The Train Conductor: Sometimes We Want To Go to Abilene.

I mentioned in a previous post how railroading’s picked up bad connotations, or rather, DM plotting  has picked up bad connotations.

Railroading is when the party is driven along like a pile of potatoes in a sack in the back of a train car, being taken from Oerth to Faerun to Dragon Pass and onwards with no true impact.

And that impact is the thing.

Players are like cats being herded, but they can also be like bloodhounds. This is because they are human beings, not animals, and thus driven by things besides basic instincts and instinctual desires. I know that most posts like this devolve into dime store psychology, but my background is in marketing, so for me it’s not about how my players’ love of their mothers or toilet training affects their drives, but about selling to the party.

See, people complain about railroads, but that’s because most railroads are taking their riders to Abilene, the Montana Sulphur Flats or Dachau. In summary, places they don’t want to be.

But when I get on a train going from say Chicago to Philadelphia, I sure as damnation want that train to get to Philadelphia. I’ll be kind of cheesed if the train ends up randomly deciding it’s going to end up in say, South Bend, Indiana.   

And what this sums up is basically, players are ok with riding the rails, if they like the destination and the ride getting there. Players aren’t dumb. They know how structured adventures work, they can see your cleverly hidden plot threads and they can choose to pick them up. They’re travelers, wanting to find a pathway to the end. So the trick is..

Be a rail company.

Give them a lot of options. Make rails and plot threads. Railways deviate their courses at certain points, different railheads heading off in countless directions, with people floating in and out. Each train line having its own unique character and feel.

But you’re still the same rail company, so even if the party opts to jump the R5 to the R3, and decides to head to Ottawa instead of Florida, they still have the same icons on the cars, and the dining cars still work the same way even if they’re serving more maple.

Plots are threads, even in sandboxes. And plots keep chugging away. Even if a party jumps the R5 line to check out what the R3 has to offer, the R5 is still going to its destination.

Basically, make sure your players know that they can choose to not pursue a given bad guy, or plot thread, but those threads don’t stop existing just because they weren’t pursued.

And that, that’s even more important for showing the players that their choices matter. If there are suboptimal choices and consequences, well..

Then the player’s choice matters!

And they aren’t a potato. They’re a passenger.