Is Your D&D Game on Rails?

Running a game of Dungeons and Dragons is a lot of fun and an incredible experience, but sometimes it's really hard. We put hours of work into providing our friends with a fun game and an engaging story and in a single moment it can suddenly feel like our plans have been derailed and we desperately want to get things back on track.

Spend any length of time online trying to up your Dungeon Master game and you are sure to come across conversations about the evils of railroading your players. Because it's the internet, you'll likely come across accusations, oversimplifications, and a host of people using the same words to mean different things. I'm not here to solve the problems of the internet, I'm sure I'm just as guilty as anybody sometimes, but I am going to talk about what railroading actually means, because there seems to be a lot of confusion about that fact.

An adventure where the players have to go through part A to reach part B to find the key that unlocks part C, is not always a railroad. Changing the location of something during play to put it in front of the player characters: an encounter, an NPC, a clue, is not necessarily railroading either. And having a plan for what happens in the next session, or further down the road, does not necessarily mean the Dungeon Master is railroading the players.

Some people prefer more or less linear designs, meaningful decision points, and preparation vs improvisation in their games, but almost no one enjoys being railroaded.

Railroading is when the players figure out some clever way to open the door to part C without using that key from part B, and the Dungeon Master stops it from working because that is not the solution they thought of in prep. Railroading is when the players gather information and make an informed decision to take the safe path on the Old Road to avoid the dangers of the Webbed Woods and the DM has giant spiders attack anyway. Railroading is when the Dungeon Master refuses to change their plans and adapt when the players (or the dice) do something unexpected. Ultimately, when the Dungeon Master forces an outcome and the actions of the players don't matter, we're probably looking at a railroad.

I think the worst offenses of railroading usually arise from issues of control. The Dungeon Master keeps too tight of a grip on everything either because we're afraid of what might happen if the players do things we're unprepared for, or we're just so in love with our own ideas that we force things to go the way we want.

Newer Dungeon Masters especially, though experienced DMs can fall into this trap as well, might say “no” to an idea because they don't know what will happen if they say “yes.” That sense of the unknown can be scary, but it's also what keeps things interesting for the players and the DM. We often feel like we have to maintain control over everything in order to provide our players with a fun game to such a degree that it no longer is a game for us. Being a Dungeon Master should feel like play a lot of the time. As we gain more experience it becomes easier to improvise in the moment, I promise. We learn by doing. You can't prepare for everything; every time you sit behind the DM screen the players will likely say or do something you did not think of, and that's great.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't “no” when something wouldn't work for good reasons. Rolling a nat 20 on a Perception check doesn't mean a secret door appears where there wasn't one. A cantrip isn't going to cause the same effect as a higher level spell. Persuasion isn't mind control. There are plenty of times the DM can and even should say no to things without it being railroading. When appropriate, I think it's good to explain why the answer is no, or what it would take to do what the players are trying to achieve, but “no” is an option. So is the classic “yes, and” or the less celebrated but perhaps even more useful “yes, but.” Yes, the barbarian and fighter can use the battering ram to knock down the door instead of finding the key, but it creates a lot of noise, alerting the monsters in the next few rooms that trouble is coming. Not letting the battering ram work simply because you planned on them using the key would be railroading.

To counteract this potential pitfall, a DM can focus on providing the challenges, and keep in mind that the solutions are the domain of the players. Sure, put a key in room B that opens room C, and if they go looking through the desk it's OK to let them find it there even if as written it was on the bookshelf. But we need to stay open to the the players thinking up other answers as well. Sometimes the key to room C got locked in room C, and the fun of D&D is that there are plenty of other ways to get in there. Let the players figure it out, the Dungeon Master has enough to do.

