Railroading and Sandboxing: In Conclusion, Jargon is a Crutch

These vocabulary words are useful in that they summarize complicated concepts, and that leads to greater communication. But we live in a time where everyone skims, and no one is very good at reading for context anymore, and subtlety is gone and nuance is out the window, and…I guess what I’m saying is, “Sandbox” and “Railroad” are positioned in our current lexicon of geek patois as Yin and Yang, a positive and a negative, one to emulate and the other to assiduously avoid at all cost.

I’m here to tell you not to drink that Kool-Aid. As we have grown and matured into not just a hobby but a pastime with numerous social applications, a developing and evolving vocabulary is essential for critical study, creative writing, and even in the classroom. But we are still talking about Dungeons & Dragons, in the end.

In the introduction to the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Mike Carr asks the rhetorical question, “Is Dungeon Mastering an art or a science?” Again with the binary choice! Why can’t it be both? I posit that it is, in fact, a balancing act (on the teeter totter or whatever metaphor you wish to use). Carr goes on to make a few points, which I will repeat in brief:

If you consider the pure creative aspect of starting from scratch, the "personal touch" of individual flair that goes into prepar­ing and running o unique campaign, or the particular style of moderating o game adventure, then Dungeon Mastering may indeed be thought of as on art. If you consider the aspect of experimentation, the painstaking effort of preparation and attention to detail, and the continuing search for new ideas and approaches, then Dungeon Mastering is perhaps more like a science - not always exacting in a literal sense, but exacting in terms of what is required to do the job well.

Esoteric questions aside, one thing is for certain - Dungeon Mastering is, above all, a labor of love. It is demanding, time-consuming, and certainly not a task to be undertaken lightly…But, as all DM's know, the rewards are great - an endless challenge to the imagination and intellect, on enjoyable pastime to fill many hours with fantastic and often unpredictable happenings, and an opportunity to watch a story unfold and a grand idea to grow and flourish. 

…Dungeon Mastering itself is no easy undertaking, to be sure. But Dungeon Mastering well is doubly difficult. There are few gamemasters around who are so superb in their conduct of play that they could disdain the opportunity to improve themselves in some way…Take heed, and always endeavor to make the game the best it can be - and all that it can be!

My takeaway from that, back then, and now, is to not get locked into one way of thinking. Adam West as Batman had an array of aerosol can oceanic threat repellents in his Bat-Copter. I bet you a million dollars he never had a reason to use the barracuda repellent spray. But I’m sure he’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Do not fear the railroad. Do not be overwhelmed by the sandbox. They are tools to be creatively used, not fixed states of being that are never altered when set in motion. The biggest realization you can come to as a DM is this: You’re making all of this shit up as you go.

And for the record, I think Dungeon Mastering is emphatically and unequivocally an art.

Railroading and Sandboxing: The Teeter-Totter

Most of my "railroading" is done in a notebook, where I plan out the series of adventures and encounters the group will face, in the order that they face them. This includes downtime sessions. All of this goes out the window if they sudden decide to abandon their course of action, but that’s not likely to happen.

Conversely, most of my "sandboxing" happens in game, at the table, and in the moment. I think that’s the best place for it to happen, because you get the instant feedback of the players to gauge where things are going and if they are playing along. You also get to react to their reactions, making hurried notes if one of them coughs up a good idea. You maybe didn’t plan for their stay at the inn to be eventful, but suddenly, all of the players are fiddling with their phones and you’re about to lose them to the Facebook. That’s when the two guys in the corner who have been talking quietly all night suddenly throw their table aside and draw weapons, and everyone in the bar roars their approval, and the bartender says, “Dammit, not again!” Sometimes you need to insert a little action while the players find their way.

That push and pull, or better yet, that back and forth rocking motion between “here’s the module I have prepped” and “what weird-ass thing do y’all want to do now?” is the essence of great DMing, and that’s the point I’ve been trying to make in my overly-long-winded way. Open play, all of the time, would beat me down and drive me crazy, not to mention creatively exhaust me. Likewise, sticking to the script and excising all of the NPC byplay and not letting the players breathe would also be zero fun.

