Since we’re now talking about the influence of player input on a campaign, let’s look at the authorial role of the players in some greater detail. As the GM, you have the prerogative to set out the basic plot, and wide latitude over the world and people in it. However, GMing is equally about reacting to the players’ interests and actions. The lack of control over the protagonists’
actions by a central authority is both significant and practically unique to RPGs.
Because of this, the outcome of each adventure is unknown—both to the players and the GM—until it has happened. You can guess, and you may be right the vast majority of the time.
But you don’tknow what the players will do ahead of time, or what the result of those actions will be.
This presents something of a conundrum for a GM trying to write an adventure. During the course of a given game session, the GM is expected to present the framework on which the story will be built, as well as running numerous NPCs complete with personalities, desires, important dialog, and abilities. The GM will also describe maps of the areas being explored, present obstacles that will challenges the other players, and dictate the events to which the players must respond.
Optimally the GM would be doing all of this on the fly, reacting to the players’ actions and generating material as the game progresses. Unfortunately, very few GMs are capable of producing challenging and balanced locations (be they dungeon, alien world, or office complex), sophisticated dialog, and intriguing plot twists off the top of their head. Preparing all of that information can take many more hours than are spent at the table actually playing. A GM may be planning out elements of adventures and foreshadowing events weeks ahead of time, anticipating the players’ actions as best they can.
This guessing game results in a level of tension between the need of the players to have the freedom to play their characters and the need of the GM to be able to generate content in advance. If the players are not free to follow their own course of action the game will suffer
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or perhaps even break down entirely. On the other hand, if the players decide to go in a totally unexpected direction a GM can hardly be expected to come up with a totally different adventure, on the spot, which will be of the same quality as what he or she just spent the past week preparing. Every GM will eventually arrive at a point where they need to resolve that tension, typically by placing some limit on the freedom of the players to make choices.
It’s widely accepted that limiting player freedom is bad. Thereason removing player control is so bad is that it steals their authorial power. It kicks the leg out from under one of the foundational pillars of what makes a roleplaying game. It transforms the game from what is fundamentally a collaboration between partners into a one-sided relationship in which the GM dictates the story to the players. It robs the game of its power, and the playershate it.
Resolving this tension in a positive way can be difficult, and many GMs miss the mark.
I’m going to suggest some ways to deal with this problem in a collaboration-friendly manner;
but first I want to point out some of the most prevalent ways in which GMs steal the players’
authorial power.
Railroading
When confronted with a situation where they are losing control of the plot, the most common GM tactic is to bully, cajole, or trick the players into following the preordained course that has been laid out for them. These methods are collectively known as Railroading.
Railroading is to the tabletop RPG what the Rail Shooter is to video games. The players are essentially on a track that leads inexorably along the path the GM has devised. All wrong paths are blocked, all wrong actions are punished, all wrong objectives are impossible to achieve. Only actions which advance towards the destination the GM has predetermined can possibly succeed.
By far, theworst campaign I was ever involved in fell apart because of this sort of railroading.
After several near riots—and a nearly successful hijacking of the plot—the game ended with the players sitting there for an hour while the GM simply gave a monologue explaining the climactic final battle. We were not even permitted the illusion of participating by being allowed to roll dice.
That is, however, a particularly egregious example. You rarely run into railroading quite that severe. Rather, railroading is often a subtle and insidious problem, committed in small doses by a GM with the best of intentions and accepted by players who don’t want to fight over minor
details. As a game master it can be tempting to simply kill every player idea which strays away from the path you had intended. While on a certain level it’s alright to “dead-end” ideas that are completely off the mark, in the long run it’s better to adapt the story around what the players are trying to do.
Years ago, I ran a D&D game in which the party was negotiating to gain access to a nobleman’s private library. Soon after arriving in the city where the nobleman lived, they were visited by a messenger—a gnome, as I recall—who gave them a letter from the nobleman asking them to meet him at a specific time. For reasons that have never been clear to me, the players decided that the gnome was suspicious and decided to follow him.
In my mind, the gnome was a nobody. He didn’t even have a name. I didn’t have anything planned for him, so I tried to kill this plot divergence. I had the gnome perform some incredibly mundane actions, hoping the players would get bored and move on. Instead, they followed him across the entire length of the city, until he finally went home.
Now, at this point nobody had really done anything wrong; either myself or the players.
Perhaps they should have given up a little sooner, but for whatever reason, they were interested.
So once the gnome went into his home, the party decided—again, I haveno idea why—that they would break into his home, take him captive, and search the building.
At this point, I had two good options. The first would have been to simply pause the game for a moment and tell the players flat out, “Hey guys, this guy is really honestly a nobody. Maybe you should move on to something else.”
Not the best option, but sometimes you have to give in to the nature of the game as a game and do whatever is going to get things moving again, regardless of how you rationalize it in-character.
Option number two would have been for me to make up something interesting for this guy to be. It wouldn’t have had to be terribly complex, but I should have at least given them some kind of reward for pursuing the guy. This was potentially the best option, assuming I could have come up with something good on the spot.
Option three—which was, sadly, the direction I went—was to try to shut the players down however I could. Note that I said there were two good options, because this was where the railroading really starts. I basically turned this guy’s house into a fortress. I stated that the door was locked and un-pickable and all of the windows had bars. After several unsuccessful attempts
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to break their way in, the players attempted toscale the building in order to get access from the roof. So I informed them the walls were flat surfaces, too slick for them to climb. They pulled out a rope and grappling hook, so the gnome responded by cutting their rope from a second story window and overturning a chamber-pot on their heads.
By this point the “mysterious gnome” sub-plot had been going on for over an hour, and the game had devolved into a narrative shoving match between the players trying to get into this random nobody’s house and me trying to come up with reasons they can’t. Having reached this point,everyone was way too frustrated with each other to continue, and we had no other choice than to completely stop the game for the night and come back to it fresh the next week.
Now, while not every instance of railroading is quite so. . . mun-dane, there is a common thought process on the part of the GM: an idea that there is a “right” thing and a “wrong” thing for the players to be doing, and if they don’t do what you were expecting then they arewrong, and that wrongness needs to be corrected, by force if necessary.