As a beginner just starting dnd that sounds frightening to me. Because I'm having trouble finding a dm and i an probably going to have to learn to be that role
@@FFmaxxx It's fun, even in total chaos that you didn't plan, it's fun. Nobody knows what your plans were or what you hoped would happen, you can't fail
@@FFmaxxxjust do it. I know that sounds simple and im down playing the stress of it but that's what you i think you should do, it's scary but the fact that you're worried about it is your first hint that you'll be willing to make a fun game. Get the dmg and a players guide listen to some real play podcasts like d20, greetings adventures, adventure zone my personal favorite is not another d&d podcast. Either pick up a prewritten campaign if you're not great at thinking on your feet otherwise make up whatever sounds interesting to you, just invite some friends to hang out and admit from the start you're new and that you know they're going to break things so you'll have to take some time to think then just jump in you'll learn faster than you think. I honestly prefer being a dm over a player even though it's more stressful and takes way more planning
@@WolfbloodJakeWilliams and IMO this is precisely why sandboxes get a bad rap: the freedom to make any decision but having to make it at THAT MOMENT, with the limited information and time available, it's near impossible to make decisions which translate to a grand plot of Fiction. It's too easy to steer towards a reality like The Great British Bake-Off.
@@kylkim93Ok then. Then the DM can include the great British bake-off into the main plot. Maybe beforehand the party was trying to hunt down some people who kidnapped some hatchling wyverns, then they discover that one of their opponents is putting Webern poison into their food to attempt to kill the judges. Then maybe they learn that it was actually the third team, and the party and the team they originally thought were the bad guys team up and win the competition and identify the whereabouts of the baby wyverns. Edit: This took me two minutes, and I’m dumb. Imagine what a smart person like you probably are could come up with
I like the idea of, instead of a railroad, it's a freeway. It comes with lots of off-ramps and on-ramps, and we'll get to the end of the road eventually, but there's gonna be some interesting diversions along the way.
This is my preferred way. Small sandboxes are fine, but that really requires players that are 100% into the world and premise. Unfortunately, most of my tables have at least 1 person not 100% engaged due to something, so it gets tiring after a while asking "what do you want to do" and getting crickets. . .
As somebody once said you write not in straight line but in circles where you are constantly moving forward like not one path but two path that both lead to the sane place.
Looking through the keyhole and Misty Stepping through the door’s actually quite interesting. You now have *a* player through, and can help solve the puzzle with additional clues or interacting with things on the other side of the door. However, the rest of the party are still blocked from entry, so it isn’t so much bypassing the puzzle as it is expanding on the ways players can interact with it.
Admittedly I feel bad that my immediate instinct was essentially a "Rocks fall that guy dies" thing by saying something like "Alright. have fun fighting the dungeon boss by yourself"
@@aquamarinerose5405 I kinda had an opposite experience in a game once. Basically I was off exploring alone for some reason and found some weird hills with doors in them (Think they were tied to alignments or something, never came back to em and the campaign fell off). I go in one, poke around, see some mural of like my own death or something and then some monster wakes up and starts moving towards me. I get back to the door to find it closed and I'm just like "Okay cool, I Dimension Door 500 feet in X direction" (Turns out casters in 3.5 are dumb :P)
Speak for yourselves. I spend every day of the weeks spare time thinking and working on the campaign and next session. Everyones games are different. Lot of people just go off the cuff and change thier world based on whatever the players do... some of us create a real live in world and have to consider every possibility and how the different choices effect the world, I will never railroad my players. So my prep time is enormous.. because my world also is alive and doesnt just move or react only to the players and I will not allow my own whims to decide a choice. It will be centered in the world and characters that I have created... so yeah, i need to prep for the chaos that they can attempt to cause. But also to tpk them if they do something stupid. Making sure my players are aware of stakes as they push them. What happens in off the cuff games is lvl 5 characters being best friends with all then importsnt people in the world. Unbelievable, not grounded. Boring.
It's laughed off, but honestly, I have a full time job and some other social commitments. There comes a time when it's just a question of whether my players want me to run sessions every couple of weeks, or every couple of months
@@CloudianMHYou can't predetermine anything they do, son. You're wasting your time doing this. Improv will always be king. If you're sitting there going through a ton of notes, that's boring. Idk how people stand doing that. Making a campaign for years. Like why? I've been a DM for fourty seven years and it still doesn't make sense to me. You can improve these player determinations. Just make sure you write down what happened. The players shape the world with their actions, not yours. Things can happen outside the players, but this is boring. It's not about them it's about the fellowship. You're basically making your players go through an insane slog of content. Think if it like a video game. It's the same thing. Stick players in a town for three sessions with nothing but themselves and no shopping list is just ridiculous and a waste of everyone's time.
Zac is so based. Being a dm is hard. I like to give my players some choices within the scope that I can, but you cannot spend the limited time we have going off the paths I have made because I can only make so much.
yeah I also let them know about thing's going on in the background via rumors or their NPC's connected to their background. Like a reminder the longer you take the more other things are happening or even my NPC's like, "look at the "heroes" goofing off" @@AFK0099
As a DM and a player, the worst sessions are always those where the party does not have enough direction on what to do. I.e., "Welcome to Phandalin you are now free to spend the next 3 sessions meeting every NPC in town and fighting 1 small building full of thugs. Or you could fuck off into the woods to clear monsters out some ruins, but that's not where the plot happens. If you don't randomly pick an event that leads you to the actual plot, too bad, you made that choice and have to wait to get to the intended story of this campaign." As a player, that leads to sessions with little motivation because the characters happen to not have run into the motivation yet. As a DM that means I have not given my players an engaging event or I have to warp circumstances to make the plot land on top of them anyway. Everyone has more fun if I give each session/location a strong inciting incident or goal that leads players where they need to be for a cinematic or compelling encounter. Crafting a plot and setting up exciting events is what I'm here to do as a DM. Call it good storytelling, not railroading.
yeah for a good sandbox you need good, dedicated and creative players. It has potential for a lot more fun than railroad but is also dependant on players, while railroad is almost exclusively dm's responsiblity
I agree completely. Providing content for your players is never railroading. It's giving them goals and stuff to accomplish, and a good DM lets them brainstorm up ways to solve things, and that's where player agency is key.
Don’t remind me of Phandalin 😭 So. Many. Goddamn. NPCs and so much “kill this and that because it did something bad off-screen” which my player don’t want to do. I’m a new DM so I thought it would be helpful but I spend so much time changing things to make it more interesting and engaging. Having to do that for multiple quests at the same time is so much work, I’ve already reduced the number of available quests but I think I’ll just choose the interesting ones and and replace the quest board with people asking them for help.
I rant about this in another comment, but you are so right. A good narrative and plots does not take away player agency. There are plenty of potential for agency. Aimlessly wandering around kills pace, bad pace kills campaigns. But once you presented a problem, rejecting any idea other than the solution in your head, is railroading.
As a new DM that started my first campaign (and homebrew at that), yeah, I screwed up big time and made large gaps where the party had nothing telling them what to do or what goal to go forth (doesn’t help they did some things out of order from what I anticipated). I wish I knew this ahead of time, since no DM wants their players to feel bored and lost.
09:10 This has happened in one of my games, one of the players was always busy and missed a lot of sessions so we turned his character into an odd-jobs specialist npc when he was gone, making money for the party at the docks. I even made an entire upgrade system for his character like the enchanted Spatula of Frenzied Flipping (+1 gold per hour when working the kitchen) so the party would essentially leave his character at some jobsite and then come back from the adventure only to rob him of everything he's worth. Now he's a wage slave IRL and in-game yay.
i like brennan's idea of "railroading" from a previous video. there's a goal the players want to get to and they're free to do whatever they want but the narrative terrain is such that the best easiest and fastest path is snaking through all the DM's desired plot points. and thats the most fun experience for players too because the straight shot to the goal would be quick and boring. but they still have complete agency, can deviate along that path as much as they want, and if they are really determined could even brute force their way up from the narrative valley and over the ridge straight to the next plot point early.
But that's not railroading. Railroading is explcitly a pejorative term of when a DM overrules or undermines the players adjency in order to force a desired outcome. Now the moment the DM has "plot points" they are starting to walk the path of the railroad. Note it's not the act of having a plot that's the problem it's when you start prescripting the actions of the players that things start taking a bad turn. The world stops making sense; the NPCs start becoming actors; the players become an audience. The players should be given interesting and meaningful choices and many of those choices should be mutually exclusive. The players should have the option to upset the applecart if needs be. Ergo they shoudn't have to brute force their way through the game.
The best is probably somewhere in the middle. Like... Planning out point A and B, but allowing the players different routes or even freedom to get from A to B. A Navigation system, basically.
In videogame terms I think that's best described as Mass Effect: Here you go, you're on this ship, you have an entire galaxy (well like 5-6 maps) to do whatever you want, but when you're done with your playtime, here is where you go to move the story along
There isn't really a best way to do these, as it's entirely preference based. I personally like the sound of a "pure" sandbox over the sort of rhomboid structure you are describing, but it's cool if that's what you prefer!
you can go in any direction you want. and talk to any NPC you want. and craft any narrative you want. the narrative is always following you. it will find you. and you were always on its path.
I think what you're referring to is the infamous "quantum ogre" route of solving the railroad vs sandbox problem. Notably, it only works if the party has no idea that you're using it, as soon as they catch on, its game over
That's not necessarily quantum ogre. There's also a Junji Ito approach to it where the themes of the world and the need for the quest is so great that it affects everyone in the world. If the Dark Lord is so bad that everyone you talk to mentions specific problems in their life that can be traced back to the Dark Lord (quests), then that's not quantum quests, that's just a wholistic problem. No matter where you try to run to, the effects of the problem will be found.
I think true sandbox play takes a fair amount of relevant skills from both the DM and players, and there is a much larger risk of them collapsing into incoherent piles. When it works it is great, but when half the players stop showing up after a month because the world is too hollow to play off of, or because the party members can't agree on a course of action, I would have much rather had a clear goal and objectives from the start.
