Hi there, everyone, and welcome back to your seat at the Epic Table! Today’s topic is a product of a D&D 5th Edition one-shot I ran this past week, but I think it’s more generally applicable as well.
Everybody hates the railroad (which, for the totally new among us, is the term for stories that don’t have any choices at all–the characters are “on rails”). Horror stories abound of DMs, GMs, and MCs who tell their stories whether the players like it or not. Meanwhile, articles like The Alexandrian’s “Xandering the Dungeon” are considered practically mandatory reading in dungeon and adventure design. Even in digital RPGs, “open world” games where players can go anywhere are practically the gold standard nowadays. To be sure, it seems as though nonlinear pathing is always the way to go.
Or is it?
That’s right: your buddy is going to argue for railroading. Well, not railroading—I don’t think anybody would enjoy a game with no choice at all. But I’m certainly going to argue that a nonlinear nature by itself isn’t enough to make a good adventure or campaign. There’s more work that need to be done in order to create a truly memorable experience.
I’m going to work through this using the typical D&D/Pathfinder model of dungeons, but for folks playing games more like Apocalypse World: this also applies to decision-making trees in your games as well. When I talk about a room in a given dungeon, imagine I’m talking about a location on the threat map or a conversation with the gang leader. It’s not quite the same as The Alexandrian’s content nodes, but it’s a similar concept: by “room” I mean “discrete piece of game content.”
Meaningless Doors
One of the one-shots I ran this week was with a group of people who had literally zero experience with any RPG ever. One of them has been watching some streams of Baldur’s Gate 3, which helped, but that’s all. The scenario in play: the group was contracted to check on a wizard named Sorath who the local town hadn’t heard from in a few months. So, to his wizard tower we went!
Given the inexperience of the players involved, you might expect that there was a point where everything kind of ground to a halt for a moment. You would be absolutely right. When was it? It wasn’t during the introductions, or getting into character. It wasn’t during the stealthy and cautious approach to the tower. (Fortunately, the Rogue’s player was the player who’d watched some BG3; they had a little bit of an idea of how sneaking worked.) It wasn’t even during the first combat, which featured an impressive use of Entangle by the new Druid to absolutely gank a group of stirges.
No, it was after that—when the players encountered two closed doors coming off a hallway.
Now, here is where I made my mistake. I’ll freely admit that I prepped this one-shot pretty late the night before, and I missed a couple of important points. The point I missed here? I forgot to do anything to differentiate between the doors. They were both wooden doors sitting in stone walls, as far as the players knew. One led to a bedroom/study with a hint and one to a storage room with a secret exit, but of course they didn’t know that. Finally, one of them saved me by asking which door looked like it had been used more; I had them roll a skill check and told them it was the bedroom one. The game moved on.
Now, consider the following map. This is from an actual WotC module (Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage). Here’s what it looks like:
If we look at this from the perspective of nonlinearity, it’s absolutely great! You can go in absolutely any room you like. But when I played through this with some friends, we had a terrible time for much the same reason: for the majority of rooms, all the doors look the same. We ended up going to each one in more or less counterclockwise order because there didn’t seem much of a point in spending more time on it. That’s basically the same as if they had all been in one long counterclockwise line.
And in both parties’ cases, that means that it doesn’t matter in what order the doors are opened.
Due to the linear nature of time, your players are going to encounter your adventure’s rooms in a certain order. (If you have an alternative to this, I and several thousand scientists would be fascinated to hear from you.) If the order of the rooms really doesn’t matter, then they’re going to get basically the same experience as if you, the DM, had picked the order for them. Why? Because it doesn’t matter who selects it if the selection is essentially arbitrary. Per William James, “A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”
How To Avoid This
You have to give the party information.
In the case of my one-shot, I let them know that there were wear marks on one of the doors from being opened and closed frequently. Dungeon of the Mad Mage, to its credit, does this on a couple of the doors in this area by having sounds from inside the room be audible from outside of them. That kind of information doesn’t seem like much, but it changes the entire calculus of how a party approaches a given door.
Why? Because now, the party is making an informed decision when it’s deciding which door to open. The party has a reason to pick the door it’s picking, even if that reason is to avoid all of its other options. In other words, the party has made a choice that matters. There’s a reason things are being done in a certain order. It’s not arbitrary or random any more.
Note that this is absolutely more work on your part, but it’s necessary work. And yes, I did just admit to not doing that earlier in this post. (If you take away a second piece of GMing advice here, it should probably be “midnight is not the best time to create reliably high-quality adventure content.”) I forgot to make that choice of doors one with some information attached to it, which threw a wrench into the adventure when a new group wasn’t sure how to approach the situation. Sure, a more experienced group might have just picked a door at random… but they also might have gotten stuck checking each one for traps over and over.
This also has the side benefit of making your rooms more unique and immersive, because you’re going to have to create things to give out that information. Rooms are going to have sounds, or smells (the pungent stench of mildew, anyone?), or vibrations, or something to distinguish them—and something’s going to have to cause those sensations. Sensations are a great way to draw players into a game, and giving them a logical source gives you a little more descriptive text to play with when they do finally open that door.
It’s Deadline And I Can’t Think Of A Good “Nonlinear” Pun
The entire point of nonlinear adventures is to avoid railroading. But the thing is that railroading is something to be avoided because it doesn’t offer the players any choices. A nonlinear map may offer a lot of choices, but unless the difference between those choices is apparent there’s effectively no difference between them. And if there’s no difference between the choices, they might as well not be choices at all. Add in more information. Let your players have a reason to decide between doors. That way, the choices they make will leaving them cheering their decisions or cursing them—rather than wondering what the point was in even bothering to make one.
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