Transcript
Speaker: Let's begin. blood orange sunrise crests the peaks of Rage Mountain as the eight of you arrive at the troubled realm of Galandor. Ahead to the north, a bridged ravine. Beyond that, a mysterious black tower where rumor has it an evil necromancer dwells.
Speaker: Your goal, reach to the top of the tower and destroy the necromancer, freeing the realm from his evil magic. Well, that's just what I love about role-playing games is being told exactly what to do.
Speaker: Tune up, level up your fun Tune up, your quest has now begun Tune up, we'll show you how it's done Tune up, tune up, tune up Tune up, your quest has now begun Tune up, we'll show you how it's done
Speaker: Welcome back to Tabletop Tune Up, friends. This is your host, Ben Dyer, here with my co-host, Mark Lehman. Hello, hello. Hey, you know, Ben, I don't remember when we used that that's that' all music track.
Speaker: I don't either, man, but you know, what goes around comes around. I guess we're We're going have to go back into the archives and figure that out. I've been diving into unused ah tracks lately, like ones that like I just thought we'd never use. I've just been pulling out and throwing them in, I don't think that was one of them. I think we used it at some point.
Speaker: In any case, welcome. table Welcome. We're back, friends. And this week, we're going to talk about one of the things we love about role-playing games. As GMs, it is railroading you.
Speaker: So this is this is something that GMs, I think, constantly kind of have to deal with. Mark, you've had this complaint. I've had this complaint. You've GMed for a handful of sessions even at some point.
Speaker: What do players say? They say this is a great game. I love it. I don't know what you're talking about, Ben. Yeah, that's right. That's what they tell you you. know what they tell me? They say, you're railroading us. And this is the kind of thing that happens sometimes if we get a little too enamored with our own plot designs.
Speaker: It's definitely a vice we can fall into. But you know what we're going to do today? We're going to kind of redeem this concept. You guys, we're going to recover this. And we're going to talk about when it's okay to railroad or...
Speaker: If you don't want to call it that, you don't have to, but like player agency isn't the end of the story in role-playing games. Yeah. And um GMs, I got to tell you too, players can try to railroad the GM as well.
Speaker: Oh, that's true. so yeah definitely this train goes in reverse. It goes both ways. and Let's talk about railroading. So Ben, what is like, I guess,
Speaker: I mean, we all kind of I guess, what railroading is, but tell the audience for those. Yeah. So look, if you're in first time GM or if somebody said this to you and you came home from the session a little unsettled and not quite knowing what they meant by it, the idea of railroading is just like a train is on railroad tracks. It doesn't have the ability to turn or to you know go wherever it wants, which all of our RPG playing parties want to do. Yeah.
Speaker: You have a plot, you have a story, you are going to execute that story. And so you say things like your character does this or that, or if you're a little subtler, you might just say like, you know,
Speaker: When they say, well, what's behind door number one? You're like, oh, it's a brick wall. And what's behind door number two? Well, door number two is locked. Well, I try to roll. ah It's too bad. It's too locked for you. You don't have that level of skill. OK, fine. What's behind door number three? They say. Oh, grown how lucky you figured it out. Yeah. How about that? they They figured out to go behind door number three. Yeah, that's railroading, guys. so But wait a minute. Wait a minute, Ben.
Speaker: Isn't this a betrayal of the game of Dungeons and Dragons or RPGs? Isn't it supposed to be collaborative storytelling? You know, here's the thing about this. I think that you can betray the form if you do it wrong. But like I said, we're going to figure out how to do it right today because sometimes it's actually a good thing. And players do appreciate it, actually, if you do it in the right way.
Speaker: So, yeah, there's a sense in which the kind of the fundamental promise of an RPG, especially if you're doing this in pen and paper, is I can go anywhere at any time. I can do anything. But- Boy, Ben, we better be on with this advice because we are messing around with player agency, which is, boy, if you hear people talk about it these days, player agency, that's- It's like the only thing that matters?
