Philosophy is regularly the #1 or #2 degree in rankings of intelligence or pattern recognition, etc, as well. Its only competitors are Physics and Math.
@@NiteSaiya You left out improv. Easily his most impressive talent or skill. I'm not saying that to minimize the significance of his degrees, actually just the opposite. There's an endless sea of people with advanced degrees in physics, philosophy and math, go to your local university there's tons of em. I challenge anyone to find 5 regular ol' non-famous people who are as good or better than Brennan Lee Mulligan when it comes to improv comedy or being a Dungeon Master. While it is true that neither of those are things sound like super *impressive* skills to have, they sure as hell are when you're at his level!
This is what doing something your entire life gets you. Not just dm'ing, but the improv and acting in general, writing, and being engrossed in a hobby from a young age leads to extreme expertise in a skill. Matt is similar, and Aabria as well, but Brennan is something else. He talked at one point in the same discussion about death making everything around it seem absurd by comparison, and that was what really made it click that he has a fundamental understanding of *life* that feels so incredibly unique, and translates directly into being a DM that I think most other people just simply don't have.
Isn't that kind of like the idea of the Absurd from Existentialism? I read about that a while ago a bit but idk. He might have gotten that from his philosophy major maybe
Brennan: crafts an incredibly insightful and well thought out metaphor that makes a complex idea very easy to visualize and to understand… Also Brennan: …does that make sense?
@@stinkmonger It makes more sense in context but what he's saying is basically that as a DM his goal is to create circumstances where his players can make optimal gameplay decisions that SIMULTANEOUSLY provide interesting arcs/stories for their characters, rather than having to choose between one or the other. So rather than having to choose between min/maxing vs. making a cool story, the DM makes it so that the players make a cool story BY min/maxing, if that makes sense.
He has a similar, great conversation with Lou Wilson in his Adventuring Academy series, where he explains to Lou that as a DM it's kind of this strange situation where, you as the DM have to look at your close friends playing D&D with you, and knowing what those players want, and having to say "not yet". Because there is very little satisfaction for the players in giving them exactly what they want. The harder it feels like they earned it, the better the payoff is. The example I think he gives in that episode is something to the effect of: "That would be like having a PC's backstory involve hunting down the person that killed their parents, and starting the campaign off with meeting and killing that bad guy in the first session." -- it would be unsatisfying, there's no journey. You need to introduce that bad guy multiple times, having them get away every time, wring that story out for every drop of drama you can squeeze out of it until the final showdown where you've ratcheted up the tension to an all time high.
Shit... that scenario of killing off the bad guy in the first game would make for such a good VtM game, lol. Player has this whole big backstory about their murdered so-and-so and they're on this quest for justice/vengeance... a kindred notices, likes the cut of their jib, and embraces them, giving them the tools they need to actually get that justice/vengeance. Then, the player actually accomplishes that character goal in the first game... but now they've fed their beast and the struggle (and game) truly begins. :D
Can confirm, first campaign had my big bad in the third session. Was very unsatisfying as we almost killed it in the first 'surprise' round (DM handed those out like nothing and we usually merked his bosses within the first two turns). Double unsatisfying as my big bad was a Fiend so his death was meaningless. I quit the campaign after six more sessions and it fell apart some time afterwards.
This makes lous reactions all the better, because he knows he can react like Brennan is the bad guy because he IS the bad guy... Brennan can laugh off all the jokingly mean things they say because he knows they know it will work out at some point
@@patrickmcisaac3142 That is the attitude that a GM should try to foster. The GM is the adversaries, but the GM is not Adversarial. A GM shouldn't play the 'I am out to kill the players' mentality, instead the 'How can I make the story interesting and fun and challenging'. Anyone can be a killer GM and throw armies of powerful enemies after the players, rocks fall everyone dies... Game over, GM wins. But a fun GM, at least to me, is one who uses dirty tricks to challenge the characters, keep them on their toes and make victory seem like it was snatched from the jaws of defeat and if they played slightly different it would have ended in failure. So the player reacts to the GM as 'You're the bad guy now and I hate what you just did', same as an audience member just hates the villain in a movie or TV show but can't stop watching to see what happens next because its so interesting.
@@MrSoup-zs4rd Something I'd thought would be cool, and I wonder if you'd have enjoyed it, is taking a fiend or an undead nemesis and just having him keep coming back to life after you kill him. Yes he dies in session three and is returned to hell, but then three sessions later some idiot teenagers playing bloody mary summon him to the mortal plane again. The adventure becomes about sealing him in one of those ridiculous dungeon temples we're always delving.
I assume I'm not the only one who forgot that he was talking about a game when he said: "You achieved the shape of a story while you were trying your hardest to go in a straight line."
I'm so glad the greater Critical Role fandom are getting time with Brennan, he's such a wonderful DM and he's really earned his recent place in the spotlight
@@TheMotherConfesser it stands for Dungeon Master. it’s the person who runs the world and essentially acts as the judge/referee of a Dungeons & Dragons game - describing the environment, designing the battles, playing the NPCs, (sometimes) building the world, coming up with the villain, etc.
@@marcolechuga5292 I recommend watch his episodes of Game Changer too (also just all of game changer is great but Brennan's hyper-competitiveness is top tier on that show)
The whole irrigation thing with the water following that path because it's technically the least resistance but being a convoluted path is so freakin' brilliant honestly
I think a lot of players that complain about "railroading" need to be willing to meet the GM half way. Like a lot of GMs, my first time running a game was running a published adventure. In my case Crown of the Kobold King. Which is a dungeon focused adventure. There are a lot of reasons a character might want to go to the dungeon in crown of the kobold king. To save some kidnapped children, to get loot because its an ancient dwarf fortress, to find hidden lore, to gain favor with the town and some of the rich and powerful people who have sway in the area, to gain renown for defeating a villain terrorizing the region. But there was a player who was just completely against going to the dungeon "because its not what there character wanted to do" but the actual reason was that they came in hating the idea of doing a published adventure and we're just adamant that no matter what hooks were provided they weren't going to that dungeon because good roleplayers don't do what the adventure says. (Not that they would ever themselves try to GM of course, or have any suggestions about what else the party should do here) Being super railroady isn't the best way to run a game, but i do think as a player you have a job to actively try to engage with the game and find things to do.
Jesús Christ if you don't want to play the game the group is playing, the right answer isn't to act out your frustrations by playing the game as a character who doesn't want to do the adventure. Just fucking. Just fucking say "pre-made adventures aren't really my thing. I'm gonna sit this one out" for fucks sake
Definitely. If a player is just being obstinate, and purposefully goes where they know the story isn't headed, and tries to fight the DM, you won't go anywhere. If a dragon attacks your village and people beg you for help, it's pretty obvious the plot involves doing something with said dragon and village. But if a player says, "nah, fuck that." And proceeds to try to sail to another continent just because, then the game falls apart.
I heard it said once, I think by Brennan, that if you are playing as a character that won't engage with the main story hook because "it's not what my character would do," then you should let that character leave and play one that will.
If you are ever in a situation where you are purposefully ignoring hooks the DM is begging you to take, then youre trolling. Butt if you have a purposefully antagonistic trolly DM with a history of brutally baiting you into death all the time, then maybe we can talk.
That's the thing, players should know what they are getting into when they create a character for the campaign. If I, as a DM am running a Curse of Strahd campaign, I make it very clear to the players that Curse of Strahd is a gothic, dark and very deadly adventure where death is a very real possibility, where the entire setting is trying to kill you, and this is the tone of Barovia. Players who know that that is the case and actively create a character who won't go to Barovia and won't engage in the macabre and dark setting are wasting everyone else's time who showed up at the table.
it seems like what causes players to resent "railroading" is when the dm cant quite manifest the illusion of choice, or subtly convince them into making choices in line with the story. I think railroading was a popular complaint with The Adventure Zone because Griffin, a (seemingly) new and inexperienced DM, couldn't quite sell the illusion of choice or that there was any other path than the one he laid out for them. At least to the audience. like he'd planned the overarching story first and then made the pcs fit into it, instead of the other way around. on the opposite end of the spectrum, there have been moments in campaign 3 where matt sitting back and letting the players decide what to do entirely led to them floundering and at a loss for what to do. i feel like much of their character exposition was driven by a lack of anything else to do at that moment and just trying to kill time until something happened. thankfully things picked up after that, but brennans understanding of how necessary it is to "railroad" players while also making them feel like theyre naturally following the best path forward speaks to his expertise.
I still don’t really agree that TAZ was even railroady. I think it was just heavily edited down so you never got to see when the players sat there and figured things out, they wanted it to feel more like a show and less like they were playing a game along with the fact that it was a lot of their first time playing a game this way. Griffin was definitely a planner, but it was clear the players surprised him in a lot of ways and things often went off the rails. Personally I only think something is railroady if it forces players to do things they wouldn’t normally do. Tres Horny Boys always got to do the stupid shit they wanted to do and the followed the story because they were having fun, not because Griffin forced them.
@@pistonfists yeah, i mean, i know the family addressed the railroading concern in an out-of-game discussion and that griffin hadn't forced them to do anything. which, obviously, if they were having fun with the story, which was more like a radio play than actual D&D like you mentioned, thats great! And what more needs be said? though anyone viewing it as a d&d game would call it railroading, because like you mentioned its so heavily edited, so them discussing options probably got cut. but even then, i feel like they had a lot more agency towards the start of the campaign, but towards the later end of balance it really did feel like griffin was merely marching them towards an ending he'd already planned while allowing for a small amount of variation and freedom. BUT all things considered, balance was still a very fun and enjoyable listen. I was just considering why the audience of TAZ felt Griffin was railroading them.
I think what causes players to resent railroading is the lack of any ability to make meaningful decisions. There doesn't have to be an "illusion of choice" where you "subtly convince" the players to follow your railroad, you can just allow for actual choices without always having a predetermined path or result that it's impossible to deviate from.
Literally what should have taken the PCs 1 session to figure out at the beginning of CR2 with the circus stuff took almost 3 because they are very prone to that kind of floundering, like you said.
