Confessions of an Average DM 3 (life on the rails)

Welcome again weary adventurer to this little blog, a bit of a delay getting it out but we move on to our next topic of story in a campaign. in all honesty I must admit when it comes to railroading I can think of a few times I have done some rather egregious attempts of railroading. I have improved over the time as a DM and have had around a years worth of DMing experience all told (only really been playing table top RPGs for little over 18 months so 2 thirds of that as a DM) some examples I have done include making it rain rather violently so the party had to stay in a town for plot to happen because the party where simply (an admittedly sensibly) flee the town before bad shit happened  =_= not a very good way to handle it and the campaign soon fell apart shortly after not just because of this but it was one of the first warning signs in hindsight.

Railroading the Eberron way

 This moves on to my main point (how well is up to you) how important is story in a campaign , well it really does depend on the DM and the players of course I my self like having a very plot-centric campaign in my own setting using my best ideas when ever I can this means however I use the rails rather strictly, however I have learnt to use rails in a good way I simply use the characters backgrounds (which I insist on my players having at least some form of backstory) as a means to move the story forward sometimes successfully sometimes not so much having villains be part of an an important plot hook for a player is a good way of keeping the player interested but has its own problems such as the player thinking that the campaign is about their character and what if that character dies what then, simple you improvise but in a more open ended campaign just using a world as a back drop you can get around a character death or even a total party kill by shifting focus to somewhere else entirely with new characters (admittedly this is depends very much on the group) but if the actions of the old party did effect the world for the new party the players might like this touch and it would be  a good way to improve your abilities at building a campaign setting.

I think I should talk a little more about open world or sand-box type campaigns it pretty much is  a type of campaign with little in the way of a main story, well this can be untrue and in some great campaigns I'm pretty sure it can be very untrue the trick with the open world campaigns with plot is well a lot of things happen behind the scenes (and therefore in the DMs head) if you can pull off a world like that more power to you because it will take a lot of effort (and lots of notes). if you have an idea for a story line in this world for the party to interact with then one of the better ways is to make changes to it if need be such as instead of one country being involved in some form of dastardly plot to destroy another make it one that is nearer to the characters a cheap tactic I admit but it would feel better over the party is suddenly transported to another part of the world entirely against their will the party are far less likely to rebel if you do it the first way.

All in all plot rails can be a good way to control a campaign as long as you don't make them the only option it can lead to a fair few unhappy players and then an unhappy DM. Well that's all I have to say for story focused versus open world settings, this is Owler signing off for now.