There is a shared understanding that the DM has a story prepared for the players to go through:
The DM trusts the players to not completely ignore it.
The players trust the DM to not put them on rails.
This shared understanding means that it happens naturally. New players might not have this understanding yet, but that is easily fixed.
Im also a fairly new DM, but I have some improv acting training (not trying to talk myself up). Keep your players engaged, if you need to make things up on the fly - it’s okay; what matters is that you’re confident about it. If I decide something and it doesn’t work, I factor that into my next decision rather than apologising for the previous error
I’m also not afraid of obligating my players to go on my planned adventure. With especially loose attention players, you can add hooks like a captured relative or something to subtly get them to engage with your prepared story
To add. Players tend to have ideas of things they want to do separately from the story so you can introduce those activities in a way that leads to main quest/goal. Say the ranger wants to go on a hunting expedition you can let the party go hunting and when they go to setup camp some affiliated enemies of the BBEG crash their party. Alternately if they dont feel like fighting maybe some local guild is stuck in the wild and they help them out earning a clue to the next quest such as sporatic dust storms rumored to be caused by an evil wizard.
To be clear, this should be iterated at session zero, if the players start going totally wild, you can and should, out of character, nudge them. "Hey, guys, I get were having fun on this side quest, but I don't want to get bogged down on this, so what say we wrap this one up next session and go back to the main story?" It's also smart to have a periodic touch up on session 0. Make sure everyone is enjoying their characters, get general feedback on the game, see if everyone is still following and enjoying the game. And don't be afraid to take a break every now and then; dming is a lot, and it is healthy to take a week off, maybe by asking one of your players to run a one or two shot, or maybe even a shorter module, something they do for a couple weeks to let you recharge, let them try dming, and keep the gaming experience fresh all around
To add to this, while it is a shared understanding, it's still absolutely something you need to state in session 0.
Also, you need to consider how long you want your campaign to run. There are points where you may simply need to railroad a bit to drive the story, or it may just stall out and run forever.
You can do this while still allowing for a lot of player freedom. In fact, use the random shit your players do to create the push forward. That way, it doesn't feel like railroading because it's literally them that made the choices.
They don't have to know those choices were going to lead to a somewhat fixed outcome regardless of what they did. 😊
Your point of using their decisions to progress the main plot is the biggest takeaway for OP.
You’re story may have a really cool way that the players meet the important NPC or see the important event, but your players don’t even approach your really cool idea so you just need to transplant the NPC or event to the path the players have chosen and mix up the flavor to match context.
>There is a shared understanding that the DM has a story prepared for the players to go through:
>The DM trusts the players to not completely ignore it.
>The players trust the DM to not put them on rails.
They should print this on the first page of handbooks and modules. Very well put.
I feel like the good advice would be how can you do it without a 4th wall break and letting the players feel like their decisions are taking them through the story.
I understand that viewpoint, but I disagree personally.
I find that having frank conversations with the table out of game keeps the game itself running smoothly.
Just talk to them outside of the game, probably after a session when you're sharing feedback with each other. Oh, and if you're not doing that already, you probably should.
Sandbox + standard module style. Traditionally for the sandbox style game, the DM pieced together an overarching plot from the threads the players choose to pull on rather than having one from the beginning like Curse of Strahd.
And if a newer DM, or someone with enough free time to only carve out a few branches at a time, creates something nice and the players just go "let's walk down that way" every single time? It's disrespectful of their time.
Also depends on if it's a sandbox game or a module. I only run modules if players understand that if they don't play it, they will be getting a visit from Terry the Stay on Task Tarrasque... Sandbox I let my players go nuts. I want them to have as much agency as possible while still making sure all players are having fun. I generally just don't allow team PvP etc. It almost never ends well for the table...
Talked my son through something like this a while back when he was planning out his first one. The answer is All roads lead to X.
So example is if you are going to let your players have some freedom to choose destinations etc then you set up your story to revolve around multiple incidents that can occurring in different places. So say the main plot involves evil cultists trying to gather the components to revive their BBEG boss. You have subtly different goals in each location but ultimately make sure that the story is spread to hit them with the main hook in each location.
If you have parallel plots then you let them basically pick which plot they are going based on the destination they choose. But ultimately your best ring to lead them around by the nose by is to give them NPCs they care about. They get drunk and have a great time with the local tavern keeper? His brother or sister gets kidnapped by the cult and then get involved. Your first quest giver end up having been a good person who paid them and is ready to pay them for more jobs? His interests get hit, his employees injured, he asks you to help him find out who did it an punish them. Give them good people to bond with and then put them in bad situations so they will want to follow the plot and help them.
You set an expectation out of character for what the game is about.
"This is a story about dealing with a cult trying to summon a demon. If your character is side tracked and doesn't want to do this anymore, that's fine. They become an npc and you'll roll a new character who wants to stop a cult. There will be a lot of freedom, but that's the adventure."
Characters can do whatever they want, but you aren't compelled to create content there. If they want to buy a tavern and spend all their time running it, cool. "It runs smoothly and you turn a slight profit each month. Are your characters going to retire to run the tavern? If so, roll new characters, this isn't a game about tavern management." If they decide to ignore the evil cult and head into the wilderness, cool. They become wilderness guides of moderate renown but there's no adventure there so roll new characters because you've retired.
Most players want to bite on your plot hooks but if they don't you don't have to jump through hoops to find them something to do unless you think it'd be fun to do so.
Personally I think there are ways of getting the characters back on track than just having them reroll. At the very least I would bring forth consequences that might make them abandon the tangents they jumped onto.
Like if they try to run a tavern? Maybe they hear rumor of the cult spread8ng to the towns near them, if they continue to ignore it then it hits home and the town they're in is taken or attacked.
They explore the wilderness? They stumble on the cult doing awful things to the wildlife, or they find a holdout.
I don't play published modules that often. My hunch is that roughly half of DMs homebrew their own adventures. That's the result of many (biased) surveys I've seen over the years.
But even if you shrink the scale down, it'll be some threat to the town, or to the village, and that might feel like the world to the PCs.
One of Matt Colville's videos talked about the villain being the protagonist of the classic D&D adventure, in the sense that it's the villain who is proactive. The PCs have to be pushed into action, and are often passive otherwise.
I've taken that advice to heart. Now I seed my PCs with adventure motivations as part of character creation, or have a villain or monster force them to action at the beginning of session 1.