It should be said that the AZ isn't a great resource for what should or shouldn't constitute railroading, since, after all, they're all experienced players who know what to avoid and are trying to entertain an audience as well. There are some very, very bad examples of railroading that just make you feel like you have absolutely no agency in the DM's plans; heck, even a lot of classic modules like Tomb of Horrors and others from they Gygax era just start off with "you find yourself at the entrance to a dungeon and decide to investigate." Some DMs, especially older ones (like myself) find it pretty easy to fall into the trap of just forcing the players to get into the game, although in our defense there is some merit to it... showing up to play D&D but not what the DM wants to do is at least a little like being invited over to a friend's house for a SuperBowl party and then demanding you watch a movie instead.
Me and my buddy who co-dm had just started learning and adapt to this SAME THING its crazy. We always wanted to build worlds and stories where the players had options and choices to do what they like but then we started realizing "railroading" is actually necessary at times because when given complete freedom the players often end up just not knowing what to do at all and it creates weird moments of confusion or nothingness and as we've started to adapt to a healthy amount of railroading, story hooks and so on the overall experience has been much better for everyone
In a sandbox game the player needs to know what they want from the start. PC "I want to play a character that wants/needs X" DM "Very well, while seeking X, Y happens to them. A, B and C are available options " PC "I'm gonna figure out D with the option A" DM "But now Z enters thr scene"
@@pez5767 I believe that this is actually in line with what Brennan is saying. He said, basically, with his water-down-the-hill analogy, "The player wants something, but not in a way that is dissatisfyingly easy, so I create a bunch of complicated paths and ways that all eventually lead to the same said thing." Which does not exclude informed choice, because it's the player that decides what they want, what version of the path to it they're taking and why.
It really is a semantic argument. When most players complain about railroading, they mean "oh boo hoo the DM didn't want me to walk off his predetermined map and away from his obvious quest hooks", while seasoned DMs like Brennan or Matt think of it as "finding a way to hit story beats while still giving the illusion of choice." I think a great example of Brennan "railroading" his players is when he found a way to get the Vile Villains of Escape from the Bloodkeep onto an airship, because Rick Perry already made kickass airship models for the next episode. They literally teleported away from the castle, but he subtly guided them back and then made escaping to the airship the best choice. Matt has also done the same with the C3's Shade Mother: the players were already ready to leave the city, but he already built up his amazing underground maps and his nasty shade mother mini, so he gets the Green Seekers to detain the party before they could leave the city and subtly rope them (via one-man show gay couple's therapy) into going to the battle map area.
Most players that complain about railroading don't understand how to build stories on their own. There ARE some GMs that flat out beat you onto a path of their design, but I feel that that's not as common as players taking ANY attempt to steer them as railroading, Without any attempt to understand the GM's intent.
I feel like to an extent the thing Brennen was talking about was avoiding the feeling of the former while doing the latter. The difficulty with even that are players who can't take a hint and bullheadedly try to continue in the way they wanted even if they see the obvious quest hooks. At another point in this talk he brings up making the story out of player backstories (or maybe it was Aabria?) so that those obvious quest hooks line up with what the players want. Since the resistance to quest hooks is often when the DM comes up with a plot that none of the players or characters want to engage in.
@@jmormaple It was Brennan who considered a 40-page backstory to be free plot hooks he knows the player will bite every single time, and makes his life easier. He clearly showed it in EXU Calamity, with majority of the plot hooks clearly related to player backstories.
The key is when Brennan states that the "player wants a story but the character wants the path of least resistance". If this is not true of your players, then none of the rest follows. If your water is not flowing downhill, then do not fight it. Players who have their idea in mind of what to do are a blessing. Help them do it. Set up the sandbox and let them play. Only give the players a story when they actually want it.
Yup. I learned this the hard way when I tried to setup a vampire story when my players wanted to not be involved and become farmers. With only roleplay of getting to know townsfolk
That’s also a difference between Actual Play and home games. I personally would find it very boring to watch if there wasn’t any constructed narrative and it was just characters living in a world making choices, and honestly would be bored to play it as well. But for some tables that’s enjoyable.
@@pieroschlochauer2186 a story always emerges regardless. But the question is whether the story comes from the players reacting to the dm, or the dm reacting to the players. Individual groups will prefer one or the, regardless of whether it's actual play or a home game.
This is extremely good advice for DMing, storywriting, and probably other things. Don’t make people seek out the challenge, make it so the challenge is the best option.
Descent to Avernus is a fantastic campaign to use Brennan’s method. It’s a sandbox and has tons of lore, granted a tad unorganized for said lore. Regardless, great technique and I’ve believed similarly and struggled with the character and myself in some games
It's actually an almost perfect example. The game is marketed as a sandbox but it's actually pretty specific: Without the right introductions and barter most locations are locked out from productive interaction and there's a very linear path that you hew to. The Alexandrian Remix discusses this in some detail and shows how the material can be tweaked to Jaquay the structure better.
After reading the book I can tell ya this is not at all true EDIT: This is not saying I dislike the book but man is it insanely restrictive and punishing for trying to explore or do anything else besides go to avernus.
I'm running it now, have been for the past 9 months or so. It's full of great ideas, but man is it terrible as a campaign as written. It's a railroad after railroad, most of them not even making sense when you think about it for 5 minutes. I would still recommend it, but DMs, be ready to do a lot of additional reading and thinking to shape it up. Alexandrian rewrite is a good starting point, DMs guild "avernus as a sandbox" document is worth a read as well for that part (if, like me, you're not a fan of a full sandboxy hexcrawl that Alex tries to do there, but still want to do something with the terrible handholding the official book offers).
Descent is a treasure trove of great ideas, that are TERRIBLY organised! Im planning to run it for 2 years now, but had to postpone it due to the pandemic (I wanted it to be an in-person Campaign so online play was not an option). But it at least gave me some time to go over the module, cut out the unnecesarry parts (So like 3/4 of the Baldur's Gate section) and tweak the others so it wouldnt be an endless string of fetch quests!
It's like the principle of least action from physics but for stories! The DM sculpts the shape of potential that a particle (player) has to navigate through, and the particle (player) will spontaneously take the path of lowest "action" or ("effort") available to it, even if that trajectory is arbitrarily squiggly :D
@@amaryllis0 And you construct the problem instance (the railroading by the GM) in such a way that the algorithm always makes a globally bad choice and reaches worst case complexity? Does that still fit with the "shape of a story"/water analogy?
@@amaryllis0 Sorry, that might have been a bit too vague. Let me try again: In Brennan's model, the character is water, which always seeks the path of least resistance (i.e. the character wants to solve the big problem of the campaign as quickly and directly as possible). The player however wants a complex and interesting story, not a direct line to the goal. As this is at odds with the interests of the character, it is the GMs responsibility to ensure that the player gets this complex story while still allowing the character to pick the seemingly most direct route to the goal. In the water example, this railroading by the GM results in a series of paths or channels that the water must flow through to reach the goal. The water still follows gravity (the path of least resistance) but is forced to follow the complex structure of the channels, resulting in the "shape of a story", which is what the player wants. In the comp sci example, the character is represented by a greedy algorithm. In a given situation, a greedy algorithm will always pick the option that currently seems to provide the best outcome, without considering if this i truly the best option in the end. This is similar to the character, who will always try to pick the option that seems to bring them closer to the goal, without considering their whole narrative arc, or the water which always flows down the currently steepest path without considering where it "wants" to end up in the end. Just like the character wants to get through the story as quickly as possible and water "wants" to reach the lowest point of a given structure as quickly as possible, the greedy algo wants to traverse its computation problem (a graph for example) as quickly as possible to reach a solution. The point of railroading in all these examples is to slow down the character-equivalent, to get a longer (and hopefully more interesting) story-equivalent. In the greedy algo example, this could be accomplished by specifically constructing a problem in such a way that the algorithms behavior of always picking the currently optimal solution will result in the algorithm needing to make more computations than it would usually require for a different problem of similar size. As such, the greedy algo, which tries to solve the problem as fast as possible by always picking the locally optimal options, is slowed down considerably by the structure of the problem it's trying to solve, similarly to the character who is slowed down by the railroading of the GM or the water which is slowed down by the structure of the channels it's flowing through. I don't know if my rambling here makes any sense to anyone, but I definitely know I shouldn't do this for a living, unlike Brennan, who explained this whole concept a lot better and in far fewer words than I did here.
In the late 90's gamer slang for this idea was "the road to El Dorado". That by making the most reasonable in universe choice you would create, almost on accident, a thematically unified story. As you might guess from the name, it wasn't really considered healthy play. The idea that slipped out of these discussions in the end was that you couldn't really think hard about the most reasonable in universe thing to do because if you started really trying to map out the implications and consequences of your decision you'd come in about five seconds to the narrative artifice that really controlled what was going on.
Every game is a railroad, the best ones happen when you work with your players to build the tracks that get to the conclusion they earned through their choices and actions.
