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There is Railroading. The GM runs his adventure like a train on a set of tracks, going forward with no surprises, everything leading back to the plot and same approach or outcome.

There is Sandboxing. The players potentially just wander off from each other, start their own bandit group, become the local alchemist or buy their favorite inn, or heaven forbid, actually continue adventuring, righting wrongs and defending the innocent. The GM follows whatever lead the players go with, in reason, hopefully still keeping them somewhat together but allowing the group to decide what they want to do, where, when – maybe they’re just tired and wave off the approaching page, covered in blood and asking for help?

There is Ideal. There is what most people refer to hopefully as “normal”, where the players follow the general direction of the adventure/scenario/plot, but do their own thing along the way, but stay together, at least a loosely cohesive like-minded group of heroes on their way to stop the Big Bad.

In between all of these, somehow, I think there is something, probably between sandboxing and ideal, what I’m calling Ideal Meta-Railboxing, which is not exactly quite another style of GM’ing as the above, but more a construct, wherein you have a plot or adventure laid out, the players, after the PC’s all get their fair share of screen time and personal agendas, follow it more or less, either from interest and personal cleverness or even being given the “Point A to Point B” clues, or because you have to break immersion and step outside the game to give the heads-up to the players to let them know something isn’t going to fly, and why, and what their real-life Player options are, with their characters, for you to continue as GM for this game.

As noted, sometimes you need to drop the cue, clue or hint to the next “scene” in the players’ laps, and sometimes you have to take off the in-game “GM narrates the scene for the Player-Characters” meta-wizard-hat and put on the out-of-character “GM clearly addresses the Players themselves” baseball cap and shoot straight.

“Look, I’m not going to do any sort of threatening to you or the characters, or let you go on a wild goose chase for no reason, or waste mounds of time doing things that won’t make any difference, and similarly, if you [X Decision], it will effectively end the game, either for your character or everyone, because I’m not interested in GM’ing the style of play or other aspect that this would lead to. Attacking the 40 Brigands will get you killed, period, Fate Points out the window, etc.

If you want that kind of death for your character, then by all means do it, but the point is, there is no “avenue” out of the current situation through that action, so do as you will.” Or perhaps “I know you’re wanting your smooth-talking outlaw to start his own little band of thieves and get a hideout and headquarters where you can set up shop – but that isn’t what I’m going for here, with this adventure, and in fact I’m not interested in GM’ing that aspect of things at all, so I’ll fairly inform you that anything you do to these ends will, at best, receive minimal, cursory effort and attention from me.”

And the same goes, in general GM-wise, for the whole “atmosphere” or even ethic of a game or adventure; some Players or GMs may be squeamish or sensitive to some issues, so those should be avoided and left unexplored, the same in the case of a GM wanting one group with heroic intentions, for example, while the group is wanting to play a bunch of bloodthirsty cutthroats or minions of Chaos.

“You know, I’m just not going to follow this whole “seduce the barmaid” thing any farther than this, where she’s already swooning for you. As far as I’m concerned, it can play out however you want, this is the point I relenquish this topic to you, and will now continue with the rest of the game.” Or “I’m not comfortable or interested in GMing a game or adventure for a group of well-armed, anti-social, psychotic misanthropes – if someone else wants to GM it, knock yourself out, but that just isn’t happening with me at the helm, so get it out of your head.”

I think Steamrolling might be when the plot runs over the PC’s rather than them being forced to follow a “set of tracks”, but I’m not sure entirely what some good examples of this might be.

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This entry was posted by J P on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 3:31 am and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.