A good tip for subtle railroading that I always do is give the players a location (city/town/landmark) to get to during session 0. They can come up with their own individual reasons why, but that gives them a pretty narrow route of travelling to follow without them even knowing + a reason why they all need to travel together in the first place. By the time they reach there (level 3 or 4) they've bonded and would have found a new quest to follow together
One thing I've liked experimenting with is sort of alternating between more "sandbox-y" sections, and more "railroady" sections to break up the game. Because while the characters having choices is awesome, sometimes life happens at them. It also lets you build smaller sandboxes and use the railroads to connect them, or even re-visit older sandboxes, with the railroad serving as a major "update" event. I've found that breaking the sandboxes up can really help give some variety, and releive some of the decision-making pressure that can build up over longer sandbox experiences.
I call these DM styles as Closed Fist, Open Palm, and Cupped Hand. Closed Fist is your classic railroad. Open Palm is a sandbox campaign. Cupped Hand provides a campaign setting with a lot plot points around to give players a feeling of freedom while still staying within an advancing narrative.
I'm mostly a sandbox DM, and want to contrast a bit with this video's advice. Personally I don't always prep a single "big bad" for a campaign. I like to seed multiple plots through the world, and let the PCs follow the one(s) that they think are most compelling. Only then do I actually make up the big villains and their lairs and so forth. This means that, ideally, the campaign is following the plot that the players want to go toward. I do think it's good advice for DMs prepping the game to prepare only a few quests with hooks going forward. I usually have one or two prepared adventures, and then I use random tables if the players go off in a direction I didn't expect. Usually something like a monster lair or a few random encounters is enough to base a session on, and then I can come up with another adventure afterward. What I did find interesting is the critique of Rime of the Frostmaiden as offering too many adventures. At $50 cover price per book, I think it's good when a published book provides more than just the core materials for one adventure. I'm probably not going to run Rime of the Frostmaiden but because I have it, I always have a book loaded with arctic adventures. A DM actually running it should, of course, find the things that are most relevant and appeal to the players. Finally - I think part of the reason railroading has a bad rap is because, in an RPG, not everything needs to be an Any % speedrun to the BBEG. A side-quest that you find irrelevant might really appeal to someone else, and not being forced into following the main quest line could be good breathing room for most RPGs. Sorry if that's long, I just thought another perspective was worth sharing.
I agree. I actually think if you are going in with one predetermined story then you might as well just railroad hard, rather than scatter clues to the plot around a sandbox, which is just setting you up for frustration as the players wander around looking for the clues and ignoring side quests. Alternatively, do what you suggest here and be open-minded about which direction the campaign will take. I much prefer this approach.
Really appreciate that! I'll admit this one was finished kind of last minute, and I was nervous that I might have rushed a little, so it's great to hear that it feels like an improvement! :)
Good: Tie adventures into the BBEG Better: Tie adventures into your players backstory Best: Tie adventures into BOTH the BBEG and players backstory Thanks for the video Bob!
Even better than this, imo, is when the GM doesn’t write adventures at all, but just preps some potential elements of adventures and then uses them to react to the players’ actions. Whatever adventure emerges from that process, that’s the adventure.
Wonderful video, thank you. A couple of pointers I would like to add for consideration. This is based on a mostly railroaded Cthulhu adventure which my players gave a lot of superlative compliments about. 1) The main piece of advice I have is to make the railroaded path feel like the players' own decisions. One way of achieving this is to have the plot contain a danger which will have real consequences if ignored. Typically this danger is death (say, an end-of-the-world scenario), since almost every PC personality/alignment still is concerned about either self-preservation or preserving others' lives. For example: "Bad railroading" would be a situation where the players say, "hey let's ignore what's happening at location X and instead go to those hills in the distance". And then the DM responds with, "an invisible barrier prevents you from going in that direction". The players feel like their desires are ignored, that they are not actually playing the game, and it becomes no fun. But if there is an imminent threat, then that threat should be communicated early so that the players would conclude, "oh but if we spend time in those hills, then the immanent danger at location X will come to fruition and we will be dead... let's save ourselves by handling that problem." For this to work, the threat of death needs to be real. If a PC decides to jump off a 1000-foot cliff, allow them to do so but it will kill them. The players will learn to fear for their character's lives and the game becomes more emotionally compelling. For my game, prior to the first session I let the players know that death is a real possibility. And so they were mindful right out of the gate. 2) Have the villain or danger progress with time, whether the PCs tend to it or not. And make this progress known to the PCs. This places the danger of the threat higher on the players' minds. 3) 100% agree with Bob that purely-random encounters should be avoided. Tie every encounter into the story. Otherwise, the players feel like we're just spinning wheels. 4) If you have a lot of prep time available and are willing to commit that time, then: While writing the adventure, at every point ask yourself: How might player decisions prevent the cool scene I'm planning from happening? If you can think of a weakness in that cool part of the railroad, then when patching it do so in a way which makes sense and is natural. For example, nothing should hinge on an NPC being alive/available at a particular moment. A specific example from my game: this was set in 1923 San Francisco. When the party discovers that the adventure location is dangerous, an intelligent player would try to get the police to handle it. So I had the adventure take place the day president Warren Harding died in SF, thus the entire police force was dedicated to that problem in order to make a show for the nation. No cops available to help the adventurers that day, and they accepted that as logical. 5) Try to tie EACH of the PC backstories into the main quest (not just 1 character). This heightens their interest in that storyline, and they are more likely to decide for themselves to pursue it. Another way to keep players engaged is something I picked up from Chris Perkins: Try to end each session on a cliffhanger. 6) Still keep a flexible approach, the players might still surprise you. Let it happen. You can always adjust or expand the main story during the prep for later sessions.
I like what Luke Hart says about the Railroad. He makes a point to distinguish it from a Linear Adventure. I think railroading would be on the side of taking the player's agency away from them and telling them what their character did. Where the linear adventure or adventure on rails is a story that has a clear starting point, with quest markers along the way, that eventually gets you to a clear ending. I definitely agree with all of your points though, and this is how I like to play, though I haven't had the full sandbox experience myself. I do run a lot of one-shots as well, so I think there is a table understanding that this is what has been prepared and that they should follow the quest hook. However, once I have the hook set, I completely leave it up to the players about how everything goes. It makes for a very fun game, in my opinion.
I think your one-shot experience is a really good way of understanding what a sandbox should look like. I run one-shots in a similar way: there’s an adventure, the PCs are doing that adventure and can’t choose to go and do something else, that’s part of the premise. I don’t consider that railroading, it’s just the boundaries of the sandbox. The important thing is that within the boundaries they have total freedom to approach the adventure however they like. The outcome isn’t fixed either: they might kill the evil wizard or join forces with him. Where I disagree with you is I think a railroad and a linear adventure are basically the same thing, namely a campaign structure where there’s a predetermined sequence of events.
My strategy tends to be sort of a graph approach, where I plot out different plot points/hints that the players should experience, but with a chart of which plot points need to happen after which, and which plot points require which information to uncover. Then I can just throw out hints towards the different currently available plot points, see which one the players choose and then let them experience that, in the process unlocking new plot points I can throw out hints for, as well as the remaining old ones. It's a great system, because the players always have a real choice, but at the same time they don't leave the confines of my plans.
I think at the end of the day, it comes down to; Find what your players are engaging with, and cater to that. There is no one right way. Just a bunch of right ways for your personal group.
I like to break down the term "railroad" into "rail-line" and "roller coaster." You have the rail-line, which is a series of interconnected railroads leading to different places. This represents preplanned plotlines, each of which could be important, but the PCs an choose WHICH railroad to take, and can swap between railroads as desired or take detours to their destination. And for shorter trips, there's the rollercoaster. It goes from one place to another and doesn't have any deviations, but it's a great ride that will entertain people. But it can't go on too long or it becomes boring.
The biggest difference between these two adventures is their intended audience. The Essentials Kit adventure is meant for newer players and probably a new GM. It's shorter, and simpler by design. None of the hardback campaign books are intended for a GM to run everything as written and have a group encounter 100% of the content. Rime of the Frostmaiden is a great sandbox for a GM to use but only if you're careful to hand out the quests in a manageable manner. I chose Bryn Shander as the starting town and only gave out the quest hooks in two of the neighboring towns. GMs also need to hand pick which parts of the book are most likely to engage the PCs.
I absolutely love the "on site" locations you go to in the videos. I don't know why, but it makes the excellent advice and content all the better! Keep it up Bob!
Im so glad someone said this. Sandbox is often seen as the "good" option. But some of the worst campaigns ive been in were sandbox taken to the extreme
A massive part of the problem is that almost nobody gets the training anymore, and the books haven't included instructs for years: Extreme sandboxes are meant to be Massively Multiplayer open table arenas where you play with a new party every week, run multiple characters at once, and multiple different parties are on their own individual focused narratives inside the space. Trying to run an extreme sandbox for four people who play the same character every week for six months, is like setting up a special version of World of Warcraft where no other people are able to join your server and you just run around the game by yourself.
I totally agree that The Essentials Kit is an amazing adventure to both play and run. I am currently running it for a group of middle school students and they are having a blast! I will be modeling my other adventures after this one. I love what you said about choice... it's great, but too much choice can easily backfire! Thanks for another amazing video!
The diffrence between sandbox style of play and railroad style of play can be looked at this way ; In a sandbox game the players tell the story of their adventures and in a railroad game players are actors in a story that's already written for them . A sandbox game isn't just random made up things on the fly there are areas of adventures waiting for the players to discover that are already planed put but aren't forced upon the players giving them the choice of what to do through rumors and clues . I have a folder with tons of pre made blank maps that I can pick from to use in an adventure and I have an index card holder filled with adventure ideas that I can use with the pre made maps to create an adventure in a very short time . And not all adventures needs to be tied together in some grand fashion with and end boss fight ( I hate MMO terms applied to d&d ) because small adventures can be just as rewarding as huge ones and the idea of a campaign being one huge adventure is a WOTC thing for the most part because when d&d first came out the campaign was the setting you played in which is where all the adventures and modules are set
I have binged a ton of your videos this past week or so and this is not the newest but I just wanna say: Thanks so much for your videos, Bob. You've given me a ton of insight and ideas/directions in my first ever DMing (ever) w/ a homebrew campaign and I've really enjoyed it all.
What you're describing is linear storytelling, not what I'd consider railroading. All those pieces that point in one direction are still optional for the players to ignore at their own peril. Let's say you do all this work when the group suddenly decides to become pirates, hijacking a ship, and taking to the high seas. Do you throw all that work away? No... you let it fester. Eventually they'll hear of the troubles of the place they'd left behind and how it's spreading, becoming worse than what it was. Hinting at the players to get back to the adventure they agreed upon at first. They could still decide to bail on that, but then you need to have a talk about what they want out of their adventures, because the original idea sold to them clearly wasn't it.
I disagree with your middle step. Proceed directly to the final step. If I prepped several plot hooks, and my players ignore every single one and steal a boat instead, I stop the game and tell them: "Guys, we agreed to do a campaign about a dragon causing trouble near Phandelver, not a pirates in the high seas campaign. I won't have anything prepped out here." Then you can discuss getting back on track or starting a different campaign. Even though it looks like an in-game problem, players ignoring all your plot hooks is actually an out of game problem in disguise, and should be handled as such.
