Railroading has gotten such a bad rap in RPG circles that we forget it is one end on a continuum. The opposite end is aimless drifting, with a DM who sits back and throws no hooks, injects little or no action. I’ve played in these games. They are THE WORST.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
Too much choice is an empty wasteland. No choice is just the DM talking while the players listen. My experience is that most DMs tend toward railroading when they start, then back away when/if they gain exposure to other styles.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
However, a lot of the anti-railroading advice is pretty bad, IMO. You can either way over-prep and over every possibility, or just have stuff happen regardless of which choice the PCs make. They’ll never know you pulled that trick unless they read your notes, right?
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
That’s lame advice, because it’s just secret railroading. My take on solving for this follows: Learn to become as active a player in the game as everyone else. As DM you are a player. You are playing everyone the players aren’t. You have infinite characters.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
This is why DMing is better than playing. I mean, infinity versus one is an easy choice, right?
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
The challenge I see is that DMs are too static in their thinking. We say prep and imagine maps, and scripted encounters, and neat index cards filled with all the stats we need. This is not how games work. Games are interactive. Static positioning is a relic of the 20th century.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
Prep for a session by learning to think like your NPCs. Play them like the players play their characters. That means DOING STUFF, it means giving your NPCs very personal, vengeful, hateful motivations to completely fuck up the characters.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
It means getting the players to buy into concrete goals for their PCs, like founding a new kingdom or finding a lost artifact, and then throwing NPCs into the mix who want to stop or foil that.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
Most campaigns do the opposite. The NPC has a plan, the PCs need to stop it. That’s sensible, but it fundamentally takes agency away from the characters. It’s also super common because it’s probably the most viable model for published campaigns.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
Published campaigns have a hard time being about your characters because we, as publishers, have no idea who they are. So we are stuck talking about the bad guys. You don’t have that drawback, so if you have the bandwidth to homebrew lean into that.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
Published campaigns have a hard time being about your characters because we, as publishers, have no idea who they are. So we are stuck talking about the bad guys. You don’t have that drawback, so if you have the bandwidth to homebrew lean into that.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
Start your campaign by forcing the players to tell you how the characters want to change the world. That’s your campaign. Now, put people in their way. Those are the NPCs you are playing. Your campaign is ready to roll.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
While I’m tweeting a bunch before bed – RPGs are distinct in tabletop gaming (and maybe in all of gaming) for being descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, rules sets, and a lot of bad/misguided design comes from forgetting that.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018
Thread. Find empathy within your story and the characters you build within the world. Use that to guide the story. #dnd thx Mike Empathy, yes! RPGs are perhaps the most emphatic game form out there. I’ve never thought of it that way before but now a ton of stuff makes sense.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 31, 2018