True sandbox play is some of the easiest DMing I've ever done. The less I had "scripted", the vaguer my plot, the freer my players, the easier the game was to run. The idea a sandbox doesn't have a clear goal or objectives is entirely backwards, sandboxes only work if the party has a way to obtain clear goals and objectives right from the get go.
Which is why it's a relevant skill for a DM to set up a sandbox. I've seen DMs who aren't experienced enough at world building or hook planting throw players into a setting that has no map, no defined nations, cities, organizations, governments, religions... Like the party literally has no choice but to choose a direction and walk in it to see what they find, and the DM intends to build on the fly ... But their skill set isn't up to their ambitions.
"As a DM, I don't have to think that much." Absolute fact. I love running flexible linear games. You signed up to my game? Its time to get on this Polar Express. We have a destination, but we don't need the rails to get there, I'll drift across that frozen lake, but we getting to that destination!
Part of the art of DMing: creating the illusion of a truly sandbox world, while having sufficient grasp of motivations and desires to guide the players to do what you want them to do
As a GM I signed up to use my limited time for a cooperative evening where heroes solve the murder, stop the necromancers plan and save the village. I did not sign up to run a bakery, chat to shopkeepers about clothes or teach a goblin to cook. 😂 If I wanted to do those things I'd play a board game. Or you can all meet up and improv some theatre without me. Be as creative as you like when moving towards the goal, take side branches as much as you like but keep moving in the vague direction of the goal.
Something that can sort of marry the two concepts is basically just tweaking things behind the scenes so that the players feel like they have enough agency to go anywhere and do anything, but secretly the GM is changing things up behind the scenes so that the players stick to the path as prescribed. A classic example of this sort thing is like, say the players go to a town, so the GM lets the players go wherever you want. The Tavern, a merchant stall, some random NPC's house, etc. But then regardless of where they go, some event happens. Like a goblin gets tossed through the window or someone pickpockets them or something like that. Maybe when they reach their destination everyone there is killed and they have a murder mystery to solve. So the event that occurs was prescribed for them like you would on a railroaded adventure, but it was designed in a such a way that it can be slotted into basically any choice the player makes for where they wanna go. So you don't have to worry about the players constantly avoiding the one place you want them to go while still being able to control the sequence of events that goes down. I think it's a really solid technique that more GMs need to think about. It obviously can still be done well or done poorly but it's worth trying out.
I don't know if you ever talked about this. But as a forever DM my hot take is that it is more beneficial and fun to a game to have good players than it is to have a good GM.
I once DM'd for a random group of people (my friend joined a rando group but the DM never showed so I stepped in) and this group would react to nothing, I'd get no responses when I'd ask them what they do. It got to the point where I started giving them REAL obvious solutions and routes of what they could do next and still they'd be silent it'd be like pulling teeth.
@@Rookie_Pyro It's a beautiful thing. An even more beautiful thing is that I've been playing for 10 years with my friends in a long running campaign. Two players who were just along for the goofs and laughs have now started to become just as invested as the other two and it's bringing me tears of joy.
I have a style that kind of combines both I like to call "Public Transit" DM'ing. Basically you have several different paths and you work the players wants and goals in with the story and world you are presenting and let them basically decide where they want to go, but with a straightforward path and story
I definitely feel like it's a really good idea to have a nuanced point of view when it comes to that debate. There's a lot of great ways to blend the two, and a lot of actual-play gms have really good advice on how to do that.
There is no way to blend a railroad with any other style of play. It cannot be done. Railroading is not a style of game it is explicitly a bad decision by the DM, it's when the DM subverts or blocks the smart choices of the players in an effort to force a prewritten conclusion. There is no half way point btween that and not doing that.
I've been on both ends of the extreme on this one. I've had one DM who really just kept repeating "What do you guys want to do now?" and I've wanted to say "Find a DM who gives us some direction, or even throws us a rogue bandit attack when we're undecided." I've also had a DM who effectively made our entire party indentured servants to a crime lord who threatened to turn us over and disavow us if we derailed in any way.
So you've played with two bad DMs one who didn't know how to run a sandbox and another who railroaded you. Your first example isn't extreme sandboxing it's just an unfinished sandbox, sandboxes should be full of things that the PCs can do and all PCs should have some kind of goal heading into the game anyway, or the party can have one collectively, there should also always be a default action that the players know they can do to find things to do.
@@Gibbons3457 The DM typically builds a world for the PCs to play in and it's considered good play if the DM's world has a life of its own that the PCs can interact with rather than the PCs needing to build the world for the DM. Otherwise, the DM becomes superfluous as the PCs will only have themselves to rely on to build the world they're meant to be playing in. A blank/uneventful world is *doable* with the right party but we just weren't it.
I DM'd a bunch decades ago and I had a hybrid approach where the party had agency to where they wanted and do what they wanted, with the caveat that whatever plot points or encounters I had come up with for the story would be 'dropped' into their adventure (Seriously, write up what you want to happen in point form on paper and add the events in as the party plays).
That's not a hybrid approach it's just a sandbox. You can't hybrid good gameplay with railroading because railroading is only ever a bad thing; it refers to overuling or undermining player choices with the express goal of forcing things to reach and expected outcome.
@@Gibbons3457 You sure can! If you really need the party to fight a big bad, because it is part of the overall plot... and they aren't going the way that you need them to... then bring the railroad to them. Your Story/Plot is the railroad. Being built from one coast to the other. How the railroad gets built is up to the players... but it will still be built.
We are ending a near two year campaign soon. And early on I decided I would not say no and roll with every railroad just to see what happens as a GM. And boy what a two years it has been.
NEVER stop telling the audience why you want us to do something or what you need us to do, idk I can't speak for everyone but I feel like it's comforting to know that you're at least not hiding some agenda
My tip for running sandbox, and it's going pretty well so far. 1. Make time matter. Give the players an initial quest that is a long travel away. This created a deadline, which motivates them, but also make it long enough for them to be able to stop off at different places along the way if they see something interesting (my players reached their destination with two weeks to spare). Let them pick their own route, which leads me to the following: 2. Make a map. A map shows the players where it is possible to be, and how long it will take to get there. Make sure the whole landmass is surrounded by ocean or impassable borders (the walls of the sandbox). While your players are traveling, they will be able to plot the route they prefer. My players had three major routes: a long trek through the northern border, a shorter but still long path along the coast, and a dangerous but quick mountain pass. All were capable of getting them to the place on time with at least two days to spare, but they chose the mountain pass. 3. Food. Water. Carry Weight. These become the true BBEGs of your game in a sandbox setting, and they provide a ton of fun opportunities for immersive puzzle solving. My players chose a short route to save on food, but then at the last stop before the mountain pass, they bought a bunch of pitons, climbing gear, pulleys, and a ton of rope. These supplies were used numerous times to haul their cart and horses up nearly impassable vertical and horizontal challenges that would've added extra time to their journey if they couldn't solve the puzzles (I also had no solutions for these, it was up to them to make it work). They solved every single one, but they ended up having to leave behind lots of rope.
I am DMing my second multi-year campaign now, and have been DMing for almost ten years now. My first campaign wasn't necessarily 'railroaded', but it was fairly linear. They had freedom to choose how to do things, but I basically gave them *what* things to do. And it still went really well, all my players really enjoyed it. For my sequel campaign, I actually set out to create a fully sandbox campaign. There were a lot of things going on throughout the world as a result of the previous campaign, so there would be something to explore pretty much wherever they went. And surprisingly, that campaign has been a lot harder. My players were less engaged with this sandbox style. I've actually had to slowly shift the campaign to be more linear again because that just happens to work better for my player's enjoyment of the game. Really, I think a big part of the sandbox vs. railroad style actually comes down to the type of players you have and what they prefer. Because I know a lot of players would love the sandbox style I initially set up for campaign 2 and may not want to be set into a linear story. And obviously the reverse has been proven by my current players. It's ended up being a more complex topic than I would have expected when I first started this campaign.
My preference is more of a hybrid mission system. "Here's what you need to accomplish, here's where the accomplishing must take place. You can do whatever you like while you're here, but you won't get your next level until you're done."
That’s why I like the setup for Curse of Strahd. “You are stuck in Barovia (it sucks here). If you want to get out of Barovia (it sucks here) then you need to slay the vampire lord Strahd von Zarovich. You need these three special items to kill him and you have to do it at castle ravenloft. The items are hidden somewhere throughout Barovia (it sucks here). You can do anything else you like along the way to increase your impact on Barovia (it sucks here) and/or learn more about the world around you.”
@ true, but all of the players worth playing with would understand and have fun with the premise given in session 0 imo. I once had a player avidly trying to dodge the “railroads” (lead ins to the actual adventure/road to barovia) the first time I ran CoS and it was probably one of the most annoying dming experiences I’ve had. This is part of the reason why whenever I run CoS now I have all the players make characters that are native to Barovia so that they’re all already stuck in the premise of the adventure lol. “All roads lead to Ravenloft because that’s the module the game master spent 40-60 dollars on and spend the last 3 weeks prepping for” -Seth Skorkowsky (loosely quoted from memory)
Im so burned out on huge open world games. Im here to relax and enjoy a game, just give me a great story on rails. Less breath of the wild, more majoras mask.
My very simplified way of looking at this is - railroad in the long term, sandbox in the short term. You are adventurers and you're going to try to save the world by defeating the evil wizard. That's the long term premise of my campaign. You need to buy into that to play, because that's going to be fun for you and it's going to make my life easier. But in the short term, when you're faced with a single encounter or puzzle, solve it however you want. Teleport through the door or find the key or smash it down or whatever you want. It's just one door.
It’s been interesting for me. My players (I started DM’ing this year) are, due to how their characters act, a very go-straight-to-the-objective type of group. And without realizing it, I was intending on running a more sandbox game. That was a fascinating and eye-opening period of time where I had to identify what my players wanted and needed and where things needed to go, despite what any original plans before the campaign were.
Whenever i think about sandbox vs railroading i always come back to the first 30ish episodes of critical role campaign 2, like objectively was it a little more meandering than their first campaign? of course, but there was a kind of wonder to it. Done well there will always be a place for it
It helped that some of the party had a specific objective. Fjord was looking to enroll in the Soltryce Academy early on, so they were meandering northward to Rexxentrum, and doing jobs/earning money in cities along the way. As they continued on, it gave Matt the opportunity to inject other plot threads (Gnolls, the Myriad in Zadash, the war with Xorhas, secrets about Fjord's patron, the Iron Shepherds) that the party could latch onto.
