Railroad
That second track leads to the walled city-state of S’an d’Bauks, but I’m not sure Fighter will be any happier there. Lemme explain.
Game designer and DM to the stars Chris Perkins once described railroading as a style of GMing that “denies [players] any opportunity to affect change through their actions or decisions.” Contrast this to sandbox design, which Technopedia defines as, “A style of game in which minimal character limitations are placed on the gamer, allowing the gamer to roam and change a virtual world at will.” It’s easy to picture these styles as a continuum, with the complete freedom of players at one extreme and the absence of freedom at the other. It’s also easy to imagine the sandbox as “good thing” and the railroad as “bad thing.” Poppycock, say I! An individual player might prefer more or less structure in a game, but I believe every game needs a little bit of both.
If you’ve ever endured a GM “reading his novel at you,” then you already know that pure railroading can be less than fun. My group mocked me mercilessly for designing a combat where a couple of drone robots literally picked up the party and moved them from set piece A to set piece B.
“They’re programmed to follow this path,” I explained.
“Can we jump off?”
“Ummm…no. The robots are moving too fast.”
“That’s fair,” they replied. “Can I blow the whistle then?”
“Can I shovel the coal?”
“Chugga-chugga!” they chorused. And I could only hang my head in shame, for I knew I deserved their derision.
But I remember a high school game too. It was DragonBall Z: The Anime Adventure Game of all friggin’ things. We made ridiculous characters, spent an afternoon pummeling each other on Kami’s Lookout, and then sat there wondering what to do next. We were so sure that an alien menace or a magical pink marshmallow monster were about to come and wreck our day. You know, the same way the plot always unfolds in the show. But when we turned to the GM to find out what happened next, he happily explained that, “You can do anything you want!”
In retrospect, I suppose we could have taken over the world or blown up the moon, but somehow it felt empty. We desperately wanted a push in the right direction, and without that first shove we could only wallow in our collective lack of initiative. The game ended after one session, and our Z Fighters were consigned to the back flap of history’s trapper keeper.
Here’s my point. As a GM, it’s your job to give players meaningful choices. However, it’s also your job to provide them with interesting situations. That’s not a continuum, kids. It’s a loop. And it’s awfully tough to hula-hoop with only half a circle.
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As a GM, I’ve found a good compromise between railroading and sandboxing. I usually give my group a “mission area” akin to games like Thief and Dishonored, where they have a clear-cut goal (usually), but they can solve it however they please. It gives them an end goal, but at the same time, there’s multiple paths. It also helps that my group is more RP-heavy than the average (in the last encounter, only two of the characters were actually fighting the enemy, the rest were solving the issue of how to stop the bad guy’s plan in action).
Sounds like a game I’d play in. 🙂
Do you have any session notes handy? I’d be curious to see an example of how you structure one of your “mission areas.” It sounds like a useful concept.
I don’t really have any session notes, as I use Roll20 to play the game, and I can set it all up in advance without worrying about setting things up, and I am a terrible note taker.
>But when we turned to the GM to find out what happened next, he happily explained that, “You can do anything you want!”
Oh lord. That might work in a really established campaign setting, like Forgotten Realms. “Do what you want!” “You know, i’ve always wanted to check out Westgate, let’s go there and get into some Rogue-y shenanigans.”
But DBZ? If you started on Kami’s Lookout, you are literally standing atop the most interesting thing on DBZ Earth. The rest of it is uninteresting to a Z Fighter because nothing on DBZ Earth is as strong as you. Your main options would be to screw around, go find the Dragon balls for some reason, or wait for someone strong to show up.
I’m sorry you had to go through that.
The link to the game doesn’t seem to work for me, is this the one where you roll 10,000d6 for a Kamehameha?
I’m…not actually sure this is what I played. I know it was a DBZ game, so I can only assume it was this one. Looks like I lucked out getting away with only one session:
http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/lynx-winters/dragonball-z-the-anime-adventure-game/
Edit: Yup. This is what I played. I remember getting super lucky on the 2d6 choose-your-race roll and being a Namekkian.
I think the issue is that your piece accurately describes railroad play, but not really sandbox play.
“Sandbox” play doesn’t mean that interesting things won’t happen unless the players force them to happen (as in your example), or that the DM is not supposed to “provide the players with interesting situations.” Your DBZ game didn’t fail because it lacked “structure” — it failed because the world was not engaging. Throwing out a bunch of adventure hooks would not have made it any less sandboxy.