In previous campaigns, I would create this wonderful world and give the players this fascinating story to be a part of. I'd spend upwards of 60 hours each week just working on my next session. Everything was hand crafted with both the overarching storyline and the relevant character arcs in mind. One of those campaigns has been lauded as the best one I've ever made. My current campaign has been going on for three years. Not every week for three years, or they'd definitely be higher than level 13, but more than half of those weeks, and I'm just winging it for this one. I'm handing more control of the story over to the players themselves. They choose almost everything. I just provide the why. It's my job to make it work. Don't get me wrong, I still have my moments in the sun where I give them this interesting and intriguing storyline with all its twists and turns, but I've learned to maintain some self control cause it's just a silly campaign where a group of goblins do goblin things. They're currently in a village populated entirely by very racist frogfolk as the culmination of the alchemist's revenge arc after one of them intentionally sold him a defective crowbar. It was just a prop one that's been plated with metal and painted to look realistic, but it's got a foam core so it just broke the first time he tried to use it. He tried to open a door that was stuck but rolled a nat 1 on the strength check, so I gave a funny reason why it broke. Considering it was in the midst of them chasing down a wizard that wanted to feed them to a dragon that was trying to become a dracolich, he was already frustrated, so it was just the cherry on top, causing him to swear vengeance upon whoever sold it to him. Also I needed some filler while I finalized the plot going forward and I thought it would be funny to see him feed into that anger. The joke just being that they don't like goblins and specifically sell defective items to goblins because they think it's funny to mess with them. They're literally picking on someone their own size and it gives me an opportunity to bring back an old character of mine, a N/E Bard, as their leader. Also there's a froghemoth but the party intentionally ignored it. What I'm getting at here is that you don't have to spend all of your free time trying to build the perfect session every single time. Once you're comfortable, it's okay to wing it. I've been DMing since 2014 and have made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I've learned from them and grown as a storyteller, so don't beat yourself up if you do. If you're making a concerted effort to improve, it's completely okay. Don't be afraid to try something new. A few months back, I had a session where I, as the DM, roleplayed as a different DM, pretending to be Hastur, the King in Yellow, who then turned the characters into their respective players and forced them to try to find a way out. It was a ton of fun for me to pretend to be this insane yet incredibly powerful being and making the players panic while playing their literal selves. That one took me a few weeks to properly write and build, along with a full reread of The King in Yellow, but it was totally worth it.
Matt Colville has a video in his Running The Game series about exactly this. It’s a really great video which illustrates the difference between forcing players down the path *you* want, and creating a structured story for them to interact with.
Genuinely I know he’s probably talking about dnd specifically but this felt like in general a good lesson in interactive story telling ie. video game thanks I’ll keep this metaphor in mind for the future
"Railroading" has 2 definitions that people use mistakenly interchangeably. When you "railroad" your players, they are often referring to not allowing them to play in the way they wish, and often with no reason besides "Because I'm the DM and I say so". What railroading SHOULD be, is setting down the line that the group should be following, and when they want to deviate letting them switch tracks, but finding a way to switch the track back without them noticing. Let's say the players need to make a long trek towards the capitol city of the nation they're in. Along the way, they're going to stop into villages with people that have problems seemingly unrelated to the story arch. However, by helping out this "random" villager, it turns out they are related to the runner of an armed escort service manager who can offer them a discount to get them to the capitol quickly and safely, or perhaps they find horses and riding equipment left behind by the bandits that were terrorizing the village, which the players can now use to get the the capitol faster. As a DM don't ask yourself "Should I let my players do this?" ask yourself "How can I let my players do this while keeping it tied to the story"
How about not switching the track back? Is your story more important than their choices? It’s this kind of sentiment that makes me bristle when people talk about “stories” in ttrpgs.
@@NarfiRef huh? Your players want to engage in the story, or at least they _should_ if you've made a good one. I don't know what kind of MMORPG type game you must run, but my players are gonna start being disappointed when I have to call the session short because I don't have any material ready for them when they decide to go in the complete opposite direction they were advised to. Are you so prepared that you know exactly what to do when all your players collectively decide they don't want to play your campaign and want to ne truffle farmers instead? If players want a sandbox they can go play minecraft. TtRPG games aren't supposed to be free-form improv.
@@cameronphenix2096 I’m more of a player than a GM at this point. Not all people play ttrpgs for the same reasons. I don’t want to be constrained by some contrived narrative with expectations of some grand arc that someone bestows upon me. I just want to inhabit a fictional person in a fictional world, and live out their life that just happens to involve interesting situations.
@@NarfiRef And you can certainly do that, but no GM on the planet could create a world so fleshed out that you can just do as you will your character to do and expect to find intricate adventure and intrigue every time. GMs have to plan, have to write. Then they have to write contingencies for when their plan doesn't work out, or be competent enough to be able to improvise a work-around. If that's not the experience you're looking for, if you're not looking to plant yourself into a story and act within it, then you're in the wrong genre of games. There are plenty of sandbox videogames that can give you that experience so much better than a GM who only has a week to a month between sessions to flesh out a stretch of a campaign alongside their fulltime job. It's called a ROLE PLAYING game. You have a role, and you're required to play it. This is why GMs reward players who commit to the bit with fate points or extra loot, because you're helping to create a story and the more you try to go rogue and forge your own path, the harder the GM has to work to keep up and the faster the walls begin to break down. Not to mention, you're going to be playing with other people that probably want their own paths as well. The GM can't split into multiple people and accommodate each of you, so it's absolutely necessary that every player is on the same page the GM is, even if they don't realize it. I can't see how what you're laying out is anything but antithetical to the entire concept of a TtRPG
That’s such a fascinating analogy and here’s why. If you’ve ever looked at a river on a map it’s rarely if ever a straight line from the source to the mouth. While the water does want to make the journey as efficiently as possible, the route naturally meanders because of the environment it traverses through. So, as Brennan said, you end up with an interesting, pleasing shape for a river that is still the most efficient path. Writers could really learn quite a bit from this analogy.
A neat little thing the DM of our group will do is after the session note down every plot hook and quest we said yes or no and records the consequences which can be big or small depending on the plot hook down the line. So nowadays we're much more likely to follow plot hooks to not miss out because the world moves on without our intervention, it doesn't pause if we go to do our own thing. We don't help a local farm from the apparent threat of goblins? Go back to that farm a session or two later to find a full blown Goblin Slayer situation occurred there. Give the players a choice. They say no to a quest and walk away? Don't shy away from showing them what occurred because they walked away. The cute farm girl who asked them for help doesn't stop existing because they wanted to go hunt seahorses or something. Players want to ignore a plot hook you drop about some kinda cult in the city and go do their own thing? Sure they can go if they like but if they come back to the city it's gonna be a lot more cult heavy than before. Give the players freedom. But also give them the freedom to take the consequences of when they just walk away. That's the motto at our table.
This is why my favorite homebrew setting I’ve made has Narrative Weight as a physical force. It’s a world made of stories, and the people in the world are aware of that, to a certain extent, though very few believe there to be beings telling or hearing these stories. A handful are fully aware that is happening, and three of them are able to observe back. Regardless, because Narrative Theory isn’t 100% accepted, and very rarely actually understood (in kind of the same way of various theories with competing ideas in science in the real world.) because of that, we can have characters who couldn’t care less about a narrative arch, but also characters who think completing what they THINK is their narrative arch is the most reliable way to complete their goals. Both are very interesting to DM for.
The game "Scion" by White Wolf kinda does that. It's sort of a "Gods are real you play kids of gods" affair, but a big part of it is Fate, which is above the gods and loves stories and myths. Fate literally twists things around your characters (and certain other supernatural beings including all divine beings) to create legends and epic stories. Your PC's may also be absolutely aware of this fact which lends itself to a bit of meta gaming as they know Fate twist things into stories so as things go along, it makes perfect sense for characters to look for the "theme" in what's happening and try to act accordingly. Patheon also comes into account too so if you're a child of Thor for example, you might want to brush up on Norse stories and legends, because you're probably gonna be living them soon enough.
Ever since a friend of Brennan's in dm's academy said he has a crazy talent for narrating visuals and visual metaphors Im always looking for the next image he will give to our minds
What Brennan describes is constructing a story in a way that incentivizes or guides players in a general way/area which can work well. When most people refer to railroading it would be where the GM forced the party into a very narrow way of doing things or completely removing choice which ultimately defeats the point of Tabletops. No one wants to be denied at every turn because the story says _ you aren’t capable of _ because you need to fail or you join _ despite them being opposed to everything you hold dear because story, you don’t have a choice.
This is a great way to look at it! I'm not sure if he's really talking about railroading though. There's a difference between railroading and "you really should probably do this." Let's say you're the DM and you want to make your players save a village from being attacked. There's (in my mind) three ways of doing this. One, have someone offer an incentive, like if they save the village they'll be paid well. This is probably the most used in our games because our party is very motivated by money, however it could be flimsy if the party deems that "it isn't worth it" forcing the DM to either raise the price or lower the danger or resort to option 2 or 3. The second is introducing a consequence. Let's say that your party is on death row and have been given a chance to be set free if they help out. This provides the party with a general direction without necessarily railroading them, and I think it's what Brennan is talking about. Sure, you're very very encouraged to help, but you don't have to. Once you're set free you can make a break for it. You can help the attackers destroy the village and gain freedim from working for them. Heck, you can just say screw it and take the death penalty. Even though this might feel like railroading because obviously helping would be the smartest choice, it really isn't because you can still find a way out without doing exactly what the DM wants. Railroading is like if you have an army of guards following you that entire time. If you take a step off the path they immediately shove you back on. If you consider betraying you're pushed away. If you try to say screw it I don't want to do this, you're pulled along anyways. You have no choice in railroading except for what the DM wants, and that is why railroading isn't good. Let me know if anyone else has different opinions on this.
Love Brennan's take! I feel like this is the only correct way to define this. The DM and the players should cooperate to create a story - it's a shared experience and a shared goal. The term 'railroading' has a negative connotation, where it feels like the DM is working against the players in order to force them to follow _his_ story. As a DM, I put a lot of time in preparation so I want my players to experience that content. But I also want them to have a good time and feel immersed. We're on the same team, people.
I'm not entirely sure if it's railroading though because giving the player the opportunities that they desire is the core of the game. Railroading in most minds is a punitive action taken by the DM to shape the results of a scenario even if it penalizes the players, usually done by DMs who can't improvise or have sadistic tendencies. I just call bringing the players onto the path of least resistance "efficiency" and a good way to DM.
Having this at the moment. What I as the player want to do is rapidly take the throne but my character was written as a very moral, good dude. So we're taking longer to get where I want as a player but having the character do things his way.
The water analogy is an interesting one, but I would say it's not rails from that point on. What the GM should be doing is putting up story elements that act like dams, spillways, divergences, weirs as elements designed to slow down, pause or otherwise divert the inherent character desire to finish their task as soon as possible. That way the player can invest in the exploration and growth that they want to take part in without feeling like they are being directed to paths or away from them.