Yeah, and i mean each player had their own internal world and perception of goals. Caleb certainly had no illusions about going to soltryce which is so funny. I think the moment the campaign clicked for me was the encounter with the kryn beacon-rescuer in the sewers, matt let them wander but he had red hot plot hooks waiting because he knew their backstory and motivations
Yeah it didnt grab me like the others did, but there are some things and moments in it i really enjoyed. i feel like i would have enjoyed it more if it had remained more self contained on marquet rather than borrowing ludinus as a bbeg from tm9 who originally encountered him
Im with Zack here. So this is just is anadoral evidence but 70% of people i GMed for prefer or need rails. There are many reasons why from they just want to play, there's too many choices and they don't understand setting up character goals, they just arnt into roleplay, ect.
when you have a DM that you know has a plot planned, lean in extra hard and it will be so much more fun than playing a crappy sandbox because your DM is making everything up. If your DM is sandbox DMing, go nuts making sandcastles.
Railroad scenes can be fun and brisk and cozy. The DM gives you a firm scene prompt and you go. "You arrive at the duke's castle bearing ill tidings. His brother is dead, and you must convince him to grant you aid in your quest. Go." On the other hand, I've had nightmare aimless sandbox scenes that go: "Well, I guess we could talk to the king." "Okay, you track down the king." "Sup. Do you know anything about The MacGuffin?" "No." "Uh... Hm. Can I roll a perception check to see if he's lying? Yeah, okay, five." "You're *pretty* sure he doesn't know anything." "Huh."
A useful key to good railroading, the phrase "It appears to be..." this allows anything to become something else based on player input. Such as, "You arrive at what appears to be a dead end". This signifies that there might be more than meets the eye, or they can just take it at face value and turn around. If the party does some snooping around and a few good rolls, maybe now there is a hidden door that leads further along their path, or some good loot, or a small ambush, or a friendly npc. It could be anything, just by leaving open the idea that it appears to be something, rather than definitely is something. Nothing is absolute, unless it has no choice.
Weirdly, I’m kind of Zac’s side here. I recently closed the book early on my multi-year long campaign because I couldn’t take the stress of designing so much that may or may not even be seen by my players. I think I started feeling the burn out a couple of years ago. I designed this enormous multi level expanding mega dungeon and I put months and months of work into it. And may players, by some miracle of god, managed to find the exact path between the entrance and where they needed to go and they just beelined for the boss and accomplished their goal in record time. And I just looked at all the hard work I put into this thing and I just thought “What was all that even for?” To be clear, I’m not disparaging the players. They did great. I am a big fan of player freedom and they made the choices they were going to make. But it did kind of make me feel like there was no point in constructing an entire building if they’re just going to walk through one hallway anyway. Problem of course being, if I ONLY design the hallway, then they will start branching off and exploring the other rooms. So I find myself needing to build a huge sandbox world JUST IN CASE they go off the beaten path. Also, as a video game player, I agree with Zac. Open world games like Skyrim bore me to tears because often they are bad at giving you agency to go in any specific direction. Or if they do, and you follow that direction, it feels like you’re missing out on 80% of the game.
The answer is: don't prep a dungeon at all. Decide what's on the other side of the door the moment they open it. I'm joking. Slightly. But that is essentially the key to a true sandbox. It's not about prepping for what they might do, but responding to what they ARE doing. It's not an approach that works super well with D&D, however, because it's not a very improv-friendly RPG system.
On the few times I've GM'd, I've done a hybrid approach: 1. Make sure that all the PC's have a reason to do something around X, where X is the overarching plot of the game. "Save the Kingdom", "Retrieve the sword", or whatever. This is to keep PC's from going "yeah, but it's what my character would do", when whatever it is that they would do is "wander away from the group and do their own thing". Yeah, inevitably the party will split, but you want a reasonable expectation that they'll all keep moving towards the same goal. 2. Have a rich-enough sandbox world that you know (basically what's going on in the immediate surroundings; enough to improvise when the PC's inevitably do something odd. 3. Have the plot continue without them. So if they don't (for example) go rescue the town from the goblin den, and instead party it up that night in the tavern, despite you saying "hey, there's goblins out there"? Well, then the goblins attack a caravan. If the PC's don't care? The goblins continue to attack and potentially get strong enough to attack the town they're getting drunk in every night (or whatever.)
I can't believe I had to scroll this far to find this. I'm not making a sandbox or a train, I'm making a beautiful clockwork. I've already told a story, I know what happens over the next sixty days at LEAST. If they want to wander around my delicate contraption of wires and chains and crystal, please, enjoy my artistic creation! But the real fun starts when something breaks, and you figure out how that propagates through this world. I spend an hour or two after each session going through all the things they broke or tripped over.
This a terrific video and I have been thoroughly annoyed and entertained. - @6:53 That’s the railroading that sucks the happiness out of roleplay. I’m glad you pointed out that example. - I’ve been into TTRPGs since 1981 and when everyone at the table is having fun and the characters are part of a story worthy of song, then how we got there is moot. - I love a good roller coaster or express train, as long at some point it’s off the rails. The sandbox lesson I learned is to not only let your player characters have fun, but also let the NPCs, monsters, and giant cats have their turns. If the players are waffling with their PCs, let them know the world lives on, although it’s going to be a lot more exciting with their participation.
My stance with videogames and DnD are actually the same. Yeah, I appreciate freedom now and then, but when the game/DM goes "Okay, you can do whatever you want, you make this story" I go "....but I came to YOU for a story." I'm not saying a DM has to have everything prepared and I'm immediatley thrown into a conflict, but at the very least when I'm starting put up a figurative sign going "the main plot is that way ->" for me to at least know which way to go when I want to And on the videogame track, this might be a controversial pick but for me Arkham Asylum > City. Because the game was a lot more linear the narrative flowed better and as a resuly the experience was better for me.
I’m currently doing a Fallout campaign, and I essentially have my campaign laid out like an amusement park. You start out in Paradise, which has fun little kiddy games, radroaches, and plot points that inform you of three locations, but one of them seems more important. You go to the next location, they tell you of three locations but one sounds more important, and I just keep giving the players different side quests and directions they can go with rewards and horror at every turn. And I let them experience each thing for as long as they want, and I don’t rush them. My players played Caravan for two hours and it was the most fun they’ve had in a session
I'm tempted to say with the Fallout Comparison that I'm tempted to point out New Vegas. The game is technically open world, but you are incentivized to follow the path of least resistance that takes you through the main plot in a roughly linear order. You can technically choose to follow or ignore any number of side objectives you find on the road along the way, but each place has SOMETHING to do.
For me, I love to give my players controlled choice in a narrative with an overall linear structure! I love to run super big sprawling maps with a ton of stuff, and every so often my players wind up indecisive between A and B. But when this happens, I find players only need the teeniest of pushes in the right direction before they're up and running! A part of your job is table management and by far the most overlooked aspect is straight up telling your friends "I have a lot more written for option A"
This is always an interesting topic, and it reminds me the adage I've heard "All roads lead to Raveloft". Basically, if you're playing Curse of Strahd, the finale of the game will be a big battle against Strahd at Castle Ravenloft. You can do pretty much anything you want before that, but that's the end goal of the game. This can apply to any game; there are so end goals you will need to do, but everything in between is up to you. There's also the "Quantum Ogres" approach; present the players with multiple choices, but whatever choice they make, the outcome will be very similar. Example, the DM prepped a fight with an Ogre, so no matter where the party chooses to go, there will be an Ogre fight waiting for them there. The location they choose could effect the environment they fight in, but it's a fight with an Ogre regardless. Basically, unless the players expressly go out of their way to avoid something the DM has prepped, the DM can put anything anywhere that makes sense whenever they want.
Me getting flashbacks to the single game I DM'ed in high school where my friends were players and in the first round of combat, they ALL kept rolling below five and I rolled an agregious amount of 18s, 19s and 20s. I even said "you see the goblins aren't getting too close to the fire" to give them an easy out by scaring them w fire and they still got tpk'ed by a pack of like 5 base goblins rolling d4s for damage 😭
What I thrive to do as a DM is to make world building like Oda did with One Piece. The PCs can go wherever they like, and where they land will have some elements getting them closer to the final goal I setup for them. But at the same time, the world around them moves and changes as well. Events happen beyond the PCs choices and interactions, and a place my PCs didn't go to session one can be totally different in session four. At least that's what I'd like to do, but it's easier said than done.
sandbox campaigns are just sharing more of the dm’s responsibilities with the players. sometimes that works, but a lot of parties just don’t vibe with it
Something i dont think enough people understand is that freedom/creativity becomes a burden (with time). When youre constantly put in charge of creating your own fun, it starts to feel like a chore. Its nice to have all the tools to do what you want, what you want…but not all the time. Best example i can think of is BG3, where you constantly restart campaigns to do the different thing the different way with the different character, but restarting over and over is not super conducive to an actual DnD campaign.
It is the same way with art. Give two people their own brush, canvass, and pallet of colors. One will start painting right away, the other will be stuck in indecision and paint nothing. There is not anything wrong with the person who needs a prompt, a theme, a setting to create art. It does not make them any lesser of a person than the one who instantly creates.
This was a great discussion. They certainly talked about sandboxes and railroading effectively. I did not get a sense of a strong stance one way or the other.
I think Brennan's comment on "building a tolerance" (ie. having experience) is honestly huge. 'Cause I've had the same experience. The first few times I played TTRPGs, I wanted to be "The Rogue" or "The Ranger" or whatever other very clearly defined archetype, and I just wanted to focus on learning the game mechanics and having a good time, so being railroaded was super helpful. But then as I played more and more, and tried different characters, and witnessed enough clichés come to fruition in front of me... well, you start lookin' for that weird shit lol It's like music. You listen to enough of a specific genre, you grow accustomed to the tricks they use to hook you in. You start needing more complex rhythms, niche instruments, subversive vocals, in order to scratch that itch.