The real trick is knowing when to switch modes. There are days when you don’t want them lollygagging about, and there are days when everyone is having the most fun gambling in the tavern. If you have the energy and the inclination, give them a “by week” and let them make friends, make enemies, and find clever ways to part them from their gold. If you don’t have the energy for a big thing, you can downplay the encounter by keeping personality off of the table. Instead of infusing the local blacksmith with an Irish brogue and an ailing wife—for that would certainly be player bait—instead say, “The blacksmith only has common weapons for sale, at the prices listed in the player’s handbook. Nothing exotic. If you want a new sword, there’s a rack of them on the south wall.”

90% of the time, they will take the hint. Buy your equipment and get ready to move out. There’s an owlbear to massacre.

I find the best time to free-wheel an NPC or two is after a mission or a dungeon crawl. It’s a nice palate cleanser from getting hit in the face with fireballs and digging through crypts. Combat is intense, especially at levels 1-5. Everyone is acutely aware of hit points and spell slots. Short rests are crucial. So, when that’s over, it’s good to let them sit back and just talk out a problem, or try to get the best deal for all of the loot they swiped.

In gaming, as well as in creative writing, there’s nothing wrong with some boundaries. A little structure makes play (and creating) much better by limiting choices and allowing you to focus in on the best outcome.

Railroading and Sandboxing: The Saga of Krystos the Tailor

 If you will allow me the briefest of interludes, I wanted to talk about a recent development in my current campaign. It's an example of how the sandbox usually works on a very practical level. 

Here is a brief scene from the superb modern-day western, Silverado (1985):

Stella (Linda Hunt): From what I've seen, Paden doesn't care about money.

Cobb (Brian Dennehy): He says he doesn't care about anything, but he does. There's just no telling what it's going to be.

Cobb: Howdy, Mr. Slick.

Slick (Jeff Goldblum): Sheriff.

Cobb: Let me tell you about your friend Paden. Me and him, and Tyree, and a few others, we did a good bit of riding together a few years back. Business, you know, and, uh, business was pretty good.

Cobb: We were moving around a lot, the way you have to in that line of work, and somewhere along the line we picked up this dog. One of the boys took to feeding it, so it followed us everywhere. Anyway, this one time we were leaving a little Missouri town in quite a hurry, a bunch of the locals on our tail, and this dog somehow got tangled up with Tyree's horse and Tyree went flying.

Cobb: Tyree was pretty mad when he jumped up, and, being Tyree, he shot the dog. Didn't kill him, though. But before you know it, Paden is off his horse and he's holding this dog. He'd gone all strange on us. Said we should go on without him. Hell, I thought he was kidding at first. But he wasn't. Tyree was ready to plug 'em both. And all this with the posse coming down on us. Yeah, I thought we were pals after all that riding we done together. (Paden Enters, walks to Cobb) And all of a sudden, he's more worried about some mutt. Well, we did like he asked, and we left him, and he went to jail for a dog.

Cobb: And you want to hear the funny part? Paden didn't even like that damn dog.

Paden (Kevin Kline): It evened out in the end. They locked me up. The dog sprung me.

Seriously, if you have not seen this movie, you simply must.

I shared that with you for two reasons. One, if you haven’t seen Silverado, you absolutely should see it as soon as possible, as it will give you a ton of ideas for RPG games, scenarios, and characters. Trust me on this. It’s the Ur-Western. And two, I wanted to make this point: Players are a lot like Paden.

There’s no telling what they will care about. Could be something big, or something little, but mostly, it’s something so damn random there was no way to plan for it. My most recent brush with this truism happened a few weeks back in the game I’m running.

One of the players had gold that was burning a hole in his pocket and insisted on looking for a local tailor to buy a new cloak. It was a small town they were in (my heavily shifted Saltmarsh, called Graystone Bay), and as I pretended to consult my notes, I decided that there would be a single tailor’s shop, and that he’d be a guy who was ill-suited for the grimy little town he was in.

Okay, so here we go:

Me: You open the door and the bell rings, and you see a middle-aged, portly man, immaculately dressed, come walking towards you, smiling, arms outstretched. “AH, my friend, welcome welcome welcome to my shop. You have such good tastes to even set FOOT in here. I am Krystos and what I don’t got, I cann’a make you, no problem!” He hugs you and kisses both of your cheeks. “Now, what cann’a I do for you?”