When you're in the middle of a crazy fight on the roof of a train, trying to complete a heist, save a princess, and defuse a bomb, that the train is on tracks is almost a comfort. Until the DM smiles and lets you know that the bridge is out.
The thing is, most players that are worth continuing to play with will be fine with you steering a general direction, what people really get upset with with rail roading is the dms who get mad at them for going off his laid out path. I had one player get upset about me railroading in a fight when in reality he was just doing something stupid that was unlikely to succeed and it ended up failing. For reference they had to try and get the collar off a big beast that woulda been someone what hard for them to fight straight out but the doors to the room were small enough that if they got it and got out it couldn’t chase them. This player tried going invisible and expected to be able to steal it without being noticed, but it was a collar attached to its neck and the creature had an ability to locate things purely by scent. So doing something like standing next to it and taking it’s collar off was gonna be damn near impossible without atleast a distraction so the creature took a swipe when he failed and since he was squishy he wasn’t exactly super high health afterwards and I had to give them ideas that they could try kiting it with the doorway or try the same thing with a distraction or try ripping the collar off or anything other than just walk up to a creature and take something it’s wearing off. I admit I coulda done much better to give my players fun options but I still get upset that they didn’t even consider that maybe their idea failed because it was poorly thought out and not because I just didn’t want it to
Railroading and keeping a group organized are two, very different things. What Brennan is talking about isn't railroading, it's just guiding the group back towards the things he's prepared. Railroading is when the group is split, and two characters are in a fight they aren't supposed to win, but are actually winning and coming back the next week with the dm saying you died during the conflict in an effort to end a combat he was losing. Railroading is when the dm punishes the wizard for playing creatively by literally severing his connection to magic so he can't use combat spells. Railroading is taking away player choice, and punishing players for playing differently than how the DM thinks they should play, not letting players do their own thing, but in a general direction that furthers the pre-built narrative. And this is the mark of a bad dm, vs a good one. Directing a group in a direction they don't want to go by making them want or need to go that way is just managing a game, and it's good dming and it's literally all in how aggressive about it you are being. Like... Brennan knew shit was up with the wurst crew plotting something and it ended up trivializing the plinth fight BUT HE LET IT HAPPEN. My dm would have just introduced a second plinth because we HAD to fight it, or he would have forced the plan to fail, or he would have instakilled the support, and that's the difference.
i feel like there is a big different between a villain punishing the players and the dm punishing the players. for example if your party is full of magic users and the villain is very smart he is going to look for ways to hinder your ability to use magic while also allowing him to use his. there is also very different between taking something away for story reasons and taking something away because a DM can. for example i have a character who is connected to a beholder in their head and the beholder and them have a connection where the beholder can take control. the beholder's name is steve and he is a dick and has his own agenda. steve and the character make deals for steve to take control and they set time limits but steve is very smart and works around things to achieve his own goals. for example he bypassed the time limit thing once. in universe there is a reason and understanding that reason or understanding the character makes a dm a good dm but manipulating the characters and players to fit a goal does not. im not gonna have a barbarian character suddenly have logical thoughts because thats not them. or im not gonna have a villain all about themselves be suddenly caring about the village.
Nah, both what you're describing and Brennan is describing are both railroading, you are just making the most absolute over the top negative examples of it. Railroading isn't inherently bad. "Guiding the group back towards the things he's prepared". Yeah, so he prepares something and then no matter what the players do, ultimately they are going end up at the point Brennan wants them to. This is railroading. It's just not an inherently bad thing.
@@SoyDrinker Not at all, and we will have to agree to disagree. Railroading is absolutely when the DM disallows any creative choice from their players. He says thats he wants to keep the group on track for the narrative, but that he also wants to give the group what they want. Railroading is definitively the opposite, when the DM gets upset becaues the group isnt engaging with their story or got sidetracked and ex machinas them on track, or punishes them. Brennan doesnt railroad. Railroading is as the name suggests; its an inflexible, one way road. Brennan is absolutely not doing this, and his analogy of giving the group what they want whilst directing them towards a final goal fits with good DM'ing. And again, he absolutely allows for his group to do different things, and expands his story to fit their needs, rather then constricting his players to fit his story.
For me as a GM, I always think of everything I do as "railroading". But my players never seem to be able to see it that way. And that's because while every major part of their adventure has been planned by me, I make no attempt to push them towards it, but instead just set it up with a "gravity" that feels natural for the characters they've created and the world that I've created. It's all about that consistency. If the plot hooks are consistent with the world and the PCs, the plot will naturally draw the players wherever you need them to go, and you can sit back and watch all the crazy shit they do along the way.
players are like water. they wear away at solid foundations over time, slip through cracks, and are both necessary and utterly detrimental to the continued story.
Wow. I wish I could play with this guy. I remember a former DM. There was a whooooooole lotta railroading going on, but in the exact opposite way. She even had a self insert character that dominated the group.
Twists were s9mething I was known for as a GM. My players would talk about the game during smoke breaks, their ideas on what they thought I was going was were 70 percent of my ideas came from.
Players also want choices, or at least the illusion of choice. They want to feel like they have input on their character's actions and story. So, a trick for a good gamemaster is to make sure the path appears to have choices, but they all lead to something CLOSE to the same route, or at least enough that they still stay on that irrigated pathway.
The same destination with a slightly different journey will always feel more rewarding It's a balance, and the railroading discussion largely stems from many not understanding it's a whole line No choices and no guidance aren't the only options n all
@@1stCallipostle Exactly. ONe of my games failed miserably because I had FAR too little guidance...which meant players weren't invested, because they didn't know there was a destination.
@@liam2745 So currently we are on a mission to meet the barbarian's father. We enter a town that we think we could just resupply and move on. However, suddenly an earth elemental suddenly rises from the ground and is about to rampage in the town. Good party does good thing, and we kill it. We take a second to breath and start getting ready to leave Then a random NPC comes up to us and gives us all tickets to the circus because we killed the earth golem, and implored us to go there. After some debate, the barbarian begrudgingly conceded to going to the circus. It might be a good way to relax after our stressful adventures. NOPE BECAUSE THE WHOLE DAMN CIRCUS WAS HIGH JACKED BY A NECROMANCER WE DEFEATED MONTHS AGO AND CAUSES 4 LITERAL DEMONS TO APPEAR AND START ATTACKING. A whole session, in a town that we just wanted to go through. And we have one more town on the way. I am not hopeful that we actually get to do what we want to do on time.
@@OmniVirusHS sounds like he’s delaying the story because he might not know how to plan he meet with the father. So he’s bloating the path, he also might be feeling like you guys have too much focus and aren’t really playing *in* his world. But just going from objective to objective, droning on until you reach a conclusion.
I mean, the problem with railroading is the same as dice fudging or CGI in movies. It's only a problem if the player is aware of it and thinking about it.
Absolutely not surprised Brennan was a philosophy major it just makes so much sense
He has degrees in philosophy and in screenwriting!
Yep, both those check out
Philosophy is regularly the #1 or #2 degree in rankings of intelligence or pattern recognition, etc, as well. Its only competitors are Physics and Math.
@@leauxgan it all makes sense-
@@NiteSaiya You left out improv. Easily his most impressive talent or skill. I'm not saying that to minimize the significance of his degrees, actually just the opposite. There's an endless sea of people with advanced degrees in physics, philosophy and math, go to your local university there's tons of em. I challenge anyone to find 5 regular ol' non-famous people who are as good or better than Brennan Lee Mulligan when it comes to improv comedy or being a Dungeon Master. While it is true that neither of those are things sound like super *impressive* skills to have, they sure as hell are when you're at his level!
This is what doing something your entire life gets you. Not just dm'ing, but the improv and acting in general, writing, and being engrossed in a hobby from a young age leads to extreme expertise in a skill. Matt is similar, and Aabria as well, but Brennan is something else.
He talked at one point in the same discussion about death making everything around it seem absurd by comparison, and that was what really made it click that he has a fundamental understanding of *life* that feels so incredibly unique, and translates directly into being a DM that I think most other people just simply don't have.
Do you have a clip about when he talked about death? I'd love you listen to him talk about that
He's a philosophy major too, so he didn't just obtain this knowledge through practice. He literally studied it.
@@mariatserpe8730 I don't have a clip, unfortunately, but the time stamp for the start of the question that leads to it is 40:30
Isn't that kind of like the idea of the Absurd from Existentialism? I read about that a while ago a bit but idk. He might have gotten that from his philosophy major maybe
His guest appearance on Rude Tales of Magic as a washed up monk that achieved nirvana is really great as well.
I have an old friend that phrased it as:
"You have to give the players exactly what they want, in a manner that they did not expect."
It's the same as when Brennan said the best surprise is one that is obviously inevitable. I believe it was during the Calamity Wrap Up
to me it sounds more like "let the players do what they want, and nudge it into what your story needs"
Brennan: crafts an incredibly insightful and well thought out metaphor that makes a complex idea very easy to visualize and to understand…
Also Brennan: …does that make sense?
Everyone else: YES PLEASE KEEP SAYING STUFF
"Does that make sense?" - for totally comprehensible, perfectly crafted responses
"You get what I mean." - for unparsable non sequiturs
And it's exactly because he asks that question that he's so good at it.
Am I the only one who has no fucking clue what the point of his rant was?
@@stinkmonger It makes more sense in context but what he's saying is basically that as a DM his goal is to create circumstances where his players can make optimal gameplay decisions that SIMULTANEOUSLY provide interesting arcs/stories for their characters, rather than having to choose between one or the other. So rather than having to choose between min/maxing vs. making a cool story, the DM makes it so that the players make a cool story BY min/maxing, if that makes sense.
He has a similar, great conversation with Lou Wilson in his Adventuring Academy series, where he explains to Lou that as a DM it's kind of this strange situation where, you as the DM have to look at your close friends playing D&D with you, and knowing what those players want, and having to say "not yet". Because there is very little satisfaction for the players in giving them exactly what they want. The harder it feels like they earned it, the better the payoff is. The example I think he gives in that episode is something to the effect of: "That would be like having a PC's backstory involve hunting down the person that killed their parents, and starting the campaign off with meeting and killing that bad guy in the first session." -- it would be unsatisfying, there's no journey. You need to introduce that bad guy multiple times, having them get away every time, wring that story out for every drop of drama you can squeeze out of it until the final showdown where you've ratcheted up the tension to an all time high.
