RWBY GM Ramblings Part 2: The "Railroad" Effect
Welp, here I am, back at it again with another installment of the hit series “Newb GM has no idea what he’s talking about, but by golly, he’s trying!” Today, I want to pontificate about the “Railroad” effect in tabletop gaming, and how tight of a hold a GM should have on a story.
For those of you who aren’t in the know, “railroading” is what happens when the GM has a very tight grip on the story, and has usually planned out the whole thing ahead of time. The opposite would be like what Matt Mercer is doing in Critical Role; creating a huge sandbox world and letting the players run around in it, and having their actions and choices create the plot, which doesn’t necessarily ever have to end. As a new GM, that’s a terrifyingly stressful idea. A TON of planning has to go into making a sandbox world, and while my first game isn’t sandbox-y, I’d like to do one like that… Eventually.
I guess if I’m gonna talk about railroading, I should talk about my game; I chose RWBY Tabletop (it’s actually called that, more details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rwbytabletop/comments/6kbubf/the_unofficial_rwby_tabletop_rpg_update_62917/) because, for one, it was an intuitive yet simple system I could easily wrap my head around, two, I had a group of friends I was already hosting board game nights for and I wanted to take it to the next level, and lastly (and most significantly, as far as this post is concerned), I really love the thematic cohesion and aesthetic of the RWBY Universe. It’s got a ton of tightly knit ideas I could use and mine from; I really wanted to tell a story set in that world.
Because RWBY is such a tightly knit story, it makes sense that the story I wanted to tell would involve railroading the players to a certain extent; if they decided they didn’t want to go after the mysterious Ludus (the BBEG of my campaign, that even after eight sessions they still don’t know a ton about), that’d be it. I wouldn’t have my story. But, I don’t want to always railroad the players in everything they do; that just wouldn’t be fun. So I’ve created a faux sandbox system via Roll20, in that I give them a world or city map, set out a handful of locations, and let them visit and discover those locations as they see fit. Then, I just have an “all roads lead to” scenario in mind for the end of that “chapter” of the story. But, depending on the player’s choices and where they visit and when, that end scenario could be WILDLY different. It’ll still involve Big Bad X and Shocking Reveal Y, but everything else is up to the players. One of my favorite parts is the collaborative storytelling aspect; picking up what the players are giving me.
But inevitably, you have a day like today. We had a session that I personally wasn’t the proudest of; I had an entire city of stuff for the players to choose from, but I felt like I did a bad job in actually making them want to explore it. Basically, there was a lot of me railroading the campaign because the players, for whatever reason, weren’t giving me a whole lot of input. They fought the giant monster they were asked to kill last session, went straight to the quest giver, and dropped off their proof of kill; they went straight to a local inn for an early night’s sleep, passing by the opportunity to talk to a rookie thief who wanted help catching a big score, and most frustratingly, when they were interacting with NPC’s, I felt like I was doing all of the talking. This was probably a combo of a few things; tonight was a weird night at a weird time, right in the middle of the day between everyone’s shifts (4pm to 7:30pm). The night started off halfway through a battle from two weeks ago because we had work interrupt it. And I was doing a bad job making the world interesting enough for them to interact with. Because of that, I basically railroaded them into a fight they shouldn’t have had; I had designed it to be the first fight they had in Vacuo, but last time, they surprised me and went off the rails; that’s what started the side quest to kill the giant monster. Instead, a mercenary group and that mission was their intro.
It resulted in a very forced confrontation because I wasn’t sure what to do, and in hindsight, I should have re-introduced a certain character I’ve been hyping, and it would have fixed all of my problems. They wouldn’t have gotten the story as I had originally planned it, and they wouldn’t have gotten all of the details, but that would have just meant they could continue to figure them out later.
The more I think about it, the more I think I should have scrapped my original plan for Vacuo and supported them in what the players were deciding. I did have huge story reveals that I was super excited to give out, but they would have gotten them eventually, anyways. I was too gung ho about a certain scenario, even though it no longer made sense, either thematically, or as part of the plot.
Obviously, I’m still trying to find a nice balance, but I’ll get there. I do think these posts are gonna help me get better, because it forces me to critically think about what I’ve been doing and where I went wrong. But anyways, I’ve rambled enough for now; thanks for actually putting up with all of this. Here’s another cookie, just for you (::)