I delivered this in an accent that was half-Italian, half-Greek, and all camp. And even as I was in the middle of it, I realized, too late, that I had created a Moment. The players, four young men from the ages of 18 to 21, stared at me with their mouths hanging open and then burst into hysterical laughter.

“Oh my God, now I thinkI also need a new cloak!”

“Yes, I go with him, in case there’s trouble.”
“I’ll tag along, too!”

Well, shit. We spent the next thirty minutes with me in full-blown improv mode, as I explained to them why my cloaks were three times as much as you’d find anywhere else. I gave Krystos magical needles that produced nearly invisible stitches. I fleeced the characters for a lot of gold, figuring they would write it off as a lesson learned. 150 gold for a cloak, even one with the tag, “very fine” in front of it, is a little much.

Nope. Didn’t matter. They’ve been back to Graystone Bay four times now. And every time, they pick up clothes they had ordered and buy new ones to go with them. They’ve begged Krystos to join them, offered him free passage to Farington, if he would only make a dress uniform for the ship’s captain. They’ve volunteered to set him up in another town. These four guys have turned into virtual clothes horses. They’ve spent more money on clothes than they have magic items and potions. They love The Krystos.

Of course, despite that initial encounter derailing the adventure for half an hour the first time, I now have a hell of a story hook. They are about to leave Graystone Bay for the big city, Farington, and they know that’s where Krystos is from. I’ve got plans to drop Krystos on them at an inopportune moment, begging for their help. Knowing my guys, they will drop everything to help the tailor out. The tailor. They are fighting Devil Fish, struggling against the forces of chaos itself, and slowly assembling a game-breaking artifact for an as-yet-undefined purpose. But they will fight to the death to save Krystos and tell the Devil Fish to go pound salt.

What started out as a note on my session sheet: Krystos—Tailor, big fish in small pond, has now become a notable NPC with a great backstory and, incidentally, a secret that will plug back into the larger campaign.

This is what happens in a sandbox campaign. You improv your way into creating brilliant ideas on the fly. Dropping Krystos into their well-laid plans like a grenade may seem like a way to control the players, but it's not. This is not railroading, as far as I’m concerned. It’s acknowledging the win and using it to move your story along. After all, Krystos happened organically, in an unscripted series of developments. It was the players who set their own hooks on him, not the other way around. 

As a DM, it would be a huge misstep not to use it in the game I’m running.  He will become a very real, very agonizing choice for the group at some point. All I have to do is find the right leverage point, and before they know it Krystos will appear before them in some dramatic fashion; he will burst into tears and say, “Oh, my friends! I don’t know what I’ma gonna dooo! You must help me! My life depends on it!”

As Darth Vader would say: “All too easy.”

Railroading and Sandboxing: Know Thyself

Yesterday I talked about the difference between railroading and sandboxing. Or rather, I discussed why I don’t like either extremes, and it has a lot to do with my upbringing, in the 1980s, awash in moral ambiguities and shades of grey. I have never liked being pushed into a definition, for the simple fact that it tends to discount any other possibilities. In the 1980s, I was very careful about being labeled a “nerd,” back when that meant something very different, and I really didn’t like being called a fan of certain things, like Star Trek, for example. There was this ridiculous notion that you could either like Star Wars or Star Trek, but not both. We were all still getting pushed, metaphorically or otherwise, into lockers, back then, and so rather than being pigeon-holed, I did my best to stay out of it.

But I digress, only a little.

There are more DM Help Tools now than ever before, really too many to count, in the form of Reddit groups, Facebook groups, websites, You Tube channels, Official sites and places like DriveThruRPG and DMsGuild that sell thousands of innovations for the harried DM. There are so many, in fact, that it’s hard to know what to use and what to invest in.

One of my favorite things is the seemingly endless myriad of random table generators available to DMs for little to no cash outlay. Granted, this is a feature of D&D anyway, but the idea that anything you want can be randomized is a freeing idea; whether it’s a d20 list, a d30 list, a 5d6 list, or a d% list, anything from the contents of a person’s pockets to a random dungeon can be made with just a few rolls. I love that.