Speaker: No, it does not matter. My agency's GM also matters. Okay. and You know, also, ah the the agency, of the the the story as a collective, as a group as a collective is also important.
Speaker: So players, when we talk about players railroading, a lot of times what they're doing is removing that agency or whatever from the the actual other players. That's actually a really good point.
Speaker: Yeah. Like there's a lot of cases where like people want to exercise player agency in ways that may manipulate the group. And one of your jobs as a GM is actually to make sure that everybody in the group is kind of on board with what you're going to do next. And so yeah um I'll give you an example of that. ah Here's an example of of a time when railroading was actually something that kind of preserved the group and the story. Um, I was playing a game.
Speaker: We had these party members who were heading into town. And I've got one of these guys that I play with who I dearly love him, but he's always kind of screwing with me a little bit. You know what i'm saying And so we said, all right, you guys get to the town. As you approach the town, you can see these outlying fields that are golden with the harvest. There are people out there now. And he just kind of breaks in goes, and I reap their lives like wheat.
Speaker: I wade in with my sword and I reap them like wheat. and And I was like, he was playing a noble character who had like no regard for the the common man. And so I had to take a moment and stop. And of course, what if what if I'd taken that seriously? Yeah.
Speaker: I can't do that. The whole game is now derailed. All focusing on one ridiculous comment. Right. So I just said, well, you look and you believe that they are not reaping their wheat correctly. And so as a noble, you take it on yourself to spend the afternoon reaping wheat with them and teaching them how to harvest properly. Yeah.
Speaker: Or an hour or whatever. But the point is, i kind of laughed it off and I kind of reinterpreted it. um That's an example of railroading. I think we could call it the railroading, the light side of the railroad, or i don't know what you want to call it, but. it Literally like, it's almost like a reverse Uno railroad play you just did there. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: So it is okay to disregard player agency sometimes and for the right reasons. And the important thing is that we're doing it in a fair way. We're doing it to kind of protect the integrity of the group and the integrity of the story we're going to tell. Not that you're telling that story without people, but you know we're going to talk a little bit about how railroading needs to actually be something that flows from and is consistent with the story if you're going to do it right.
Speaker: Okay. So what do we contrast this with? Well, I mean, obviously the the alternative is like the sandbox, which is the which is you know maximal agency. it's it's You can go wherever you want. You can do whatever up you want.
Speaker: Now, I find this to be both exhausting as a GM, but if I'm a player in that type of game, It's exhausting too, because the game just lacks a lot of focus for me.
Speaker: It doesn't have what i look for as a little bit of structure, i.e. a railroad. I like a little structure, so players are pointed in the direction at least.
Speaker: um Sometimes a sandbox, like i I think about Morrowind. Did you ever play that? Oh, yeah. Did you ever finish the story?
Speaker: No. Matter of fact, I didn't finish Skyrim either, and but I had a blast with it for all of the reasons you're about to say. i I just got lost in the sandbox. and it's six I just quit.
Speaker: I'm like, well, I don't know where the story I don't know what's going on. i had fun, but I think I'm done. Well, so here's the thing. I think sandbox kind of games are great for people that want to do that and they have that expectation. I think if the GM is ready to do that kind of game, that's great too.
Speaker: But I think there's trade-offs with it, right? So part of the thing we're talking about is the alternative to a sandbox game is much more of a plot and character story narrative driven game. That's the kind of game we're usually talking about on this podcast. But...
Speaker: I think it's probably worth doing a whole episode on sandbox type games maybe in the future. What I would say for now though is a sandbox game is one where if you're going to do that, you as the GM and the player group all have to be kind of content with a lot less, as you say, structure, a lot less preparation.
Speaker: Your GM had better be able to come up with stuff off the top of his head, cities, towns, names, biomes, monsters, whatever else it is that you're going to run into out out there in the wild.
Speaker: ah And you as players, if that stuff is like hastily drawn, not fully consistent, has all kinds of like sort of continuity issues and who who knows what else, like that's something you're going to have to live with. But the upside is you get to go wherever you want. You get to drive the car over any kind of terrain. Like that's the story.