Shit... that scenario of killing off the bad guy in the first game would make for such a good VtM game, lol.
Player has this whole big backstory about their murdered so-and-so and they're on this quest for justice/vengeance... a kindred notices, likes the cut of their jib, and embraces them, giving them the tools they need to actually get that justice/vengeance. Then, the player actually accomplishes that character goal in the first game... but now they've fed their beast and the struggle (and game) truly begins.
:D
Can confirm, first campaign had my big bad in the third session. Was very unsatisfying as we almost killed it in the first 'surprise' round (DM handed those out like nothing and we usually merked his bosses within the first two turns). Double unsatisfying as my big bad was a Fiend so his death was meaningless. I quit the campaign after six more sessions and it fell apart some time afterwards.
This makes lous reactions all the better, because he knows he can react like Brennan is the bad guy because he IS the bad guy... Brennan can laugh off all the jokingly mean things they say because he knows they know it will work out at some point
@@patrickmcisaac3142 That is the attitude that a GM should try to foster. The GM is the adversaries, but the GM is not Adversarial. A GM shouldn't play the 'I am out to kill the players' mentality, instead the 'How can I make the story interesting and fun and challenging'.
Anyone can be a killer GM and throw armies of powerful enemies after the players, rocks fall everyone dies... Game over, GM wins. But a fun GM, at least to me, is one who uses dirty tricks to challenge the characters, keep them on their toes and make victory seem like it was snatched from the jaws of defeat and if they played slightly different it would have ended in failure. So the player reacts to the GM as 'You're the bad guy now and I hate what you just did', same as an audience member just hates the villain in a movie or TV show but can't stop watching to see what happens next because its so interesting.
@@MrSoup-zs4rd Something I'd thought would be cool, and I wonder if you'd have enjoyed it, is taking a fiend or an undead nemesis and just having him keep coming back to life after you kill him. Yes he dies in session three and is returned to hell, but then three sessions later some idiot teenagers playing bloody mary summon him to the mortal plane again.
The adventure becomes about sealing him in one of those ridiculous dungeon temples we're always delving.
I assume I'm not the only one who forgot that he was talking about a game when he said: "You achieved the shape of a story while you were trying your hardest to go in a straight line."
Thats what great game design does for you
Reminds me of the C.S. Lewis quote: The longest way round is the shortest way home
And also the Steel Ball Run quote: “The shortest route was a detour.”
I'm so glad the greater Critical Role fandom are getting time with Brennan, he's such a wonderful DM and he's really earned his recent place in the spotlight
He's got me like "mercer effect who?" Give me that Mulligan effect.
And vice versa, now that Matt is DM’ing a D20 campaign.
What’s a DM
@@TheMotherConfesser it stands for Dungeon Master.
it’s the person who runs the world and essentially acts as the judge/referee of a Dungeons & Dragons game - describing the environment, designing the battles, playing the NPCs, (sometimes) building the world, coming up with the villain, etc.
Brennan is a genius. And to my great regret, I only fully understood that watching calamity.
same, but we still have all his other games to watch. and his improv sketches on CH
not only is he a genius, he is an exceptional communicator. it's underrated how sharp he is at explaining concepts without skipping a beat
@@marcolechuga5292 I recommend watch his episodes of Game Changer too (also just all of game changer is great but Brennan's hyper-competitiveness is top tier on that show)
I knew he had something special the moment Fig met her father in Fantasy High.
He is amazing and just so open. And a freaking God tier comedian to boot
The whole irrigation thing with the water following that path because it's technically the least resistance but being a convoluted path is so freakin' brilliant honestly
I've never wanted to be railroaded by someone so much in my life until now.
that sounds like a euphemism
Want to have a train run on you?
Ayo?!
Forget the road, he can just rail me
@@knox247 ahhhh, please
I think a lot of players that complain about "railroading" need to be willing to meet the GM half way. Like a lot of GMs, my first time running a game was running a published adventure. In my case Crown of the Kobold King. Which is a dungeon focused adventure. There are a lot of reasons a character might want to go to the dungeon in crown of the kobold king. To save some kidnapped children, to get loot because its an ancient dwarf fortress, to find hidden lore, to gain favor with the town and some of the rich and powerful people who have sway in the area, to gain renown for defeating a villain terrorizing the region. But there was a player who was just completely against going to the dungeon "because its not what there character wanted to do" but the actual reason was that they came in hating the idea of doing a published adventure and we're just adamant that no matter what hooks were provided they weren't going to that dungeon because good roleplayers don't do what the adventure says. (Not that they would ever themselves try to GM of course, or have any suggestions about what else the party should do here)
Being super railroady isn't the best way to run a game, but i do think as a player you have a job to actively try to engage with the game and find things to do.
Jesús Christ if you don't want to play the game the group is playing, the right answer isn't to act out your frustrations by playing the game as a character who doesn't want to do the adventure. Just fucking. Just fucking say "pre-made adventures aren't really my thing. I'm gonna sit this one out" for fucks sake
Definitely. If a player is just being obstinate, and purposefully goes where they know the story isn't headed, and tries to fight the DM, you won't go anywhere. If a dragon attacks your village and people beg you for help, it's pretty obvious the plot involves doing something with said dragon and village. But if a player says, "nah, fuck that." And proceeds to try to sail to another continent just because, then the game falls apart.
I heard it said once, I think by Brennan, that if you are playing as a character that won't engage with the main story hook because "it's not what my character would do," then you should let that character leave and play one that will.
If you are ever in a situation where you are purposefully ignoring hooks the DM is begging you to take, then youre trolling. Butt if you have a purposefully antagonistic trolly DM with a history of brutally baiting you into death all the time, then maybe we can talk.
That's the thing, players should know what they are getting into when they create a character for the campaign. If I, as a DM am running a Curse of Strahd campaign, I make it very clear to the players that Curse of Strahd is a gothic, dark and very deadly adventure where death is a very real possibility, where the entire setting is trying to kill you, and this is the tone of Barovia.
Players who know that that is the case and actively create a character who won't go to Barovia and won't engage in the macabre and dark setting are wasting everyone else's time who showed up at the table.
it seems like what causes players to resent "railroading" is when the dm cant quite manifest the illusion of choice, or subtly convince them into making choices in line with the story. I think railroading was a popular complaint with The Adventure Zone because Griffin, a (seemingly) new and inexperienced DM, couldn't quite sell the illusion of choice or that there was any other path than the one he laid out for them. At least to the audience. like he'd planned the overarching story first and then made the pcs fit into it, instead of the other way around. on the opposite end of the spectrum, there have been moments in campaign 3 where matt sitting back and letting the players decide what to do entirely led to them floundering and at a loss for what to do. i feel like much of their character exposition was driven by a lack of anything else to do at that moment and just trying to kill time until something happened. thankfully things picked up after that, but brennans understanding of how necessary it is to "railroad" players while also making them feel like theyre naturally following the best path forward speaks to his expertise.
I still don’t really agree that TAZ was even railroady. I think it was just heavily edited down so you never got to see when the players sat there and figured things out, they wanted it to feel more like a show and less like they were playing a game along with the fact that it was a lot of their first time playing a game this way. Griffin was definitely a planner, but it was clear the players surprised him in a lot of ways and things often went off the rails. Personally I only think something is railroady if it forces players to do things they wouldn’t normally do. Tres Horny Boys always got to do the stupid shit they wanted to do and the followed the story because they were having fun, not because Griffin forced them.
@@pistonfists yeah, i mean, i know the family addressed the railroading concern in an out-of-game discussion and that griffin hadn't forced them to do anything. which, obviously, if they were having fun with the story, which was more like a radio play than actual D&D like you mentioned, thats great! And what more needs be said? though anyone viewing it as a d&d game would call it railroading, because like you mentioned its so heavily edited, so them discussing options probably got cut. but even then, i feel like they had a lot more agency towards the start of the campaign, but towards the later end of balance it really did feel like griffin was merely marching them towards an ending he'd already planned while allowing for a small amount of variation and freedom. BUT all things considered, balance was still a very fun and enjoyable listen. I was just considering why the audience of TAZ felt Griffin was railroading them.
I think what causes players to resent railroading is the lack of any ability to make meaningful decisions. There doesn't have to be an "illusion of choice" where you "subtly convince" the players to follow your railroad, you can just allow for actual choices without always having a predetermined path or result that it's impossible to deviate from.
Literally what should have taken the PCs 1 session to figure out at the beginning of CR2 with the circus stuff took almost 3 because they are very prone to that kind of floundering, like you said.
It should be said that the AZ isn't a great resource for what should or shouldn't constitute railroading, since, after all, they're all experienced players who know what to avoid and are trying to entertain an audience as well. There are some very, very bad examples of railroading that just make you feel like you have absolutely no agency in the DM's plans; heck, even a lot of classic modules like Tomb of Horrors and others from they Gygax era just start off with "you find yourself at the entrance to a dungeon and decide to investigate." Some DMs, especially older ones (like myself) find it pretty easy to fall into the trap of just forcing the players to get into the game, although in our defense there is some merit to it... showing up to play D&D but not what the DM wants to do is at least a little like being invited over to a friend's house for a SuperBowl party and then demanding you watch a movie instead.
Me and my buddy who co-dm had just started learning and adapt to this SAME THING its crazy. We always wanted to build worlds and stories where the players had options and choices to do what they like but then we started realizing "railroading" is actually necessary at times because when given complete freedom the players often end up just not knowing what to do at all and it creates weird moments of confusion or nothingness and as we've started to adapt to a healthy amount of railroading, story hooks and so on the overall experience has been much better for everyone
In a sandbox game the player needs to know what they want from the start.