Yes. Absolutely. There is SO much emphasis on DMs bending over backward to accommodate the players, but that compromise HAS to go both ways. ANY style of game/campaign can work perfectly well as long as the players are getting what they were expecting from the outset. It's fine to "subvert their expectations" every now and then and throw a railroad scenario into a sand box, or vice versa. (Sometimes players are like small children who say they hate some sort of food, having never tried it, so you slip it into their meal without telling them. Then when they enjoy it you say casually mention it the next time they moan about it...) But if the DM says "This is what my game will be..." and they are all happy with that, then run with it, and don't let nobody tell you you're doing it "wrong."
@@jedrzejkraszpulski442 Absolutely agree with this. Like it or not, there has to be some sort of implied agreement to follow the main hook of the story or there is no point to sign up to be part of the particular campaign the DM proposed to the group. I would not agree to DM a group that expected me to keep up with content to satisfy their erratic decisions to ignore the main plot hooks.
Hmmm maybe, not sure I'm understanding which part of my description was linear and which was railroading, but yes, I typically think of linear and railroad as the same thing
@@BobWorldBuilder Railroading is a DM/GMs tool to get things to go the way he wants them to go, sacrificing player agency. It can be a very important tool, but has to be used with a light touch or it can become quickly heavy handed or awkward and frustrating to your players. A Linear Campaign is a type of campaign where situations happen in a linear order, but how the players deal with those situations is up to them. For example, you have your players start with situation 1... that situation includes a number of encounters, investigations and scenes that lead into situation 2, which has its own scenes, situations and encounters which lead on to situation 3 and so on.
Great video Bob! I read a comment concerning agency and unrelated world going-ons that really helped my game and the railroad-sandbox conundrum. It was concerning empty dungeon rooms. Many see them as a waste, but in a structure relatively linear, "empty" rooms serve to break up the feeling of being herded by reminding players that not every choice is fated to be tied to the narrative or objective, and that a larger world exists beyond the game. I think the bit about Icespire Peak you mentioned is the inverse, for Sandbox play- an vast open play space where many things on the surface have roots in major events.
@@BobWorldBuilder I suppose my own aren't 'empty' per say, but they often hold either 'zone exposition' details or random mystery trinkets and scraps that I use to sneak in world-building when they get explorative/curious enough, haha. I like efficiency too.
@@BobWorldBuilder The other thing about empty rooms is that they're supposed to serve a strategic purpose in other encounters. They're supposed to support strategies like "I take the Disengage action, then I move back into the empty room to the South, Dash into the empty room to the East of that room. Next turn I Dash North into the room that's East of the room the combat's in, move up the staircase in that room, pop out on the balcony in the room the combat is in, and Sneak Attack the archer on the balcony." If you curate each encounter space too hard, it becomes like a Final Fantasy battle where nothing in the rest of the building is a tool you can use in the room that you're in.
I honestly hate the terminology of sandbox and railroads. As Bob highlights here, even with a sandbox styled adventure like the starter set (when done right) it is incredibly controlled by the DM. Even when the players decide which objective the players want to go on, the DM is crafting memorable adventurers and random encounters. Even when players are choosing what parts of the story interest them most and engage with that, the DM is deliberately creating content that fills that desire, in essence creating what some would call a "railroad".
Yeah I just left a comment and realized that they don't describe what I was even talking about. Railroading just means a more linear story but it still doesn't tell you if it is player led story telling or dm led story telling.
@@CemeterySunshine either way it doesn’t really matter, the majority of the work is still on the DM regardless. And If you’ve made a campaign with zero story at all, and just let the players dictate everything, then yea you’re gonna experience one of the extremes that Bob mentions in this video; It has to be a collaborative effort, other wise the players or dm should just write a book. The DM is a player too, not just a random encounter bot that spits out numbers and dialogue at the players behest. This isn’t a video game with a disconnected phantom narrator. I think People often tend to forget the whole “Master” part of DM tbh
Because Starter Set isn't really a great sandbox, more like a linear adventure with a set ending that has a few sidequests. You can run games purely off hexmaps, random encounter tables and a few pre-made NPCs/factions. You can run a sandbox that's not just "which of these pre-planned adventure hooks will you take first", D&D adventures are just stuck in that model.
@@jonahbardwell551 I never said it's great for everybody (I don't like it, I know people who are having absolute best time with it). Preferences are just that, I personally consider published adventures and adventures written by the GM (no matter how well written as stories) to be a waste of time. My point is that "even sandbox is heavily controlled/moderated by the GM" is a flat out wrong statement coming from how narrow of a spectrum D&D adventures actually occupy. There are games driven by the GM, there are those where the GM only prepares the setting and it's up to player's initiative, there are those that have no pre-planned story and rely on rules to have everybody (not just the GM) contribute to one during play.
I will say my personal best Sandbox on Rails Ive run as a DM was with my SKT group. After the initial giant attack at their location (which I picked based on proximity to their “home base” at the start based on backstories) there are a BUNCH of sidequests with no real impact on the larger storyline, other than to allow PCs to get loot before taking on more of the true baddies. So always in the background is the larger plot of the campaign, but for a little over a year IRL our sessions were built around the group traveling up and down the Dessarin Valley doing sidequests and seeing interesting locations and NPCs. I know a lot of people don’t like and routinely skip that entire chapter of SKT, but for us it was a highlight. We got so into it that at several points after a session I would poll my players to make sure they were enjoying it, and they always were happy to do more. I used a bunch of resources from the FR wiki to maps out of other sources to calendars and holidays and tracking the passage of time so that the world felt truly living. It gave me ample opportunity to add elements tailored for each character and their backstory. By the end when we moved back to the main plot, they were much more invested in the story because it meant them saving the people and villages we had just spent a year connecting with during these little mini adventures. It was great!
The "sandbox on rails" is really a great way to go about things. I also recommend having a separate piece of paper or white board or something where the players/dm can keep track of main quests/side quests/quest objectives, just like a video RPG might (thinking world of warcraft). It's so easy to lose track of all the quests and hooks. If the players can keep track of these in even a brief format, it allows them to add their own "rails" towards things they want, and it also helps the dm have an idea of the quests and hooks they are interested in pursuing. If the players don't want to follow a quest/hook, they can just cross it off and abandon it.
Something I want to talk about almost all the time is the fact that since all of the theory of this hobby is spread out over game manuals and podcasts and blogs and magazines, most of which haven't published new content in over five years. There is this constant churn where people can't react to old ideas because they just can't find them. I feel like this prep strategy is some kind of cross between a pointcrawl, beads on a string, and a node based design philosophy. But I literally can't tell where it's meant to sit between these ideas, because I'm willing to bet that only like five other people in this comment section have even heard of all three of them.
I have heard of (and used) pointcrawls and node based design philosophy but couldn't+ honestly tell you that there is a difference. I have never heard of beads on a string design (sounds like a linear pointcrawl). This prep strategy feels like an open world pointcrawl with ~ 4 points of adventure, a town, and a list of premade encounters and hooks that tie into each point of adventure. It's a focused and small open world with an emphasis on the particular adventure narrative that the players choose and the player's backstories (if feasible). It seems like a perfect manifestation of OC / Neo-Trad gaming style popular in 5e if mixed onto a DM who grew up loving open world sandbox RPG video games. I'm trying something similar but a lot less...focused. My game uses a small hexcrawl with maybe 9+ points of adventure and incidental consequences of the players actions (rather than trying to make something of their often non-existent backstories). It's gonzo science fantasy wilderness exploration after a ship crashes them into the island and I love it.
I have been dming for years and the best way I have found to decide the sandbox vs railroad problem with new players is to start them on a railroad and the see how your group responds to opening it up. If they seem to not really know where to go from there or struggle with what to do next, then more railroading is what the group needs to keep things going. If they start taking more interest in the game are you introduced more choices then open it up a little more and see how they respond. I do this little by little through the campaign until they start hesitating on choices more than normal and then you know where that line is for that party. Sometime the adventure setting or your writing might not be clear enough as to what to do so keep that in mind when assessing the groups response.
In my experience this can backfire tremendously. I've played games with players who struggled when the campaign was more open. Then I met their gm, who bragged about how any time a player left her railroad she killed their characters immediately. These players didn't prefer a more focused narrative, they were terrified I was playing some cat an mouse game to assert dominance. New players are learning how to play the game from how you run it. If you tell them that the game is played by finding the secret clues to the only thing they're allowed to do next, they will take that lesson and apply it all the time. They won't think there isn't a secret only thing to do just because the game's a sandbox, they'll think the secret thing is so hidden they can't find any clues, and just look for clues harder.
I use railroading as a form of “cutscene”. First session is mostly a railroad with no other choices besides “go here, do this”. After that, progressively more choices depending on which NPCs the players find and whose questlines they want to advance.
Wow! Someone finally agrees with me! Pure chaos cant work because us DM's have things like jobs and other addictions like golf so we can't plan infinite encounters in a fantasy due to IRL constraints! Love ya Bob! Been a DM since '80 (they never let me out to PC anymore lol) and this is a great description of how to make the basics of a true campaign, let players help you flesh out the world, but not lose sight of the fact that just wandering off the map to mess with the DM (this happens?? *gasp* yes it does 8>D ) isn't an instance of creativity, it just slows things down because then its just random tables time-aka near certain boredom.
Usually my DMing method is to set up some plot checkpoints that I want/need to happen or locations that I want/need the PCs to be. Now the "how", the "when" and at which cost I have no idea, Ive got the most absurdly random and fun player group so I just improvise and try to be as descriptive as I can, and also give life to as many NPCs as I can. Fun times with PCs joining the bandit leader they went to get the bounty of and ending up defeating a galactic empire after getting to the past to change what happened in the first session.
The image in the beginning is actually super helpful. Seeing as my next campaign is a wild west setting, that has legitimate rail roads at some point. That actually gave me a good visualization of what i should do for location placement
As for the rime of the frostmaiden... You are off course aware that you can cull and curate the elements you don't want to explore and keep the party turning through the ones that matter, right? You don't get a completion badge for seeing and using every page in the book
Yeah I few others have said that, but I literally have always took those terms to be synonymous. I'm glad it's more nuanced than I thought but apparently I need to do some research!
You hit the nail on the head. _This_ is why I've been hating my Rime of the Frostmaiden group as a player. _This_ is why I loved running all the Dragon of Icespire Peak chapters. _This_ is why Critical Role season 2 was so bad. I like the idea of making little clusters of choices along a linear path. That way there aren't too many choices all the time, but there's not a single path forward.
I mean, there could be different endings depending on what they do, but there should be some kind of uniform concluding encounter that the characters all care about.
@@MichaelG485 In the Beads on a String structure (which is what this is called in some articles you can look up) yeah basically. The idea is something like- the final encounter is always the final encounter, but for every decision you made in the other beads you have some bonus or penalty to addressing that encounter.
I agree, Bob. Railroading has gotten a bad name, but gently nudging players should be not only acceptable among DM's, but embraced! Thanks for sharing.
The first DM in my group is so into sandbox that it can be frustrating at times. We end up on side quests from side quests from side quests and never actually get to where we were going, but whenever we try and skip something because it didn’t seem important it turns out that was the one side quest that actually tied back into the main plot.
