 I've been talking for almost an hour about some random bull. Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie and today I'm going to be talking about railroading versus open-ended campaigns. For those of you who don't know, a railroaded campaign is a campaign in which the DM has a very set story that they want the players to follow, and so they are sort of pushing the players to follow exact story beats based off of what they want. That is in contrast to an open-ended campaign in which the players decide pretty much everywhere they go and everything that they do, and it's completely player-driven. And real quick, I'd like to give a brief shout out to my new patrons this month. Ryan Auhn, Obi-Rose, Liam, Marks2688, JRooks92, ChaoticSyne, Mishka, the DM Bear, Sean Orr, Jeffers Korr. Thank you all for pledging to my Patreon, now back to your weekly scheduled usage of my face. So, I personally don't like the term railroading because it brings a negative connotation to it. It does railroading if you intend for it to have a negative connotation, but a lot of the time I just use DM versus player-driven campaigns. And if we're being perfectly honest, and I said this in my writing a campaign guide, you, as a DM, when you're writing your story, are creating a railroaded campaign. Sure, you can have them want to go down different paths to get to the exact same situation, but at the end of the day, you have a story that you want your players to follow and you can totally rewrite everything that you're doing, but more often than not, you're not going to do that. If you are going to do that, props to you, you're still writing a railroaded campaign, you're just changing it based off of what the players do a bit. And that's not a bad thing at all. A DM-driven campaign works a lot of the time. Most D&D campaigns are like that. They are railroaded, and they're not West Marsh games where the DM literally has no notes outside of what the players have already done and just lets the players go off and do their own thing. That's a much, much harder way of playing the game, that's a much harder story to do, but props to the people who could accomplish it. I don't even know if I could, but it's the difference between railroaded and open-ended. What you're generally going to find with the two is that open-ended campaigns, you're going to be given a lot more freedom. So if you really want the freedom to do anything and everything that you want, then you're going to want to find an open-ended West Marsh style campaign. But what you're often going to see the drawback of in those games is that they're not going to have as rich of a story as other ones. They might, you can have that perfect DM that can accomplish everything and just get a man who can do both. But more often than not, that's the issue you're going to run into, is that it's going to feel very off the cuff. And if you're okay with that, have fun. With railroaded campaigns, you are not going to get as much freedom. There is a story that is going to tug you along and you're going to end up following that story for as long as the DM wants to. The bonus to that is a lot of the time you will have, because you're following a story, a better story overall. Granted, you won't be able to affect that story as much as you could in an open-ended campaign, but that is the rub. Do you want to be playing Lord of the Rings? Or do you want to be playing Lord of the Rings online? And again, it bears repeating, neither of those options are inherently bad. You just have to know upfront what you're getting yourself into. I myself, my own homebrew games, prefer doing a mix of both, which of course everybody's going to say, oh yeah, I prefer doing a mix of both. What I mean is I'm doing a railroaded campaign and that is what's happening. But through all of the side stories and the little bits, the traveling sections, the bits where they happen to run into a tiny little village that break up the monotony of them constantly following a story, those bits right there are the things that I'm going to keep track of, those things where they might accidentally offend a guard of a tiny little town, and I'm going to keep a little note of that so that maybe somewhere down the line that comes back to, like, bite them or it turns into its own bigger thing where the guard comes to arrest this dude, but oh no, a monster happens to attack right then and there. And so now, inadvertently, the party has a group of people to assist them with what would otherwise be a very difficult mission. That is how you fool your players into thinking that you aren't really railroading them, is to have a bunch of smaller things that the players do have complete and total control over. And with that complete and total control, they will be giving you more fuel to throw onto your own campaigns. And that is really cool when the tiny stuff affects your story because then you might have your players offend the guards, but because of the way that your story is written, because you want the chivalry to have, like, a central presence, maybe that will affect the main story. And those instances where the tiny nothings affect the overarching plot are the things that really make D&D breathe, the thing that really fleshes out everything. I feel like I'm just doing an impromptu how to write a D&D campaign video. God, I loved writing that video. I could just talk on forever about how to make a campaign. But this is how railroading versus open-ended works. If you are making a completely open-ended game, then you don't have to worry too much about story. You can have, like, minor little plot points. You're basically doing the opposite. You'll have tiny little instances of story that are just strewn about, tossed off into the ether, and then you spawn something off of that. It can be a very, very rewarding style of storytelling, but it isn't as easy to do. And when you're being a DM, DMing is hard. Sometimes you just don't want to do the very hard thing for the one role in D&D that is already hard to do. And when you're railroading, you don't have to tell your players that you're railroading. I cannot tell you how many times I have had the players look at this map that I've created and then say, hey, what town do you want to go to? Do you want to go over this way? Do you want to go over that way? There are a bunch of, like, different places that you can go to. There's a city right here, a city right there, and they haven't gone to any of them. So newsflash, they're the same city. If you go off to the north, then, and you go to, like, Schwarmenstein, or if you go off to the west and go to Westerburg, the only difference is the name. I'm literally going to keep the exact same plot points, exact same NPCs, exact same characters, and I'm literally just going to plug them into whichever place you decide to go to. There's no secret. There is no choice. I control everything for I am God. But more likely, it's just because I don't have it in me to write two different cities just off the cuff and then have you not go to one. It's part of why railroading works and is more likely to be used is because your players will never know what they actually are and aren't in control of if you do not tell them. It doesn't affect them as long as they don't know about it and as long as they can't figure it out on their own because once they start going to the exact same village three times in a row, perhaps there is an issue here with the villages that they go to. Perhaps they're all the exact same place. I remember when Critical Role Season 2, they just got through, I think it was Ushorhas. Matt gave them a big old map and he's like, Hey, where do you want to go? And they all look at each other and they're like, Uh, I don't know. I don't know where I want to go. How about we just go this way? And I'm sure to some extent, he just took his story and threw it in that direction because they decided to go that way. That is one of the things with railroading that will make it feel like you're doing an open-ended campaign, but you're really not. But as I always say, check with your players. Ask them what they would like. Of course they're going to say, I would love as much freedom as possible, but you are the DM and you want to make a good story, so I'm going to compromise. And if they don't say that, well that's going to be a little bit weird. But I don't really think there's much else to talk about. I've really said everything that there is to be said about railroading versus open-ended games. Like it's not like I'm teaching you how to be a railroader or an open-ender, but that's like the contrast between the two. So I hope you enjoyed this video. Please, if you want to support me, check out all my social media in the description below. But yeah, Davi out.