The Fallout 2d20 system has been a LOT of fun to run as GM. It's just like playing a game of Fallout 4 and players can even build their own settlements. The freedom is entirely in their hands and I'm just steering the ship to navigate for them. It has been really rewarding to see my 8 year old thinking in creative ways.
Look, I run a sandbox train, I stay on the rails and guide my characters. But they do have the options to fuck around and find out. Improving those find out scenarios have been some of the best session memories 😅❤
The way I like to DM is that I give my players agency, but I have a story in mind. If they come up with something better (they frequently do), I roll with it. I have maim story beats, prepared random characters and threads for wherever they go, and just slot it all in where it fits and make changes as they come up with them if I like them.
I'm really struggling with this as a DM right now, so it's nice to hear other perspectives. I have been trying to adopt a more player-driven style of D&D where I design a mine field and let players go where they want, confident that something will blow up no matter their goal, and I have one player who absolutely will poke at any mines they notice. But most of my players will just stand still and hope for a sign of "where they have to go". And I think it really boils down to that, they want to know the thing they are doing is ultimately going to progress toward a goal, even if there might be some moral ambiguity along the way. They don't want to ever feel lost as players even if they're okay with their characters being mistaken.
"Theme Park" is my favourite way to run games. Different path to go through it with lots of attractions but it has clearly establised entry and exit and walls all around. I usually fail to run sandboxes as players loose drive and I get overwhelmed with too much prep work.
The best way I have heard it is that you are essentially creating a ride at a themepark. It is on rails, but you want to make it so that your players dont really care about that because they have so much else to experience, however also be ready for people to do things you never expected, because they will.
8:44 I honestly would love to just play a guy with a sword in a port town with no special destiny. I've played enough adventures where it's my job to save the world, I would love to play in a game where such responsibility doesn't underpin the very concept the activity that we're doing. Like, sure, I might chose to do something and get in a little over my head, maybe even have my character die, and I'd be fine with that, because I chose that path in pursuit of what was important to that character. And it's not like heroics are completely off the table. Just because destiny doesn't inherently favor you doesn't mean you can't try to do something good. And, if you succeed, the victory will be that much sweeter, because you did it in a world that was not set up to aid your efforts and maybe even actively harmed them, but you found a way or just got really lucky and managed to make the world a better place despite the odds.
Just some random guy DM here. I always tell my players, I like to run my games like an amusement park. You are free to run around the amusement park and get on any ride you want, but once you get on a ride, we will see it to the end. Then you can get on another ride. Now me as the DM, I don't know the twists, turns, loopy loops that my players will throw at me(or even the ending), but at least we are on the same ride.
Counter proposal: A more of a tree branch approach. The DM creates a starting scenario, and then grow the game from there based on the players character's roots. This allows the DM to have a plot while also giving the player's agency and meaning as they make decisions which shape the story different for each group of players.
As a GM I run both. The world is open! The players can do whatever they want to do! Sometimes they run into a place that things were happening for a long time, and in order to get out they need to get in the mine-cart, since that's the only way through the things that were already going on. Sometimes the players are in charge of their fate. Sometimes the players run into someone who has put in too much work to allow fate to interfere.
Love this It’s all about the players. I’m a noobish DM and already I’ve found most of the people I DM for really, really need a railroad. They want the tracks leading them to exactly where they need to go with game like hints popping up. Meanwhile, there’s a few I haven’t DM’d for much, that absolutely, 100% can carry the session with their own antics and agendas, with very little to no objectives from me (which once I realized that was extremely refreshing). I currently aim to create really cool tracks, clear objectives, and real enough npcs that regardless of what the players choose we’ll have a good session. That’s the ideal anyway, that scheduling creature has a CR of f-me 😂
I think railroading is good (to an extent) when a player is actively looking for that rich, deep storytelling experience with twists & challenges. On the other hand, sandbox style games are great for the player(s) who are just looking for a quick/simple de-stresser after a long day/week. If you have the mental/emotional energy for a railroad, it can be a lot of fun to go on that journey. If you're tired & don't have it in you to take part in a story, it can be nice to do a quick dungeon crawl or side mission
They key for being a great GM is to railroad without the players knowing what you are doing. The adventure is going to happen, and now you just have to trick or persuade the players to want to take the path down the road you lay out for them.
Sandboxing means you have to develop several quest lines at once. Ensuring that no matter what the players do there's always something interesting going on. Bonus points if you weave those quest lines together into a larger narrative that the players can uncover. Much like Skyrim has a main quest line to follow, several large side quest lines and many many short one offs, a good dnd sandbox will also have all of that to explore, not just a main quest line.
As a DM, I am in the middle of this argument. I think players should always feel like they have choices and options in their world so they don't feel forced into a story, however i also believe there has to be some pushing towards directions for the game to progress. A game with too much railroading is bad, but a game with too much sandboxing can leave players feeling like they don't know what to do or what would be important.
You can do both. As a DM I whitebox out the encounters I want to have in a session, then based on player decisions I just change set dressings and such. The core encounter remains the same They are on the railroad but they think they are in the sandbox. If the players have a clever way through an encounter, power to them, then something else will need to be the climax or challenge. Someone mist steps through a key hole? Sure. You are the other side. It is dark and you hear growling deeper in the cave. There is no latch on the inside to unlock the door. Rest of the party, what do you want to do? You are still on the outside. (Me in my head, thanks for raising the stakes of this encounter teleporting player, now we have a timer for the rest of the party for the puzzle).
The way to counter the sandbox feeling small and weak is to first, have the open world be a bit smaller. Sometimes smaller than a railroad. But have the players find and defeat challenges that are actual feats that make them stronger. Such as finding an abandoned city, and finding a creative way to get to the boss of the place and then beating him in an epic way. Because the arena is limited to a small ring around the boss, with basically infinite height and depth. Then having players destroy the boss by dropping stuff and then getting rid of its standing support to have it plumit.
I started running my first sandbox a few months ago and I will never go back. I have so much more fun running a game when I have no idea what is about to happen. Make some factions, some NPCs, then shake it up to make it a big ol' powder keg for your players to collide with.
You know, one of the best examples I had with a bleak sandbox that encouraged the railroad option, is Mount & Blade Viking Conquest. In the beginning you start off with nothing and don’t have enough money to buy weapons, you are given an option to work a normal job. The job takes in game day to perform and you get almost negligible amount of money and you get a description of how miserable and back breaking the job was. You quickly realize living a “normal” life is useless and you are pushed to follow the storyline and become a Viking in order to make good progress.
I feel like this is a close cousin topic to making your own campaign modules versus running pre-made ones. Time spent preparing and what you and your players are looking for in a game will determine your answer. 🙂
my personal favourite allegory is the one creepypasta about the foggy train station, wander as much as you want around this city, you *will* end up back at the train station
i think it's also like, the fun is where the dm has planned stuff, and the problem with sandbox can be that like, there's a whole lot of nothing. it's like the whole joke of trying to avoid what the dm's planned, it's like, there's no fun there, because nothing is there
There is also something to be said for the fact that a lot of tables are not going to be filled with people who are the best at improv or the most committed to the game. Try playing a sandbox game coming off an 8-10 hour shift when your energy has been sapped from your body but it's the only day everyone can get together to play. There are just times when railroading gets the job done. Present me with a clear problem and give me some options to solve it. When some people are too shy to speak up consistently and some are too tired to come up with elaborate plots and theories, having a clear path to walk down is the most relieving thing in the world, plus you still played the game everyone enjoys. Railroading rocks when you need it to.
![Nat 1's Are Better Than Nat 20's | Adventuring Academy [Brennan Lee Mulligan, Sam Reich]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ea_cR__Cej4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Nat 1's Are Better Than Nat 20's | Adventuring Academy [Brennan Lee Mulligan, Sam Reich]](/img/tr.png)
"Every DM has two scripts, the script of how we want it to go, and another script that is The Goonies"
* Brian Murphy, 20something
Goonies 2: Data Learns Fireball.
As a beginner just starting dnd that sounds frightening to me. Because I'm having trouble finding a dm and i an probably going to have to learn to be that role
@@FFmaxxx It's fun, even in total chaos that you didn't plan, it's fun. Nobody knows what your plans were or what you hoped would happen, you can't fail
@@FFmaxxxjust do it. I know that sounds simple and im down playing the stress of it but that's what you i think you should do, it's scary but the fact that you're worried about it is your first hint that you'll be willing to make a fun game. Get the dmg and a players guide listen to some real play podcasts like d20, greetings adventures, adventure zone my personal favorite is not another d&d podcast. Either pick up a prewritten campaign if you're not great at thinking on your feet otherwise make up whatever sounds interesting to you, just invite some friends to hang out and admit from the start you're new and that you know they're going to break things so you'll have to take some time to think then just jump in you'll learn faster than you think. I honestly prefer being a dm over a player even though it's more stressful and takes way more planning
@@FFmaxxx Feeling scared? Just play a brave character. You might be intimidated but Horatio the Unfuckwithable isn't.
“The goal of these fantasy worlds isn’t to be in middle earth, it’s to be in the fellowship.” What a great way to put it.
Players: We need money. I open up a bakery in town.
Next three sessions are about opening and running a bakery.
Was such a great quote, I want it on a T-Shirt!
@@WolfbloodJakeWilliams and IMO this is precisely why sandboxes get a bad rap: the freedom to make any decision but having to make it at THAT MOMENT, with the limited information and time available, it's near impossible to make decisions which translate to a grand plot of Fiction. It's too easy to steer towards a reality like The Great British Bake-Off.
@@kylkim93Ok then. Then the DM can include the great British bake-off into the main plot. Maybe beforehand the party was trying to hunt down some people who kidnapped some hatchling wyverns, then they discover that one of their opponents is putting Webern poison into their food to attempt to kill the judges. Then maybe they learn that it was actually the third team, and the party and the team they originally thought were the bad guys team up and win the competition and identify the whereabouts of the baby wyverns.
Edit: This took me two minutes, and I’m dumb. Imagine what a smart person like you probably are could come up with
“There’s two jumps on the rail.”
