Players are spiders. They sit at the center of enormous webs, waiting for fat story-flies to come buzzing along. Plotlines spiral out from them: thin tendrils of narrative webbing. These strands weave together to make delicate little worlds, each one held together by gossamer bonds. But like their webs, player-spiders are sensitive things. Pluck a strand with your hand and the spider sits still, because it knows the difference between blundering fingers and tasty morsels. Only when the story-flies are fat, wriggling, living things will the spiders stir to action. Unless, that is, to bite the hand that disturbed the web.
This, my friends, is why we don’t railroad our players into contrived situations. They can tell when you’re disturbing the webbing, and you’re likely to get bit.
It’s a lesson all GMs have to learn, and it can be a frustrating one. As story tellers we want to fill our campaigns with set-piece action sequences, dramatic confrontations, and startling reveals. We’ve got ideas for cool moments! And if those moments happen to unfold naturally at the table, all is well. But when it takes “narrative tweaking” for your cool idea to work, you’re guilty of disturbing the web.
This business comes in all kinds of flavors.
“Your teleportation magic suddenly doesn’t work here.”
“Your honor has been insulted! Make a Wisdom save of [undisclosed DC] to resist punching the guard.”
“You can’t dig your way in. The ground is all solid stone in this region!”
When you make this kind of move, you don’t just risk your integrity as a GM. You risk frustrating your players. And even if they are willing to play along, chances are they won’t think your “correct solution” is quite as cool as you do. Just remember that player-spiders are happy when they’re the ones doing the fly catching. They care about their master plans, not yours. So don’t go blundering through their webs. Just be patient enough to watch them spin for themselves.
Question of the day then! What is the worst, most heavy-handed railroading you’ve encountered in a game? Were you forced to go along with some NPC’s plan instead of your own? Was talking useless when you were “supposed” to fight? Did all roads lead to Castle Dark Bad? Tell us your tales of contrived encounters and forced situations down in the comments!
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BBEG wants a solo RP encounter with Fighter huh? Hmm. Could this be about Mr Stabby?
“¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “
While there were certainly frustrating cases in the past, very few cases were truly frustrating. I think a big point here is that the illusion needs to be maintained – obviously the GM cant prepare infinte cases for all the crazy player plans but they need to make it feel that it was our actions that ended us up in encounter X even if that would have happened regardless. Of course there were minor cases here and there – and I myself am not free of guilt most definitly.
We did have one big case in recent memory in a Pathfinder AP: In this case we didnt even wanted to do something different. It was just that the AP would transparently play out exactly the same regardless of our competence, speed or actions. I. E. when we had to search for a specific item we were lucky that our group had the perfect skills for that and a ton of spells for support. We finished a task of weeks in like, 2,5 days. A – completly seperate – problem we were trying to get ahead of just happened to happen after day 2. We chased enemies and the AP went “OK, you can either rush to their location a dozen miles away or deliver the important message” and because two of our chars were very invested in it for RP reasons our level 6 party spend money on teleport scrolls to deliver the message and still arrive hours earlier than on foot. Didnt matter, we delivered the message, so to late. Oh, and to add insult to injury, we didnt even have much reason to be here and do this stuff in the first place or engange with the various transparently set up encounters in-universe, we mostly did it because we didnt want to annoy the GM. For that reason we made two of our chars super invested, so we had a reason to stay despite the hindrances.
To a big part this is the aforementioned illusion: Of course the plot is going to happen to the PCs, but the GM (and in this case the RP) needs to make it feel like thats the result of our actions and the world, not “because plot”.
On a more direct level, I feel a lot can be made with some small rewards/punishments, especially in regards to timing or clever solutions.
In your examples: Your character rolling high on their WIS save makes them realize the other guy is trying to engineer a fight. The other guy has such standing they can just pretend you punched them but this way, he looks less convincing and you can more easily turn public opinion after the fight.
