DM Advice: How to railroad without railroading.
DM Advice: How to railroad without railroading.
I have been DMing for a while, but I have recently come across a method of worldbuilding that has transformed how I create campaigns. This method also allows me to make shorter campaigns that have a end-point trajectory, rather than one that is open ended, and helps me to create satisfying stories. Additionally, this helps to reduce the amount of effort that needs to be performed from session-to-session, by frontloading the most important parts of the campaign preparation before the start of the game.
In short, the process has 3 phases
Phase 1
You get the idea for the kind of world the adventure will take place in. The general story themes and concepts you would like to play around with as well. Write a 1 page treatment for what the world is like and what the broad locations in the world appear to be.
For example, in my most recent campaign prep I made a treatment of what the factions in the world are, the virtues of the different areas of the world, and a statement of what is common historical knowledge versus what are secrets that are not commonly known. I ended with a statement of what the themes are going to be for this world as well. NOTE: You should not know what the plot of the actual game is, or what the adventure will hing on at this stage.
Phase 2
Send out a small summary to your players, and ask them what kinds of characters they want to play. Work with them on their backstories to make sure they bookend with eachother for a matter of convenience, and ask them to provide information about their families and what aspirations and goals their characters have, or what kinds of stories they want for their characters.
This allows players to either lean into, or purposefully away from the elements of your world. As long as they do one or the other, this process has worked, as they can be part of the established culture of the world, or part of the counter-culture. Either way, you have material and character motivation to work with. The only way this does not work, is if they clearly did not actually engage with the world in some fashion during their character creation. If you notice that, try to gently encourage it with additional requests for information from them.
Phase 3
Use all the information your players gave you to worldbuild and plot out your campaign. Did you have a player who wrote a lot? GREAT! The NPCs will become major plot NPCs, the events depicted will become common knowledge, with some hidden truths that player didn’t know. But before you know what your players want to do, you can't know what kind of plot will engage them. This is where the actual plot for your campaign is written.
This makes your players into collaborators for your story, which will make them invested in the goings on. Additionally, if you know exactly who their characters are and what they want, then you simply need to place obstacles within the plot between them and their desires. Or better yet, present them with interesting decisions or bespoke antagonists that challenge their sense of self. This allows you to be INCREDIBLY detailed and plan out plot beats ahead of time because you are essentially building a railroad to exactly where the players want to go.
Railroading is bad because it usually doesn’t honor the choices of the players. This is railroading, but it honors the players’ decisions.
Finally, I should credit where this idea came from, as this is the method that Brennan Lee Mulligan of Dimension 20 fame has described in multiple instances. My latest games have actually been the easiest to prep from session to session, because I have done a lot of the hardest work prior to the start of the campaign.
And as for the game-to-game prep, I have to credit Slyfourish. His 'Lazy DM Guide' series also keeps my 'procrastinating' work down to a minimum as I focus on what is the most important for the game sessions.
As with many of my other posts, I have crossposted this to the /r/dndnext subreddit. Feel free to upvote it there for higher visibility.
Our group just had a campaign start and I thought the GM was going to do some variation on this because he was really asking everybody to supply him with detailed backstories on our characters. Normally this is an aspect that's completely ignored by most GMs in our group, it's something the players do on their own to flesh out their own character more so they understand who they're playing. So I was excited and we all supplied him with content, but it feels as though it's all been set aside, like he just wanted it for ideas on how to get us introduced into the setting, but didn't really have any plans for it after that.
Initially, I was trying to play to my backstory and my character's reason for coming to this city in the first place, but it's kind of all just been handwaved away and any questions I asked related to it were given dismissive or vague answers. I was directed to a meeting where I'd get some answers, but then that just sort of magically fell through and was never brought up again or just ignored when asked about. We're sort of being "classically railroaded" now from one encounter to another for the vaguest of reasons, many of us don't even understand what's going on because nothing we're doing seems to align with our own character's motivations.
I normally don't even mind railroading that much when gaming. I've GM'd before, I know how hard it is to come up with an adventure and especially if you're going off of a published adventure, it's hard to prep for a session if the players are messing up the story beats and not following along. I get that and I'll usually try to follow what I think is the intended story arc, as I realize it's going to be easier for the GM to run and have content for, I'll usually understand the story's "logic" of why we're doing certain things. But it bothers me that we were even solicited for story and it hasn't been used for any of the characters (I don't need the spotlight), we're quite obviously just following the published adventure and none of our characters really matter.
I guess my point is, if you're going to solicit the players for character backstory, actually use it and acknowledge it in-game, at least occasionally or just don't even bother. I don't mind writing up my own backstory for myself, I do that every game anyways and I'll pepper it in where appropriate, but if you make it seem like it's going to be relevant to the story and then subsequently ignore it, that makes me care about the game less and less.