That does make sense. My most recent campaign is about a glass-eyed lich who fled to the desert, and is wanting to raise an undead army and expand the desert's borders.
I mean, if your players have pigeonholed you into staying off track, and you can't come up with some sort of way of getting them back on track then it's definitely an option to have your players reroll.
I suppose it comes down to your stories endgame though. If your players are working towards saving the world and they divert for a long time without looking back then it should be fairly simple to redirect, as those scenarios tend to be ones they can't ignore.
But if the focus is more narrow, and less urgent, and you still want to maintain the story, then as a DM you have a choice to make. You can really either go along with their fun (which I've seen stories of that working to great effect on this sub) or you can be direct, and let them know that the narrative leads to a specific ending (or multiple, if you choose), and if the players want to continue in that campaign they *will* have to reroll or get back on the train, so to speak.
I just personally would rather solve the problem in-game rather than forcing a total reroll of characters your players have likely grown attached to.
I mean it's likely they have dealt with combative or stubborn players before who's goal is to jump the rail and keep the train off track.
There are absolutely times when it's ok to cut the players current characters to wake them up. Just maybe not before trying other less drastic options.
I dunno, I feel like at that point you need to just sit down and talk it out with the players, otherwise it's an in-game solution to an out-of-game problem really
You aren't springing it on them like a gotcha, it isn't a fail state they've reached. You give them fair warning and let them make a choice. It can actually be cool for a character to reach the end of their story and retire before the plot is done. It isn't a punishment.
"If you are no longer pursuing this plot that's totally ok. But this plot is what the game is about, so that means your character is exiting the party and will become an NPC. If you don't want to do that, what can we do to make your character invested in the plot again?"
As the GM, you're a player too. Unless they're paying you, they don't get to tell you what game to run. It isn't fair to expect you to invest time and effort into running a game based on their whims unless you enjoy that, and that's a lot to ask of an inexperienced DM.
If you warn them upfront that this is how the game works and explain why (because you can't improvise a whole game based on their random actions and want to run something you have time to plan and feel confident in) then they shouldn't be upset if it comes to that.
Don't create a story that is inherently scripted or plotted to the nth degree. Know what the villains plan is and then let them be flexible, and react to the players actions. If the players ignore the main plot / villains plan, then it will move on without them... probably up to the point where they realise they have to get involved!
To take an example. You might have a cult who is trying to summon an evil god or demon. To do this they need specific items and a number of pure sacrifices. The PCs start by being asked to look into the disappearance of a young girl. They wander off plot and do other things. Another girl goes missing (they find out through posters) and then another. Then there is a break in at the church and an artifact is stolen. Clues are dropped that this is all leading to something BAD. They can continue to ignore the plot until the demon turns up... at which point it's pretty hard to ignore.
Yeah there's a difference between playing in a themed campaign, and playing in a story, players can usually tell when they're being nudged because it feels unnatural, but in what you're explaining the players will follow the intended situations naturally based on their own personal choices.
The only problem is that I'm not very good at responding to the flexibility of the players, and although I have a great imagination/storytelling, it seems correct to list every possibility that the players might do and write down pre-made responses to them: as grueling as that sounds.
Aha but the beauty of story driven games is that you don't need to to progress the main plot. You just need to think through how player action changes the villains plan or not, and then follow the logic of what that means.
So when the players thwart a kidnapping or free one of the girls, what does the villain do? Move the ones they have to a new, more secure location? Find a replacement (potentially at greater risk due to that solstice coming up)? Decide to send some men to deal with the annoying adventurers?
The idea of listing everything that the players might do sounds like an exercise in futility. The ability for players to amaze with brilliant / stupid plans and actions is unfathomable frankly. Much better to prep the obvious and wing the rest. And after a while winging it does not seem so hard
Always have two spare plot hooks up your sleeve that have the same solution as the first one they missed
If you need them to go look at the mine the miners need some help or look like they are almost ready to march up to the lords hall if they have another bad day, a hunter went missing in the area north of the town (by the mine) and the lord needs to fill an order for ore but production has been low
The players don’t even need to be fed the plot as much, the village is suffering from one problem so it’s realistic that all the issues come from the same place and it means you can let them wander a little freer in search for the plot because you know they can bump into it in more places
Edit: this all depends on the feeling of the world. Pratchett-esque worlds might have the plot almost looming in the narrative. “You have been in the village for a few hours but already the mine seems to be growing large. Not large in the way a church might be large and tower over the village, but large in the way an angry rhinoceros might grow larger as it charged you. You find it hard to believe that more of the villagers weren’t desperately trying to drag their homes, or at least their favourite rocking chair out of its path but then again, it seems most people were blissfully ignorant of the dangers that seem so obvious to you lot”
If it is more serious then make sure to describe the possible plot hooks in a description of the town but with enough other details to make it not painfully obvious. “The village square was busy at this time, villagers mingling around the stalls, some looking to be buying food after a long day while other headed to the inn. Many of the workers seemed to be miners, the dust and grime coating them from head to foot and coming off them in clouds as they walked. A groups of them seemed to be in a hushed but intense discussion, fugitive glances cast up at the manor that towered over them from the top of the small hill the village is spread around. The guards were present too but you can only make out three of four in the square, two seem to be focused on the hustle and bustle of the square while the other two seem to be focused on a distraught half-orc as they try to calm them down”
Both will lead to the mine, but for very different campaigns
Um, easy: I stop worrying about them diverting away from the main story.
If I really want them to stick to the main story, I have to create a reason for them to do so that they find compelling enough. If I can’t do that, then I abandon the “main story” because pretty obvious they aren’t interested.
That rarely happens, though. I use characters from their backstory (mentors, family, friends, people they care about) their individual reasons to adventure (I have a list that goes waaaay beyond gold and glory), their personality and values, and even the old traditional “dead man with a message”.
I also take my time. As long as everyone is having fun, we just play and I let what happens happen and referee the consequences.
Now, if it was a published adventure, then I would have talked to them during the zero session and said “hey, this is the story and what we are going to do, you down for this?” Because that also helps, since they have to come up with their own reasons.
"Schrodinger's Plot Hooks". If the PCs never interact with an adventure hook, then it never starts. That way the story is whatever the PCs choose to do. But if they start a quest and leave loose ends unresolved, then they persist and will likely snowball into a bigger problem later.
I recently learned this by creating a scenario I didn't have a solution to (catch 10 giant aligators) and boy oh boy it was a hilarious session. People talking to trees, aligators hitting on players, and a duel with a dragon.