I use the multiple choice middle ground. They have three to four choices which have effects on the world. Usually two options dealing with backgrounds and one random
This is a really good addendum to the last video. Icespire Peak is a fantastic template for a sandbox game. You can take the lessons learned from it and apply them to other sandbox campaigns or homebrew. It's worked quite well for me and I would never be able to properly parse the quicksandbox that is Rime of the Frostmaiden without that technique.
Good job tackling this difficult subject. I also agree that too many options can create a confusing mess. I respectfully disagree, though, about trying to create a story using more rails; this can be stressful, messy, and just involve too much work. I think you’re on the right track with providing a few interesting locations. What I do is add a few NPCs (or factions of them) with differing goals (understandable but bad ones are great), and some innocents who are in the crossfire, or other situation relevant to the PC backgrounds. When the players enter the scene, I play the NPCs reacting to them in accordance with the goals and resources they have. There’s no need to plan events happening after that, since things just logically flow from one scene to the next. Anyway, that’s just one successful (mostly) method I’ve used, YMMV.
Completely agree, I love this approach. Justin Alexander has written thousands of words about how to make this work on his site the Alexandrian. I think the key thing is to regard your prep as a “toy box”. The “toys” (factions, NPCs, locations etc) can be deployed in response to the players’ actions so that no plotting out of predetermined events is necessary. Instead the story emerges from play.
My solution: I had a few longer story threads mapped out (broadly) that all eventually led to a much smaller number of larger events... but I wanted the world to feel "big" and "free" whenever possible. To avoid players being paralyzed by choice and being unsure what to do to move things forward, I gave out something in secret to each player at session zero - a Rumor. Based on each player's background and provided mini-bio, I created a handful of different rumors they may have heard or encountered in their previous travels. Each one provided a thread that, if pulled, would lead them toward one of those story hooks... but I didn't specify which one they should follow, and I let them know it was their choice whether to share it with the others, and when. It worked wonderfully. At one point, one of the storylines just stopped "hooking" them the same... but one of the players made a vague connection from their Rumor, and things started moving again. They basically switched tracks, but in a way that felt like they had "found" the next step without me prodding (in the present). The Rumors were vague. "Your uncle at the shipyard has been worried lately about some irregularities in the tightly-regulated mithril shipments coming through the port," or "Local tension seems to be brewing about the Gnomish territories possibly hording resources to drive up the price of [McGuffin Mineral]," or "Frantic - and drunk - sailors at your tavern recently began spinning yarns about a horned aquatic beast attacking ships in trade lanes - breathing fire, to boot!"
I think the most useful information I was given was; to remember that your players are blind...in that they know nothing outside what you tell them. The world is a Sandbox with Railroads crisscrossing through it, and the NPCs are running the Trains. I usually just put my players at the train station and see what train they get on. ;:)
I'm surprised Curse of Strahd wasn't the example of a good sandbox on rails. Barovia is a huge sandbox with MacGuffins strewn about. Player choice dominates where the party goes. Most everything ties in to the BBEG and the story quite clearly. And the railroad is quite short, as Castle Ravenloft is right there looming over everything and ready for the players whenever they want to stop exploring their sandbox.
"Most everything ties in to the BBEG and the story quite clearly." Well... sorta? Sure, there's a lot of stuff that is there because of Stahd. But very little about it actually helps the party against him. The only actual story is the hunt for the mcguffins.
I have come up with a technique for managing a "sandbox", that allows me to give the players a lot of freedom, and yet still create a cohesive story. Of course, this is entirely dependent on having cooperative players. Without those, nothing is guaranteed to work. The first pice of my method is that my "hooks" are situation triggered, and location agnostic. I can drop them in to whatever situation meets the criteria, that the characters find themselves in. The second is to create points of conflict, whether combat, exploration or social. Success and failure need to have entirely different results, but you need to answer the question of how BOTH possibilities move the story forward. This one rule has kept me out of trouble very consistently, and every time I ended up with a stuck story, I could trace it back to someplace I failed to follow this rule. Example: The important npc has been captured by the enemy npc faction. The party must free the npc. So, the part has to sneak, talk or fight their way in to where the npc is being held. If they succeed, they find themselves in the jail cell with the npc. But what if they get discovered, fail the social skills, or are defeated? Obviously, they're captured and locked in the same cell. Obviously, the conditions of being in the cell are totally different. But the story needs the party to interact with the npc, so that plot point is now protected. Next, the party's goal is to free him. What if they fail? What if he's slain in the attempt? Well, whatever plot point would be accomplished by freeing him, you have to figure out how to get to that point if he's not freed. Regardless of how you imagine this, as long as you keep enough of your details flexible, but protect both sides of your plot points, you'll be able to keep the story moving. Without protecting two sides of each plot point, the DM is frequently in a situation where he CAN'T let the PCs fail, or the story can't progress. If the PCs can't fail, then there's no risk to anything they do. If there's no risk, then there's no reward, and all actions become meaningless. By protecting the story, you allow for failure. By allowing for failure, you protect player agency. By ensuring player agency AND story progression, you make each portion of the game more meaningful and engaging.
This is a really nice fail-forward approach if you do want to ensure certain things happen. My preferred approach is to simply not ensure certain things happen. What I do try to ensure is that *something* happens even when they fail. If it completely changes the trajectory of the whole campaign that’s fine, because that trajectory was never set in stone to begin with. In fact I try not to even think about the trajectory, I want to stay focused on the present moment and we’re always just driven to found out what’s the next thing that happens.
@@ChristnThms Well for the story arcs question, they create themselves. Story arcs naturally emerge. They’re not exactly Shakespeare, but in my experience neither are story arcs deliberately planned by a GM, in practice, and the really cool thing is that the story write itself. No other medium offers that. As for where encounters come from, I’m not saying I do no prep at all. I prep a bunch of stuff that the players are likely to interact with based on their current situation, and deploy that stuff as needed during play. I will say 5E isn’t the best system for running this kind of campaign. I like to run lighter systems where you can throw good encounters together on the fly much more easily, which helps. But yeah, the way I like to run games there is still prep, just no predetermined plot points.
I have been running Dragon of Icespire Peak and the players have been liking it so much that they rushed around doing every quest they could, a few side quests I made fit in when a party member didn't make it, and are still eager to play! Now they're determined to go to Icespire Hold and face the dragon but after reading about the Stone Cold Reavers I feel like they deserve to be more of a challenge based on their supposed infamy and that my players deserved a more interesting challenge from them. I made them as some slightly higher-level NPCs that may be a leadoff point to something after the Dragon that isn't necessarily the sequel Adventures. I've also changed the nature of their initial encounter with the party and have seeded in rumors of their misdeeds through clues to possible kidnappings they could have done for someone and news that they were in Phandalin being disrespectful to their favorite NPCs while the party was away. The party tends to think the reavers are in league with Talos somehow and that the humanoid sacrifices that the anchorites performed were supplied through them but I have something entirely different in mind. If a player dies I've also thought about asking if they want their new character to be a Reaver of a more neutral nature to add spice 🤔. It is very fun to see their minds work this adventure out and the admittedly low detail parts of the design are great places to give the players something they have been playing towards. I agree with what Bob says about the setting being great for the contained adventure as well as player exploration and believe this is why my players are still engaged so late in the story. Sorry so long. Thanks for the videos Bob!
I like how you described it I plan one session at a time but keep an end goal in mind for the campaign. Sometimes the players take a different path and I have to change my plans
Thanks again Bob for this insightful video! Personally, this video and the other related video before this, made me realize that this sandbox and railroad thing is actually a philosophical one! It's like delving into that destiny versus free will topic. I guess I should not have read the latest current world events before watching your videos so that my real-life head space wouldn't be bleeding into understanding your tips! 😅 Nevertheless your tips are really helpful. Your basic principle of having a feedback loop and being open in incorporating those into your preparation actually enriches the experience of the DM & players. It so strengthens the collaborative nature of playing D&D that the desire to label things as railroad or sandbox become meaningless or unimportant.😊
Oh hey I first found your channel from your Dragons if Icespire Peak content a few years ago- then your channel just came back into my feed recently. Keep doing the good stuff Bob!
If I may make a suggestion: The Sourcebook for Tales from the Loop (or the "sequal"/Second Edition: Things from the Flood) has some VERY good tips on how to set up clues and plot points, showing various Sandboxy-yet-linear ways that the players could find out what's /really/ going on, building upon the central mystery and giving out information in a good trickle.
I would not call that a railroad, since that term is for me all about denying player agency. I would describe it more as a web-approach, that lets players move from node to node freely. I used to run my games, but I prefer these days more character driven games, which means no modules, but the kicker for the adventure lying in the characters themselves, thus no web, no sandbox, and no rail.
Have you played any PbtA games? It sounds like how they work. You focus on the characters and build narrative around them as they go, in response to their choices. It’s a really cool style.
@@BobWorldBuilder oh, i know! I have using your tips with great succes. My party just returned to Phandalin from loggers camp with three pigs in tow. :)
I'm not sure where I read this, but some time ago, a game designer described all interior locations in an RPG as a "dungeon" and, as such, has railroad qualities built into it. Unless your party determines to make new pathways, by digging through walls or teleporting at will, they have to follow the limited paths as constructed, which limits choice in terms of anything sandboxy. I think this is why most GMs prefer to use interior settings in adventures. A PC can't just retreat in any direction they want.
I don't care for the terminology of "railroad" or "sandbox" anymore. They used to be a useful guide, but this far into playing dnd, we need to get more specific/nuanced with our terminolofy. For example, when DMs complain about their players "going off the rails" or plays complain about "being railroaded" they're 90% of the tie dealing the with the problem that the DM put "the players do X" somewhere in their notes. But the whole point of an RPG, as pointed out in this video, is that players have choice, so they often will not do X. There will almost always be a little bit of this, but it is baked into the social contract of the game and should be worked out during session 0 or before session 1. "We are playing a game in which you have been hired to rescue the dragon from a princess-guarded castle". This is pretty much the only time a DM should write "players do X" in their notes. In this example, say the party make it to the castle where the dragon is being kept. The DM's prep says "the party approaches from the front, answers the riddles posed by the first princess, and cross the shaky bridge, and enter the Great Hall". Then the party chooses to polymorph into birds and approach from behind. Or they kill the first princess. The players haven't broken the social contract here. The DM's prep should read something like "There is a princess in front of the bridge. If the players answer her riddles, they may pass. Otherwise, she will attack. If left alive, she ambushes the party in chamber 4". The only problem with this prep is that it can take a lot of time, so it is normally a good idea for the DM to ask what players intend to do at the end of the session.
I think the TH-cam channel how to be a great GM has a great start. Someone wants something badly and something is stopping them from getting it. For example the big bad wants a magic item that will give him the power to take over a kingdom. From that he will need to higher minions to get the item. You have a whole area of Villians working toward one goal of taking over. The heros are just the thing that keeps getting in the way.
Dude, I totally thought this video was about adding a literal train railroad to your world. I thought that sounded like a cool idea so that's why I clicked the video! haha I got bamboozled! But I do understand the points you made.