But I don’t love it in the middle of a game. Not for me, anyway. My DM style is more narrative, and I like to sit back before a game and think about what the best twist, the coolest scene, the most interesting destination would be.

That’s when I use random tables. I brainstorm with them, often rolling several times as a process to get a few ideas running around in my head. This is a huge help for me, and it keeps me from doing a lot of rolling and pausing in the middle of a session.  

I also like to write general guidelines for areas such as the forest they are traipsing around in, or the city they just pulled up to.  Even if they never go to the mountains in the west, or visit the upper crust part of town, I have something there in mind and I don’t have to struggle to make it interesting if they suddenly get the urge to go there. In fact, I only fill out those general details until I need to do more.

The one thing I rely on the most is a list of names I have pulled together beforehand. Players love to “go to the blacksmith” and look for cool weapons. You don’t need to create an interesting blacksmith shop (not unless it’s an essential location for your campaign). All you need is the list of equipment with gold costs, and an NPC. This person doesn’t have to be interesting, but they can be. Most of the time, players just want something new for the quest. Asking them what they are looking for saves you a ton of time. When they tell you, “any magic swords?” You can reply, in character, “Magic swords? Where d’you think you are, anyway, Dimnae? I got regular swords for killin’ regular things, all right?”

Boom. Done. Role-playing.

On your DM notes, you write the NPC name you randomly picked, along with the notation, "black smith, gruff demeanor, scornful of magic."

That’s it. You don’t NEED anything else. If they keep going back to that guy, you can have him warm up to the players, maybe show them his high quality scale mail he makes, and use it to part them from their gold. The players will let you know if they like him and want to see more of him. That’s when you make a short encounter using Tolzan, the Blacksmith and his suddenly missing children.

The other thing I have, ready to go, are a few small encounters tailored to the environment. They all involve combat, and a little treasure. Five room dungeons, or one-page dungeons with a simple set-up and execution. These are my “wandering monsters.” I truck them out whenever the players falter, don’t know where to go, or worse, insist on leaving in the middle of the quest to head down a side alley.

Emirkol  the Chaotic was always
good for spicing things up.

That usually means the players are bored, and it’s up to me to liven things accordingly. These simple, generic encounters can be dressed on the fly to either refer to the existing story, or just provide a bloody break in the decision-making. And whenever possible, tie the seemingly random bits together by moving the clue you were going to bestow on them at the end of the session to something they get for defeating all of the thugs who tried to ambush them.

I know that sounds like you’re circumventing player agency, but if you are a narrative DM who likes to craft a story, then you will learn quickly how to use every part of the buffalo, if you know what I mean. Narratively speaking, there’s no difference between the guard with the crucial letter inside the warehouse and the bandit who jumped the party down that side alley they insisted on investigating.

The real trick to not undercutting player agency is to never let them know you’re doing it. When they take off down that alley, shuffle a few papers, make a roll, react to it, shake your head, and say, “Okay, you’ve not gone more than fifty feet down the alley when you hear footsteps behind you…” and now you’re in the little encounter you’ve been sitting on for three sessions.

The players will do what they do: turn and yell at whomever had the bright idea to NOT go to the warehouse, and then we roll for initiative and in this case, the game is your friend because even simple combat takes time. While they fight, you have plenty of time to restructure what you had planned for them, up to and including leaving the game in a cliffhanger, which is one of my favorite things to do that keeps players engaged.

Preparing ahead of time is not railroading. Picking up your dungeon and setting it back down in front of the party is not railroading. Giving your game some structure in the form of pre-written material is not a cheat. Now, if the players want to hop the fence and you tell them they can't...okay, that IS railroading.

Trying to find that balance of spontaneity and craftsmanship is the thing to cultivate. Play to your own strengths, and shore up your own weaknesses.

Railroading and Sandboxing: When Vocabulary Lets Us Down

One of the great advantages to re-engaging with the RPG hobby after three decades out is that we now have a vocabulary for talking about the concepts we employ when we play. Granted, it’s more of a jargon than a real vocabulary, but that’s an academic nit-pick.

We had that language, too, back in the 1980s. An overpowered campaign was called a Monty Haul, for example. If your barbarian had a light saber, you were in a Monty Haul campaign. But we didn’t have the amount, nor the precision of terms that exist now.