PC "I want to play a character that wants/needs X"
DM "Very well, while seeking X, Y happens to them. A, B and C are available options "
PC "I'm gonna figure out D with the option A"
DM "But now Z enters thr scene"
This is much more nuanced and accurate than what Brennan is describing above. Illusion of choice is not the same a informed decisions.
@@pez5767 I believe that this is actually in line with what Brennan is saying. He said, basically, with his water-down-the-hill analogy, "The player wants something, but not in a way that is dissatisfyingly easy, so I create a bunch of complicated paths and ways that all eventually lead to the same said thing." Which does not exclude informed choice, because it's the player that decides what they want, what version of the path to it they're taking and why.
My dude understands entropy
The way Matt looks at Brennan at 1:19 is so full of respect and pride and it's so fucking cute
"That's my boy"
"You should do this for a living" and then Brennan being nervous/shakey with the cup lmao
I feel this exactly with my players when I started to log their "Adventure Line" and I realized just how far west this quest to the north had gone.
Time for the PC's to meet a character named "solair w. king" with hints of monkey like characteristics and have a strange journey
@@atlas_vash Does it involve a silver dragon disguised as a horse?
@@ultraliskbuilder5831 nah that'd be crazy....so crazy it might just work
It really is a semantic argument. When most players complain about railroading, they mean "oh boo hoo the DM didn't want me to walk off his predetermined map and away from his obvious quest hooks", while seasoned DMs like Brennan or Matt think of it as "finding a way to hit story beats while still giving the illusion of choice."
I think a great example of Brennan "railroading" his players is when he found a way to get the Vile Villains of Escape from the Bloodkeep onto an airship, because Rick Perry already made kickass airship models for the next episode. They literally teleported away from the castle, but he subtly guided them back and then made escaping to the airship the best choice.
Matt has also done the same with the C3's Shade Mother: the players were already ready to leave the city, but he already built up his amazing underground maps and his nasty shade mother mini, so he gets the Green Seekers to detain the party before they could leave the city and subtly rope them (via one-man show gay couple's therapy) into going to the battle map area.
Most players that complain about railroading don't understand how to build stories on their own. There ARE some GMs that flat out beat you onto a path of their design, but I feel that that's not as common as players taking ANY attempt to steer them as railroading, Without any attempt to understand the GM's intent.
Yeah, I don't play TTRPGs for the *Illusion* of choice. I play it for the actual choices. I DM the same way too.
I feel like to an extent the thing Brennen was talking about was avoiding the feeling of the former while doing the latter. The difficulty with even that are players who can't take a hint and bullheadedly try to continue in the way they wanted even if they see the obvious quest hooks. At another point in this talk he brings up making the story out of player backstories (or maybe it was Aabria?) so that those obvious quest hooks line up with what the players want. Since the resistance to quest hooks is often when the DM comes up with a plot that none of the players or characters want to engage in.
@@captin3149 yeah. The group of players who complain the most about railroading are the murderhobos.
@@jmormaple It was Brennan who considered a 40-page backstory to be free plot hooks he knows the player will bite every single time, and makes his life easier.
He clearly showed it in EXU Calamity, with majority of the plot hooks clearly related to player backstories.
This reminds me of the Soren Johnson quote, "Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game"
Matt’s look of deep interest and understanding while Brennan is talking here is one of my favorite things.
The key is when Brennan states that the "player wants a story but the character wants the path of least resistance". If this is not true of your players, then none of the rest follows. If your water is not flowing downhill, then do not fight it. Players who have their idea in mind of what to do are a blessing. Help them do it. Set up the sandbox and let them play. Only give the players a story when they actually want it.
Yup. I learned this the hard way when I tried to setup a vampire story when my players wanted to not be involved and become farmers. With only roleplay of getting to know townsfolk
That’s also a difference between Actual Play and home games. I personally would find it very boring to watch if there wasn’t any constructed narrative and it was just characters living in a world making choices, and honestly would be bored to play it as well. But for some tables that’s enjoyable.
@@pieroschlochauer2186 a story always emerges regardless. But the question is whether the story comes from the players reacting to the dm, or the dm reacting to the players. Individual groups will prefer one or the, regardless of whether it's actual play or a home game.
thinking about my bard... who does not want to go back to her hometown... but i the player very much do because it's going to be juicy!
This feels like a convoluted way of saying "include challenges in your game".
Yup
Yea
Me coming here expecting Brennan talking about locomotives and railways
I bet he can make that interesting as well lmao
Brennan Lee Mulligan is the nerd version of Bruce Lee
This is extremely good advice for DMing, storywriting, and probably other things. Don’t make people seek out the challenge, make it so the challenge is the best option.
Descent to Avernus is a fantastic campaign to use Brennan’s method. It’s a sandbox and has tons of lore, granted a tad unorganized for said lore. Regardless, great technique and I’ve believed similarly and struggled with the character and myself in some games
Also Zariel is a pretty great villain.
It's actually an almost perfect example. The game is marketed as a sandbox but it's actually pretty specific: Without the right introductions and barter most locations are locked out from productive interaction and there's a very linear path that you hew to. The Alexandrian Remix discusses this in some detail and shows how the material can be tweaked to Jaquay the structure better.
After reading the book I can tell ya this is not at all true
EDIT: This is not saying I dislike the book but man is it insanely restrictive and punishing for trying to explore or do anything else besides go to avernus.
I'm running it now, have been for the past 9 months or so. It's full of great ideas, but man is it terrible as a campaign as written. It's a railroad after railroad, most of them not even making sense when you think about it for 5 minutes. I would still recommend it, but DMs, be ready to do a lot of additional reading and thinking to shape it up. Alexandrian rewrite is a good starting point, DMs guild "avernus as a sandbox" document is worth a read as well for that part (if, like me, you're not a fan of a full sandboxy hexcrawl that Alex tries to do there, but still want to do something with the terrible handholding the official book offers).
Descent is a treasure trove of great ideas, that are TERRIBLY organised!
Im planning to run it for 2 years now, but had to postpone it due to the pandemic (I wanted it to be an in-person Campaign so online play was not an option).
But it at least gave me some time to go over the module, cut out the unnecesarry parts (So like 3/4 of the Baldur's Gate section) and tweak the others so it wouldnt be an endless string of fetch quests!
It's like the principle of least action from physics but for stories! The DM sculpts the shape of potential that a particle (player) has to navigate through, and the particle (player) will spontaneously take the path of lowest "action" or ("effort") available to it, even if that trajectory is arbitrarily squiggly :D
In computer science, it's a greedy algorithm.
@@amaryllis0 And you construct the problem instance (the railroading by the GM) in such a way that the algorithm always makes a globally bad choice and reaches worst case complexity? Does that still fit with the "shape of a story"/water analogy?
@@mumfol4791 What?
@@amaryllis0 Sorry, that might have been a bit too vague. Let me try again: In Brennan's model, the character is water, which always seeks the path of least resistance (i.e. the character wants to solve the big problem of the campaign as quickly and directly as possible). The player however wants a complex and interesting story, not a direct line to the goal. As this is at odds with the interests of the character, it is the GMs responsibility to ensure that the player gets this complex story while still allowing the character to pick the seemingly most direct route to the goal. In the water example, this railroading by the GM results in a series of paths or channels that the water must flow through to reach the goal. The water still follows gravity (the path of least resistance) but is forced to follow the complex structure of the channels, resulting in the "shape of a story", which is what the player wants.
In the comp sci example, the character is represented by a greedy algorithm. In a given situation, a greedy algorithm will always pick the option that currently seems to provide the best outcome, without considering if this i truly the best option in the end. This is similar to the character, who will always try to pick the option that seems to bring them closer to the goal, without considering their whole narrative arc, or the water which always flows down the currently steepest path without considering where it "wants" to end up in the end.
Just like the character wants to get through the story as quickly as possible and water "wants" to reach the lowest point of a given structure as quickly as possible, the greedy algo wants to traverse its computation problem (a graph for example) as quickly as possible to reach a solution.
The point of railroading in all these examples is to slow down the character-equivalent, to get a longer (and hopefully more interesting) story-equivalent. In the greedy algo example, this could be accomplished by specifically constructing a problem in such a way that the algorithms behavior of always picking the currently optimal solution will result in the algorithm needing to make more computations than it would usually require for a different problem of similar size. As such, the greedy algo, which tries to solve the problem as fast as possible by always picking the locally optimal options, is slowed down considerably by the structure of the problem it's trying to solve, similarly to the character who is slowed down by the railroading of the GM or the water which is slowed down by the structure of the channels it's flowing through.
I don't know if my rambling here makes any sense to anyone, but I definitely know I shouldn't do this for a living, unlike Brennan, who explained this whole concept a lot better and in far fewer words than I did here.
@@mumfol4791 I see! Thnk you for the eloquent explanation c:
In the late 90's gamer slang for this idea was "the road to El Dorado". That by making the most reasonable in universe choice you would create, almost on accident, a thematically unified story.
As you might guess from the name, it wasn't really considered healthy play. The idea that slipped out of these discussions in the end was that you couldn't really think hard about the most reasonable in universe thing to do because if you started really trying to map out the implications and consequences of your decision you'd come in about five seconds to the narrative artifice that really controlled what was going on.
this man has so many thoughts
Brennan is going to find a way to use his philosophy degree come hell or high water.
Every game is a railroad, the best ones happen when you work with your players to build the tracks that get to the conclusion they earned through their choices and actions.
In previous campaigns, I would create this wonderful world and give the players this fascinating story to be a part of. I'd spend upwards of 60 hours each week just working on my next session. Everything was hand crafted with both the overarching storyline and the relevant character arcs in mind. One of those campaigns has been lauded as the best one I've ever made.
My current campaign has been going on for three years. Not every week for three years, or they'd definitely be higher than level 13, but more than half of those weeks, and I'm just winging it for this one. I'm handing more control of the story over to the players themselves. They choose almost everything. I just provide the why. It's my job to make it work. Don't get me wrong, I still have my moments in the sun where I give them this interesting and intriguing storyline with all its twists and turns, but I've learned to maintain some self control cause it's just a silly campaign where a group of goblins do goblin things. They're currently in a village populated entirely by very racist frogfolk as the culmination of the alchemist's revenge arc after one of them intentionally sold him a defective crowbar. It was just a prop one that's been plated with metal and painted to look realistic, but it's got a foam core so it just broke the first time he tried to use it.