I feel like the complaint about Icewind Dale is less germane to its execution as a project, and more to the idea that a sandbox campaign, that is to say, a campaign in which the adventures are structured in such a way that *they do not form a single coherent plot intentionally* , is not going to appeal to players who are interested in a focused narrative experience. And funnily enough, the fact that the adventure funnels downward into a focused narrative at its ending has been criticized as meaning this adventure is not *enough* of a sandbox, that its structure is *too* connected. Part of the point of a campaign structure like the Ten Towns setting is that it should be totally viable to finish the Ten Towns chapter, end the game, roll up brand new level one characters, play the TT chapter again, end the game, roll up brand new characters, and run the adventure a third time, and each time it be a radically different and surprising campaign, because each time the players are encountering different adventures, meeting NPCs in a different order, taking different sides in the conflicts, etc., etc. It should actually be possible to have two or three different game groups running in the same campaign simultaneously, picking different adventures and bouncing off of each other as they go, in a way that's not as satisfying in a focused narrative game.
The best thing about trains and railroads is that there's no seatbelts! You can just hop right off, play around town, do whatever you like, and then go right back to the rails and hop on the next train.
This is very different from the kind of sandbox where the story is allowed to arise from the travel, exploration, random encounters, population centers and adventure locations in interaction with the characters and their goals. If the main villain has been decided beforehand, there's less room for the story to emerge from the aforementioned elements. Nothing wrong with any method as long as people are having a good time together.
I think it was a Matt Collville (spelling?) recommendation, but especially if you are running milestones in a semi sandbox… use some visible form of quest tracker. I use a folded note card with a short form version of the objective, on the back (or hidden part if you don’t want players to see) I have the reward. The characters don’t even have to know about them yet (even better if they don’t, then they will help drove the story to that quest).
I have run a large portion of both Rime of the Frostmaiden and Out of the Abyss. And i have to say: Out of the Abyss is so much worse. This makes sense, since it was so much older. I also still think Out of the Abyss has some awesome ideas worth digging for. But man, some things need to be changed to get it working. In icewinddale, I recommend picking your favorite sections from chapters 1+2 (based on the pcs you have) and only mentioning those to the characters with overheard rumers and interactions.
It's strange that, in my opinion, the best adventures are the beginner adventures. Phandelver and Icespire both very well connect each location to each other and help players flow from one location to another, while helping the dm with the flow along the way.
Incredible video, and I really like the variety on your channel Let's rebrand the railroad. I call them "rollercoasters" (bc if I need to make life come at the PCs in a way they can't ignore, I'm at least gonna make it a wild ride)
An especially good idea bc railroading has a non-gaming meaning of "forcing someone to do something that isn't fun by screaming at them or lying to them." that is actually what you're supposed to be thinking of. The person who came up with the terminology was a sandbox radical who thought people were just pretending to have fun with narrative games because he didn't get it.
Idk man my DM must be a super dude because he just makes a shit ton of story lines in an area and we just go find them and do them if we want then some times they all lead to one big story but on the other hand we don't need to do the story. If we want to just make a bar settle down we can. Idk love my dude shout out to good DMs < 3
Linear narratives are not railroads. Railroads are where you run any adventure without respecting the input of your players. Some of the tightest and most well flowing games come from linear narratives. Railroading players without letting them make an impact on the story is bad.
Sometimes a game on rails is just what I want - eg if we want to play Pathfinder 2 and explore its dizzying array of character options and make the best of it by having tons of fights, and the story is really just a pretext to get from one fight to the next. But my *favourite* way to play an RPG, the style I think reaches the medium’s full potential, is *absolutely no railroading whatsoever*. I often hear people criticise fully sandbox campaigns for not guaranteeing that a particular story takes place, and I think that’s a mistake. I think a bad sandbox is one in which you *do* try to also include a predetermined story. This always just ends up with players wandering around trying to find the plot, and it does become unfocused and boring. But a *true* sandbox is where there simply isn’t a predetermined story, and whatever the players end up doing becomes the story. I’d urge anyone who hasn’t played this way to put aside their misgivings and try it, because it’s a really awesome experience. Try not having a BBEG before you start. Instead just have the hook that there are bandit raids going on, and then maybe the PCs get ambushed by some bandits, kill all of them except one, because they take pity on that one, and then he vows to get revenge on them. Next time they face him they might kill him or he might escape again. Maybe he gets his hands on the magical artifact the players sold to some merchant, and now he’s got magic powers. Maybe that guy ends up becoming the BBEG of the whole campaign. The players will be deeply invested in that story because it was their actions that caused it - this is, imho, infinitely more satisfying than any predetermined story could ever be, whether the predetermined story is completely on rails or hidden in a big sandbox. Again, just talking about my preferred style, but that’s my reason for it.
Good video, but theres some terminology confusion. When you say sandbox, I think you actually mean open world. Sandbox generally refers to allowing the players to solve a problem however they want, while open world refers to them being able to go wherever they want and find adventure there. Railroading is less officially defined, but the game industry tends to use "linear gameplay" to mean the opposite of open world. And since most gamers use "railroading" as a term for something negative, it makes more sense to have railroading be the opposite of sandbox. Using these definitions, a linear sandbox adventure would be an adventure where the party needs to defeat the dragon, but it's up to them how they do it, while a railroaded linear adventure would be the party needs to defeat the dragon in combat. No, you cant try to trick it into leaving its lair, no you cant ask that knight you met for help, no you cant sneak in while its asleep.
In an earlier era where focused narrative games were less omnipresent and open world video games did not exist, the open world sandbox distinction was called the sandbox dungeon distinction, where a dungeon or site based game would be a sandbox in your usage and a sandbox would be an open world in your usage. The creation of open worlds in another genre and the collapse of the dungeon as a kind of campaign structure in popularity has basically lead to a generational break in these word's definitions.
I think we’re really talking about the scope of the sandbox. You can have a linear overall campaign structure that leads the players to a dungeon which is in itself a sandbox. So within that dungeon they can explore, go back and forth, and try whatever approach they like to achieve their goal. But what the goal is is predetermined. And there will always be some level of predertimination. Even in an open world game, there will be a premise, even if it’s as broad as “we are adventurers in a fantasy world”. That’s the boundary of the sandbox. But it’s not railroading. To me railroading is when there’s some predetermined sequence of events.
I tend to kinda overkill sandbox a bit for my players but ive realised lately how much pressure they start to feel after too many choices for too long. Especially if they dont all jump on something together because one player wont want to decide something for the group and thus it starts to wear on the group
My group is finishing phandelver and would start hoard of the dragón Queen next. Im starting to see this Will require a lot of work. But also how different it is from phandelver, beign the whole campaign one big trip, its gonna be hard to cover the rails.
as a first time DM i chose to run the essentials based on your analysis. currently we are at the start of the bronze shrine of the Sleeping Dragon's Wake. I'm searching for the next adventure we can play. Again because of your analysis i think of choosing the rime of the frostmaiden. I like running an a more fun and relaxed games where people can come or miss some sessions. And i also like the railroad aspect cause its easy to prepare for upcoming sessions. But after the thing you said about the rime of the frostmaiden i dont know. What other adventure should i try maybe ? (not the starter set)
In in personal experience with players, oftentimes they need to be railroaded a bit, and sometimes even want to be. Especially with newer players. I could say "guided" might be a better term though. Also check out what game TH-cam thinks the video is about lmao.
A good example of literally railroading players to sandbox areas that’s not DnD is metro Exodus. That’s the whole game. Train ride to a free to explore smaller area until it time to be railroaded again to the next sandbox
It depends. There are radically different ways to run games, and practicing one game won't necessarily do much to prepare you for another. If you want to run the kind of game where there's always a buffet of options and things advancing on their own around the players, and it's more an MMO than a Visual Novel, then Frost Maiden will be great practice. If you want the game to emphasize tactics over strategy and be more about the How than the What or the Why, then you won't get to focus as much on those skills.
I would argue that the Essentials Kit is a sandbox by itself and has nothing to do with railroading. Hoard of the Dragon Queen by what I have heard is a railroad because you must go from point to point without being able to make any decisions that are not planned out by the module. The problem with modern D&D games is that it makes people think that you have to encounter the thing on the cover but we have to realize that the Campaign setting and goal of the main quest are 2 different things. There was a time when you would buy a module which was basically a dungeon or scenario that you could put into your setting and there was no real pressure to make you feel that you had to run that at all but if you did you would make hooks to get to the thing in the module. The thing I dislike most about modern D&D are the main quests. I bought the Tomb of Annihilation for the setting and not for the tomb. The worst part about the Curse of Strahd is the assumption that the players should have to go to Castle Ravenloft to kill Strahd but in reality they should be able to go about the world as they see fit and if they don't have good reason to go and confront Strahd then they should not be expected to. Not all of the things in the book need to be done but the things in the book should act more as a guide for things the players could do if that is what the players want to do. A dungeon does not have to be one story either, the players could go into the same dungeon for several different quests and they don't all need to be given all at once nor do they all need to be accepted by the party. As a DM you should be able to guide players to places they might want to go to but should not feel that the thing on the cover of the book or the story of the book even needs to be directly followed because the story happening at the table is more important.
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Thank you SO much for captioning your video - please continue to do so! Deaf people like me really appreciate it!
A good tip for subtle railroading that I always do is give the players a location (city/town/landmark) to get to during session 0. They can come up with their own individual reasons why, but that gives them a pretty narrow route of travelling to follow without them even knowing + a reason why they all need to travel together in the first place. By the time they reach there (level 3 or 4) they've bonded and would have found a new quest to follow together
Good tip! I love it when the party gets to do a little world building
One thing I've liked experimenting with is sort of alternating between more "sandbox-y" sections, and more "railroady" sections to break up the game. Because while the characters having choices is awesome, sometimes life happens at them. It also lets you build smaller sandboxes and use the railroads to connect them, or even re-visit older sandboxes, with the railroad serving as a major "update" event. I've found that breaking the sandboxes up can really help give some variety, and releive some of the decision-making pressure that can build up over longer sandbox experiences.
Yeah I think mixing it up is the key to any good game!
That's basically what Baldur's Gate 2 does, and it's awesome.
I call these DM styles as Closed Fist, Open Palm, and Cupped Hand.
Closed Fist is your classic railroad.
Open Palm is a sandbox campaign.
Cupped Hand provides a campaign setting with a lot plot points around to give players a feeling of freedom while still staying within an advancing narrative.
I'm mostly a sandbox DM, and want to contrast a bit with this video's advice.
Personally I don't always prep a single "big bad" for a campaign. I like to seed multiple plots through the world, and let the PCs follow the one(s) that they think are most compelling. Only then do I actually make up the big villains and their lairs and so forth. This means that, ideally, the campaign is following the plot that the players want to go toward.
I do think it's good advice for DMs prepping the game to prepare only a few quests with hooks going forward. I usually have one or two prepared adventures, and then I use random tables if the players go off in a direction I didn't expect. Usually something like a monster lair or a few random encounters is enough to base a session on, and then I can come up with another adventure afterward.
What I did find interesting is the critique of Rime of the Frostmaiden as offering too many adventures. At $50 cover price per book, I think it's good when a published book provides more than just the core materials for one adventure. I'm probably not going to run Rime of the Frostmaiden but because I have it, I always have a book loaded with arctic adventures. A DM actually running it should, of course, find the things that are most relevant and appeal to the players.
Finally - I think part of the reason railroading has a bad rap is because, in an RPG, not everything needs to be an Any % speedrun to the BBEG. A side-quest that you find irrelevant might really appeal to someone else, and not being forced into following the main quest line could be good breathing room for most RPGs.