Speaker: Yeah. And, you know, less people get too like high on their horse about like, you know, railroading. mean, what's a module? I mean, a module is a railroad. It's it's a story. you're You're all agreeing to go along with this module.
Speaker: We're already, we we are all as a collective saying, we agree to this package material. We're going to play this. um But there's also types of games that we've played. Ben, you and I have played with that, the pulp game that we played, which oh yeah it it felt like we were in a movie, which essentially is a little bit of ah um a, a,
Speaker: a module, we're moving from set piece to set piece and we're loving in it. It's definitely railroading, but we loved it. It was the, it was the joy of going from one set to another and playing in that, like on a stage almost.
Speaker: Yeah. Something that you guys did a great job of in that game, I think. And I think it's, it's worth thinking about is Maybe the creativity that you want, the agency you want is over how your character responds in a scene.
Speaker: You know, actors are very creative and they've got scripts. You know, sometimes they'll improvise a little bit. Other times they won't. But the key idea is that they see their space that they get to be creative in. And it's how they express that character they have. So I think players, even in a very kind of highly scripted module or game like that, they've got a lot of room still to yeah to have that freedom to kind of express who their character is and how they respond to the events at hand.
Speaker: But GMs have to bring it, you guys. Like you can't. go lazy into these types of, if you're going to railroad them, you better make this a very fun train ride.
Speaker: You know what I mean? Like you got to make this exciting. Otherwise they're going to get off the train at the next station. I think that's the kind of the opposite of that point we're making about the sandbox, right? So if the sandbox means because we don't know where we're going, we don't have time to prep. So you better be ready for it to seem really ad hoc.
Speaker: Well, ah The other side of that is that if you do know where they're going and you do have a module or you do have a pretty straight line to go ah you know through the story, you as the GM need to like do a real bang up job of bringing that story to life with descriptive text, find some good maps, get some really memorable NPCs and villains and monsters because presumably you know ahead of time where all that stuff is, who they're going to be and so forth.
Speaker: Yeah, you really got to you gotta to bring your game. and And they'll appreciate it. When they realize what craft you've put into it, what care you've put into it, they'll recognize that, like, look, whatever agency I gave up was worth it because what you what you just did as a GM was beautiful. It was wonderful.
Speaker: so well and also it couldn't have been done if there wasn't some of that railroading kind of stuff right like there's no way to create the level of preparation you need for a truly great battle encounter if you had to do it at ad hoc off the top of your head in five minutes yeah that's just not possible you gotta have you gotta think about those kind of things so let's take this a little bit step further about like how you know we're just talking about you got to bring up your game but like It also has to be very like – it's got to be satisfying.
Speaker: Like if it's not satisfying, they're going to – that's when you're going to start hearing like we're being railroaded. yeah That's a sign that you're you're losing your crowd a little bit because they should know. They should really realize that they're on the railroad.
Speaker: let's Let's turn up our challenge to the people that don't like railroading that like, actually railroading can be one of the best ways to validate player agency because after all, actions have consequences. And if the players make certain kinds of choices, the logic of the story should generate a way that the world's gonna be. yeah And they don't get to choose whether or not they get the consequences because this is the integrity of the world that we're talking about, right? So- The choice that they've made or the- Yeah.
Speaker: You know, i I've mentioned to you, and i one of my philosophies in a campaign is that the entire structure is shaped to me like a pyramid with the beginning levels at the base.
Speaker: And as you progress, that distance gets shorter and shorter. And in fact, that's the railroad. Those are the two The slopes of the pyramid are the two rungs of a railroad. in my Kind of like the the convergence of their possible choices. Like there's a certain amount of latitude. You have more at the bottom, less at the top. yeah Exactly. And as the campaign progresses, the players are making more choices.
Speaker: Each choice they make is narrowing to a point. And the point is the end of the campaign where all their choices, all the decisions have reached a point. Now that point can still twist and turn.
