Roads Versus Railroads

If you have ever played a pre-written adventure sometimes it can feel like you are just walking down a hallway. This can be okay as a lot of times your characters are walking down a dungeon hallway. The decisions you are making in this situation are what doors do you want to open and how to fight the monsters.

However when a tabletop RPG gets boiled down to only this it can feel like you are on a train track just going. You may choose to blow the horn or disconnect the caboose, but there is only one direction you can go. It can feel like you are stuck on a track, and this is where the term rail-roading comes from.

I first started playing a little bit with the 3.5 edition of DnD but never got into a long term campaign until 4th edition. A lot of what I played had that feeling of being on a train track, but I was new to DnD so I was still trying to understand the rules and just enjoying the scenery. However once I started playing with more experienced DMs and seeing games online. I saw the open world type choices that were available to them, and quickly what I had been playing felt like a video game with extra work. This is what inspired me to DM knowing the limitless possibilities of a table top RPG how it can change to the players and the frustration when it remains rigid. You want your players to become DMs, the more the better, but preferably not out of frustration!

To keep players interested for the long haul they need choices or at least the illusion of choice so that the world feels real, this is called verisimilitude. Well how do you do that, DMs are people too and have day jobs and we cant create every aspect of the world so the players can just go wherever. Your absolutely right, but there are a few things you can do here.

Improv it all - have your notes about the world and make it up as you go. Create things as you play and flesh out the things the players seem most interested in between sessions. While this can be awesome, it is understandable if its not something that everyone can do, and sometimes people who are good at it can even get stumped. Some RPGs even encourage collaborative world building and is meant to be made up as you go so maybe a different game could help here. However if the thought of this makes you anxious or doesn't sound like your cup of tea then maybe...

Get a premade campaign - this goes the complete opposite direction of improv. In a premade campaign the world has been laid out for you. All the locations your players can go to, whats there and who is there. All you need to do is react to the actions of your party, and the campaign book serves as a guide to how to do that. The most recent Wizards of the Coast campaigns Curse of Strahd and Storm Kings Thunder do an excellent job of this. Then again maybe you want to do something original this is were building roads come in.

Putting your players behind the wheel - when you drive your car it's rare for most people to drive off the road. Typically we stick to the roads, we go to the grocery store, our jobs, the movies. Yet we choose which roads we want to take: the highway to get there as soon as possible, the back roads to avoid traffic, or maybe the scenic route to take in what is around you. You can take this in mind when you are building sandboxes for your world for the players to drive around in.

NPCs can be good passengers to have in the car as well. They can suggest interesting places to go, or warn of dangers that lay in certain directions. Just make sure you don't have these NPCs take the wheel or constantly steer the party out of danger. Because you are no longer giving the illusion of infinite choices.

Also I want to stress just because your the DM doesn't mean you have to know everything! It is perfectly okay to say hey lets take a 5-10 min snack break while I think about what is going to happen here. You are just as  much a player as the PCs, and remember it's a game for you to enjoy. Don't put unneeded pressure on yourself.

No matter which approach your take just remember to stick to it and do it a lot. Repetition will only make you better at weaving a world for your players to create wonderful stories in.

So will watching people better than you who have been doing it longer! Matt Colville has an excellent video on the subject you should give it a watch.