Sorry if that's long, I just thought another perspective was worth sharing.
I agree. I actually think if you are going in with one predetermined story then you might as well just railroad hard, rather than scatter clues to the plot around a sandbox, which is just setting you up for frustration as the players wander around looking for the clues and ignoring side quests.
Alternatively, do what you suggest here and be open-minded about which direction the campaign will take. I much prefer this approach.
I’ve always enjoyed Bob’s videos, but WOW they are steadily increasing in quality and content and I am really appreciative!! Go Bob, go!!
Really appreciate that! I'll admit this one was finished kind of last minute, and I was nervous that I might have rushed a little, so it's great to hear that it feels like an improvement! :)
Good: Tie adventures into the BBEG
Better: Tie adventures into your players backstory
Best: Tie adventures into BOTH the BBEG and players backstory
Thanks for the video Bob!
My pleasure!
Even better than this, imo, is when the GM doesn’t write adventures at all, but just preps some potential elements of adventures and then uses them to react to the players’ actions. Whatever adventure emerges from that process, that’s the adventure.
Wonderful video, thank you.
A couple of pointers I would like to add for consideration. This is based on a mostly railroaded Cthulhu adventure which my players gave a lot of superlative compliments about.
1) The main piece of advice I have is to make the railroaded path feel like the players' own decisions.
One way of achieving this is to have the plot contain a danger which will have real consequences if ignored. Typically this danger is death (say, an end-of-the-world scenario), since almost every PC personality/alignment still is concerned about either self-preservation or preserving others' lives.
For example: "Bad railroading" would be a situation where the players say, "hey let's ignore what's happening at location X and instead go to those hills in the distance". And then the DM responds with, "an invisible barrier prevents you from going in that direction". The players feel like their desires are ignored, that they are not actually playing the game, and it becomes no fun.
But if there is an imminent threat, then that threat should be communicated early so that the players would conclude, "oh but if we spend time in those hills, then the immanent danger at location X will come to fruition and we will be dead... let's save ourselves by handling that problem." For this to work, the threat of death needs to be real. If a PC decides to jump off a 1000-foot cliff, allow them to do so but it will kill them. The players will learn to fear for their character's lives and the game becomes more emotionally compelling.
For my game, prior to the first session I let the players know that death is a real possibility. And so they were mindful right out of the gate.
2) Have the villain or danger progress with time, whether the PCs tend to it or not. And make this progress known to the PCs. This places the danger of the threat higher on the players' minds.
3) 100% agree with Bob that purely-random encounters should be avoided. Tie every encounter into the story. Otherwise, the players feel like we're just spinning wheels.
4) If you have a lot of prep time available and are willing to commit that time, then: While writing the adventure, at every point ask yourself: How might player decisions prevent the cool scene I'm planning from happening? If you can think of a weakness in that cool part of the railroad, then when patching it do so in a way which makes sense and is natural.
For example, nothing should hinge on an NPC being alive/available at a particular moment.
A specific example from my game: this was set in 1923 San Francisco. When the party discovers that the adventure location is dangerous, an intelligent player would try to get the police to handle it. So I had the adventure take place the day president Warren Harding died in SF, thus the entire police force was dedicated to that problem in order to make a show for the nation. No cops available to help the adventurers that day, and they accepted that as logical.
5) Try to tie EACH of the PC backstories into the main quest (not just 1 character). This heightens their interest in that storyline, and they are more likely to decide for themselves to pursue it.
Another way to keep players engaged is something I picked up from Chris Perkins: Try to end each session on a cliffhanger.
6) Still keep a flexible approach, the players might still surprise you. Let it happen. You can always adjust or expand the main story during the prep for later sessions.
The advice in this video is so quality I don’t know how else to put it
good quality I hope haha
@@BobWorldBuilder yeah of course! love your vids (and not just cause the name lol)
I like what Luke Hart says about the Railroad. He makes a point to distinguish it from a Linear Adventure. I think railroading would be on the side of taking the player's agency away from them and telling them what their character did. Where the linear adventure or adventure on rails is a story that has a clear starting point, with quest markers along the way, that eventually gets you to a clear ending. I definitely agree with all of your points though, and this is how I like to play, though I haven't had the full sandbox experience myself. I do run a lot of one-shots as well, so I think there is a table understanding that this is what has been prepared and that they should follow the quest hook. However, once I have the hook set, I completely leave it up to the players about how everything goes. It makes for a very fun game, in my opinion.
I think your one-shot experience is a really good way of understanding what a sandbox should look like. I run one-shots in a similar way: there’s an adventure, the PCs are doing that adventure and can’t choose to go and do something else, that’s part of the premise. I don’t consider that railroading, it’s just the boundaries of the sandbox. The important thing is that within the boundaries they have total freedom to approach the adventure however they like. The outcome isn’t fixed either: they might kill the evil wizard or join forces with him.
Where I disagree with you is I think a railroad and a linear adventure are basically the same thing, namely a campaign structure where there’s a predetermined sequence of events.
My strategy tends to be sort of a graph approach, where I plot out different plot points/hints that the players should experience, but with a chart of which plot points need to happen after which, and which plot points require which information to uncover. Then I can just throw out hints towards the different currently available plot points, see which one the players choose and then let them experience that, in the process unlocking new plot points I can throw out hints for, as well as the remaining old ones. It's a great system, because the players always have a real choice, but at the same time they don't leave the confines of my plans.
Ooh, I think you nailed it with the idea of "unlocking" new points later on. That's what DoIP does very well
I think at the end of the day, it comes down to;
Find what your players are engaging with, and cater to that. There is no one right way. Just a bunch of right ways for your personal group.
100% !
I like to break down the term "railroad" into "rail-line" and "roller coaster."
You have the rail-line, which is a series of interconnected railroads leading to different places. This represents preplanned plotlines, each of which could be important, but the PCs an choose WHICH railroad to take, and can swap between railroads as desired or take detours to their destination.
And for shorter trips, there's the rollercoaster. It goes from one place to another and doesn't have any deviations, but it's a great ride that will entertain people. But it can't go on too long or it becomes boring.
I like this railroad that projects you into the wider world of small sandboxes. That's a really fun way to get your players out exploring.
The biggest difference between these two adventures is their intended audience. The Essentials Kit adventure is meant for newer players and probably a new GM. It's shorter, and simpler by design. None of the hardback campaign books are intended for a GM to run everything as written and have a group encounter 100% of the content. Rime of the Frostmaiden is a great sandbox for a GM to use but only if you're careful to hand out the quests in a manageable manner. I chose Bryn Shander as the starting town and only gave out the quest hooks in two of the neighboring towns. GMs also need to hand pick which parts of the book are most likely to engage the PCs.
I really enjoyed the thumbnail for this video!
Glad you did! ...sorry to say I might end up changing it though bc YT didn't seem to like it as much as you and I did haha
Might be the most important DM advice video on the website. Going to be coming back to it a lot as I prep for my first proper experience DMing
That is high praise! Thank you!
All the accolades for Icespire Peak make me so happy. Required reading for anybody wanting to homebrew I think. The structure is so so solid
Yeah it's been too long since I showed the Essentials Kit some love in a video haha
I absolutely love the "on site" locations you go to in the videos. I don't know why, but it makes the excellent advice and content all the better! Keep it up Bob!
Im so glad someone said this. Sandbox is often seen as the "good" option. But some of the worst campaigns ive been in were sandbox taken to the extreme
Exactly! Sandbox gets a little too much love haha
A massive part of the problem is that almost nobody gets the training anymore, and the books haven't included instructs for years:
Extreme sandboxes are meant to be Massively Multiplayer open table arenas where you play with a new party every week, run multiple characters at once, and multiple different parties are on their own individual focused narratives inside the space. Trying to run an extreme sandbox for four people who play the same character every week for six months, is like setting up a special version of World of Warcraft where no other people are able to join your server and you just run around the game by yourself.
/kiss of perfection! Thanks Bob!
Glad you like it!
I totally agree that The Essentials Kit is an amazing adventure to both play and run. I am currently running it for a group of middle school students and they are having a blast! I will be modeling my other adventures after this one. I love what you said about choice... it's great, but too much choice can easily backfire! Thanks for another amazing video!
The diffrence between sandbox style of play and railroad style of play can be looked at this way ;
In a sandbox game the players tell the story of their adventures and in a railroad game players are actors in a story that's already written for them .
A sandbox game isn't just random made up things on the fly there are areas of adventures waiting for the players to discover that are already planed put but aren't forced upon the players giving them the choice of what to do through rumors and clues .
I have a folder with tons of pre made blank maps that I can pick from to use in an adventure and I have an index card holder filled with adventure ideas that I can use with the pre made maps to create an adventure in a very short time .
And not all adventures needs to be tied together in some grand fashion with and end boss fight ( I hate MMO terms applied to d&d ) because small adventures can be just as rewarding as huge ones and the idea of a campaign being one huge adventure is a WOTC thing for the most part because when d&d first came out the campaign was the setting you played in which is where all the adventures and modules are set
I have binged a ton of your videos this past week or so and this is not the newest but I just wanna say: Thanks so much for your videos, Bob. You've given me a ton of insight and ideas/directions in my first ever DMing (ever) w/ a homebrew campaign and I've really enjoyed it all.
What you're describing is linear storytelling, not what I'd consider railroading. All those pieces that point in one direction are still optional for the players to ignore at their own peril.
Let's say you do all this work when the group suddenly decides to become pirates, hijacking a ship, and taking to the high seas. Do you throw all that work away? No... you let it fester. Eventually they'll hear of the troubles of the place they'd left behind and how it's spreading, becoming worse than what it was. Hinting at the players to get back to the adventure they agreed upon at first.
They could still decide to bail on that, but then you need to have a talk about what they want out of their adventures, because the original idea sold to them clearly wasn't it.
I disagree with your middle step. Proceed directly to the final step. If I prepped several plot hooks, and my players ignore every single one and steal a boat instead, I stop the game and tell them: "Guys, we agreed to do a campaign about a dragon causing trouble near Phandelver, not a pirates in the high seas campaign. I won't have anything prepped out here." Then you can discuss getting back on track or starting a different campaign.
Even though it looks like an in-game problem, players ignoring all your plot hooks is actually an out of game problem in disguise, and should be handled as such.
Yes. Absolutely.
There is SO much emphasis on DMs bending over backward to accommodate the players, but that compromise HAS to go both ways.
ANY style of game/campaign can work perfectly well as long as the players are getting what they were expecting from the outset.
It's fine to "subvert their expectations" every now and then and throw a railroad scenario into a sand box, or vice versa. (Sometimes players are like small children who say they hate some sort of food, having never tried it, so you slip it into their meal without telling them. Then when they enjoy it you say casually mention it the next time they moan about it...) But if the DM says "This is what my game will be..." and they are all happy with that, then run with it, and don't let nobody tell you you're doing it "wrong."
@@jedrzejkraszpulski442 Absolutely agree with this. Like it or not, there has to be some sort of implied agreement to follow the main hook of the story or there is no point to sign up to be part of the particular campaign the DM proposed to the group. I would not agree to DM a group that expected me to keep up with content to satisfy their erratic decisions to ignore the main plot hooks.