Sandbox is just the opposite of plot-based. It means that there is no expectation about what the players *do* when they encounter the interesting scenarios the DM creates. In a plot-based game the players are expected to go along with the DM’s intended story. They are supposed to help the disgraced prince restore his name and the rightful monarchy or whatever. The DM has set up a detailed plot, and (ideally) the players agree to a social contract where they will through their play and choices collectively help him/her tell that story. Problems can arise if the players haven’t agreed to this and are trying to do something else so that the DM is having to “force” them to go along with the story.
In a sandbox game, there is no inherent expectation about how the players will respond to the situations the DM presents, so DM preparation ends up looking different.
So I don’t think this is a situation where there are two “extremes” that are bad and a “happy medium” that makes sense. It’s just two different playstyles. You can do one or the other or a combination. All that’s important is that everyone is on board.
A reasonable response. However, I’m not entirely sure that “railroad” or “sandbox” actually exist. What I’m suggesting is that the two are actually parts of a single cycle. If we conceptualize railroad-as-situation (the king is missing) and sandbox as reaction-to-situation (we impersonate the king and take over!), it creates a feedback loop. The GM is still providing structure, but the choices of players creates a new situation. The loop repeats. In my view, the two are not distinct, but parts of a single cycle.
A “pure railroad” or a “pure sandbox” like I described result when you try to strip away half that cycle. I suggest that “adventure hooks” are inherently linked to the concept of the railroad, because the railroad represents a pre-existing structure outside of player initiative.
“If we conceptualize railroad-as-situation (the king is missing) and sandbox as reaction-to-situation (we impersonate the king and take over!), it creates a feedback loop. The GM is still providing structure, but the choices players creates a new situation. The loop repeats. In my view, the two are not distinct, but parts of a single cycle.”
That’s true, but it’s not a conception of “sandbox” or “railroad” that any sandbox player would understand or agree with. No sandbox player ever has suggested that their style of play de-emphasizes providing “situations” to players, or that presenting players with interesting situations represents a “railroad” or that the world in sandbox play should lack a “pre-existing structure outside of player initiative.”
There is value to your observation (good RPG play requires the DM to provide interesting situations and the players to react to those situations). But it doesn’t really have anything to do with any sandbox/story-game distinction that exists in real life.
“Railroad” is pejorative, but “story game”-style play certainly does exist. It’s where the players and DM are collaborating to tell a rich story, and where there is very little player agency in the sense of changing the DM’s “narrative.” Railroad is where the DM is forcing players to follow a predetermined narrative and they don’t want to.
“Sandbox” also exists. There is a world with interesting things in it that the players can react to and which will react to the players. (Your feedback loop). But because the “plot” is not predetermined or fixed the events that unfold may be unsatisfying to some DMs and players. All sandboxes have “adventure hooks” — not in the sense of a quest offered to players with a set goal and a beginning and an end, but in the sense of an interesting situation that the players can react to however they want.
I don’t think it’s particularly useful to redefine these concepts as something that’s vaguely related but not really recognizable and then claim that they don’t exist.
A well-reasoned argument. Easily the best I’ve heard for the continuum model. However, the “pure sandbox” of my high school DBZ days did not have ‘interesting things in it that the players could react to.’ While we could do anything, there was nothing to do. My attempt at an explanation for this broken game is to turn the traditional railroad/sandbox continuum into a cycle: GM presents a situation, players react to situation. Without half of that cycle, the game couldn’t work.
I think that what we normally think of as “sandbox play” or “railroad play” has a lot to do with the degree to which a player’s decisions matter. You might write up a “story game” with a “most likely path.” The GM’s session notes have a likely ending, but that ending is subject to change when a player does something unexpected. By the same token, you might also create a sandbox featuring a hex map. Each hex is full of interesting situations, and the players are free to react to or ignore any number of them. However, those situations still come from outside the PCs’ authorship. If they decide to build a keep on a cleared-out hex, they have complete narrative control. But if the GM doesn’t come in with a dynamic new situation (e.g. you find ancient dwarven tunnels when you dig the foundation!) then that decision is still meaningless.
I don’t think that “sandbox” or “railroad” are useful terms in their own right. I think they’re stand-ins for the more important concept of player agency. I also think that players need interesting situations in order to make meaningful choices. It matters less how those situations are presented than that players’ reactions to them affect the story in interesting ways.
I really hate “you can do whatever you want” in a face-to-face RPG. The last time that happened to us, the group started infighting, no one trusted each other, and we made the insane member of the party a figurehead king in a warring city-states scenario because the rest of us didn’t want to get assassinated.