Sometimes we have the impulse to hold onto control and not let the players ideas work because it would mess up our precious story. We want the players to use the key because we wrote a really cool description of it and how it fits into the lock. Or: the bad guy was supposed to get away during this fight so that the true dramatic final battle could happen in the epic set piece we spent a lot of time preparing. But the players cleverly blocked his escape route and put up a surprising amount of damage and now that big bad is dead. In situations like this the desire to force an outcome despite the players' actions can be very tempting. Do your best to avoid railroading in these moments, even though it might hurt. Let the players bask in their unexpected victory and revel in the dismay they have caused in shredding your best lain plans. I'll even play the heel and ham it up sometimes because players often really love it. We're here to have fun after all, running a game is about creating fun.

Getting railroaded kills the fun. And along with providing fun, one the most important of the DM's many tasks is to make the players feel like their characters are awesome. OK, if the PCs just dropped the bad guy in the first round, maybe crank up the big bad's hit points up to provide better pacing and tension, to make a boss encounter that feels like a climax and not a dud. A big bag that drops instantly might not make them feel as awesome as taking them out after they prove themselves to be a formidable opponent. But if the party achieves great things through smart play and good luck, let them take out the threat that was supposed to live to fight another day. If you force an outcome it kills the pacing and tension, as well as the awesomeness and fun. And that is not going to save your cool ideas and the great story you wanted to tell.

I understand the appeal of trying to tell a good story, I do. Whether you're using a prewritten adventure or homebrewing your own, you can spend all this time and effort crafting foreshadowing moments, dramatic themes and meaningful conclusions. D&D is a fantastic storytelling engine, but a Dungeon Master has to keep in mind that they are not an author writing a novel. The story doesn't get written during the preparation, it emerges at the table through the act of playing the game. Again, this can be intimidating because we want so badly to do a good job, to give our friends an entertaining and meaningful experience. But it can also be very liberating surrender some control. Remember that there are other people at the table who should have some say in this story too. A lot of say actually. The players are in charge of the protagonists after all, and a story where the actions of the protagonists are irrelevant is probably not the best story we could tell. And it's definitely not the most fun game to play.

The DM has nearly infinite control of the world, they can fearlessly give the players a ton of agency and still have plenty of power left over to shape the game. Let the players enjoy their clever plays and unexpected victories. Celebrate with them. That cool lock and key combo they bypassed can come up elsewhere. That big bad they took out could have been working for an even bigger badder big bad, or maybe they get resurrected, or their demise creates a vacuum that allows some other force to arise. There's always more adventure out there and evil to vanquish.

When we counteract, undermine, or simply don't even offer our players meaningful choices, that's railroading. Sure, not everything has to be a choice, and not every choice has to be meaningful. Sometimes you might have to go through room A to get to room B, and sometimes the encounter that was written for room C happens in room X because the party turned away from part C and there wasn't anything prepped for X yet. But if the Dungeon Master already knows exactly how everything is going to go, they don't need the dice or the players.

So how do we avoid railroading our players? Share that control. Give the players meaningful choices and remember that we are not solely in charge of the story. I like to think in terms of preparing scenarios, not scenes; plot hooks, not plots; situations, not stories. The story happens at the table when we play the game.

One way I practice this when I am preparing an adventure is to consider different ways things can go down. Maybe they'll attack these guards, but maybe they'll try to trick them, or maybe they'll sneak in the back way. Now, be warned, taken to far and this way madness lies as there's an impulse to try to prepare for every possibility. That's what I tried to do when I first starting running games. If they do this, I'll do that, and if they go over here, then this one will do that, etc, etc. I'd wast hours getting ready for things that mostly never happened and was therefore somehow even less prepared, not more, when the unexpected occurred. I was trying to control too much. I try to hold on much more loosely now, but when I am prepping something I still try to think of a couple ways things might happen just so I'm not stuck on a single one. It's a bit like stretching to remain flexible.

I especially think it's good to do this when it comes to major beats and plot points. It is very easy to have an ending in mind, but I really make the effort to consider how things will turn out if the PCs fail, or never get involved in the first place. This helps you not get stuck on a single, predetermined outcome, and helps you adapt your world to the players actions on the fly.

Now the popular answer given to solve the railroad problem is to build a sandbox. I love a good sandbox, but I believe that there are also a lot of oversimplifications and misunderstandings about what that means exactly. So next time we're going to dive into the sandbox.