Hmmm maybe, not sure I'm understanding which part of my description was linear and which was railroading, but yes, I typically think of linear and railroad as the same thing
@@BobWorldBuilder Railroading is a DM/GMs tool to get things to go the way he wants them to go, sacrificing player agency. It can be a very important tool, but has to be used with a light touch or it can become quickly heavy handed or awkward and frustrating to your players. A Linear Campaign is a type of campaign where situations happen in a linear order, but how the players deal with those situations is up to them. For example, you have your players start with situation 1... that situation includes a number of encounters, investigations and scenes that lead into situation 2, which has its own scenes, situations and encounters which lead on to situation 3 and so on.
Great video Bob! I read a comment concerning agency and unrelated world going-ons that really helped my game and the railroad-sandbox conundrum. It was concerning empty dungeon rooms. Many see them as a waste, but in a structure relatively linear, "empty" rooms serve to break up the feeling of being herded by reminding players that not every choice is fated to be tied to the narrative or objective, and that a larger world exists beyond the game.
I think the bit about Icespire Peak you mentioned is the inverse, for Sandbox play- an vast open play space where many things on the surface have roots in major events.
Ya know, I'm all about efficiency, so empty rooms usually get on my nerves, but that's an excellent point! Thanks for sharing!
@@BobWorldBuilder I suppose my own aren't 'empty' per say, but they often hold either 'zone exposition' details or random mystery trinkets and scraps that I use to sneak in world-building when they get explorative/curious enough, haha. I like efficiency too.
@@BobWorldBuilder The other thing about empty rooms is that they're supposed to serve a strategic purpose in other encounters. They're supposed to support strategies like "I take the Disengage action, then I move back into the empty room to the South, Dash into the empty room to the East of that room. Next turn I Dash North into the room that's East of the room the combat's in, move up the staircase in that room, pop out on the balcony in the room the combat is in, and Sneak Attack the archer on the balcony." If you curate each encounter space too hard, it becomes like a Final Fantasy battle where nothing in the rest of the building is a tool you can use in the room that you're in.
I honestly hate the terminology of sandbox and railroads. As Bob highlights here, even with a sandbox styled adventure like the starter set (when done right) it is incredibly controlled by the DM. Even when the players decide which objective the players want to go on, the DM is crafting memorable adventurers and random encounters. Even when players are choosing what parts of the story interest them most and engage with that, the DM is deliberately creating content that fills that desire, in essence creating what some would call a "railroad".
Yeah I just left a comment and realized that they don't describe what I was even talking about. Railroading just means a more linear story but it still doesn't tell you if it is player led story telling or dm led story telling.
@@CemeterySunshine either way it doesn’t really matter, the majority of the work is still on the DM regardless. And If you’ve made a campaign with zero story at all, and just let the players dictate everything, then yea you’re gonna experience one of the extremes that Bob mentions in this video; It has to be a collaborative effort, other wise the players or dm should just write a book. The DM is a player too, not just a random encounter bot that spits out numbers and dialogue at the players behest. This isn’t a video game with a disconnected phantom narrator. I think People often tend to forget the whole “Master” part of DM tbh
Because Starter Set isn't really a great sandbox, more like a linear adventure with a set ending that has a few sidequests.
You can run games purely off hexmaps, random encounter tables and a few pre-made NPCs/factions. You can run a sandbox that's not just "which of these pre-planned adventure hooks will you take first", D&D adventures are just stuck in that model.
@@Tachi2407
Gonna be honest, that does not sound fun
@@jonahbardwell551 I never said it's great for everybody (I don't like it, I know people who are having absolute best time with it). Preferences are just that, I personally consider published adventures and adventures written by the GM (no matter how well written as stories) to be a waste of time.
My point is that "even sandbox is heavily controlled/moderated by the GM" is a flat out wrong statement coming from how narrow of a spectrum D&D adventures actually occupy.
There are games driven by the GM, there are those where the GM only prepares the setting and it's up to player's initiative, there are those that have no pre-planned story and rely on rules to have everybody (not just the GM) contribute to one during play.
I will say my personal best Sandbox on Rails Ive run as a DM was with my SKT group. After the initial giant attack at their location (which I picked based on proximity to their “home base” at the start based on backstories) there are a BUNCH of sidequests with no real impact on the larger storyline, other than to allow PCs to get loot before taking on more of the true baddies. So always in the background is the larger plot of the campaign, but for a little over a year IRL our sessions were built around the group traveling up and down the Dessarin Valley doing sidequests and seeing interesting locations and NPCs. I know a lot of people don’t like and routinely skip that entire chapter of SKT, but for us it was a highlight. We got so into it that at several points after a session I would poll my players to make sure they were enjoying it, and they always were happy to do more. I used a bunch of resources from the FR wiki to maps out of other sources to calendars and holidays and tracking the passage of time so that the world felt truly living. It gave me ample opportunity to add elements tailored for each character and their backstory. By the end when we moved back to the main plot, they were much more invested in the story because it meant them saving the people and villages we had just spent a year connecting with during these little mini adventures. It was great!
The "sandbox on rails" is really a great way to go about things. I also recommend having a separate piece of paper or white board or something where the players/dm can keep track of main quests/side quests/quest objectives, just like a video RPG might (thinking world of warcraft). It's so easy to lose track of all the quests and hooks. If the players can keep track of these in even a brief format, it allows them to add their own "rails" towards things they want, and it also helps the dm have an idea of the quests and hooks they are interested in pursuing. If the players don't want to follow a quest/hook, they can just cross it off and abandon it.
coming back to this video on my next prep session, really good ideas
Something I want to talk about almost all the time is the fact that since all of the theory of this hobby is spread out over game manuals and podcasts and blogs and magazines, most of which haven't published new content in over five years. There is this constant churn where people can't react to old ideas because they just can't find them.
I feel like this prep strategy is some kind of cross between a pointcrawl, beads on a string, and a node based design philosophy. But I literally can't tell where it's meant to sit between these ideas, because I'm willing to bet that only like five other people in this comment section have even heard of all three of them.
I have heard of (and used) pointcrawls and node based design philosophy but couldn't+ honestly tell you that there is a difference. I have never heard of beads on a string design (sounds like a linear pointcrawl).
This prep strategy feels like an open world pointcrawl with ~ 4 points of adventure, a town, and a list of premade encounters and hooks that tie into each point of adventure. It's a focused and small open world with an emphasis on the particular adventure narrative that the players choose and the player's backstories (if feasible). It seems like a perfect manifestation of OC / Neo-Trad gaming style popular in 5e if mixed onto a DM who grew up loving open world sandbox RPG video games.
I'm trying something similar but a lot less...focused. My game uses a small hexcrawl with maybe 9+ points of adventure and incidental consequences of the players actions (rather than trying to make something of their often non-existent backstories). It's gonzo science fantasy wilderness exploration after a ship crashes them into the island and I love it.
I have been dming for years and the best way I have found to decide the sandbox vs railroad problem with new players is to start them on a railroad and the see how your group responds to opening it up. If they seem to not really know where to go from there or struggle with what to do next, then more railroading is what the group needs to keep things going. If they start taking more interest in the game are you introduced more choices then open it up a little more and see how they respond. I do this little by little through the campaign until they start hesitating on choices more than normal and then you know where that line is for that party. Sometime the adventure setting or your writing might not be clear enough as to what to do so keep that in mind when assessing the groups response.
In my experience this can backfire tremendously. I've played games with players who struggled when the campaign was more open. Then I met their gm, who bragged about how any time a player left her railroad she killed their characters immediately. These players didn't prefer a more focused narrative, they were terrified I was playing some cat an mouse game to assert dominance.
New players are learning how to play the game from how you run it. If you tell them that the game is played by finding the secret clues to the only thing they're allowed to do next, they will take that lesson and apply it all the time. They won't think there isn't a secret only thing to do just because the game's a sandbox, they'll think the secret thing is so hidden they can't find any clues, and just look for clues harder.
I use railroading as a form of “cutscene”. First session is mostly a railroad with no other choices besides “go here, do this”. After that, progressively more choices depending on which NPCs the players find and whose questlines they want to advance.
Would agree with "Essentials". Sandboxing is great, but their should lie a skeleton right under the sand for the player to find bone by bone.
Great video I agree with nearly everything. Especially the 'too many choices=actually pointless choices"
Wow! Someone finally agrees with me! Pure chaos cant work because us DM's have things like jobs and other addictions like golf so we can't plan infinite encounters in a fantasy due to IRL constraints! Love ya Bob! Been a DM since '80 (they never let me out to PC anymore lol) and this is a great description of how to make the basics of a true campaign, let players help you flesh out the world, but not lose sight of the fact that just wandering off the map to mess with the DM (this happens?? *gasp* yes it does 8>D ) isn't an instance of creativity, it just slows things down because then its just random tables time-aka near certain boredom.
I’m just starting building my first world and these videos are super helpful. Thanks Bob, keep up the great videos!
love the way you filmed this one
Thanks! :)
Usually my DMing method is to set up some plot checkpoints that I want/need to happen or locations that I want/need the PCs to be.
Now the "how", the "when" and at which cost I have no idea, Ive got the most absurdly random and fun player group so I just improvise and try to be as descriptive as I can, and also give life to as many NPCs as I can.
Fun times with PCs joining the bandit leader they went to get the bounty of and ending up defeating a galactic empire after getting to the past to change what happened in the first session.
Yes, I love that style as a player! As a DM, I need to do more planning to feel prepared
@@BobWorldBuilder Truth is: as a DM we're never really prepared xD and that is part of the magic
The image in the beginning is actually super helpful. Seeing as my next campaign is a wild west setting, that has legitimate rail roads at some point. That actually gave me a good visualization of what i should do for location placement
Excellent vid...nice one
Thanks! And thanks for commenting!
As for the rime of the frostmaiden... You are off course aware that you can cull and curate the elements you don't want to explore and keep the party turning through the ones that matter, right? You don't get a completion badge for seeing and using every page in the book
I think you meant to say 'The Advantage of a Linear Game in D&D' rather than 'railroading'.
Otherwise, good on ya.
Yeah I few others have said that, but I literally have always took those terms to be synonymous. I'm glad it's more nuanced than I thought but apparently I need to do some research!
You hit the nail on the head. _This_ is why I've been hating my Rime of the Frostmaiden group as a player. _This_ is why I loved running all the Dragon of Icespire Peak chapters. _This_ is why Critical Role season 2 was so bad. I like the idea of making little clusters of choices along a linear path. That way there aren't too many choices all the time, but there's not a single path forward.
Do all of the different paths just lead to the same ending though?
I mean, there could be different endings depending on what they do, but there should be some kind of uniform concluding encounter that the characters all care about.
Happy to help clarify the struggle :P
@@MichaelG485 In the Beads on a String structure (which is what this is called in some articles you can look up) yeah basically.
The idea is something like- the final encounter is always the final encounter, but for every decision you made in the other beads you have some bonus or penalty to addressing that encounter.
I agree, Bob. Railroading has gotten a bad name, but gently nudging players should be not only acceptable among DM's, but embraced! Thanks for sharing.
Totally! Players often need more guidance than they seem to want
I really dig your down to earth instruction. Keep up the great work!
I appreciate that!
BBEG = carrot on a stick.
DM = stick holder.
Players = mule, trying to get the carrot.
