Choo Choo - The Fine Art of Railroading

Railroading: The act of giving your players only one real course of action. To many this has become almost a curse word in gaming. Cries for complete freedom of player choice go out across Reddits, Facebook pages, and message boards across the internet. But is railroading actually that bad? Is complete freedom of choice actually that good?

A very vocal group will tell you that nobody likes railroading. They advocate for complete sandbox all the time, every time. If nobody likes railroading why are modules some of the top selling products of RPG publishers? People have been enjoying modules from as far back as the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, with stories being told over beers about getting the final bad guy or surviving a particularly dangerous dungeon.

One of the first things reasons many people actually do like being on the rails is choice paralysis. This isn’t just a gaming phenomenon. Personally, choice paralysis hits me especially hard when it comes to ordering food. Asking me what I want to eat is far too broad a question; I never know what to pick. But once you’ve narrowed down the choices to half a dozen restaurants, it’s much easier for me to choose. The same holds true for gaming, just asking “What do you want to do?” gives many people too many choices and this is one of the reasons modules sell so well.

One of the other factors as to why people like modules, and thus some railroading, is that many people like to tell epic stories. I get that there is also a contingent of folks who have no issues doing the day-to-day minutia of setting up a business and going into detail about their morning shower, shave, and breakfast routine. But many, many gamers want to have epic adventures that rivals The Lord of the Rings. To tell a cohesive story, though, sometimes the players need a little nudge.

One of the biggest issues I have is that in most sandbox games you end up repeatedly being asked what you want to do. You head off in some random direction, a little bit happens, and then you get asked what you want to do again. All these little things don’t add up to big adventure and that just doesn’t work for me or a lot of other gamers. I get GMs who say "But you haven’t played with me", and honestly many GMs say that and very few actually deliver.

There is always this rivalry between people who like canned adventures and those who espouse sandboxing. The argument invariably gets made that needing to be on the rails comes from a video game mentality. Kids these days and their newfangled games are the death of imagination, and so on and so forth. "Hey you kids, get off my lawn!" Modules, however, have been selling like hotcakes for generations. Adventure games from the text based D&D games, to Tomb Raider or Dragon Age, have grown from the very stories that were being told in the early D&D modules. If anything video game culture is much more influenced by us than we are by it.

Frankly, though, there is a middle ground. True railroading is as bad as completely free sandboxing. There is a fine art to both giving actual choices and providing the illusion of choice. Some say "hooks, not rails", and I suppose that is an apt representation. There are many ways to give the players options while still staying within the story. There are also methods for adjusting or adding to the story, depending on player actions within. I do my best to help guide my players without making them feel like I am pushing them.

The one thing I have left to talk about is the start of the adventure. When you sit down, there does need to be some agreement on what kind of adventure there is going to be. The players, for their part, need to play along for a bit to get the ball rolling. This leads back to my thoughts on making a character for the game you’re in, but it also showcases one of the few types of players I think is truly a problem.

When you’re starting your game and you give the players the hook, and they know it’s the hook, they bite to start the adventure and one player says, “My character wouldn’t do that.” If your character wouldn’t go on an adventure, then why did you make that character?

Do you prefer a game that is more on the rails (like modules) or completely free?  Have you found that a middle ground approach works best? As a player do you snap at plot hooks or does it make you feel like you’re being led around by the nose?

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