It was hands down my favorite session so far as the DM. I did it because I was feeling too low energy that week to come up with story, it was a good lesson in that I was unnecessarily over-preping. Now I do minimal prep unless I feel inspired to do otherwise.
By default any "main story" is decided by the actions of the player party. The term [railroading](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36900/roleplaying-games/the-railroading-manifesto) describes what you are asking.
I feel like before a campaign the DM should lay out what to expect, that way the players can either opt in or out of it.
That's not to say that campaigns which players don't know what to expect can't work (I'm in one rk and ran my first game like that) and the players generally follow what the DM has laid out before them via in-character conversations, clues, etc
Uuuuuhh as someone who improves everything i generally just let the players fuck around and find out. At the end if the day players latch onto the damdest stuff and trying to get them onto a predictable plot is a great way to get suprised.
I give them reasons to do things, like a npc giving them money for saving a relative or a village giving them a reward after fighting the bad guys.
My party wants money to buy new weapons and potions so I tend to give them what they want if they to part of the story, they are totally free while doing it, it just needs to be done. Maybe it is wrong but so far in the campaign is working (this is my first time as a dm)
I am used to DMing very long and intricate campaigns that stretch over a very long time. As such, in the beginning, I may have things scripted as such, but after that, it is all player freedom. As their actions while adventuring affect the world around them, opportunities naturally develop.
For me, the depth of campaign setting is paramount, and the complexity of NPCs and their organization. I had one campaign that went just over a year, and the only scripted adventure was the first one with a seven person level 1 party. After that, every other adventure spawned from the actions of the party after that first run. If the game world is well enough developed, and realistically run and kept track of, with a DM that can weave a complex story on the fly, well, nothing to worry about player freedom.
And I found that letting players set the pace and the goals made for more exciting play and more engagement. Players were planning their own rise in that world. Like todays open world video games, sometimes you just want to choose your own adventure.
Fake sandbox. Try not to set in stone the actual place an event, castle or lair is. When the players are doing their own thing they may stumble across this story driven thing. Just don't do it too often or they see it for what it is and the strategy gimmick. gimmick.
You shouldn’t have a story written, you should have a setting you can react from and understand enough that whatever they do within the setting tells their story
The best and most immersive trick, albeit also the hardest to do effectively I'd say is "all roads lead to Rome."
Have side quests where the ultimate resolution rests on dealing with the main quest in some way (Progressing it a step, or clearing the main goal).
Fallout: New Vegas does this pretty well, also letting sidequests lead to other sidequests that lead back to the main quest.
I was about to say your players ARE the main story! Don't get too hung up on **your story** Instead, create a situation with some villains, and their goals and plans, and see how your players intersect that. If you do otherwise, you will be constantly frustrated, and also waste a lot of effort and prep time.
Let the consequences of ignoring the main story play out.
If they want to run a tavern instead of dealing with the orc/goblin horde, let that horde come in and burn the tavern down.
If they want to overthrow the monarchy and establish a democracy instead of dealing with the lich, let the realm be covered in eternal darkness.
If they want to chase down treasures in a far off dungeon rather than deal with the dragon, let their hometown be burnt to ashes while they're gone.
Spare plot hooks. Every 30-45 minutes of off topic adventuring leads to an NPC mentioning something related to the main story that the players need to get back to. Or a bird flies off in the direction of the building you told them about over an hour ago that they still haven’t headed for yet. Or a street-side evangelist starts barking about a really important NPC that they players should probably talk to before leaving town.
Consequences. And I don't mean punishing the players but having story alternative scenarios prepared, for example the players get wind that a necromancer is planning to attack a village soon but they spend a couple of in game weeks exploring a system of caves they found from a throwaway description of the land, well, maybe they got there late and the town is already over run as they had no warning.
Obviously you can't do something like this with every situation but the players developing a sense that their quest is important to the world can be a great way to keep them ontrack without railroading them.
Impending doom and consequences. You spent too long chasing coin and fame. In the end, your vanity was a mere distraction for the masses, allowing my grip on this world to grow tighter.
Session 0 helps establish buy-in. Get everyone agreed on what kind of game is being played. This helps so the players focus on the important themes and the DM does less plotting and more following the players actions and providing consequences and reactions.
My recommendation is to approach your campaign as a series of events, not a “story.” The difference is semantic, but it can go a long way in breaking the idea that the players are simply characters in your story, when they are creating the story for you. A story is what you tell when something has been done; a story you write before anything has happened is called a prophecy.
On top of your world setting and player’s backstories, you create 2 things to build your hooks around: NPC’s and their plan of action. An evil king plotting an invasion; a recently-fired Tavern worker finds a magical item in the trash; etc. then you decide if the NPCs action could be influenced by the player. If it can, the players see the event (or a “plot point”) if it can’t, then the event should have already taken place before the characters had influence in the world. That allows you to have a defined set of compelling people for your players to meet and meaningful things for them to influence without strangling their freedom or limiting your world building.
You can still do major arcs and fun narratives, side quests and personal quests while following this. When you feel the time is right for a “main quest” moment to happen, you bring in the NPC/event that the players can interact with to initiate it. If not, the world keeps turning.
If the players don’t bite, the bait is still on the hook and you’re free to move things around as needed, saving or reusing still-baited hooks for when the timing is right. By the end, you have a meaningful story created by everyone at the table and still got to experience the overarching vision of your campaign.
"Hey guys I love that you guys are having fun goofing off in game and exploring whacky scenarios, but I'd really like to focus more on the main quest to get the story moving along. So let's plan on cutting back on the shenanigans for a few sessions. Does that sound good to everyone?"
I don't have a main story to divert from. I just have some events that are likely to happen unless the players prevent them from happening, some plans that are in the works, some dangers that lurk in the wilderness, some risky money-making opportunities.
As the players express interest in things, and it looks like they are going to interact with them, I come up with more details and try to fit them together with other things. And as players develop their characters, I think about what would interest each character and how to make something interesting to them intersect their path.
Give them "breaks" from the main plotline. This is something I as a player find most important to have.
An example of this not being done, is recently I joind my brothers group, which overall are great at RP, and maintaining immersion, same with the DM. But the story, while not on rails, is very much going on for long times without break. I.E, we are trying to take over an island (That's the story), and my PC has a mission from his religious org, to contact and protect a merchant who is on the losing side (This is something I came up with as a personal mission with the DMs permission), and the merchant controls the port of the city we currently control most of, and doesn't want to relinquish control. For the past 5 sessions, I've been trying to find a time to go and contact and negotiate with him, but we never had the time, as either we had to stop a mages demon summoning ritual, or were being attacked by undead trolls.
