if you commit to giving more than a sightseeing tour and give your players some control (for the small price--or truly, benefit--of seeing them actually impact the world), you can get them invested.
I do get it. I once spent the better part of a year meticulously designing, mapping, and populating a small desert continent. It was to be a Wild West setting, a style I've always loved. I had varied and interesting towns that matched the Old West aesthetic (a puritanical religious town, a saloon-heavy town, a frontier fortress) and unique twists on the classics (a treetop town in the forest, an academy on a small island, an underground city of criminals). I had even personally named every member of several towns, chosen their professions, drawn maps of their homes, plotted who they knew and cared about--this continent was my baby. I gave it to a group of hijinks players. They were banned from basically every town they went to after causing massive destruction and ruckus. It was painful. Why open yourself up to that?
To answer that point, one more example: I got to play some cool alternative tabletop games during college with a friend who was a very talented GM. For about a year, he ran a campaign of Geist, a game where you play someone who basically died but was brought back by a ghost who is tethered to them, granting them some supernatural abilities. My character was an old man who'd created magnetic skates and was trying to sell them to young punks. Our GM was slow to introduce a main storyline for us--it was only after our group solidified and formally affiliated together that we got a whiff of what the story would be. So up to that was a lot of roleplaying and exploration, which we loved. By the time the main story kicked in, we were so invested in the world and our home in it that we felt very connected to it.
You don't need to play out 8 months of game sessions getting people settled the way my GM did, but ultimately, you do need to give your players time to bite into the world, or else it's just set dressing. The sightseeing tour I went on with the railroading GM had many exciting and interesting places, but we never spent enough time in any of them to feel like they were real to us or we mattered there. I try to develop a sense of place each time we visit a location to deepen the description and detail of places the group visits frequently.
So if you've accepted that it's time to stop railroading and let your players have free reign of your world, I have you covered. For railroading basics, read about
- how to avoid overpreparing
- how to tell a grand story and avoid railroading
- how to adjust your story while avoiding railroading
- how to run a game with plot/exploration balance
- how to manage your pacing
- how to react when your players think of something you don't
To address more fundamental issues, read about
But to be honest, the hard part is done. Accepting that it's time to give more control to players is the worst of it. It's hard to admit that you should change. But you're ready, and the path forward is filled with joys big and small.
That's all for now. Coming soon: a profile on the island of Ramsey, a guide to the planes, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!
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