The first DM in my group is so into sandbox that it can be frustrating at times. We end up on side quests from side quests from side quests and never actually get to where we were going, but whenever we try and skip something because it didn’t seem important it turns out that was the one side quest that actually tied back into the main plot.
I use the multiple choice middle ground. They have three to four choices which have effects on the world. Usually two options dealing with backgrounds and one random
This is a really good addendum to the last video. Icespire Peak is a fantastic template for a sandbox game. You can take the lessons learned from it and apply them to other sandbox campaigns or homebrew. It's worked quite well for me and I would never be able to properly parse the quicksandbox that is Rime of the Frostmaiden without that technique.
Good job tackling this difficult subject. I also agree that too many options can create a confusing mess. I respectfully disagree, though, about trying to create a story using more rails; this can be stressful, messy, and just involve too much work.
I think you’re on the right track with providing a few interesting locations. What I do is add a few NPCs (or factions of them) with differing goals (understandable but bad ones are great), and some innocents who are in the crossfire, or other situation relevant to the PC backgrounds. When the players enter the scene, I play the NPCs reacting to them in accordance with the goals and resources they have. There’s no need to plan events happening after that, since things just logically flow from one scene to the next. Anyway, that’s just one successful (mostly) method I’ve used, YMMV.
Completely agree, I love this approach. Justin Alexander has written thousands of words about how to make this work on his site the Alexandrian. I think the key thing is to regard your prep as a “toy box”. The “toys” (factions, NPCs, locations etc) can be deployed in response to the players’ actions so that no plotting out of predetermined events is necessary. Instead the story emerges from play.
I love the “toy box” description!
My solution: I had a few longer story threads mapped out (broadly) that all eventually led to a much smaller number of larger events... but I wanted the world to feel "big" and "free" whenever possible. To avoid players being paralyzed by choice and being unsure what to do to move things forward, I gave out something in secret to each player at session zero - a Rumor.
Based on each player's background and provided mini-bio, I created a handful of different rumors they may have heard or encountered in their previous travels. Each one provided a thread that, if pulled, would lead them toward one of those story hooks... but I didn't specify which one they should follow, and I let them know it was their choice whether to share it with the others, and when.
It worked wonderfully. At one point, one of the storylines just stopped "hooking" them the same... but one of the players made a vague connection from their Rumor, and things started moving again. They basically switched tracks, but in a way that felt like they had "found" the next step without me prodding (in the present).
The Rumors were vague. "Your uncle at the shipyard has been worried lately about some irregularities in the tightly-regulated mithril shipments coming through the port," or "Local tension seems to be brewing about the Gnomish territories possibly hording resources to drive up the price of [McGuffin Mineral]," or "Frantic - and drunk - sailors at your tavern recently began spinning yarns about a horned aquatic beast attacking ships in trade lanes - breathing fire, to boot!"
Oh, also, while each player had three potential rumors, I had them pick one at random (from their "pool")
I think the most useful information I was given was; to remember that your players are blind...in that they know nothing outside what you tell them.
The world is a Sandbox with Railroads crisscrossing through it, and the NPCs are running the Trains.
I usually just put my players at the train station and see what train they get on. ;:)
I'm surprised Curse of Strahd wasn't the example of a good sandbox on rails. Barovia is a huge sandbox with MacGuffins strewn about. Player choice dominates where the party goes. Most everything ties in to the BBEG and the story quite clearly. And the railroad is quite short, as Castle Ravenloft is right there looming over everything and ready for the players whenever they want to stop exploring their sandbox.
"Most everything ties in to the BBEG and the story quite clearly."
Well... sorta? Sure, there's a lot of stuff that is there because of Stahd. But very little about it actually helps the party against him. The only actual story is the hunt for the mcguffins.
I have come up with a technique for managing a "sandbox", that allows me to give the players a lot of freedom, and yet still create a cohesive story. Of course, this is entirely dependent on having cooperative players. Without those, nothing is guaranteed to work.
The first pice of my method is that my "hooks" are situation triggered, and location agnostic. I can drop them in to whatever situation meets the criteria, that the characters find themselves in.
The second is to create points of conflict, whether combat, exploration or social. Success and failure need to have entirely different results, but you need to answer the question of how BOTH possibilities move the story forward. This one rule has kept me out of trouble very consistently, and every time I ended up with a stuck story, I could trace it back to someplace I failed to follow this rule.
Example:
The important npc has been captured by the enemy npc faction. The party must free the npc.
So, the part has to sneak, talk or fight their way in to where the npc is being held.
If they succeed, they find themselves in the jail cell with the npc.
But what if they get discovered, fail the social skills, or are defeated?
Obviously, they're captured and locked in the same cell.
Obviously, the conditions of being in the cell are totally different. But the story needs the party to interact with the npc, so that plot point is now protected.
Next, the party's goal is to free him. What if they fail? What if he's slain in the attempt? Well, whatever plot point would be accomplished by freeing him, you have to figure out how to get to that point if he's not freed. Regardless of how you imagine this, as long as you keep enough of your details flexible, but protect both sides of your plot points, you'll be able to keep the story moving.
Without protecting two sides of each plot point, the DM is frequently in a situation where he CAN'T let the PCs fail, or the story can't progress. If the PCs can't fail, then there's no risk to anything they do. If there's no risk, then there's no reward, and all actions become meaningless.
By protecting the story, you allow for failure. By allowing for failure, you protect player agency. By ensuring player agency AND story progression, you make each portion of the game more meaningful and engaging.
This is a really nice fail-forward approach if you do want to ensure certain things happen. My preferred approach is to simply not ensure certain things happen. What I do try to ensure is that *something* happens even when they fail. If it completely changes the trajectory of the whole campaign that’s fine, because that trajectory was never set in stone to begin with. In fact I try not to even think about the trajectory, I want to stay focused on the present moment and we’re always just driven to found out what’s the next thing that happens.
@@hideshiseyes2804 then how do you create story arcs? In fact, how does an encounter come to exist at all, if you're not planning them?
@@ChristnThms Well for the story arcs question, they create themselves. Story arcs naturally emerge. They’re not exactly Shakespeare, but in my experience neither are story arcs deliberately planned by a GM, in practice, and the really cool thing is that the story write itself. No other medium offers that.
As for where encounters come from, I’m not saying I do no prep at all. I prep a bunch of stuff that the players are likely to interact with based on their current situation, and deploy that stuff as needed during play. I will say 5E isn’t the best system for running this kind of campaign. I like to run lighter systems where you can throw good encounters together on the fly much more easily, which helps.
But yeah, the way I like to run games there is still prep, just no predetermined plot points.
Icespire is pretty good for integrating backstorys. Running it for second Time with another group and its already an unique experience
Though I did give a random gnome the runscape gnomechild image as a roll20 token and both teams have adopted him!
Nice, just what I needed. I also like how you say "import-ant"!
This is right in line with how I run things. I call it the train yard.
I have been running Dragon of Icespire Peak and the players have been liking it so much that they rushed around doing every quest they could, a few side quests I made fit in when a party member didn't make it, and are still eager to play! Now they're determined to go to Icespire Hold and face the dragon but after reading about the Stone Cold Reavers I feel like they deserve to be more of a challenge based on their supposed infamy and that my players deserved a more interesting challenge from them. I made them as some slightly higher-level NPCs that may be a leadoff point to something after the Dragon that isn't necessarily the sequel Adventures. I've also changed the nature of their initial encounter with the party and have seeded in rumors of their misdeeds through clues to possible kidnappings they could have done for someone and news that they were in Phandalin being disrespectful to their favorite NPCs while the party was away. The party tends to think the reavers are in league with Talos somehow and that the humanoid sacrifices that the anchorites performed were supplied through them but I have something entirely different in mind. If a player dies I've also thought about asking if they want their new character to be a Reaver of a more neutral nature to add spice 🤔. It is very fun to see their minds work this adventure out and the admittedly low detail parts of the design are great places to give the players something they have been playing towards. I agree with what Bob says about the setting being great for the contained adventure as well as player exploration and believe this is why my players are still engaged so late in the story. Sorry so long. Thanks for the videos Bob!
I like how you described it
I plan one session at a time but keep an end goal in mind for the campaign. Sometimes the players take a different path and I have to change my plans
Thanks again Bob for this insightful video!
Personally, this video and the other related video before this, made me realize that this sandbox and railroad thing is actually a philosophical one! It's like delving into that destiny versus free will topic.
I guess I should not have read the latest current world events before watching your videos so that my real-life head space wouldn't be bleeding into understanding your tips! 😅
Nevertheless your tips are really helpful. Your basic principle of having a feedback loop and being open in incorporating those into your preparation actually enriches the experience of the DM & players. It so strengthens the collaborative nature of playing D&D that the desire to label things as railroad or sandbox become meaningless or unimportant.😊
I like Dragon Of Icespire Peak because every quest and npc foreshadows a fight with Cryvoian, The White Dragon
Oh hey I first found your channel from your Dragons if Icespire Peak content a few years ago- then your channel just came back into my feed recently. Keep doing the good stuff Bob!
If I may make a suggestion:
The Sourcebook for Tales from the Loop (or the "sequal"/Second Edition: Things from the Flood) has some VERY good tips on how to set up clues and plot points, showing various Sandboxy-yet-linear ways that the players could find out what's /really/ going on, building upon the central mystery and giving out information in a good trickle.
Another great video. Keep them coming.
Thank you! :)
I would not call that a railroad, since that term is for me all about denying player agency. I would describe it more as a web-approach, that lets players move from node to node freely. I used to run my games, but I prefer these days more character driven games, which means no modules, but the kicker for the adventure lying in the characters themselves, thus no web, no sandbox, and no rail.
Have you played any PbtA games? It sounds like how they work. You focus on the characters and build narrative around them as they go, in response to their choices. It’s a really cool style.
@@hideshiseyes2804 Yes, PbtA games shaped how run games quite a bit, but other types of games did so as well, like Fiasco.
Running DOIP as my groups Intro to dnd and we all like the style. Interesting to see your take on it.
I have a whole series about it! Check it out!
@@BobWorldBuilder oh, i know! I have using your tips with great succes. My party just returned to Phandalin from loggers camp with three pigs in tow. :)
I'm not sure where I read this, but some time ago, a game designer described all interior locations in an RPG as a "dungeon" and, as such, has railroad qualities built into it. Unless your party determines to make new pathways, by digging through walls or teleporting at will, they have to follow the limited paths as constructed, which limits choice in terms of anything sandboxy. I think this is why most GMs prefer to use interior settings in adventures. A PC can't just retreat in any direction they want.
I don't care for the terminology of "railroad" or "sandbox" anymore. They used to be a useful guide, but this far into playing dnd, we need to get more specific/nuanced with our terminolofy.
For example, when DMs complain about their players "going off the rails" or plays complain about "being railroaded" they're 90% of the tie dealing the with the problem that the DM put "the players do X" somewhere in their notes. But the whole point of an RPG, as pointed out in this video, is that players have choice, so they often will not do X.
There will almost always be a little bit of this, but it is baked into the social contract of the game and should be worked out during session 0 or before session 1. "We are playing a game in which you have been hired to rescue the dragon from a princess-guarded castle". This is pretty much the only time a DM should write "players do X" in their notes.