He tried to open a door that was stuck but rolled a nat 1 on the strength check, so I gave a funny reason why it broke. Considering it was in the midst of them chasing down a wizard that wanted to feed them to a dragon that was trying to become a dracolich, he was already frustrated, so it was just the cherry on top, causing him to swear vengeance upon whoever sold it to him.
Also I needed some filler while I finalized the plot going forward and I thought it would be funny to see him feed into that anger. The joke just being that they don't like goblins and specifically sell defective items to goblins because they think it's funny to mess with them. They're literally picking on someone their own size and it gives me an opportunity to bring back an old character of mine, a N/E Bard, as their leader. Also there's a froghemoth but the party intentionally ignored it.
What I'm getting at here is that you don't have to spend all of your free time trying to build the perfect session every single time. Once you're comfortable, it's okay to wing it. I've been DMing since 2014 and have made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I've learned from them and grown as a storyteller, so don't beat yourself up if you do. If you're making a concerted effort to improve, it's completely okay. Don't be afraid to try something new.
A few months back, I had a session where I, as the DM, roleplayed as a different DM, pretending to be Hastur, the King in Yellow, who then turned the characters into their respective players and forced them to try to find a way out. It was a ton of fun for me to pretend to be this insane yet incredibly powerful being and making the players panic while playing their literal selves. That one took me a few weeks to properly write and build, along with a full reread of The King in Yellow, but it was totally worth it.
The way I like to word it is that there are two things I must balance: what my character wants, and what I as a player want for my character.
I swear he is by favorite chaos talking DM next to Mercer's narration and verbal sound effect (including his purple wurm impression)
I could listen to Brennan explain random stuff for days
Matt Colville has a video in his Running The Game series about exactly this. It’s a really great video which illustrates the difference between forcing players down the path *you* want, and creating a structured story for them to interact with.
This dude goes hard every time I see him
Genuinely I know he’s probably talking about dnd specifically but this felt like in general a good lesson in interactive story telling ie. video game thanks I’ll keep this metaphor in mind for the future
"Railroading" has 2 definitions that people use mistakenly interchangeably. When you "railroad" your players, they are often referring to not allowing them to play in the way they wish, and often with no reason besides "Because I'm the DM and I say so". What railroading SHOULD be, is setting down the line that the group should be following, and when they want to deviate letting them switch tracks, but finding a way to switch the track back without them noticing.
Let's say the players need to make a long trek towards the capitol city of the nation they're in. Along the way, they're going to stop into villages with people that have problems seemingly unrelated to the story arch. However, by helping out this "random" villager, it turns out they are related to the runner of an armed escort service manager who can offer them a discount to get them to the capitol quickly and safely, or perhaps they find horses and riding equipment left behind by the bandits that were terrorizing the village, which the players can now use to get the the capitol faster.
As a DM don't ask yourself "Should I let my players do this?" ask yourself "How can I let my players do this while keeping it tied to the story"
It's the Quantum Ogre problem. It's not bad unless the players can see behind the curtain.
How about not switching the track back? Is your story more important than their choices? It’s this kind of sentiment that makes me bristle when people talk about “stories” in ttrpgs.
@@NarfiRef huh? Your players want to engage in the story, or at least they _should_ if you've made a good one. I don't know what kind of MMORPG type game you must run, but my players are gonna start being disappointed when I have to call the session short because I don't have any material ready for them when they decide to go in the complete opposite direction they were advised to. Are you so prepared that you know exactly what to do when all your players collectively decide they don't want to play your campaign and want to ne truffle farmers instead? If players want a sandbox they can go play minecraft. TtRPG games aren't supposed to be free-form improv.
@@cameronphenix2096 I’m more of a player than a GM at this point. Not all people play ttrpgs for the same reasons. I don’t want to be constrained by some contrived narrative with expectations of some grand arc that someone bestows upon me. I just want to inhabit a fictional person in a fictional world, and live out their life that just happens to involve interesting situations.
@@NarfiRef And you can certainly do that, but no GM on the planet could create a world so fleshed out that you can just do as you will your character to do and expect to find intricate adventure and intrigue every time. GMs have to plan, have to write. Then they have to write contingencies for when their plan doesn't work out, or be competent enough to be able to improvise a work-around. If that's not the experience you're looking for, if you're not looking to plant yourself into a story and act within it, then you're in the wrong genre of games. There are plenty of sandbox videogames that can give you that experience so much better than a GM who only has a week to a month between sessions to flesh out a stretch of a campaign alongside their fulltime job. It's called a ROLE PLAYING game. You have a role, and you're required to play it. This is why GMs reward players who commit to the bit with fate points or extra loot, because you're helping to create a story and the more you try to go rogue and forge your own path, the harder the GM has to work to keep up and the faster the walls begin to break down. Not to mention, you're going to be playing with other people that probably want their own paths as well. The GM can't split into multiple people and accommodate each of you, so it's absolutely necessary that every player is on the same page the GM is, even if they don't realize it.
I can't see how what you're laying out is anything but antithetical to the entire concept of a TtRPG
I have never played D&D at all but understood everything he was saying. That is how phenomenally Brennan communicates with you.
Oh, I love this outlook. This changed everything for me.
That’s such a fascinating analogy and here’s why. If you’ve ever looked at a river on a map it’s rarely if ever a straight line from the source to the mouth. While the water does want to make the journey as efficiently as possible, the route naturally meanders because of the environment it traverses through. So, as Brennan said, you end up with an interesting, pleasing shape for a river that is still the most efficient path. Writers could really learn quite a bit from this analogy.
A neat little thing the DM of our group will do is after the session note down every plot hook and quest we said yes or no and records the consequences which can be big or small depending on the plot hook down the line.
So nowadays we're much more likely to follow plot hooks to not miss out because the world moves on without our intervention, it doesn't pause if we go to do our own thing. We don't help a local farm from the apparent threat of goblins? Go back to that farm a session or two later to find a full blown Goblin Slayer situation occurred there.
Give the players a choice. They say no to a quest and walk away? Don't shy away from showing them what occurred because they walked away. The cute farm girl who asked them for help doesn't stop existing because they wanted to go hunt seahorses or something.
Players want to ignore a plot hook you drop about some kinda cult in the city and go do their own thing? Sure they can go if they like but if they come back to the city it's gonna be a lot more cult heavy than before.
Give the players freedom. But also give them the freedom to take the consequences of when they just walk away. That's the motto at our table.
This is why my favorite homebrew setting I’ve made has Narrative Weight as a physical force. It’s a world made of stories, and the people in the world are aware of that, to a certain extent, though very few believe there to be beings telling or hearing these stories. A handful are fully aware that is happening, and three of them are able to observe back. Regardless, because Narrative Theory isn’t 100% accepted, and very rarely actually understood (in kind of the same way of various theories with competing ideas in science in the real world.) because of that, we can have characters who couldn’t care less about a narrative arch, but also characters who think completing what they THINK is their narrative arch is the most reliable way to complete their goals. Both are very interesting to DM for.
You read A Practical Guide To Evil? I think it so effectively illustrates narrative as a physical force in a world. Can't recommend it enough
The game "Scion" by White Wolf kinda does that. It's sort of a "Gods are real you play kids of gods" affair, but a big part of it is Fate, which is above the gods and loves stories and myths. Fate literally twists things around your characters (and certain other supernatural beings including all divine beings) to create legends and epic stories. Your PC's may also be absolutely aware of this fact which lends itself to a bit of meta gaming as they know Fate twist things into stories so as things go along, it makes perfect sense for characters to look for the "theme" in what's happening and try to act accordingly. Patheon also comes into account too so if you're a child of Thor for example, you might want to brush up on Norse stories and legends, because you're probably gonna be living them soon enough.
As insane as that man is, Brennan has an amazing way with words.
Ever since a friend of Brennan's in dm's academy said he has a crazy talent for narrating visuals and visual metaphors Im always looking for the next image he will give to our minds
What Brennan describes is constructing a story in a way that incentivizes or guides players in a general way/area which can work well. When most people refer to railroading it would be where the GM forced the party into a very narrow way of doing things or completely removing choice which ultimately defeats the point of Tabletops.
No one wants to be denied at every turn because the story says _ you aren’t capable of _ because you need to fail or you join _ despite them being opposed to everything you hold dear because story, you don’t have a choice.
he worded that so well
that was beautifully put.
This is a great way to look at it! I'm not sure if he's really talking about railroading though. There's a difference between railroading and "you really should probably do this." Let's say you're the DM and you want to make your players save a village from being attacked. There's (in my mind) three ways of doing this. One, have someone offer an incentive, like if they save the village they'll be paid well. This is probably the most used in our games because our party is very motivated by money, however it could be flimsy if the party deems that "it isn't worth it" forcing the DM to either raise the price or lower the danger or resort to option 2 or 3. The second is introducing a consequence. Let's say that your party is on death row and have been given a chance to be set free if they help out. This provides the party with a general direction without necessarily railroading them, and I think it's what Brennan is talking about. Sure, you're very very encouraged to help, but you don't have to. Once you're set free you can make a break for it. You can help the attackers destroy the village and gain freedim from working for them. Heck, you can just say screw it and take the death penalty. Even though this might feel like railroading because obviously helping would be the smartest choice, it really isn't because you can still find a way out without doing exactly what the DM wants. Railroading is like if you have an army of guards following you that entire time. If you take a step off the path they immediately shove you back on. If you consider betraying you're pushed away. If you try to say screw it I don't want to do this, you're pulled along anyways. You have no choice in railroading except for what the DM wants, and that is why railroading isn't good. Let me know if anyone else has different opinions on this.
this is the MOST SENSE ive ever heard story writing broken down
Thats one hell of an analogy
Love Brennan's take!