The ground is rock solid in most ways, but you find some cracks and can get some intel via your digging/you realize the enemy has fortified the ground and can draw conclusions from that.
It’s a rough go, realizing that the if/then statements in an AP aren’t fool-proof.
“If they deliver the message, then they get ‘bad ending #2.”
I wonder if the GM wasn’t slightly inflexible in that case? I mean, couldn’t you have walked away with “good ending #1” because of clever play?
According to them it was very much written in a way that it needed to happen. Though I do think that that might not be as true as they feel, so I agree with you here. In this particular situation we actually talked with them later and yeah, they pretty much changed it to that. But they did tell us how insistent the AP was on that.
Which was the bigger problem: A lot of it was just “the plot only works if X happens so X needs to happen” and I guess the fact that X keeps happening regardless of what the players are doing was supposed to be endearing. Our GM certainly tried to play it for humor, though I felt some of it was just desperation. There is no serious way to explain it, so humor.
I remember being stuck at one point because the GM wanted to hand me a big important power as a story beat.
Unfortunately, I was playing an office drone of the gods with a noted distaste for prophecy and divine power. So when the choice was initially offered to me, I sat there thinking “but my character WOULDN’T accept this, he does not want to be frelling special”. It wasn’t until next session that I made the choice, and in character the actual decision was made mostly by accident.
I remember a tower defense moment in my megadungeon that went down like this. I wanted Holy Item A to go onto Sacred Altar B so the party could get Divine Power Up C. For some reason my PC wanted to wait and collect Holy Items D & E before placing any of them on the altar, thus throwing my power balance out of whack. I wound up giving some pretty heavy-handed “you get a felling” type hints. In retrospect, I really should have just let the decision stand.
As a DM, I think I try to make it clear that “This is the contrived plot hook to direct you to the site of this evening’s shenanigans.” Beyond that, I usually let the PCs screw up my plans however they will.
Though I’ve lost plenty of my own characters over the years, I think my two biggest grievances would be the result of the same DM:
a) One session where we spent 5 hours of real time before any of the 7 people at the table were allowed to make a decision or die roll or affect the narrative in any meaningful way. On the plus side, though there was no treasure, no one took any damage, either. Then again, no one ever took any damage in that campaign, no one accepted buffs, and we never faced any undead, making my cleric a poor man’s backup fighter.
b) The oft-mentioned “Death to all PCs” session where an anti-magic field surrounded an entire castle, nullifying spells, spell-like effects and abilities, supernatural abilities, extraordinary abilities, and everything but basic laws of physics and chemistry (and that last took some arguing). The monsters and villain were allowed to function as normal. In the end, we were all told “A door opens. You go in the room.” Many of us said “Like hell we do.” We were not given a save or a choice, just told “Yes, you do.”
Big yikes on that last one. What encounter was your GM trying to orchestrate that he had to make such a hard force?
He’s never been too clear on that. Best we can figure is he had a narrative in mind where we made a literal stand in a big, rectangular room, puzzled out the mechanics of the fight (in a specific time frame he’d envisioned) from the extraneous details he intended as vague hints, and somehow all made increasingly difficult poison saves each round until the “out-of-phase” arcane caster big-bad became material on round umpteenth. Then any PCs who weren’t already mesmerized into fighting for the enemy could have attempted to kill him using only physical damage or alchemy bombs.
Instead, we retired the campaign and started over at level 1 in a new adventuring world.
Oof. I think I had it right the first time: Big yikes.
One time, the GM railroaded my party into an extradimensional sort of dream sequence. My character, having experience with the kinds of monsters that could do this, used every spell he could muster to try to dig a way out, and the GM repeatedly shut him down. In the end, I actually asked my GM OOC “is there any way out of this?” and they said “no,” and nothing has put so bad a damper on my fun before or since.
Oof. That’s one I struggle with myself. To what extent should players “accept the premise” so that the session can actually happen? To what extent should a GM be willing to abandon that premise?