Speaker: like Like you're on a train track. You may not see around the bend here and there. But essentially it all the game logic, all the game backstory, it's all led to this track that everybody has agreed upon.
Speaker: And it is now a really fun, wild train ride that everybody is excited to be on. Well, and so Mark, what happens if you don't do a good job with this? What happens if the way that you unfold the story in this railroady way, if it doesn't really have a ah good enough connection to the preceding story logic and the choices players made and so forth? Like what's the consequence of that for us as GMs?
Speaker: You could, your campaign could, the worst case is your campaign could end early. You could have an upset player getting upset about like, you know, their agency or or something of that nature. um Yeah, there's all, I mean, the the end result could just be the end of the game though. what you What are your thoughts? Or or maybe a player gets bored with their character and says, I want to play something else.
Speaker: Yeah, i I think that's kind of where I'm going a little bit. I think the psychology at work here is that if it feels like when I make choices, those things don't actually have an impact on the world, then i'm going to get disengaged. I'm not going to make choices. I'm just going to feel like I'm on somebody else's ride.
Speaker: Yeah. can i Can I give you an an example of where I've seen this before? I had a GM that was running the game and he said, Really didn't like lot of the spells that were in like, you know, I think we were playing second edition at the time.
Speaker: And um he always edited these spells in the fly. Oh, I don't like this one. i'm going to change the ruling here. Oh, yeah. And it was and it was constant. Enough that at one point the player just says, I give up.
Speaker: I'm going to make a warrior. and It's too much hassle. yeah don I can't rely on what's in the book because every time I try to cast something, you see you're going to make a house roll and you don't like that spell.
Speaker: So yeah you just end up making a mid game, end up making a fighter and we moved on and kept playing. But like that was the idea of like maybe he railroaded too hard. Maybe he didn't give enough player agency.
Speaker: Yeah, I got to say, I think one of the the impulses or the temptations you might have to kind of get on rails is is if you think there's certain things that have to happen in a story and then you don't see the players kind of The penny doesn't drop, they don't figure it out, they they go left when they were gonna go right. Like you're thinking to yourself, well, I gotta save this story. And so you start wanting to like force the players to kind of go some other way than the way they've chosen to go. And if they don't have some reason to choose that route,
Speaker: um If you can't kind of convey that to them, you know, in a way that feels like it's preserving their agency, then that's okay. I think you don't want a railroad at that point. What you want to do is you want to step back and kind of figure out later, maybe after the session, or maybe you need to take a break for 10 minutes or whatever, but figure out how to kind of recover the story plot element that you want or figure out a different way into that next encounter than the one you'd kind of laid out.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it happens quite often. um You think the encounter is going to be one thing, and it turns out to be something else. Now, ah we just had this happen in one of my games a few weeks ago. like ah I kind of expected the party to all be showing up at this one in the area where they were going to be ambushed.
Speaker: Oh, yes. I remember this well. Only two of the five showed up. I know which two of those five showed up, and I was one of them. Yeah. So we kind of ended it there in a cliffhanger.
Speaker: And the players in a sense kind of graciously gave me a bit of an out by by fleeing um which allowed for a very exciting rooftop chase scene and i feel like you say we graciously gave you an out but the fact is there were like yeah a couple dozen dudes we would have had to fight like just the two of us it was a monster yeah you guys would die but i will say like some players might think oh the gym would never throw things you know
Speaker: that I can't handle. I would never do that, but but I would. I know you would. Yeah. That's you guys go old school. If you're going to do this, it's, but what I'm saying is that like, I could have railroaded and said like, no, the others have to be there for that encounter.
Speaker: Right. But then I was like, no I'm just gonna let it be what it is. And the end result was that we had to make up some new maps and we had to do, do some new stuff, which I had time to do.