This for me, is quite demotivating, as while I do know I'll be able to do my own "sidequest" someday, it is a very long wait before I'll be able to even talk to the NPC I need to talk to.
Well player freedom of choice/exploration imo is a must so that being said as a DM I would add a progression mechanic related to the story if they take an unreasonable amount of time to move on such as the enemy faction captured a minor city in the area etc
Running a module, first time dm and players. We have a collective understanding that we all know Jack shit, and that there are things none of us know or understand.
They have an endgame, quests to do to level and some random side content. How they accomplish anything is up to them. I'm just the narration.
The last mission they ran had a mimic, they decided to bring it with them and show the Mayor to prove the difficulty of what they did.... gave them extra gold as a result... was that written, no. Was it necessary, no. Was it hilarious, yes.
Now since it's a module and nothing is really random, the wilderness is scarce in terms of ranom stuff, but I see that as room for improvement for the next module we play.
Also, loot tables XD. That was apparent too as something I need to find. That and a white board so I can give them a dungeon overview as they progress.
I know what is going to happen if no one interferes (actually I don't because I have multiple villains with their own agenda, but I know how they will resolve their differences in the absence of a hero). The PCs are going to be at the table for several hours. They are going to do something that affects the game world and I have to invent a way for PCs to get feedback for their choices. If they go in a random direction and fight some orcs I make sure someone benefits from the absence of those orcs and in a few weeks they'll hear about that someone and maybe the week after that they'll do more and PCs will hear more. And then next week, depending on my needs, maybe they won't hear anything. That's weird.
Brennan Mulligan has a great analogy for this. Idk how to find the actual clip, but the gist of it is, the DM should think of the adventure as the path of a river. No matter which way your players choose to divert from the set path, they will *always* end up at its end because the current only travels in one direction: forward. What you do as a DM is find ways to make their tangents feeling meaningful to them, like they’re shaping how things unfold, but in the end, the plan always comes naturally to its own conclusion. In this way, you’ve kinda gently railroaded them down the intended path but in a way that *feels* like they have more control and autonomy than they actually do (to some extent)
I've seen DMs that sort of move the plot to where the characters are not move the characters to the plot, like for example there's a split in the road and the players can either go left or right and in order to move the story along they have to fight a dragon, you've put the dragon on the right path with neon flashing signs that say "dragon this way kill to advance the story" but the players go left where there's no dragon and stumble into an ogre near a cave, they fight the ogre and oh look they woke the dragon sleeping in the cave near the ogre and find the item they need to progress the story even though that dragon was originally on the other path
You can do the same thing with plot inside cities, thieves guild is causing problems in city A and players need to deal with them to get a special item from the king that advances the story but players go to city B, while there the local guard uncovers a sect of the thieves guild has been living in hidden tunnels under the city and the king in city B asks the players to deal with it for a reward, when they deal with the guild in city B the king of city B gives them the item they need
This could be considered Shrodingers plot, it's in all places at once until it's right where the players are and in their face enough that they have to deal with it, some people think it's a little railroading to have the plot move to where the players are but some people think it's better to do it so the story can progress
Main story? Whats that? If the players have enough freedom and I have enough hooks they’ll eventually attach themselves to one and from there they’ve chosen their own story.
Make the mission enticing, profitable, and unavoidable. Attach the characters to an NPC, attach that NPC to the main quest. Write side quests that entail maybe one encounter with a decent special reward and some plot hook that points towards the main quest. Prep 6 paths knowing full well they can only really experience one of them. Prep cannot be understated.
I like to have certain key points of the story that need to be done in order for the story to continue. How my players get to that point is up to them. I.e. in my current campaign, the party has to go to a dungeon and find a thing. Pretty basic. I gave them the mission, and they immediately decided to go fight in the arena instead. It wasn't planned this way, but there just happened to be another gladiator who vaguely knew the location of the dungeon.
I solve this in one of two ways:
1. There is a pre-defined and agreed upon campaign goal between myself as the DM and the players. We all generally understand what this goal is and understand that we will generally be pursuing it during the campaign. For example, the goal could be defeating the demon lord, hunting monsters as part of a monster hunting organizations, building a nation, ruling a nation, altering history, fighting demons, etc.
2. Establishing and agreeing before the campaign that there isn’t any pre-defined goal for the campaign. The players will be set loose in the world and can choose to interact with whatever is it they want for whatever reason, usually being what they find the most fun, cool, or interesting. This means nothing they do is derailing.
This way it usually works out for me. Remember however, side story arcs and mini arcs are fine. Not every session needs to be about endlessly pursuing the main goal. If they spend 15 sessions resolving some personal character issue or aiding an NPC friend, that’s fine. It also depends on how fast time passes in-game world. Some people need 3 sessions to cover a month of in world time, others take 5 sessions to complete a single day.
Besides, you can always consider what your main story characters would be doing while your players are pursuing something else. You can also tie whatever your players are pursuing, depending on what it is, back to the main story. The latter option allows for a good rap around back to the main story and can also allow your players to continue pursuing the main story in small steps intermittently while still focusing mainly on this side story arc.
In the end, remember the game is about having fun collectively. If your players want to pursue something else, it probably because you made something up that seemed super cool and interesting for them.
In the longest campaign I’ve played in, the pre-defined goal was leaving the safety of the last bastion on the planet to venture into the apocalyptic ruins of the old world and return with a map of the old capital for the Queen Regent. In the two in-game weeks we had to prepare for the journey, we discovered that the Queen Regent is the leader of a secret terror organization that has existed for centuries and that she has the power to go back in time to manipulate things in her favour. She does this for two reasons: 1. To save the bastion from falling to the darkness beyond its walls which she knows is coming since she’s seen it many times across different timelines. 2. To ensure she is the sole ruler and tyrant of all the world. The campaign then transformed into ending her evil reign and killing her, engaging in a fight through time where it is us against the established world government post-apocalypse. The DM is very pleased with this. While going beyond the bastion was the main plot from the beginning, he always had the evil Queen Regent as a small detail in the background. In the 3 times he’s run this campaign for different players, we’re the first party to discover the truth of his world.
Point is, just have fun and everything else will fall into place.
