A common complaint from players and game masters alike is that a specific adventure for a roleplaying game is “railroaded”. They mean that the players lack agency – that the GM is forcing them to act as an audience to the GM’s script. This is then frowned upon as bad GMing. I used to think so, as well, but these days? I no longer see railroading, in the sense it’s usually meant, as a bad thing. Of course my perspective on what it means and why it matters has changed.
Case study: can anyone hear you lay the tracks in space?
I’ve recently run the Alien RPG adventure Chariot of the Gods for two different groups, and both games followed the exact same structure, beat for beat, for the majority of their three session run time. Only the third act deviated.
This adventure is not set up as a railroad. The players can choose relatively freely where to go and what to do. The GM triggers beats (scenes) as appropriate to build tension towards the big set pieces (scenes) in the adventure.
Now, the adventure says that the events could be triggered in mostly any order, and you could choose to omit ones you don’t need, but they have clearly been written as a timeline of events, and that’s how I’ve run them: in the exact order presented, omitting nothing.
Up until we get to the point in the third act where the individual character agencies start to interact meaningfully (violently), I know exactly what we’ll do and when. And even then, there isn’t really anything surprising for me – I know what the players’ secret agencies are, and thus what the players are likely to do. Their timing or who they might bring along can vary, but these aren’t really surprises to me.
Is this a railroaded game? Do the players have agency? How do they feel?
I got one complaint after the second game that a player felt like their actions didn’t matter, as all the characters were going to get infected anyway. The other players pointed out that their character unwittingly exposed everyone to the alien infection by dropping a sample container in the medlab. While true, this didn’t really matter: the adventure asked the GM to trigger infections as dramatically appropriate. So the complaint was correct – the player’s actions didn’t ultimately matter, but them having dropped the container made my choices as GM easier.
I found it interesting that the other players wanted to protect their play experience and ward off accusations of being railroaded. One player added that in a previous run, several of their characters had managed to escape uninfected, further underlining that they had agency. This is also true! While the GM was at liberty to trigger infections, it may not be dramatically appropriate – truthful to the fiction – to do so. It all does depend on what the players choose to do… even if there’s ultimately just one or two ways the scenes will unfold.
Why should we care about railroading?
Usually when I run a game, I have a very good idea of what’s going to happen. Not the specifics, but what the beats are, and in what order they drop. I might not know how we’ll get there, but I can relax in knowing that we will. I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and the dynamics of the table rarely surprise me at this point.
The trope of being a GM whose plans have been thwarted by players doing something weird hasn’t really applied at my table in decades. I’m sure it sometimes happens even now, but I’ve learned to plan at a level where it doesn’t ultimately matter.
What is bad is if anyone at the table feels like their time is wasted. They should have agency over their actions, and those actions should matter.
And yet, I’ve just run the Alien scenario with dozens of beats that happen in the exact same order, and all of my players save one have been happy with their agency. In two separate games. How do these two things coexist? Where is the player agency if the experience has been preordained?
Players need to be able to make decisions that feel important. It doesn’t matter whether they actually are, as long as the player feels they are. Preserving fiction coherence is key here. If a player feels that they would really want to take a specific action because that’s how this would play out in fiction, and they can’t for railroading reasons (the GM blocks them, one way of another), that’s bad.
The trick is that if you have established the fiction clearly, everyone at the table will have a shared vision of what should happen next. As the GM you merely tap into that, and you won’t be surprised.
When is railroading bad?
Bad railroading happens when the players don’t understand the goal or the fiction. Then it feels that things are happening to them, instead of them doing stuff to which the game reacts. When everyone is on the same page, you’re working together to tell the same story. You will be going in a direction everyone can see, and that’s not a bad thing.
Is there room for surprises? Of course. When you’re watching a horror movie, a major part of the suspense is not knowing exactly what will happen and when, while having a very good idea of the potential options. It’s all about foreshadowing and setting the scene. Be clear about what the moving pieces are and where they’re going, and then it doesn’t matter all that much in which order they move.
I worry about railroading when I can’t think of a way to get the players to go where I need them to go, without taking away their agency. Why do I need to know where they go? Because great content doesn’t generally just happen, it needs to be prepared.
The secret here is preparing things in a way where the actual route taken doesn’t matter. Whether they go left or right is of no consequence if I know where they’ll end up. Which brings us to:
Sandbox play
Often seen as the antithesis of railroading, in sandbox play you set up a playground (the sandbox) and let the players loose. You don’t tell them what to do, and they’ll create their own fun.
I’ve run some good sandboxes, a highlight being