Speaker: And it made for a better encounter. So like, Um, you can still get back on that train. But again, I got back on that railroad. Like i got, I, Well, but see, that's my point, I guess, is at that point, it's not a railroad. You know what I mean At that point, it is you recovering the story, yeah but without sacrificing the player's agency. So again, I think it's okay for you to take breaks. I think it's okay for you to kind of recalibrate um and do a little kind of reflection on like, how okay, this is what's happened. It went this way when it should have gone that way. What am I going to do now?
Speaker: And he'll be amazed when you kind of get step away from the table for a hot second and, you know, go refill your drink. Or if it's a moment where you could actually end the session there and you've got a week or something like that to, to rethink what you're doing, you're this thing will be buzzing in the back of your head and you will definitely come up with a whole bunch of new ideas to bring together the next time you do this.
Speaker: Yeah. It's a tricky thing, folks. It's a tricky thing, but don't, don't be discouraged by, the the people out there who are always poo-poo on railroading, because there's a time and a place for it.
Speaker: And if it's done well, it's ah it's ah it can be a wonderful ride. Yeah. I'm going to give you guys one little tip. This is something I saw in an ah interview with Matt Mercer, who I think whatever else you may think of him, you like him or you don't, if you're a critter or not, that's great. um But he had this sort little interesting observation that I think makes a really interesting tool in your toolkit. He said, one of the things that GMs have so much power over is time and the way that time progresses in the game.
Speaker: You know what i mean? so Imagine here's a couple different stories, right? And this is a very subtle way that you can kind of quote unquote railroad is let's say that our party is leaving the city. And if you just sort of let time progress in a way, then you kind of, okay, well, what do you do next? Or what do you do for the next 10 minutes? Or what do you do for the next two minutes or whatever? but Like players can start making all kinds of chaos out of that. If on the other hand, what you said is, all right, well, you guys leave the city and Then during that morning, you travel all the way from there to here. And well, guess what you've just done? You've basically just railroaded four hours of those characters time. And you've moved them to the place where you want to have that encounter at the forward of the river or whatever. So you have a lot of interesting, subtle tools. So think about time as one of those. And I think you'll find some useful, useful things you can do with that, that maybe your players won't, ah won't object to it too much to.
Speaker: All right. Well, that's I think that's what we covered here on Tabletop Tune-Up for Railroading. let's Let's get on with the yeah ah tune-up segment.
Speaker: Oh, we have a tune-up segment. We
Speaker: do. All right, all right. So we got a tune-up segment here. We have a question here. What are the ways you can handle... going from point of interest to point of interest.
Speaker: Now we're talking about, could there be story interludes, random encounters, or pseudo random encounters? Ben, what are your thoughts on this? Okay, I want to make sure I'm getting clear on the question here. So it's kind of like travel. Let's just call it traveling in RPGs.
Speaker: what yeah what do you What do you do to make it interesting? ah Okay, so things that I'm going to do if we're traveling, even if we're traveling over a relatively homogenous landscape, right? Like even if we're traveling through the mountains and for the next week, that's all you're going to be seeing is mountains, mountains, mountains. There's still things you can do to vary it.
Speaker: um But... Obviously, the first thing to do is think about, can you change the terrain or the area, right? Can you travel from the coast to the forest, to the mountains, to the desert, right? And so you each one of those transitions gives you a chance to describe the world a little bit. um It gives you a chance to maybe engage in story. You remember when we first saw Fellowship of the Ring way back when, One of the things that they did is when they cut out to the the big you know Howard Shore soundtrack, they're traveling around helicopter shots. That's right. And they've got all these ruins that they might pass by. you know And you're like, I wonder what that place was. Or when they're traveling down the River Anduin and they come to the Argonath and they've got these massive statues, you go, oh, that's amazing. you know I wonder what the story is behind those things.
Speaker: So changing the biome is good. And then also changing the weather would be the other thing I would do a lot. Anybody who's played with me, i am not a fan of random encounters. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't like them. um I mean, i I guess occasionally some people might like it, but I've just never been a big fan. However, i do like a few things that we've done.