A lot of these terms are borrowed and stolen from Video Game studies, which is deeply ironic in that video game culture owes everything to role-playing games. It’s just as well that we share the cool words and terminology.

Unfortunately, that terminology can be as limiting as it is expressive. Maybe not the words themselves, but in describing conditions they inevitably create a dichotomy, an either-or choice that’s a bit of a fallacy.

I’m talking about “Railroading” and “Sandboxing.” Railroading refers to a campaign or an adventure with no room for player deviation; narrative, plot, and structure are rigidly controlled and any attempts by the players do alter that are summarily defeated. The way it’s talked about, it’s two steps below slaughtering newborns in their cribs.

Sandboxing is shorthand for an “open world” where the players have free reign to roam about the game space, doing what they want on their nickel and being the sole architects of their fates. It’s usually spoken with awed reverence, such as when you first lay eyes on the Ark of the Covenant.

Whenever campaigns are discussed (or disgusted) it’s because these two tensions are in play, much to the howls of outrage from game masters who insist on 100% player agency and no room of any kind to impose their will on the players. Or it’s someone complaining that they got forced into a mission or a dungeon where the DM kept having bad things happen to them and there was no way to avoid it.

I’m nearly 50. I am squarely in the GenX demographic. I don’t like absolutes and never have. Blame it on my formative years, popular culture, whatever. I don’t care. But I don’t think a little railroading is a bad thing in a sandbox campaign. And I suspect that most other people don’t, either. I’m talking about the dungeon master, here.

Oh, sure, there’s certainly a percentage of DMs who run everything on the fly, gleefully pulling stuff out of their ass in response to whatever crazy nonsense the players get up to. I knew a guy like that. Played briefly in his game. His players had been with him for years, and they had developed a co-dependent relationship with one another built on the mutual idea that they were going to fuck each other over as often as possible. So all decisions where made like chess moves, three steps ahead, trying to figure out what the GM (let’s call him Gary) was GONNA do if they did X, Y, or Z.

Games progressed at a glacial pace, and took six hours at a time, most of which was spent arguing about what to do next while also trying to slip role-playing notes into the game narrative. It was madness. But hey, it was a sandbox, and moreover, the players really seemed to enjoy it, for all of their kvetching.

I never liked that. For my games, I mean. I always had something planned. What that plan was depended on the game, the players, the system, you name it. Railroading is usually conflated with campaign structure, but follow me here for a second: if the goal of table top role-playing is to create a story that everyone participates in, doesn’t that implicitly require structure of some kind? Plot, Story, and Character are essential elements for telling a story, even in Improv. Right? And while a sand box game, even one like Gary’s above, is open-ended, eventually players will have to engage with the world. They will require a goal. Conflict. Intrigue. Something, anything, move them forward and roll some dice.

To me, having the characters forced into a mission they don’t want, or having them wake up captured with all of their stuff taken isn’t railroading—it’s bad DMing. Either the DM is a novice, not quite clear on the concept, or just doesn’t “get it” for one reason or another.

My current campaign, the World of Thera, is technically an open world. I say technically because even though the players can do what they want, what they really want is something to do. Even when they were starting out, I never asked them “what do you want to do?” without first giving them some choices: “You can investigate the rumors of the haunted tower, go check out the supposedly abandoned keep, or explore the surrounding wilderness. Or stay here at the trading post and get to know folks. Or something else.”

For new players, that’s really too many choices. I had to remind them that they can do it all, but not at the same time. After that, they quickly prioritized what they wanted to do and we were off and running. I think many modern-day players understand the idea of main quests and side quests thanks to video games, so it’s not a hard sell. Generally speaking, players in the game want the story. They like knowing they are getting clues and info and help and plot points. It’s not railroading to keep them on task.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think there’s much difference, DM-wise, between railroading and sandboxing. You still need the prep (though what you prep is very different) and you still have to pay close attention to what the players are doing. I don’t like it when players go off-script. I can deal with it, mind you; I’ve been doing it for years. I just don’t like it. And the other thing is this: I never let my players know when they are in the weeds.

There are ways to do this that allows you to keep your cool and your street cred as a DM. I’ll talk about that more tomorrow.