I feel like this is the only correct way to define this. The DM and the players should cooperate to create a story - it's a shared experience and a shared goal. The term 'railroading' has a negative connotation, where it feels like the DM is working against the players in order to force them to follow _his_ story.
As a DM, I put a lot of time in preparation so I want my players to experience that content. But I also want them to have a good time and feel immersed.
We're on the same team, people.
There will never be anyone better than him. He understands this game like no one else can
I'm not entirely sure if it's railroading though because giving the player the opportunities that they desire is the core of the game. Railroading in most minds is a punitive action taken by the DM to shape the results of a scenario even if it penalizes the players, usually done by DMs who can't improvise or have sadistic tendencies. I just call bringing the players onto the path of least resistance "efficiency" and a good way to DM.
best metaphor i ever heard for what makes a good DM
Brennan rattling his tankard is my favourite running gag in this fireside chat
Just pieced together that he is the oreo ceo from college humor
Dream blunt rotation
Having this at the moment. What I as the player want to do is rapidly take the throne but my character was written as a very moral, good dude. So we're taking longer to get where I want as a player but having the character do things his way.
A path of water will always take the quickest route, yet it's meandering is what makes it beautiful
The water analogy is an interesting one, but I would say it's not rails from that point on. What the GM should be doing is putting up story elements that act like dams, spillways, divergences, weirs as elements designed to slow down, pause or otherwise divert the inherent character desire to finish their task as soon as possible. That way the player can invest in the exploration and growth that they want to take part in without feeling like they are being directed to paths or away from them.
Beautifully put
Could you imagine an alternate universe where Brennan decided to go into organised crime or politics
THAT’S frightening
this sounds very difficult to pull off but ultimately sounds very satisfying
Brennan Lee Mulligan hitting us with Bruce Lee philosophy for DnD. Be like water.
10,000 hours of dedication to a craft.
As a DM that's some damn good insight and perspective.
When you're in the middle of a crazy fight on the roof of a train, trying to complete a heist, save a princess, and defuse a bomb, that the train is on tracks is almost a comfort.
Until the DM smiles and lets you know that the bridge is out.
The way this guy talks is just incredible. I stopped counting how many times I watch this from time to time.
the best description i have ever heard
The thing is, most players that are worth continuing to play with will be fine with you steering a general direction, what people really get upset with with rail roading is the dms who get mad at them for going off his laid out path. I had one player get upset about me railroading in a fight when in reality he was just doing something stupid that was unlikely to succeed and it ended up failing. For reference they had to try and get the collar off a big beast that woulda been someone what hard for them to fight straight out but the doors to the room were small enough that if they got it and got out it couldn’t chase them. This player tried going invisible and expected to be able to steal it without being noticed, but it was a collar attached to its neck and the creature had an ability to locate things purely by scent. So doing something like standing next to it and taking it’s collar off was gonna be damn near impossible without atleast a distraction so the creature took a swipe when he failed and since he was squishy he wasn’t exactly super high health afterwards and I had to give them ideas that they could try kiting it with the doorway or try the same thing with a distraction or try ripping the collar off or anything other than just walk up to a creature and take something it’s wearing off. I admit I coulda done much better to give my players fun options but I still get upset that they didn’t even consider that maybe their idea failed because it was poorly thought out and not because I just didn’t want it to
Brennan is an inspiration.
HE PUT IT IN WORDS
The major really shines through 😁👍
As someone who has DMed for nearly a decade... the boi be right.
Railroading and keeping a group organized are two, very different things.
What Brennan is talking about isn't railroading, it's just guiding the group back towards the things he's prepared.
Railroading is when the group is split, and two characters are in a fight they aren't supposed to win, but are actually winning and coming back the next week with the dm saying you died during the conflict in an effort to end a combat he was losing. Railroading is when the dm punishes the wizard for playing creatively by literally severing his connection to magic so he can't use combat spells.
Railroading is taking away player choice, and punishing players for playing differently than how the DM thinks they should play, not letting players do their own thing, but in a general direction that furthers the pre-built narrative.
And this is the mark of a bad dm, vs a good one. Directing a group in a direction they don't want to go by making them want or need to go that way is just managing a game, and it's good dming and it's literally all in how aggressive about it you are being. Like... Brennan knew shit was up with the wurst crew plotting something and it ended up trivializing the plinth fight BUT HE LET IT HAPPEN. My dm would have just introduced a second plinth because we HAD to fight it, or he would have forced the plan to fail, or he would have instakilled the support, and that's the difference.
i feel like there is a big different between a villain punishing the players and the dm punishing the players.
for example if your party is full of magic users and the villain is very smart he is going to look for ways to hinder your ability to use magic while also allowing him to use his. there is also very different between taking something away for story reasons and taking something away because a DM can. for example i have a character who is connected to a beholder in their head and the beholder and them have a connection where the beholder can take control. the beholder's name is steve and he is a dick and has his own agenda. steve and the character make deals for steve to take control and they set time limits but steve is very smart and works around things to achieve his own goals. for example he bypassed the time limit thing once. in universe there is a reason and understanding that reason or understanding the character makes a dm a good dm but manipulating the characters and players to fit a goal does not. im not gonna have a barbarian character suddenly have logical thoughts because thats not them. or im not gonna have a villain all about themselves be suddenly caring about the village.
Nah, both what you're describing and Brennan is describing are both railroading, you are just making the most absolute over the top negative examples of it. Railroading isn't inherently bad. "Guiding the group back towards the things he's prepared". Yeah, so he prepares something and then no matter what the players do, ultimately they are going end up at the point Brennan wants them to. This is railroading. It's just not an inherently bad thing.
@@SoyDrinker Not at all, and we will have to agree to disagree. Railroading is absolutely when the DM disallows any creative choice from their players. He says thats he wants to keep the group on track for the narrative, but that he also wants to give the group what they want. Railroading is definitively the opposite, when the DM gets upset becaues the group isnt engaging with their story or got sidetracked and ex machinas them on track, or punishes them.
Brennan doesnt railroad. Railroading is as the name suggests; its an inflexible, one way road. Brennan is absolutely not doing this, and his analogy of giving the group what they want whilst directing them towards a final goal fits with good DM'ing. And again, he absolutely allows for his group to do different things, and expands his story to fit their needs, rather then constricting his players to fit his story.
For me as a GM, I always think of everything I do as "railroading". But my players never seem to be able to see it that way.
And that's because while every major part of their adventure has been planned by me, I make no attempt to push them towards it, but instead just set it up with a "gravity" that feels natural for the characters they've created and the world that I've created.
It's all about that consistency. If the plot hooks are consistent with the world and the PCs, the plot will naturally draw the players wherever you need them to go, and you can sit back and watch all the crazy shit they do along the way.
At the end, she says "I'm different now" and that's a startlingly profound, yet very simple phrase.
I love this man so much.
Such an interesting thought, and you can see he really lives it. Cool take Brennan!
This irrigation metaphor is a brilliant actually - had been trying to think of a way to define the sort of guided-freeform play I try to do as DM
i dont know why and how but this sounds like actual life advice
players are like water. they wear away at solid foundations over time, slip through cracks, and are both necessary and utterly detrimental to the continued story.
Legend 💛
amazing brennan railroading philosophy.
Wow. I wish I could play with this guy. I remember a former DM. There was a whooooooole lotta railroading going on, but in the exact opposite way. She even had a self insert character that dominated the group.
Twists were s9mething I was known for as a GM.
My players would talk about the game during smoke breaks, their ideas on what they thought I was going was were 70 percent of my ideas came from.
brennan flustered and dropping his cup at the end is the most important part of this video
Guiding is not railroading there’s a HUGE difference Brennan
That's the best summary of the dms job and the player's paradoxical existence that I think I've heard of
Players also want choices, or at least the illusion of choice. They want to feel like they have input on their character's actions and story. So, a trick for a good gamemaster is to make sure the path appears to have choices, but they all lead to something CLOSE to the same route, or at least enough that they still stay on that irrigated pathway.
The same destination with a slightly different journey will always feel more rewarding
It's a balance, and the railroading discussion largely stems from many not understanding it's a whole line
No choices and no guidance aren't the only options n all
@@1stCallipostle Exactly. ONe of my games failed miserably because I had FAR too little guidance...which meant players weren't invested, because they didn't know there was a destination.
Matthew Mercer's appreciation in the end 😅
These two minutes say something profound about life in general. I'm not sure what, though.
I think Brennan is a genius.
Brennan Lee Mulligan: Water...
I wish my dungeon master wouldn't dam the flow of of the story, but he constantly does it, and it drives me crazy.
Any specific examples? Just want to make sure I don’t make the same mistake
@@liam2745 So currently we are on a mission to meet the barbarian's father. We enter a town that we think we could just resupply and move on. However, suddenly an earth elemental suddenly rises from the ground and is about to rampage in the town. Good party does good thing, and we kill it. We take a second to breath and start getting ready to leave
Then a random NPC comes up to us and gives us all tickets to the circus because we killed the earth golem, and implored us to go there. After some debate, the barbarian begrudgingly conceded to going to the circus. It might be a good way to relax after our stressful adventures.
NOPE BECAUSE THE WHOLE DAMN CIRCUS WAS HIGH JACKED BY A NECROMANCER WE DEFEATED MONTHS AGO AND CAUSES 4 LITERAL DEMONS TO APPEAR AND START ATTACKING.
A whole session, in a town that we just wanted to go through. And we have one more town on the way. I am not hopeful that we actually get to do what we want to do on time.
@@OmniVirusHS sounds like he’s delaying the story because he might not know how to plan he meet with the father. So he’s bloating the path, he also might be feeling like you guys have too much focus and aren’t really playing *in* his world. But just going from objective to objective, droning on until you reach a conclusion.
So to paraphrase. The character cares about the river. The player cares about the boat.
I mean, the problem with railroading is the same as dice fudging or CGI in movies. It's only a problem if the player is aware of it and thinking about it.
The "umm" at the end got me
and yet, despite all that, he was really good at playing Sleepaway!