Speaker: One is something we've picked up called Trail Talk. It's something you do every once in a while. You don't have to do it very often. But if they're traveling like a long span, you might pick a night on that travel where you roll dice and one player gets to ask a question of another person.
Speaker: I mean, one character gets asked a question of another character and they can have a conversation about that. And it just adds this little element of like, this might be a conversation somewhere along the trail.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting because, of course, we don't, generally speaking, bring out a whole lot of character in combat sessions. And lot of times when we're in towns other NPCs, the party's attention is shifted outward to the NPCs, the stores, the noble the nobles or whatever. um So I think what's cool is when you're on those kind of extended trips, you have a great opportunity to unfold your character to the other characters in the party. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and and it's fun. It's an interactive thing. it can it can stop for a bit. and people I was surprised how the players kind of got into it, to be honest with you. When I first started doing this, I was like, you know what? this This is pretty fun. If you use it you know not too often, kind of keep it special and a little bit random, you'll be surprised. Another thing I like to do is incorporate some sort of skills along the way.
Speaker: You had talked about in Lord of the Rings, they come across these runes and stuff like that. And visually, you're like, what are these things? Why not have a time for a skill check? That's right. And then you could tell the players a little bit of a lore.
Speaker: um Or maybe you along the way, they want to pick up some herbs and do some foraging, do some foraging maybe a little hunting. You could take a little time, have a few skill checks,
Speaker: It gives you a sense of passing of time because it's literally passing at the table, but also fills in a bit of a gap that are mostly a random encounter might. which um I do say there are random encounters.
Speaker: And sometimes I'll even ask a player, hey, what was that random encounter we had? And somebody will just tell me of these ah these large snakes they just defeated, and now they're eating that you know the meat off them. We never had that happen at the table. It's just something that happened.
Speaker: It's a random encounter. Yeah. I think one of the things I did too, I think if you want something a little more memorable or if you want to tell of a harrowing passage from point A to point B, I think there's some other things you can do too. Obviously the skill checks you're talking about give people a way to do environmental hazards and to traverse those.
Speaker: um One thing I did in the game that you played in that I think went over pretty well was I started the session that was going to include these encounters with a kind of a retrospective commentary from somebody who was later telling that story. Yeah.
Speaker: And I said, you know in the days you know in the years that followed when they finally told this story, there were many dangerous encounters that happened along the way. But the most dangerous one was this one. And then that teed up the occasion where we then fought, I think it was like some giants or a dragon or something something like that. We did have a random encounter. And that was a fun fun one because yeahll love the way you prefaced it with there were many. It's just one that was memorable.
Speaker: And that was that was brilliant. i Hats off to you on that one. um You know, that's the one thing I'll say that was very, ah it was a no brainer. i'll give you I'll give you some props on it because it was like, duh, it was great.
Speaker: We were playing that pulp game that we had. yeah And were, of course, traveling across the globe. Well, you just queued up the Indiana Jones music. And then we just ran this line from point A to point B with the music playing. Yep.
Speaker: That's all we needed. That was it. Like we just, we knew exactly what game we were playing. Yeah. That's a really good point though, too, when you think about it in terms of player expectations for that kind of a game, a globe trotting pulp game, like yeah they do not expect you to belabor the passage from, yeah you know, Los Angeles to Tokyo. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Speaker: you know yeah exactly Well, you guys, I think that is a lot of great stuff for you to spice up your travel and moving from point A to point B. You can talk about the different places you're visiting, the biomes. You can talk about the weather. You can talk about trail talk. You can do some retrospective encounters even if you want. We hope you'll try any and all of those things and let us know how it went. You can email us, by the way, at tabletoptuneup at gmail.com.
Speaker: And we'd love to take your tune-up ideas. Mark, last word. Hit us up with a little troll talk, too, on YouTube. if you listen to us there, you could just throw in a little troll talk there. we'll We'll be happy to respond.
Speaker: Love it. Well, and we will respond again with another podcast in a couple weeks. Until then, though, keep those dice rolling.
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