That fucking got me
I like the idea of, instead of a railroad, it's a freeway. It comes with lots of off-ramps and on-ramps, and we'll get to the end of the road eventually, but there's gonna be some interesting diversions along the way.
I kinda did that too for the one and only time I Dm. Always gave them options for other things but it still went along a set story
This is my preferred way. Small sandboxes are fine, but that really requires players that are 100% into the world and premise. Unfortunately, most of my tables have at least 1 person not 100% engaged due to something, so it gets tiring after a while asking "what do you want to do" and getting crickets. . .
So less railroad and more Route 66?
As somebody once said you write not in straight line but in circles where you are constantly moving forward like not one path but two path that both lead to the sane place.
I really like that analogy!
not even a passing nod to Zac for not only winning, but getting Brennan to make his point for him😆
You could say he railroaded him into it.
If Brennan noticed, his competitive spirit would have awoken and Zac might not have left alive. It had to be a subtle victory
@@TheHighSorcererYEEEEEAAAAHHH 😎
Looking through the keyhole and Misty Stepping through the door’s actually quite interesting. You now have *a* player through, and can help solve the puzzle with additional clues or interacting with things on the other side of the door. However, the rest of the party are still blocked from entry, so it isn’t so much bypassing the puzzle as it is expanding on the ways players can interact with it.
Admittedly I feel bad that my immediate instinct was essentially a "Rocks fall that guy dies" thing by saying something like "Alright. have fun fighting the dungeon boss by yourself"
@@aquamarinerose5405 I kinda had an opposite experience in a game once. Basically I was off exploring alone for some reason and found some weird hills with doors in them (Think they were tied to alignments or something, never came back to em and the campaign fell off). I go in one, poke around, see some mural of like my own death or something and then some monster wakes up and starts moving towards me. I get back to the door to find it closed and I'm just like "Okay cool, I Dimension Door 500 feet in X direction" (Turns out casters in 3.5 are dumb :P)
2:20 "As a DM I don't have to think of that much 💩"
Zac Oyama out here spittin' facts, saying the truth that most DMs are afraid to voice.
Speak for yourselves. I spend every day of the weeks spare time thinking and working on the campaign and next session. Everyones games are different. Lot of people just go off the cuff and change thier world based on whatever the players do... some of us create a real live in world and have to consider every possibility and how the different choices effect the world, I will never railroad my players. So my prep time is enormous.. because my world also is alive and doesnt just move or react only to the players and I will not allow my own whims to decide a choice. It will be centered in the world and characters that I have created... so yeah, i need to prep for the chaos that they can attempt to cause. But also to tpk them if they do something stupid. Making sure my players are aware of stakes as they push them. What happens in off the cuff games is lvl 5 characters being best friends with all then importsnt people in the world. Unbelievable, not grounded. Boring.
It's laughed off, but honestly, I have a full time job and some other social commitments. There comes a time when it's just a question of whether my players want me to run sessions every couple of weeks, or every couple of months
@@CloudianMHYou can't predetermine anything they do, son. You're wasting your time doing this. Improv will always be king. If you're sitting there going through a ton of notes, that's boring. Idk how people stand doing that. Making a campaign for years. Like why? I've been a DM for fourty seven years and it still doesn't make sense to me. You can improve these player determinations. Just make sure you write down what happened. The players shape the world with their actions, not yours. Things can happen outside the players, but this is boring. It's not about them it's about the fellowship. You're basically making your players go through an insane slog of content. Think if it like a video game. It's the same thing. Stick players in a town for three sessions with nothing but themselves and no shopping list is just ridiculous and a waste of everyone's time.
Zac is so based. Being a dm is hard. I like to give my players some choices within the scope that I can, but you cannot spend the limited time we have going off the paths I have made because I can only make so much.
I do counters so that new stuff happens and I also do all roads go to Rome, the trick is make sure they think it's their idea
yeah I also let them know about thing's going on in the background via rumors or their NPC's connected to their background. Like a reminder the longer you take the more other things are happening or even my NPC's like, "look at the "heroes" goofing off" @@AFK0099
Thanks for this, it’s been a rough day
I feel ya, man
The way i legit forgot. The power of Dropout 😂😅
We'll make it through ~ ❤
Don't give up! Stay strong!❤🇸🇪
Too true
As a DM and a player, the worst sessions are always those where the party does not have enough direction on what to do. I.e., "Welcome to Phandalin you are now free to spend the next 3 sessions meeting every NPC in town and fighting 1 small building full of thugs. Or you could fuck off into the woods to clear monsters out some ruins, but that's not where the plot happens. If you don't randomly pick an event that leads you to the actual plot, too bad, you made that choice and have to wait to get to the intended story of this campaign."
As a player, that leads to sessions with little motivation because the characters happen to not have run into the motivation yet. As a DM that means I have not given my players an engaging event or I have to warp circumstances to make the plot land on top of them anyway. Everyone has more fun if I give each session/location a strong inciting incident or goal that leads players where they need to be for a cinematic or compelling encounter.
Crafting a plot and setting up exciting events is what I'm here to do as a DM. Call it good storytelling, not railroading.
yeah for a good sandbox you need good, dedicated and creative players. It has potential for a lot more fun than railroad but is also dependant on players, while railroad is almost exclusively dm's responsiblity
I agree completely. Providing content for your players is never railroading. It's giving them goals and stuff to accomplish, and a good DM lets them brainstorm up ways to solve things, and that's where player agency is key.
Don’t remind me of Phandalin 😭
So. Many. Goddamn. NPCs and so much “kill this and that because it did something bad off-screen” which my player don’t want to do.
I’m a new DM so I thought it would be helpful but I spend so much time changing things to make it more interesting and engaging. Having to do that for multiple quests at the same time is so much work, I’ve already reduced the number of available quests but I think I’ll just choose the interesting ones and and replace the quest board with people asking them for help.
I rant about this in another comment, but you are so right.
A good narrative and plots does not take away player agency. There are plenty of potential for agency.
Aimlessly wandering around kills pace, bad pace kills campaigns.
But once you presented a problem, rejecting any idea other than the solution in your head, is railroading.
As a new DM that started my first campaign (and homebrew at that), yeah, I screwed up big time and made large gaps where the party had nothing telling them what to do or what goal to go forth (doesn’t help they did some things out of order from what I anticipated). I wish I knew this ahead of time, since no DM wants their players to feel bored and lost.
09:10 This has happened in one of my games, one of the players was always busy and missed a lot of sessions so we turned his character into an odd-jobs specialist npc when he was gone, making money for the party at the docks. I even made an entire upgrade system for his character like the enchanted Spatula of Frenzied Flipping (+1 gold per hour when working the kitchen) so the party would essentially leave his character at some jobsite and then come back from the adventure only to rob him of everything he's worth. Now he's a wage slave IRL and in-game yay.
i like brennan's idea of "railroading" from a previous video. there's a goal the players want to get to and they're free to do whatever they want but the narrative terrain is such that the best easiest and fastest path is snaking through all the DM's desired plot points. and thats the most fun experience for players too because the straight shot to the goal would be quick and boring. but they still have complete agency, can deviate along that path as much as they want, and if they are really determined could even brute force their way up from the narrative valley and over the ridge straight to the next plot point early.
But that's not railroading. Railroading is explcitly a pejorative term of when a DM overrules or undermines the players adjency in order to force a desired outcome. Now the moment the DM has "plot points" they are starting to walk the path of the railroad. Note it's not the act of having a plot that's the problem it's when you start prescripting the actions of the players that things start taking a bad turn. The world stops making sense; the NPCs start becoming actors; the players become an audience. The players should be given interesting and meaningful choices and many of those choices should be mutually exclusive. The players should have the option to upset the applecart if needs be. Ergo they shoudn't have to brute force their way through the game.
That felt more conversed than contested. I welcome this
The best is probably somewhere in the middle. Like... Planning out point A and B, but allowing the players different routes or even freedom to get from A to B. A Navigation system, basically.
Yeah. "You need to get enough power to break this seal", and then letting them choose the method to get there.
In videogame terms I think that's best described as Mass Effect: Here you go, you're on this ship, you have an entire galaxy (well like 5-6 maps) to do whatever you want, but when you're done with your playtime, here is where you go to move the story along
There isn't really a best way to do these, as it's entirely preference based. I personally like the sound of a "pure" sandbox over the sort of rhomboid structure you are describing, but it's cool if that's what you prefer!
@@harrycookson6086 Oh yeah definitely. And in a group it's important to find a solution everyone can be happy with.
Amusement park
you can go in any direction you want. and talk to any NPC you want. and craft any narrative you want. the narrative is always following you. it will find you. and you were always on its path.
Ah yes, the runaway ghost train.
I think what you're referring to is the infamous "quantum ogre" route of solving the railroad vs sandbox problem. Notably, it only works if the party has no idea that you're using it, as soon as they catch on, its game over
Everything you do is destiny.
"All roads lead to Ravenloft..." 😏
That's not necessarily quantum ogre. There's also a Junji Ito approach to it where the themes of the world and the need for the quest is so great that it affects everyone in the world. If the Dark Lord is so bad that everyone you talk to mentions specific problems in their life that can be traced back to the Dark Lord (quests), then that's not quantum quests, that's just a wholistic problem. No matter where you try to run to, the effects of the problem will be found.
I think true sandbox play takes a fair amount of relevant skills from both the DM and players, and there is a much larger risk of them collapsing into incoherent piles. When it works it is great, but when half the players stop showing up after a month because the world is too hollow to play off of, or because the party members can't agree on a course of action, I would have much rather had a clear goal and objectives from the start.
True sandbox play is some of the easiest DMing I've ever done. The less I had "scripted", the vaguer my plot, the freer my players, the easier the game was to run.
The idea a sandbox doesn't have a clear goal or objectives is entirely backwards, sandboxes only work if the party has a way to obtain clear goals and objectives right from the get go.
Which is why it's a relevant skill for a DM to set up a sandbox. I've seen DMs who aren't experienced enough at world building or hook planting throw players into a setting that has no map, no defined nations, cities, organizations, governments, religions... Like the party literally has no choice but to choose a direction and walk in it to see what they find, and the DM intends to build on the fly ... But their skill set isn't up to their ambitions.