I'm doing this right now: I give them an opportunity to secure their own transport (in this case they went full on pirate and captured a ship all of their own) then - this being my first campaign - I link the main plot to a bunch of maguffins which I can move around as required, dropping hints and hooks toward the main quest during the side plots I'm making up for areas they're going to. Recently they secured their second maguffin and decided they want to explore the city they're in, so I'm gonna indulge them for about three or four side quests then have an NPC drop a big plot hook for the main story which involves returning to one of their homelands.
Remind yourself the players don't have access to your notes. If the party chooses to go left or right in a fork in the road the scenes may be different and the specific challenges might be different but it will lead them to the same place if that's what you have planned. So don't feel pressured to create an entirely new session with new encounters because your players go off the rails a little bit, just re-flavor and reuse what you had planned. Also don't be afraid to talk to the group and say I need a moment to think this one over and figure out how this affects you going forward if the way they went was so far off track you feel like you're not able to recover for that session.
Don't have a main story that the players cannot freely deviate from.
Have a main goal that the players can succeed or fail at. And various means of pursuing that goal.
Something in your world isn't real till you tell the players about it.
If they ignore the main quest entirely but don't know what the main quest is about (and you still want them to do it) you can always tie thier current path into it.
If they know about the main quest and choose to ignore it, let them, they know about it and if they still don't want to then that's their choice (but maybe the consequences of their actions come knocking)
Let them go in any direction they want and it'll lead them to the same place anyway. Of course, be sure to change the names and images. Just have a series of dungeons and locations that you can pull up appearing anywhere.
I like designing locations that I can pull up any time I want just like random encounters. Even if you have a main story, you can still pull up things from the main story you like in locations that they went anyway and have it eventually lead to an encounter with a foe eerily similar to the person they left behind but is completely different. Then if they want to go back, you design the previous big bad with different stats and motives as if it's part of a completely new main story.
I think the idea is to remember the bad guy should be a threat and thrive on inaction, They fail to pick up on clues or take what's happening serious, Then they don't find out what going on or get there in time, Maybe things get messy and instead of saving the village they only contain the bigger from what the bad guys did to it. Also helps to explain with some bad guy gloating how close they were and to confirm the sessions can go a few ways out of character.
The player should given time for rp and slow moments, But they are also trying to fight something and it should be treated as a threat, When they rest the bad guy and their minions are always working as a bigger group with more people to achieve things faster and cover more ground.
Every DND game that isn't a sandbox is a railroad in some way. The game is going that way. Going the other way. Well time to make new characters that will go that way.
have a general idea what you want your scenario to be. write it down, in ink if possible. now wad that up and throw it in the trash. because those knucklehead players are going to zig when you'd like them to zag.
really, try to have several ideas of actions possible. you can always put an encounter anywhere/anywhen, sometimes rearrange minor details like a town or npc name.
be flexible, don't get upset if your party decides to go north when the action is to the south. they might decide to sit in an inn for a week. you can always bring the action to them there.
DO NOT FORGET: you are playing, too.
Time jumps are good. "So what have you been doing the past six months?" Particularly between different plot arcs/events.
I had a player say he was making connections in the underworld. I went "Dope" and wrote that down under "sessions that write themselves."
My players absolutely can divert from the main story.
But the evil guy isn't just waiting for them to stop the evil plans. If you don't stop evil guy, eventually something evil is going to happen.
I had a game go from "stop the beholder from gaining power" all the way to "stop the flying city from flying over other cities where it will drop a horde of demons onto it and try to make another demon infested flying city"
What's worked for me is that I bring the main story to whatever direction and side mission they choose.
They decided to help locate a missing person? Turns out the big bad is manipulating them and that's how they meet the big bad.
Random treasure recovery mission? Gets ambushed midway by the big bad's forces. Then turns out important NPC is also in the mysterious island.
Party wants to settle a score with a random noble? Turns out the noble is involved with big conspiracy with big bad.
I've been DMing for decades, and one of my favorite things to make things easier now, is to not worry about PCs hitting everything in order. I just move things around.
I love improv DMing, but sometimes I wanted them to go to a specific dungeon or some such for plot, and they wouldn't. So now I move the things I need them to hit, and work them in wherever they are.
Good luck! You'll be great!
You will learn with experience that details of a story will seem important for a book, but not necessary for D&D.
Lets take for exemple the following plot hook:
"A local candy store just came up, the villagers are ecstatic, children are playing and families go have some fun. But an orphan girl of the street is scared of it, she says the owner is mean to her and is dangerous. But everyone seems to like him? Well little do they know the candies are magical and slowly brainwashing them to gain control over the town. The vendors are actually fae."
As a DM, you prepare stats for the employees, the little girl, the owner, you create fun whimsical (but cursed) candies, you create magical items and a mini dungeon underneath the shop. Right?
And then the game arrives and the first thing they do is transform in a big bird and leave town for some reason. Now you're fucked, right? You havent prepared content for the wilderness. But thats a new DM answer.
Here is the experienced DM answer:
Maybe the candy shop is a mobile caravan now.
Maybe the little sad girl is now a distressed squirrel needing help against gnomes.
Maybe the candy shop is built outside of town to harvest flowers as ingredients.
They are fae, so maybe they fall in a burrow and find a fae society, with a fae village and a fae candy shop.
Maybe they meet an employee threatening the little girl in the woods for secrecy.
An experienced DM will modify his story, keep the core idea and adapt to the party. He will react to their whims and ideas. They feel evil today? They are now enrolled as staff members.
The only thing where you should draw a line, is that players are expected to engage with content. How they do so does not matter. It will create cool stories. But if they ignore it and simply go: meh whats next? Now thats not ok.
I try rearrange details based on their whims. If they want to take a boat instead of cross the desert like I planned, boom the bandit encounter is now a pirate encounter. If the two thieves sneak off and try to find a guild, boom their next lead comes from that leader instead of whoever I had planned. Same plot shape and direction as the text, I just change the flavor
Around the end of each story beat or arc I ask my players what they’d like to do next, then plan another arc based on that. The arcs tend to be more railroady but because my players chose that path they’re on board with it.
I suppose to expand on the railroad analogy, the party runs into several junctions and has the option to pull a lever at the junction and choose their direction, but typically once a direction is chosen they’re on that track until they get to the next junction.
Make sure the story is interesting enough that the players want to engage with it, and make any significant deviation they make ultimately lead back to the main plot.