For what it’s worth, I’m sorry your guy came down on the wrong side of that question.
rather a tale of exactly the opposite and how railroading can be a good thing some times.
it was a new DM (this is a justification for them, but it doesn’t make the story any better) and perhaps as a result of hearing tales about rail roading being a bad thing, after everyone had created their characters, and been given an idea of where the game would start, we were narrated to the starting city where…
the leash was removed and the DM said “have fun!” (not literally, but the figurative statement and idea was definitely “no rules, no boundaries, no restrictions, go forth and adventure”… )
The problem is that when you collect 6 different individuals with no clear goal to begin, and tell them to just do what they want, that is exactly what they will attempt to do.
It was such uncontrolled chaos, that the DM planted too many hooks in the water and all the fish nibbled at each but never grabbed hold (and a couple of our players literally just went off and started being stereotypical thieves and pick pockets and getting in trouble with the local law in the first ten minutes of play).
Eventually we seemed to have a possible plot to follow by the end of the session, but the next session no one could even remember what that plot was or why anyone cared, and it didn’t help that half the group showed up late and seemed to be more interested in more chaos (the thief player from before and their real life brother. Both very young. Not an excuse, more a cautionary tale).
The group broke up in the third session when the same lateness and lack of attention span made a couple of the older players too annoyed to continue. And I haven’t heard from that DM again (they left the community that they were a part of when the game was formed originally).
This is a cautionary tale to say that while rails can be seen as a bad thing, there is a reason that starting on rails and sometimes being pulled back onto rails in a game that has gotten maybe a little too loose and chaotic can be a good thing. It’s a balance, and every group has to find theirs, but don’t be afraid to gather the characters into the train and start them down a singular path when things are just so free that no one is going anywhere at all.
See my original “Railroad” rant for a similar take.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/railroad
Structure is good. Railroading isn’t. And figuring out the difference is the art.
This is why I hate Ravenloft. I merely disliked Ravenloft as a concept. Then we had a guy in college who looooooved Ravenloft. When the campaigns du jour ended, he offered to run a Realms campaign. We whipped up characters and six minutes unto the sessions friggin’ interdimensional fog. Not only is it Ravenloft, it’s Ravenloft where you are inhabiting someone else. You have some minor amount of your abilities and it’s a time loop, where each time you are someone else, trying to stop the unstoppable Strahd-tragic-origin-story, but you’ve also lost a level.
We tried logic, appeals to emotion, raising a mob, theft (stole a McGuffin of some kind, tried to throw it in a river) and finally, with like 2 levels left, at the start of the time loop I said “Hail Elminster!” And watched four other me’s look up. Other PCs did same and we went for a multi-faceted zerg rush.
Some went to literally sit on sad girl. Others went to throw some magic doohikey out a window. Other group set the castle on fire to make the other people leave. Last ones tried to get Strahd blind drunk.
As “destiny” thwarted us and we converged, we created a living meat wall at the balcony ……at which point the DM had the balcony sheer off.
With our last levels we again gathered out clones and all dove over the balcony to our deaths.
No idea what we were supposed to accomplish besides GM enjoyment. Just go read a book, or go to a play. Actors are paid to follow a script.
Dude didn’t even give you a “here’s the correct solution” at the end? Poor form, Peter!
My GM once forced us to run a gauntlet of magic traps, none of which could be avoided or disabled (despite the fact that I was a level 20 rogue by that point), each floor set up so that it would take at least an hour to run through to make sure any magic buffs were dispelled by that point. The only way out of each floor was to reach a magic exit at the end of each floor. There were no clever ways to be had. It was hell. And I seemed to be the only one who minded.
On the one hand, I think traps are more fun when you have to survive their effects rather than simply rolling the problem away. That said, I can see why “trap dungeon where disable traps does nothing” would be a problem.
Did the dude at least give an excuse for shutting down Disable Device?