"As a DM, I don't have to think that much."
Absolute fact.
I love running flexible linear games.
You signed up to my game? Its time to get on this Polar Express.
We have a destination, but we don't need the rails to get there, I'll drift across that frozen lake, but we getting to that destination!
Part of the art of DMing: creating the illusion of a truly sandbox world, while having sufficient grasp of motivations and desires to guide the players to do what you want them to do
As a GM I signed up to use my limited time for a cooperative evening where heroes solve the murder, stop the necromancers plan and save the village. I did not sign up to run a bakery, chat to shopkeepers about clothes or teach a goblin to cook. 😂
If I wanted to do those things I'd play a board game. Or you can all meet up and improv some theatre without me.
Be as creative as you like when moving towards the goal, take side branches as much as you like but keep moving in the vague direction of the goal.
Attempting to be in better shape, so working out while watching. “There are two jumps on the rail” almost ended my life. What a legend
Something that can sort of marry the two concepts is basically just tweaking things behind the scenes so that the players feel like they have enough agency to go anywhere and do anything, but secretly the GM is changing things up behind the scenes so that the players stick to the path as prescribed.
A classic example of this sort thing is like, say the players go to a town, so the GM lets the players go wherever you want. The Tavern, a merchant stall, some random NPC's house, etc. But then regardless of where they go, some event happens. Like a goblin gets tossed through the window or someone pickpockets them or something like that. Maybe when they reach their destination everyone there is killed and they have a murder mystery to solve.
So the event that occurs was prescribed for them like you would on a railroaded adventure, but it was designed in a such a way that it can be slotted into basically any choice the player makes for where they wanna go. So you don't have to worry about the players constantly avoiding the one place you want them to go while still being able to control the sequence of events that goes down. I think it's a really solid technique that more GMs need to think about.
It obviously can still be done well or done poorly but it's worth trying out.
I don't know if you ever talked about this. But as a forever DM my hot take is that it is more beneficial and fun to a game to have good players than it is to have a good GM.
I agree. Best DM in the world doesn't matter if the players are shit. Mediocre DM but players that enjoy each other? Still gonna have fun.
Yes!!
I once DM'd for a random group of people (my friend joined a rando group but the DM never showed so I stepped in) and this group would react to nothing, I'd get no responses when I'd ask them what they do. It got to the point where I started giving them REAL obvious solutions and routes of what they could do next and still they'd be silent it'd be like pulling teeth.
Give me 4 invested, proactive, players with diverse play styles and you'll have to pry us away from the table.
@@Rookie_Pyro It's a beautiful thing. An even more beautiful thing is that I've been playing for 10 years with my friends in a long running campaign. Two players who were just along for the goofs and laughs have now started to become just as invested as the other two and it's bringing me tears of joy.
Zac is right. Most players think they want a sandbox but eventually they just bury themselves and search for that mine cart.
I have a style that kind of combines both I like to call "Public Transit" DM'ing. Basically you have several different paths and you work the players wants and goals in with the story and world you are presenting and let them basically decide where they want to go, but with a straightforward path and story
If you give no path don't be surprised when the party walks in a circle lol
Love this series so much. I feel like I'm actually gaining knowledge rather then just listening to people talk back an forth about pros and cons.
I definitely feel like it's a really good idea to have a nuanced point of view when it comes to that debate.
There's a lot of great ways to blend the two, and a lot of actual-play gms have really good advice on how to do that.
There is no way to blend a railroad with any other style of play. It cannot be done. Railroading is not a style of game it is explicitly a bad decision by the DM, it's when the DM subverts or blocks the smart choices of the players in an effort to force a prewritten conclusion. There is no half way point btween that and not doing that.
The Alexandrian blog has a lot of articles ("Don't Prep Plots" is a good one to start) on this subject, in case anyone is interested
The big takeaway from this video is that Zac does not know how to prep for a game.
I've been on both ends of the extreme on this one.
I've had one DM who really just kept repeating "What do you guys want to do now?" and I've wanted to say "Find a DM who gives us some direction, or even throws us a rogue bandit attack when we're undecided."
I've also had a DM who effectively made our entire party indentured servants to a crime lord who threatened to turn us over and disavow us if we derailed in any way.
So you've played with two bad DMs one who didn't know how to run a sandbox and another who railroaded you.
Your first example isn't extreme sandboxing it's just an unfinished sandbox, sandboxes should be full of things that the PCs can do and all PCs should have some kind of goal heading into the game anyway, or the party can have one collectively, there should also always be a default action that the players know they can do to find things to do.
@@Gibbons3457
The DM typically builds a world for the PCs to play in and it's considered good play if the DM's world has a life of its own that the PCs can interact with rather than the PCs needing to build the world for the DM. Otherwise, the DM becomes superfluous as the PCs will only have themselves to rely on to build the world they're meant to be playing in.
A blank/uneventful world is *doable* with the right party but we just weren't it.
I DM'd a bunch decades ago and I had a hybrid approach where the party had agency to where they wanted and do what they wanted, with the caveat that whatever plot points or encounters I had come up with for the story would be 'dropped' into their adventure (Seriously, write up what you want to happen in point form on paper and add the events in as the party plays).
This exactly. I have an overarching narrative that the players kind of stumble upon as they play through a hex-based sandbox. It works well!
That's not a hybrid approach it's just a sandbox.
You can't hybrid good gameplay with railroading because railroading is only ever a bad thing; it refers to overuling or undermining player choices with the express goal of forcing things to reach and expected outcome.
@@Gibbons3457 You sure can! If you really need the party to fight a big bad, because it is part of the overall plot... and they aren't going the way that you need them to... then bring the railroad to them. Your Story/Plot is the railroad. Being built from one coast to the other. How the railroad gets built is up to the players... but it will still be built.
We are ending a near two year campaign soon. And early on I decided I would not say no and roll with every railroad just to see what happens as a GM. And boy what a two years it has been.
Were you a player and followed plot hooks? Or were you the DM and let them dodge plot hooks?
NEVER stop telling the audience why you want us to do something or what you need us to do, idk I can't speak for everyone but I feel like it's comforting to know that you're at least not hiding some agenda
My tip for running sandbox, and it's going pretty well so far.
1. Make time matter. Give the players an initial quest that is a long travel away. This created a deadline, which motivates them, but also make it long enough for them to be able to stop off at different places along the way if they see something interesting (my players reached their destination with two weeks to spare). Let them pick their own route, which leads me to the following:
2. Make a map. A map shows the players where it is possible to be, and how long it will take to get there. Make sure the whole landmass is surrounded by ocean or impassable borders (the walls of the sandbox). While your players are traveling, they will be able to plot the route they prefer. My players had three major routes: a long trek through the northern border, a shorter but still long path along the coast, and a dangerous but quick mountain pass. All were capable of getting them to the place on time with at least two days to spare, but they chose the mountain pass.
3. Food. Water. Carry Weight. These become the true BBEGs of your game in a sandbox setting, and they provide a ton of fun opportunities for immersive puzzle solving. My players chose a short route to save on food, but then at the last stop before the mountain pass, they bought a bunch of pitons, climbing gear, pulleys, and a ton of rope. These supplies were used numerous times to haul their cart and horses up nearly impassable vertical and horizontal challenges that would've added extra time to their journey if they couldn't solve the puzzles (I also had no solutions for these, it was up to them to make it work). They solved every single one, but they ended up having to leave behind lots of rope.
I am DMing my second multi-year campaign now, and have been DMing for almost ten years now.
My first campaign wasn't necessarily 'railroaded', but it was fairly linear. They had freedom to choose how to do things, but I basically gave them *what* things to do. And it still went really well, all my players really enjoyed it.
For my sequel campaign, I actually set out to create a fully sandbox campaign. There were a lot of things going on throughout the world as a result of the previous campaign, so there would be something to explore pretty much wherever they went. And surprisingly, that campaign has been a lot harder. My players were less engaged with this sandbox style. I've actually had to slowly shift the campaign to be more linear again because that just happens to work better for my player's enjoyment of the game.
Really, I think a big part of the sandbox vs. railroad style actually comes down to the type of players you have and what they prefer. Because I know a lot of players would love the sandbox style I initially set up for campaign 2 and may not want to be set into a linear story. And obviously the reverse has been proven by my current players. It's ended up being a more complex topic than I would have expected when I first started this campaign.
My preference is more of a hybrid mission system. "Here's what you need to accomplish, here's where the accomplishing must take place. You can do whatever you like while you're here, but you won't get your next level until you're done."
That’s why I like the setup for Curse of Strahd. “You are stuck in Barovia (it sucks here). If you want to get out of Barovia (it sucks here) then you need to slay the vampire lord Strahd von Zarovich. You need these three special items to kill him and you have to do it at castle ravenloft. The items are hidden somewhere throughout Barovia (it sucks here). You can do anything else you like along the way to increase your impact on Barovia (it sucks here) and/or learn more about the world around you.”
And simply by saying it has to be done, players will scream 'railroad!' Not that I agree with them, I like your approach and do the same. :)
@ true, but all of the players worth playing with would understand and have fun with the premise given in session 0 imo. I once had a player avidly trying to dodge the “railroads” (lead ins to the actual adventure/road to barovia) the first time I ran CoS and it was probably one of the most annoying dming experiences I’ve had. This is part of the reason why whenever I run CoS now I have all the players make characters that are native to Barovia so that they’re all already stuck in the premise of the adventure lol.
“All roads lead to Ravenloft because that’s the module the game master spent 40-60 dollars on and spend the last 3 weeks prepping for”
-Seth Skorkowsky (loosely quoted from memory)
That sounds awful
Zac is by far my fav for anything ever
Im so burned out on huge open world games. Im here to relax and enjoy a game, just give me a great story on rails. Less breath of the wild, more majoras mask.
12:45 I caught that sly camera wink, I wonder what inside joke he was hinting at about that Pirate game.
My very simplified way of looking at this is - railroad in the long term, sandbox in the short term. You are adventurers and you're going to try to save the world by defeating the evil wizard. That's the long term premise of my campaign. You need to buy into that to play, because that's going to be fun for you and it's going to make my life easier. But in the short term, when you're faced with a single encounter or puzzle, solve it however you want. Teleport through the door or find the key or smash it down or whatever you want. It's just one door.