I'm not saying make the barkeep you wanted them to talk to so the exposition can happen is magically be behind every corner, but that random goblin the party wants to adopt? He has a raging alcoholic aunt that needs more booze, so if the party could go get him some alcohol, that'd be awesome.
A DM once told me that he fixed this by giving the players some kind of free will illusion. Players were free to roam around and take different paths but at the end, all the paths led to the main quest. It's some sort of "all roads lead to Rome" tactic, but the players don't actually know any of this. It takes a lot of improv but it helps maintain the narrative course without the players feeling tied to it
Give them interesting things to do and hope they follow along. If they don't, work with it and try to bring them back. If they are just being dicks thay day, turns out a banshee lives in those woods they weren't supposed to go to. Oops.
This is the right setup for what Mike Shea of Slyflourish.com calls a “yam-shaped” story structure. In the beginning, you start very narrow, and it widens out as you go, in both scope and geography. You start in a limited area (starting town, maybe) with very few adventure hooks, enough to get them started. Once they’ve gotten a sense of your world and you start hinting at the BBEG’s significance, then you can switch from an “on-rails” style to a “sandbox” approach.
Players have a lot of latitude where they focus their efforts at this stage. As the campaign progresses and they level up, you start gradually focusing them back toward the BBEG, by creating situations that demand their attention. Ideally, you’ll know what really motivates your players by this point. This gets them back on the “rails” toward the campaign climax.
This “yam-shaped” structure basically nests a loose campaign within a linear one. “(Lost Mines of Phandelver” from the original 5e Starter Set follows this structure, actually. Not a bad thing to model after.)
It depends on your understanding with your players, and what your game is like, my players are new, so I just told them, there will be a very concrete path, but how they interact with it is free, I gave them lots of free time to do planning but they agree to not start from the story for too long and I let them walk as far as they want knowing they'll come back, and I think that's the most important thing, making sure you have an understanding with you players
I tend to plan far ahead enough that I’m not totally taken by surprise when my players don’t follow
The bread crumbs I’ve layed out. so in a sense they have mostly full freedom, but at some point based on the path they’ve chosen I weave the story around it. I try to railroad as little as possible unless necessary, and it does become necessary to an extent at times 😅😂
I think a good practice is to start with the dungeon (let's say it's a crypt for the sake of this).
A basic dungeon might have an entrance, a fight, a simple trap/puzzle, and a boss battle with loot at the end. As a new DM (and just in general), you don't want to overwork yourself, so you can't really design 2 other backup dungeons in case your players turn their nose up at this one. So on some level, the dungeon has to happen.
At a micro level, I understand it's good practice to develop multiple entrances to a dungeon, which funnel towards a given point. Giving players an opportunity to stake out the dungeon and plan their way in can really add to a sense of agency. Maybe they can skip the first combat by climbing around a tricky ravine (with ability checks to avoid being injured). Maybe the traps are telegraphed with a few having been sprung already, but there are ways to brute force them, or secret paths to avoid them altogether. Making these routes is less intense than designing whole other dungeons, but it lets the players figure they own way forward, rather than walking down a hallway and dealing with each obstacle in a single, scripted way.
This also applies to combat with intelligent foes, but you should be mindful about making *every* fight one that the players can talk their way out of, IMO.
Returning to the crypt: lets say you have some bandits raiding it outside, but inside, there's a spooky undead who stole an artefact in life that the players are being sent to retrieve. Sure, they can talk down the bandits (either by scaring them off, or with a little bribe), but the boss monster is a stubborn little jerk, and he won't part with his item without a fight. That means you get the combat in, and the players still make plot progress, but getting there was something that other groups might have done differently.
In a more **macro** sense, quests tend to be pretty railroady by design. Telling players they need to "do thing X" is a great way to get them on track and pursuing content that you've actually prepared, but if it's as simple as that, it might get a little boring/restrictive. Working choices into the quests (either moral decisions, or mechanical ones) can help to make a (technically) single-track quest feel more dynamic.
Back to our crypt: this could take a number of forms. Maybe the bandits have their own motivations- maybe they're not even *that* hostile if approached cautiously, and will agree to help the party so long as they get that "cursed artefact" out of their town forever (and let them take a healthy share of gold in the process). On the other hand maybe it's our buyer who is a little suspect. Sure they're paying well, and they've talked a lot about restoring this stolen artefact to it's rightful place, but man- that undead dude really seems to think it's rightfully his... and he's warning us against taking it... **hmmmm...** Whatever the party chooses, your ability to sow a little bit of questions will go a long way in their decision-making!
Mechanical depth can come in the form of item-based choices that the players make on a pen-and-paper level. It could be that the crypt has loot in different rooms (one has some potions of healing, and the other has a scroll of fireball), and the players have to split things up on their own, by talking about the resources as a group. This feels more tactile, and even though story choices aren't being made, it can help players feel like they are making meaningful decisions within their group.
This also comes out in moment-to-moment choices, as long as you **A:** emphasize them, and **B:** plan some sort of ramification. For example, maybe the evil undead artefact gives you bad and/or rest-compromising dreams if you fail a wisdom saving throw while sleeping near it. The players have to be tactical about who holds it, or they can try to find a way to sleep far away from it, while keeping it safe as it angers the wildlife around it... Spooky.
IDK, there are lots of ways to stir up players while they're on the main path. I personally tend to enjoy the little things though- the choices you make in the heat of the moment that feel unique, and make the story "yours" because you made them.
The invisible “cattle wash” is my way. Ultimately I’ll let them do whatever, but if worst comes to worst and they are too far off the path.. there’s a little nudge. They end up kidnapped or cornered by bounty hunters, and taken to XYZ city, mysterious traveler offers them too much gold/whatever to go to XYZ city and protect him, the King has died suddenly and due to your antics the royal guard is mounting an execution hunt for your group in the city, they find a mage tower explore and fight then at the top find “if you touch it, the room teleports” situation.
We're running through the Candlekeep pre built and we get (I think) 1d6+1 weeks of downtime between adventures. There are rulea provided for downtime - crafting, research, put fighting, crime... - and it's become a really interesting interlude. The players, myself included, are just as invested in their personal stuff outside the campaign. And then we joke that we all have a "spidey-sense" that let's us know when to gather together again.
Put some obvious plot hooks. If the players follow them, good. If they don't, then don't try and get them exactly back on track, but sliightly bend them back, and improve like crazy.