The insane character proclaimed himself emperor-god-king-whatever-it-was, and all the assassins that came after him were killed by the rest of the party. He became a feared name throughout the land because we kept going and killing the kings of the cities that sent assassins in such a way that no one ever realized there were multiple people involved.
And you know what? It wasn’t anywhere near as fun as it sounds like it should have been. Never felt like anything meaningful got accomplished.
I suspect that what players really want is for their ideas to have an effect on narrative. If the impetus for plot stems too much from the players, they may feel like they’re doing all the work in an otherwise uninteresting world. They make decisions, but the narrative doesn’t reflect those decisions in a satisfying way. On the other hand, if plot comes too much from the GM, then interesting narrative is probably happening, but players have no ownership of it. I think that an “unsatisfying sandbox” or a “frustrating railroad” both grow out of imbalance, with too much emphasis on GM input on the one hand and player input on the other. That’s why I’m trying to draw the connection between the two ideas, and why I think you need both.
I think it’s always important as a GM to let players have the freedom to do what they want, but always know they’re going to want quests of some kind. Sure, some times they’ll make up their own, but I doubt very many groups can manage to come up with all their own adventures without from time to time at least asking the GM what’s going on in the area that might be of interest. Most groups I imagine want a bit more guidance than that as well, at least a decent chunk of the time if not ALL the time.
I think mostly “railroading” is a problem not of the quest being there, but of the expectation they will do A then B then C and aren’t allowed to make up their own ways of handling it or just choosing not to do it.
The DBZ game doesn’t really fit what I imagine as “sandbox” though. Usually a sandbox irl has some structures and toys to play with to give kids an idea of what to do at least the start out and some water to make sand into mud for making their own things. I imagine sandbox games the same way. It’s not that there aren’t things sitting around in plain view to play with, you’re just free to choose to not play with those things and do whatever you like with the provided materials of the setting instead. As long of course as you stay within the sandbox area and don’t go running out into the street.
I very much agree with your assessment of this one – Sandbox and Railroad are not useful concepts. A good GM will provide plots to follow but allow the players flexibility in how they follow them. GMs who try to be too “open world” always fail in my experience – an engaging plot takes simply too much DM input for them to create more than a few.
DMs who just create a heap of ‘point of interest’ and wait for the players to choose for themselves are always scrambling to come up with a story, and it shows. A dm onsessed with following their story without deviation shows too, but I can at least find some fun in that, playing out my character’s actions in a situation they are futile to change.
The very best open world campaigns I have been in almost worked, thanks to the dm in question making a full-time job of designing her worlds and characters; but even then, it failed, because the other three or four party members would pull in three or four different directions, and the DM did not want to “railroad” by providing us with a clear an indisputible priority. Each of her games collapsed in about 6 months as too many players deserted, which was very sad for those of us who had invested so much in our characters.
I still hear a lot of chatter — especially from the Powered by the Apocalypse folks — about open world, player-driven games being their ideal. I’ve never sat in on a successful one myself, which makes me awfully curious to find a PbtA actual play to listen to. I’d like to know exactly how these guys are managing that style of play for any length of time, especially because it’s a “no prep / low-prep” game.
The post covering sandboxing and railroading is one of the few I’ve seen here where the post-comic text doesn’t include at least one question for commenters to respond to. Does that qualify that as a sandboxed comment section, and most others as railroaded? And is this a coincidence, or a subtle (and clever) gag?
Heh. This blog post brought to you by Oinkbane:
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Oinkbane
“GM acts, players react” vs. “players act, GM reacts.” I never find a second one as fun as a first one. If players are “entertaining themselves,” it could be fun for GM to find ways to screw their plans, but that’s not my style of play.
Speaking of railroading, the trick is to trick (pun intended) the players into thinking they are doing meaningful choices without actually giving them a choice. Example: put a crossroad with a sign on it: “Left road – lose life, middle road – lose horse, right road – lose money.” Then make all roads lead to the same place with man-eating horse-eating ogre thief.
You’re talking about quantum man-eating horse-eating ogre thieves:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2b3qsx/the_quantum_ogre_a_dialogue/
That’s a viable trick, but tricky to sustain long-term. Players want the experience of agency, and if they begin to suspect that “nothing I do matters,” it can be tough to recover. To that end, I like to pull the quantum ogre sometimes. I’m not a good enough actor to feign innocence at every major decision point.