It’s been interesting for me. My players (I started DM’ing this year) are, due to how their characters act, a very go-straight-to-the-objective type of group. And without realizing it, I was intending on running a more sandbox game. That was a fascinating and eye-opening period of time where I had to identify what my players wanted and needed and where things needed to go, despite what any original plans before the campaign were.
"A good game is a series of interesting choices" - Sid Meier
additionally: Choice is only interesting when it is both impactful and informed.
Whenever i think about sandbox vs railroading i always come back to the first 30ish episodes of critical role campaign 2, like objectively was it a little more meandering than their first campaign? of course, but there was a kind of wonder to it. Done well there will always be a place for it
It helped that some of the party had a specific objective. Fjord was looking to enroll in the Soltryce Academy early on, so they were meandering northward to Rexxentrum, and doing jobs/earning money in cities along the way. As they continued on, it gave Matt the opportunity to inject other plot threads (Gnolls, the Myriad in Zadash, the war with Xorhas, secrets about Fjord's patron, the Iron Shepherds) that the party could latch onto.
Yeah, and i mean each player had their own internal world and perception of goals. Caleb certainly had no illusions about going to soltryce which is so funny. I think the moment the campaign clicked for me was the encounter with the kryn beacon-rescuer in the sewers, matt let them wander but he had red hot plot hooks waiting because he knew their backstory and motivations
Though then some would note that Campaign 3 was TOO meandering and sandboxy. Though I haven't actually watched that much so idk how true that is.
Yeah it didnt grab me like the others did, but there are some things and moments in it i really enjoyed. i feel like i would have enjoyed it more if it had remained more self contained on marquet rather than borrowing ludinus as a bbeg from tm9 who originally encountered him
Im with Zack here. So this is just is anadoral evidence but 70% of people i GMed for prefer or need rails. There are many reasons why from they just want to play, there's too many choices and they don't understand setting up character goals, they just arnt into roleplay, ect.
when you have a DM that you know has a plot planned, lean in extra hard and it will be so much more fun than playing a crappy sandbox because your DM is making everything up. If your DM is sandbox DMing, go nuts making sandcastles.
Railroad scenes can be fun and brisk and cozy. The DM gives you a firm scene prompt and you go. "You arrive at the duke's castle bearing ill tidings. His brother is dead, and you must convince him to grant you aid in your quest. Go."
On the other hand, I've had nightmare aimless sandbox scenes that go:
"Well, I guess we could talk to the king."
"Okay, you track down the king."
"Sup. Do you know anything about The MacGuffin?"
"No."
"Uh... Hm. Can I roll a perception check to see if he's lying? Yeah, okay, five."
"You're *pretty* sure he doesn't know anything."
"Huh."
Sometimes if you give the players a sandbox they sit in the middle and wait for the castle to be built in front of them.
12:56 Gonna have to fight Luffy for that title LMAO😂🏴☠
A useful key to good railroading, the phrase "It appears to be..." this allows anything to become something else based on player input. Such as, "You arrive at what appears to be a dead end". This signifies that there might be more than meets the eye, or they can just take it at face value and turn around. If the party does some snooping around and a few good rolls, maybe now there is a hidden door that leads further along their path, or some good loot, or a small ambush, or a friendly npc. It could be anything, just by leaving open the idea that it appears to be something, rather than definitely is something. Nothing is absolute, unless it has no choice.
Weirdly, I’m kind of Zac’s side here. I recently closed the book early on my multi-year long campaign because I couldn’t take the stress of designing so much that may or may not even be seen by my players.
I think I started feeling the burn out a couple of years ago. I designed this enormous multi level expanding mega dungeon and I put months and months of work into it. And may players, by some miracle of god, managed to find the exact path between the entrance and where they needed to go and they just beelined for the boss and accomplished their goal in record time.
And I just looked at all the hard work I put into this thing and I just thought “What was all that even for?”
To be clear, I’m not disparaging the players. They did great. I am a big fan of player freedom and they made the choices they were going to make.
But it did kind of make me feel like there was no point in constructing an entire building if they’re just going to walk through one hallway anyway.
Problem of course being, if I ONLY design the hallway, then they will start branching off and exploring the other rooms.
So I find myself needing to build a huge sandbox world JUST IN CASE they go off the beaten path.
Also, as a video game player, I agree with Zac. Open world games like Skyrim bore me to tears because often they are bad at giving you agency to go in any specific direction. Or if they do, and you follow that direction, it feels like you’re missing out on 80% of the game.
The answer is: don't prep a dungeon at all. Decide what's on the other side of the door the moment they open it.
I'm joking. Slightly. But that is essentially the key to a true sandbox. It's not about prepping for what they might do, but responding to what they ARE doing. It's not an approach that works super well with D&D, however, because it's not a very improv-friendly RPG system.
On the few times I've GM'd, I've done a hybrid approach:
1. Make sure that all the PC's have a reason to do something around X, where X is the overarching plot of the game. "Save the Kingdom", "Retrieve the sword", or whatever. This is to keep PC's from going "yeah, but it's what my character would do", when whatever it is that they would do is "wander away from the group and do their own thing". Yeah, inevitably the party will split, but you want a reasonable expectation that they'll all keep moving towards the same goal.
2. Have a rich-enough sandbox world that you know (basically what's going on in the immediate surroundings; enough to improvise when the PC's inevitably do something odd.
3. Have the plot continue without them. So if they don't (for example) go rescue the town from the goblin den, and instead party it up that night in the tavern, despite you saying "hey, there's goblins out there"? Well, then the goblins attack a caravan. If the PC's don't care? The goblins continue to attack and potentially get strong enough to attack the town they're getting drunk in every night (or whatever.)
I can't believe I had to scroll this far to find this. I'm not making a sandbox or a train, I'm making a beautiful clockwork. I've already told a story, I know what happens over the next sixty days at LEAST. If they want to wander around my delicate contraption of wires and chains and crystal, please, enjoy my artistic creation! But the real fun starts when something breaks, and you figure out how that propagates through this world. I spend an hour or two after each session going through all the things they broke or tripped over.
This a terrific video and I have been thoroughly annoyed and entertained.
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@6:53 That’s the railroading that sucks the happiness out of roleplay. I’m glad you pointed out that example.
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I’ve been into TTRPGs since 1981 and when everyone at the table is having fun and the characters are part of a story worthy of song, then how we got there is moot.
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I love a good roller coaster or express train, as long at some point it’s off the rails. The sandbox lesson I learned is to not only let your player characters have fun, but also let the NPCs, monsters, and giant cats have their turns. If the players are waffling with their PCs, let them know the world lives on, although it’s going to be a lot more exciting with their participation.
My stance with videogames and DnD are actually the same. Yeah, I appreciate freedom now and then, but when the game/DM goes "Okay, you can do whatever you want, you make this story" I go "....but I came to YOU for a story."
I'm not saying a DM has to have everything prepared and I'm immediatley thrown into a conflict, but at the very least when I'm starting put up a figurative sign going "the main plot is that way ->" for me to at least know which way to go when I want to
And on the videogame track, this might be a controversial pick but for me Arkham Asylum > City. Because the game was a lot more linear the narrative flowed better and as a resuly the experience was better for me.
The railroad exists because the Fates will it so. Will you accept your destiny, or will you try to fight the Fates themselves.
I’m currently doing a Fallout campaign, and I essentially have my campaign laid out like an amusement park. You start out in Paradise, which has fun little kiddy games, radroaches, and plot points that inform you of three locations, but one of them seems more important. You go to the next location, they tell you of three locations but one sounds more important, and I just keep giving the players different side quests and directions they can go with rewards and horror at every turn.
And I let them experience each thing for as long as they want, and I don’t rush them.
My players played Caravan for two hours and it was the most fun they’ve had in a session
I'm tempted to say with the Fallout Comparison that I'm tempted to point out New Vegas.
The game is technically open world, but you are incentivized to follow the path of least resistance that takes you through the main plot in a roughly linear order. You can technically choose to follow or ignore any number of side objectives you find on the road along the way, but each place has SOMETHING to do.
For me, I love to give my players controlled choice in a narrative with an overall linear structure! I love to run super big sprawling maps with a ton of stuff, and every so often my players wind up indecisive between A and B. But when this happens, I find players only need the teeniest of pushes in the right direction before they're up and running! A part of your job is table management and by far the most overlooked aspect is straight up telling your friends "I have a lot more written for option A"
I love how much of an assist Brennan gives Zac on fleshing out his point, before he bothers with trying on a counterpoint.
This is always an interesting topic, and it reminds me the adage I've heard "All roads lead to Raveloft". Basically, if you're playing Curse of Strahd, the finale of the game will be a big battle against Strahd at Castle Ravenloft. You can do pretty much anything you want before that, but that's the end goal of the game. This can apply to any game; there are so end goals you will need to do, but everything in between is up to you.
There's also the "Quantum Ogres" approach; present the players with multiple choices, but whatever choice they make, the outcome will be very similar. Example, the DM prepped a fight with an Ogre, so no matter where the party chooses to go, there will be an Ogre fight waiting for them there. The location they choose could effect the environment they fight in, but it's a fight with an Ogre regardless. Basically, unless the players expressly go out of their way to avoid something the DM has prepped, the DM can put anything anywhere that makes sense whenever they want.
Engagement comment cause I have no agency here. You're both right.
This was definitely more of a discussion than a debate. 😅 Still happy I watched it... And engaged, you gremlins.
Excellent engagements. Hit the numbers. Get the connects.
Me getting flashbacks to the single game I DM'ed in high school where my friends were players and in the first round of combat, they ALL kept rolling below five and I rolled an agregious amount of 18s, 19s and 20s. I even said "you see the goblins aren't getting too close to the fire" to give them an easy out by scaring them w fire and they still got tpk'ed by a pack of like 5 base goblins rolling d4s for damage 😭
This is all to say, whether you railroad or sandbox your players, sometimes the dice just make the story SUCK 💀
Zac deciding he wants to be the antagonist this round is a gift.