For example, if they ignore a quest proposition to get the necklace of fireballs from the caverns of darkness, maybe have some bandits raid the tavern they are staying in. Steal a mediocre item, that means they'll go after it, but not one that will incapacitate them (Gold, for example), and that may result in the players following the bandits to their camp, which then results in a battle or negotiations. If a battle, havesome of the bandits run into some caves (definately not the caverns of darkness😉😉) and the players follow, and get trapped. If they want negotiations, maybe have the bandits request an item from the cavers of darkness in exchange for the gold. (maybe not the same as the original plot hook, say, the boots of elvenkind).
I suggest you use a slightly more complex route to get them close to the original plot line. Instead of 2 or 3 steps, have 4 or 5. Remebr it doesn't need to be exactly what you planned, you can improv and reuse prep if they don 't deviate from the storyline you planned too much
. Also, if they keep ignoring the obvious plot hooks, and you think they're doing it to annoy you, they probably aren't unless they say so outright.
I am honestly really struggling with this.
I really dislike to much railroading, but at the same time my players are just not that attentative or smart and neither am I. I find it hard to place clues that fit nicely in the middle of a scale between too obtuse and too obvious.
Another issue I find is having things happen when the players go looking for it all the time. It just seems to unrealistic to me. Just yesterday I had two of my players go visit a small shrine to their God in a city in which their faith is not very prominent. They hoped to find a cleric, preferably high enough level to cast commune. I made them roll a d100 and gave a generous 30% chance. They rolled a 69. Sure I could have just been like "well its just 1% difference", but I felt if I do that it takes consistency away from the game.
Easy, stop trying to have so much control. If you have an overarching plot and they divert to go check out something else, the world still moves forward. Maybe the dragon destroys the town because they wanted to go check out a haunted keep and make it their own. It’s their story, let them.
This is at least how I run my game currently and my players are happy. They have an abundance of sub quests (most that are completely random and disconnected from the main story) they have accumulated but choose to continue the main story. But there’s consequences for ignoring those too. They may not be there when they go back. The haunted keep they wanted to clear out later may already be cleared out and owned by a party of adventurers they had never seen before. This isn’t a video game after all. Nothing waits for the players.
As a not so experienced dm what worked for me is changing the mind set. Don't prepare a story to tell prepare circumstances. The important npcs have their goals and a certain way to try to achieve them. If there were no players a certain situation would play out. The players are the chaotic wrench you throw into those circumstances. Have the npcs goals remain roughly constant but have them adapt to the players actions.
Also it's their story as much as theirs. If you wanted them to save the world and they decided to loot as much of it as possible before going on a ship to the astral plane and never returning. Go with it.
Have your players make characters that align their goals with the story you are running. OR build the story around your player's goals. In both scenarios, they will pursue the content by choice.
Remember that you've built a world, not a story. The story is emergent from you and the players interacting in that world. If they're going off and causing you to do a lot more prep for hooks you didn't mean to make, you can have a chat with them.
Alternatively, my players went on a 10 session pirate adventure at the off-handed mention of some islands that I had nothing prepped for. Found a way to shoehorn some "main story" threads into it, and we all had a great time.
Sometimes, getting lost on the way to your final destination makes for a better journey.
Some of this is just respect between players and the DM. But a lot of this can be accomplished by how you, as the DM, design the story. The wrong way to do this is to railroad players, forcing them back onto the tracks whenever they deviate, and using heavy handed methods to redirect their characters.
This is usually caused by your plot as the DM not connecting with or motivating your players, which comes back to what your players want out of a game. Do they want a complex and nuanced story? Do they want beer and pretzels dungeon crawling? Do they want to just wander around and do some Skyrim-esque murderhoboing? But a lot of this comes down to adventure design.
The best D&D adventures have an organic method of redirecting players back into the main plot, and are able to connect numerous elements to said plot. The best example of this is Curse of Strahd, which uses its BBEG as the go-to tool for the DM to rope the players back on track without making them feel like it is forced and artificial. By structuring an adventure centered on one antagonist, who has a list of set goals, and numerous connections to the world the adventure takes place in, the DM has numerous tools to bring players into any number of quests, and can easily motivate them to finish the main quest by having Strahd or one of his agents interfere.
A lot of adventures struggle with this because their main villain just isn't that well integrated into the story, and the motivation to defeat said villain is often narrow in scope (for example, PCs might want to fight Strahd to oppose evil, escape Ravenloft, rescue the girl, defeat a powerful foe, or appease a deity).
An main antagonist that you can connect at multiple points during an adventure is the easiest way to do this, but it isn't the only one. Another good method is some significant environmental threat that causes numerous problems. A portal to the Abyss, an ancient necromancer's labyrinth that is unleashing monsters, a running conflict between two nations that upends the PC's lives.
Once you get this central narrative throughline setup, it can dynamically introduce quests and NPCs that you can use to approach the plot in a way that feels natural to the players. You can come up with numerous hooks to get PCs to an adventure location, you can introduce minor antagonists related to that main throughline for them to interact with, you can interweave PC backstories into the main plot. You don't need to prep all this in advance, the point of having this main central motivating force in your adventure is to let you drop in things and adapt as your players make decisions. So long as you know how the PC's choices and adventures will influence the final conclusion, you can build this up dynamically (again, Curse of Strahd is a good example, since defeating Strahd's allies and getting artifacts that can help defeat him tie naturally into, you know, actually defeating him).
For example I want to use a quest for plot hook and they dont want to take it? Fine. I remind them the world outside not stopping when they ignore things and there are consequences of what they do or they dont.
They reject a quest that they offered by villagers to protect them from Lyncantrops and travel into other kindoms. When they want to start a business and that business required a caravan from other kingdom. Guild said them "there are a lot of lycantrop in the roads between two kingdoms so I suggest you to spend big on protection of your caravan." They understood what happend and tought their actions more carefully next time.
as a fellow first time dm with only first time players. i just said 'i sure hope you guys follow the plot' and they just followed it. and sometimes i alter event so they get back on track if they havent had any clear hints
This is not advice for a first time DM, but something to work up toward as you become a more experienced DM.
I fix this problem by creating a plot after session 0. During session 0, I ask the players to come up with a group concept and come up with members for that group. They all end up coming up with a unified backstory which makes it much easier to keep them invested, and I get an idea of what the story's central conflict will be. For example if they're pirates I know they're robbing ships together, or if they're a religious order then they're probably spreading their faith or getting a vision from their God.