In this example, say the party make it to the castle where the dragon is being kept. The DM's prep says "the party approaches from the front, answers the riddles posed by the first princess, and cross the shaky bridge, and enter the Great Hall". Then the party chooses to polymorph into birds and approach from behind. Or they kill the first princess.
The players haven't broken the social contract here. The DM's prep should read something like "There is a princess in front of the bridge. If the players answer her riddles, they may pass. Otherwise, she will attack. If left alive, she ambushes the party in chamber 4". The only problem with this prep is that it can take a lot of time, so it is normally a good idea for the DM to ask what players intend to do at the end of the session.
Definitely true that campaigns are more nuanced than these two terms can cover!
I think the TH-cam channel how to be a great GM has a great start. Someone wants something badly and something is stopping them from getting it. For example the big bad wants a magic item that will give him the power to take over a kingdom. From that he will need to higher minions to get the item. You have a whole area of Villians working toward one goal of taking over. The heros are just the thing that keeps getting in the way.
Dude, I totally thought this video was about adding a literal train railroad to your world. I thought that sounded like a cool idea so that's why I clicked the video! haha I got bamboozled! But I do understand the points you made.
I feel like the complaint about Icewind Dale is less germane to its execution as a project, and more to the idea that a sandbox campaign, that is to say, a campaign in which the adventures are structured in such a way that *they do not form a single coherent plot intentionally* , is not going to appeal to players who are interested in a focused narrative experience. And funnily enough, the fact that the adventure funnels downward into a focused narrative at its ending has been criticized as meaning this adventure is not *enough* of a sandbox, that its structure is *too* connected.
Part of the point of a campaign structure like the Ten Towns setting is that it should be totally viable to finish the Ten Towns chapter, end the game, roll up brand new level one characters, play the TT chapter again, end the game, roll up brand new characters, and run the adventure a third time, and each time it be a radically different and surprising campaign, because each time the players are encountering different adventures, meeting NPCs in a different order, taking different sides in the conflicts, etc., etc. It should actually be possible to have two or three different game groups running in the same campaign simultaneously, picking different adventures and bouncing off of each other as they go, in a way that's not as satisfying in a focused narrative game.
The best thing about trains and railroads is that there's no seatbelts! You can just hop right off, play around town, do whatever you like, and then go right back to the rails and hop on the next train.
This is very different from the kind of sandbox where the story is allowed to arise from the travel, exploration, random encounters, population centers and adventure locations in interaction with the characters and their goals. If the main villain has been decided beforehand, there's less room for the story to emerge from the aforementioned elements. Nothing wrong with any method as long as people are having a good time together.
I think it was a Matt Collville (spelling?) recommendation, but especially if you are running milestones in a semi sandbox… use some visible form of quest tracker. I use a folded note card with a short form version of the objective, on the back (or hidden part if you don’t want players to see) I have the reward. The characters don’t even have to know about them yet (even better if they don’t, then they will help drove the story to that quest).
I have run a large portion of both Rime of the Frostmaiden and Out of the Abyss. And i have to say: Out of the Abyss is so much worse.
This makes sense, since it was so much older. I also still think Out of the Abyss has some awesome ideas worth digging for. But man, some things need to be changed to get it working.
In icewinddale, I recommend picking your favorite sections from chapters 1+2 (based on the pcs you have) and only mentioning those to the characters with overheard rumers and interactions.
I've been running icespire peak since it released, run through it with 3 different groups and its my favorite starter campaign.
I love the essentials kit
It's strange that, in my opinion, the best adventures are the beginner adventures. Phandelver and Icespire both very well connect each location to each other and help players flow from one location to another, while helping the dm with the flow along the way.
Incredible video, and I really like the variety on your channel
Let's rebrand the railroad. I call them "rollercoasters" (bc if I need to make life come at the PCs in a way they can't ignore, I'm at least gonna make it a wild ride)
An especially good idea bc railroading has a non-gaming meaning of "forcing someone to do something that isn't fun by screaming at them or lying to them." that is actually what you're supposed to be thinking of. The person who came up with the terminology was a sandbox radical who thought people were just pretending to have fun with narrative games because he didn't get it.
I'm full of criticism, but I do love your vids Bob! Keep them coming dude... 😊
Idk man my DM must be a super dude because he just makes a shit ton of story lines in an area and we just go find them and do them if we want then some times they all lead to one big story but on the other hand we don't need to do the story. If we want to just make a bar settle down we can.
Idk love my dude shout out to good DMs < 3
When you realise Icewind Dale is a dessert: ???
I built a railroad in a sandbox. But I lost my train in the sand...
Linear narratives are not railroads. Railroads are where you run any adventure without respecting the input of your players. Some of the tightest and most well flowing games come from linear narratives. Railroading players without letting them make an impact on the story is bad.
Sometimes a game on rails is just what I want - eg if we want to play Pathfinder 2 and explore its dizzying array of character options and make the best of it by having tons of fights, and the story is really just a pretext to get from one fight to the next.
But my *favourite* way to play an RPG, the style I think reaches the medium’s full potential, is *absolutely no railroading whatsoever*. I often hear people criticise fully sandbox campaigns for not guaranteeing that a particular story takes place, and I think that’s a mistake. I think a bad sandbox is one in which you *do* try to also include a predetermined story. This always just ends up with players wandering around trying to find the plot, and it does become unfocused and boring. But a *true* sandbox is where there simply isn’t a predetermined story, and whatever the players end up doing becomes the story. I’d urge anyone who hasn’t played this way to put aside their misgivings and try it, because it’s a really awesome experience. Try not having a BBEG before you start. Instead just have the hook that there are bandit raids going on, and then maybe the PCs get ambushed by some bandits, kill all of them except one, because they take pity on that one, and then he vows to get revenge on them. Next time they face him they might kill him or he might escape again. Maybe he gets his hands on the magical artifact the players sold to some merchant, and now he’s got magic powers. Maybe that guy ends up becoming the BBEG of the whole campaign. The players will be deeply invested in that story because it was their actions that caused it - this is, imho, infinitely more satisfying than any predetermined story could ever be, whether the predetermined story is completely on rails or hidden in a big sandbox.
Again, just talking about my preferred style, but that’s my reason for it.
Good video, but theres some terminology confusion. When you say sandbox, I think you actually mean open world. Sandbox generally refers to allowing the players to solve a problem however they want, while open world refers to them being able to go wherever they want and find adventure there.
Railroading is less officially defined, but the game industry tends to use "linear gameplay" to mean the opposite of open world. And since most gamers use "railroading" as a term for something negative, it makes more sense to have railroading be the opposite of sandbox.
Using these definitions, a linear sandbox adventure would be an adventure where the party needs to defeat the dragon, but it's up to them how they do it, while a railroaded linear adventure would be the party needs to defeat the dragon in combat. No, you cant try to trick it into leaving its lair, no you cant ask that knight you met for help, no you cant sneak in while its asleep.
Yes I am definitely thinking of open world when I use the term sandbox
In an earlier era where focused narrative games were less omnipresent and open world video games did not exist, the open world sandbox distinction was called the sandbox dungeon distinction, where a dungeon or site based game would be a sandbox in your usage and a sandbox would be an open world in your usage. The creation of open worlds in another genre and the collapse of the dungeon as a kind of campaign structure in popularity has basically lead to a generational break in these word's definitions.
I think we’re really talking about the scope of the sandbox. You can have a linear overall campaign structure that leads the players to a dungeon which is in itself a sandbox. So within that dungeon they can explore, go back and forth, and try whatever approach they like to achieve their goal. But what the goal is is predetermined.
And there will always be some level of predertimination. Even in an open world game, there will be a premise, even if it’s as broad as “we are adventurers in a fantasy world”. That’s the boundary of the sandbox. But it’s not railroading. To me railroading is when there’s some predetermined sequence of events.
I tend to kinda overkill sandbox a bit for my players but ive realised lately how much pressure they start to feel after too many choices for too long. Especially if they dont all jump on something together because one player wont want to decide something for the group and thus it starts to wear on the group
My group is finishing phandelver and would start hoard of the dragón Queen next. Im starting to see this Will require a lot of work. But also how different it is from phandelver, beign the whole campaign one big trip, its gonna be hard to cover the rails.
I didn't watch this video at first because I thought it was about adding trains to a DND campaign.
Ah, yes. DnD Jesus returns to give me a reason to argue with my friend (who's also a DM).
Haha, hope you enjoy the debate with your friend :P
as a first time DM i chose to run the essentials based on your analysis. currently we are at the start of the bronze shrine of the Sleeping Dragon's Wake.
I'm searching for the next adventure we can play. Again because of your analysis i think of choosing the rime of the frostmaiden.
I like running an a more fun and relaxed games where people can come or miss some sessions. And i also like the railroad aspect cause its easy to prepare for upcoming sessions. But after the thing you said about the rime of the frostmaiden i dont know. What other adventure should i try maybe ? (not the starter set)
I'm about to run Dragon of Icespire peak. How can I make sure I set it up right so they realize that the bbeg was displaced by another monster?
In in personal experience with players, oftentimes they need to be railroaded a bit, and sometimes even want to be. Especially with newer players. I could say "guided" might be a better term though. Also check out what game TH-cam thinks the video is about lmao.
I run Curse of Strahd like this,
But the base adventure is far more linear than it seems at first glance,
So it's a bit of a struggle sometimes.
A good example of literally railroading players to sandbox areas that’s not DnD is metro Exodus. That’s the whole game. Train ride to a free to explore smaller area until it time to be railroaded again to the next sandbox
Well idk about good but definitely an example of something similarish
Aw man I thought this was gonna talk about the benefit of railroads for travelling great distances 😅
Damn I kinda am running rime of the frost maiden, I feel like I lowkey went the wrong way for my first ever pre-written
It depends. There are radically different ways to run games, and practicing one game won't necessarily do much to prepare you for another. If you want to run the kind of game where there's always a buffet of options and things advancing on their own around the players, and it's more an MMO than a Visual Novel, then Frost Maiden will be great practice. If you want the game to emphasize tactics over strategy and be more about the How than the What or the Why, then you won't get to focus as much on those skills.
I would argue that the Essentials Kit is a sandbox by itself and has nothing to do with railroading. Hoard of the Dragon Queen by what I have heard is a railroad because you must go from point to point without being able to make any decisions that are not planned out by the module. The problem with modern D&D games is that it makes people think that you have to encounter the thing on the cover but we have to realize that the Campaign setting and goal of the main quest are 2 different things. There was a time when you would buy a module which was basically a dungeon or scenario that you could put into your setting and there was no real pressure to make you feel that you had to run that at all but if you did you would make hooks to get to the thing in the module. The thing I dislike most about modern D&D are the main quests. I bought the Tomb of Annihilation for the setting and not for the tomb. The worst part about the Curse of Strahd is the assumption that the players should have to go to Castle Ravenloft to kill Strahd but in reality they should be able to go about the world as they see fit and if they don't have good reason to go and confront Strahd then they should not be expected to. Not all of the things in the book need to be done but the things in the book should act more as a guide for things the players could do if that is what the players want to do. A dungeon does not have to be one story either, the players could go into the same dungeon for several different quests and they don't all need to be given all at once nor do they all need to be accepted by the party. As a DM you should be able to guide players to places they might want to go to but should not feel that the thing on the cover of the book or the story of the book even needs to be directly followed because the story happening at the table is more important.
Engagement for the engagement god!