What a wild first minute there 😳 😂❤
What I thrive to do as a DM is to make world building like Oda did with One Piece. The PCs can go wherever they like, and where they land will have some elements getting them closer to the final goal I setup for them. But at the same time, the world around them moves and changes as well. Events happen beyond the PCs choices and interactions, and a place my PCs didn't go to session one can be totally different in session four. At least that's what I'd like to do, but it's easier said than done.
sandbox campaigns are just sharing more of the dm’s responsibilities with the players. sometimes that works, but a lot of parties just don’t vibe with it
Something i dont think enough people understand is that freedom/creativity becomes a burden (with time). When youre constantly put in charge of creating your own fun, it starts to feel like a chore. Its nice to have all the tools to do what you want, what you want…but not all the time. Best example i can think of is BG3, where you constantly restart campaigns to do the different thing the different way with the different character, but restarting over and over is not super conducive to an actual DnD campaign.
It is the same way with art. Give two people their own brush, canvass, and pallet of colors. One will start painting right away, the other will be stuck in indecision and paint nothing.
There is not anything wrong with the person who needs a prompt, a theme, a setting to create art. It does not make them any lesser of a person than the one who instantly creates.
This was a great discussion. They certainly talked about sandboxes and railroading effectively. I did not get a sense of a strong stance one way or the other.
You just make me remember what i like in fantasy worlds ! Thanks
ZAC will always have brennan's true laugh button. zac can get him to break so well.
I think Brennan's comment on "building a tolerance" (ie. having experience) is honestly huge. 'Cause I've had the same experience. The first few times I played TTRPGs, I wanted to be "The Rogue" or "The Ranger" or whatever other very clearly defined archetype, and I just wanted to focus on learning the game mechanics and having a good time, so being railroaded was super helpful.
But then as I played more and more, and tried different characters, and witnessed enough clichés come to fruition in front of me... well, you start lookin' for that weird shit lol
It's like music. You listen to enough of a specific genre, you grow accustomed to the tricks they use to hook you in. You start needing more complex rhythms, niche instruments, subversive vocals, in order to scratch that itch.
I have honestly never been so engaged thank you for the recommendation UA-cam 👍👍
The Fallout 2d20 system has been a LOT of fun to run as GM. It's just like playing a game of Fallout 4 and players can even build their own settlements. The freedom is entirely in their hands and I'm just steering the ship to navigate for them. It has been really rewarding to see my 8 year old thinking in creative ways.
Look, I run a sandbox train, I stay on the rails and guide my characters. But they do have the options to fuck around and find out. Improving those find out scenarios have been some of the best session memories 😅❤
The way I like to DM is that I give my players agency, but I have a story in mind. If they come up with something better (they frequently do), I roll with it. I have maim story beats, prepared random characters and threads for wherever they go, and just slot it all in where it fits and make changes as they come up with them if I like them.
I'm really struggling with this as a DM right now, so it's nice to hear other perspectives.
I have been trying to adopt a more player-driven style of D&D where I design a mine field and let players go where they want, confident that something will blow up no matter their goal, and I have one player who absolutely will poke at any mines they notice. But most of my players will just stand still and hope for a sign of "where they have to go". And I think it really boils down to that, they want to know the thing they are doing is ultimately going to progress toward a goal, even if there might be some moral ambiguity along the way. They don't want to ever feel lost as players even if they're okay with their characters being mistaken.
"Theme Park" is my favourite way to run games. Different path to go through it with lots of attractions but it has clearly establised entry and exit and walls all around. I usually fail to run sandboxes as players loose drive and I get overwhelmed with too much prep work.
The best way I have heard it is that you are essentially creating a ride at a themepark. It is on rails, but you want to make it so that your players dont really care about that because they have so much else to experience, however also be ready for people to do things you never expected, because they will.
8:44 I honestly would love to just play a guy with a sword in a port town with no special destiny. I've played enough adventures where it's my job to save the world, I would love to play in a game where such responsibility doesn't underpin the very concept the activity that we're doing.
Like, sure, I might chose to do something and get in a little over my head, maybe even have my character die, and I'd be fine with that, because I chose that path in pursuit of what was important to that character.
And it's not like heroics are completely off the table. Just because destiny doesn't inherently favor you doesn't mean you can't try to do something good. And, if you succeed, the victory will be that much sweeter, because you did it in a world that was not set up to aid your efforts and maybe even actively harmed them, but you found a way or just got really lucky and managed to make the world a better place despite the odds.
Welcome to being alive, brother.
I literally just watched Zach the Bold rant for 40 minutes about how stupid sandbox style is, then get recommended this. 😂
Zach the Bold doesn't sound like a very good GM.
@@Gibbons3457why are you in the comments defending the valor of sandbox play like you’re a missionary of the church of open worlds.
Contested Roll could have it's own podcast honestly
Just some random guy DM here. I always tell my players, I like to run my games like an amusement park.
You are free to run around the amusement park and get on any ride you want, but once you get on a ride, we will see it to the end. Then you can get on another ride. Now me as the DM, I don't know the twists, turns, loopy loops that my players will throw at me(or even the ending), but at least we are on the same ride.
I’m doing my part
Counter proposal: A more of a tree branch approach. The DM creates a starting scenario, and then grow the game from there based on the players character's roots. This allows the DM to have a plot while also giving the player's agency and meaning as they make decisions which shape the story different for each group of players.
As a GM I run both. The world is open! The players can do whatever they want to do! Sometimes they run into a place that things were happening for a long time, and in order to get out they need to get in the mine-cart, since that's the only way through the things that were already going on.
Sometimes the players are in charge of their fate. Sometimes the players run into someone who has put in too much work to allow fate to interfere.
Love this
It’s all about the players. I’m a noobish DM and already I’ve found most of the people I DM for really, really need a railroad. They want the tracks leading them to exactly where they need to go with game like hints popping up. Meanwhile, there’s a few I haven’t DM’d for much, that absolutely, 100% can carry the session with their own antics and agendas, with very little to no objectives from me (which once I realized that was extremely refreshing). I currently aim to create really cool tracks, clear objectives, and real enough npcs that regardless of what the players choose we’ll have a good session.
That’s the ideal anyway, that scheduling creature has a CR of f-me 😂
I think railroading is good (to an extent) when a player is actively looking for that rich, deep storytelling experience with twists & challenges. On the other hand, sandbox style games are great for the player(s) who are just looking for a quick/simple de-stresser after a long day/week. If you have the mental/emotional energy for a railroad, it can be a lot of fun to go on that journey. If you're tired & don't have it in you to take part in a story, it can be nice to do a quick dungeon crawl or side mission
They key for being a great GM is to railroad without the players knowing what you are doing. The adventure is going to happen, and now you just have to trick or persuade the players to want to take the path down the road you lay out for them.
Sandboxing means you have to develop several quest lines at once. Ensuring that no matter what the players do there's always something interesting going on. Bonus points if you weave those quest lines together into a larger narrative that the players can uncover. Much like Skyrim has a main quest line to follow, several large side quest lines and many many short one offs, a good dnd sandbox will also have all of that to explore, not just a main quest line.
here to get those numbers up
Basically Brennan 10min monolog on DM. I Love it
As a DM, I am in the middle of this argument. I think players should always feel like they have choices and options in their world so they don't feel forced into a story, however i also believe there has to be some pushing towards directions for the game to progress. A game with too much railroading is bad, but a game with too much sandboxing can leave players feeling like they don't know what to do or what would be important.
Get the numbers up!
You can do both. As a DM I whitebox out the encounters I want to have in a session, then based on player decisions I just change set dressings and such. The core encounter remains the same They are on the railroad but they think they are in the sandbox. If the players have a clever way through an encounter, power to them, then something else will need to be the climax or challenge.
Someone mist steps through a key hole? Sure. You are the other side. It is dark and you hear growling deeper in the cave. There is no latch on the inside to unlock the door. Rest of the party, what do you want to do? You are still on the outside. (Me in my head, thanks for raising the stakes of this encounter teleporting player, now we have a timer for the rest of the party for the puzzle).
The way to counter the sandbox feeling small and weak is to first, have the open world be a bit smaller. Sometimes smaller than a railroad. But have the players find and defeat challenges that are actual feats that make them stronger. Such as finding an abandoned city, and finding a creative way to get to the boss of the place and then beating him in an epic way. Because the arena is limited to a small ring around the boss, with basically infinite height and depth. Then having players destroy the boss by dropping stuff and then getting rid of its standing support to have it plumit.
I started running my first sandbox a few months ago and I will never go back. I have so much more fun running a game when I have no idea what is about to happen. Make some factions, some NPCs, then shake it up to make it a big ol' powder keg for your players to collide with.
You know, one of the best examples I had with a bleak sandbox that encouraged the railroad option, is Mount & Blade Viking Conquest. In the beginning you start off with nothing and don’t have enough money to buy weapons, you are given an option to work a normal job. The job takes in game day to perform and you get almost negligible amount of money and you get a description of how miserable and back breaking the job was. You quickly realize living a “normal” life is useless and you are pushed to follow the storyline and become a Viking in order to make good progress.
I feel like this is a close cousin topic to making your own campaign modules versus running pre-made ones. Time spent preparing and what you and your players are looking for in a game will determine your answer. 🙂
my personal favourite allegory is the one creepypasta about the foggy train station, wander as much as you want around this city, you *will* end up back at the train station
i think it's also like, the fun is where the dm has planned stuff, and the problem with sandbox can be that like, there's a whole lot of nothing. it's like the whole joke of trying to avoid what the dm's planned, it's like, there's no fun there, because nothing is there
There is also something to be said for the fact that a lot of tables are not going to be filled with people who are the best at improv or the most committed to the game. Try playing a sandbox game coming off an 8-10 hour shift when your energy has been sapped from your body but it's the only day everyone can get together to play. There are just times when railroading gets the job done. Present me with a clear problem and give me some options to solve it. When some people are too shy to speak up consistently and some are too tired to come up with elaborate plots and theories, having a clear path to walk down is the most relieving thing in the world, plus you still played the game everyone enjoys. Railroading rocks when you need it to.
I'm here to get those engagement numbers up 🔥
My favorite parts of playing were feeling like we were wandering and exploring a world.