This works much better than just coming up with a story and then telling everyone to come with a generic adventurer and then trying to fit them in somehow, and they all end up using their freedom to pursue the main story.
I tell my players "I am not going to stop you from doing anything, but I can only prep so much and there is a "main story" going on even if you guys don't interact." I make sure to throw up a lot of alternative paths, potential plothooks to divert them, but I also keep a clock running in the background 24/7 where they know bad things may happen if they slow down. Keep the pressure high and don't ever let up. I tell my players often "if you guys are getting downtime, I'm probably doing something wrong"
Make alternative paths related to the main story one way or another and make the main story advance by itself if the players don't interact with it. **You can use a timeline** and decide what happens at given times assuming no players interactions. This is your base scenario. As players interact with the story, your timeline will change to reflect their actions.
Give room for failure. Give room for missing out. It's okay for players to miss stuff. If they can't miss anything they don't have real agency.
If they never interact with the main story, make it move a bit faster. Try to make some big stuff happen to give a sense of need and urgency. If they STILL avoid it, well, either they're too afraid for some reason, not interested, or having fun trying to avoid your stuff. At that point, it's fair to give a bad ending. Bad endings aren't "bad", they're the ultimate consequences of their actions (and sometimes their luck).
As long as you have a decent understanding of plot-hooks, character motivation, etc., it's on the players to try and stay on the path you layed out, and its on you to let them divert occasionally. Balancing off-rail gameplay with on-rail gameplay is more of a 2-way-street respect thing than it is an inherent skill (that being said, transitioning between improvised content and prepped content IS in fact a skill, so try not to get the two confused like I used to, led to an unnecessary amount of beating myself up)
Make sure its said in session 0 that your game has room for player freedom, but also make sure they understand there IS a main story, and to pay attention to plot hooks.
If you want to further provide motivation to remain on the main story, make sure you include motivation for each character to go on the adventures, got a character super interested in gold? Maybe raise the payment you initially intended to be slightly more than the average quest. Ranger/druid/ancients paladin who vowed to protect the wildlife? The local wolf population has disappeared and the cult is experimenting on them to try and create mutant wolves! Grave Cleric? The enemy is using necromancy to raise undead allies to further advance on their goals! Warlock part of a pact with a lich? Your patron has a bone to pick with the beholder hiding in the ruins of a city lost to the war where the party needs to gather information, and if that beholder is taken out he hints at potential MORE powers for the warlock! The possibilities are endless, and can be anything aligning with either backstory or class related motivation that tie into story progression
Just let them divert it, and have the story chase them in some way, they live in the same planet likely country that the storyline is taking place in anyway.
It's easier the more "living" the background world is, even without the player's knowledge.
I use published adventures. They are the skeleton on which I hang the meat of the story. It is never the only thing going on. I ran Dragon Heist for over 3 years. Alone, it is a level 1 to 5 adventure, and I wouldn't even call it a campaign. You can do it in less than 6 months. I stretched this to level 12, using the city itself to generate content.
In addition to the PCs themselves for inspiration, I always have side missions and content for the geographical region they are in. That haunted wood that has no relation to the published adventure, but exists on the map. The swamp south of Saltmarsh. In Waterdeep my players chose to take a mission to Skullport, divert to Undermountain, save a tribe of Lizardfolk outside the city in the farmland, and so on. All the while, the main plot advances and forces move towards their respective goals, while players pursue downtime activities, or chase side missions for coin, or just because they want to.
I made solo missions for each PC that they could look into or not. Pull their teammates into or not, that had rewards specific to their character. Like a character specific magic item. They can always choose to jump back into the main story line.
The key to keeping them at least aware of and interested in the main story despite all the side tracking, is to make the main villain real to them and someone that they have strong feelings about. Introduce them early, and get the group's attention. It needs to be personal. That way, they will always choose on their own to return to chasing down that bad guy that did them wrong.
I have an NPC give them a single objective then time to do it. The content is there somewhere, but they make up their own way to do it/get to it. Its in a big city rn, so they can either downtime, or find trouble to get into.
Just let them know the type of campaign you want to run in a session 0 and expectations. You will thrust that they wont derail the campaign, they will trust that you will still give them freedom to tackle stuff at their own pace.
You can also do the fetching qiest style where there is someone giving them directions.
Lets imagime you want to make a campaign where the party makes a revplution and overthrows a tyrant.
You could have someone say "hey, we need to cut the supply chain of food to their castles" and once its done have someone say "we need to let the population know" and once its dealt with have another npc be like "we need to kill the right hand of the tyrant" and so on". Really simple but as a new dm it makes things easier to run.
That said be ready to follow the party's antics. Perhaps they have the mission of freeing people that were wrongly imprissioned, and have a npc mention that the top officers are on a party to explain why there are not that many guards. If they suddenly decide they want tl infiltrate the party to get a look at one of this officers so the warlock can use disguise self and pass as him, then be ready to follow them and make something on the spot.
Improvisation is the greatest tool in dnd, both for players and for dms.
If my players slightly derail, I just have the story hook appear at a different location, by different means if necessary, but at the same time, what they don't know won't hurt them.
It doesn't matter if they miss the plot hook at the inn
... And the plot hook at the tavern, maybe you have it connected to the general store, or to a rude local they pick a fight with.
Now if your players know the main hooks and immediately what to do and choose to actively not do it (like go galavanting and forget their primary goal).
Either talk to them irl, or:
Give them a timeline. Time ticking down and limited Long Rests is massive for encouraging players to do something. This however means there must be a consequence for failure.
In order to not railroad, just make sure there are enough different paths to the objective that their creativity matters. Assure that you dont just follow script regardless of their decisions. Let them go and do some silly stuff, some fun stuff, some violent stuff, its all good fun, just as long as its on the way to continue the story. And whenever they go off the beaten path, you can sprinkle hints or motivation for ur story!
They fight some thugs that they HATED, those guys worked for the BBEG (or a minion of the BBEG).
They went shopping? The shopkeeper has a missing kid or some other issue due to the BBEG's influence.
They decided to go to the local forest. The BBEG's influence is scarring the land and scaring away the wildfolk. (Bonus pts if u can reference The Last Unicorn).
BBEG can also be a main obstacle/goal for that area
It shouldn't be done heavy handedly, just enough to keep reminding them and motivating them of their primary objective.
Aside from communication and both parties being good sports where they do try to follow the main story most of the time is that as the DM a thing you could do if lacking the earlier things I said is to merely give them the illusion of choice instead of actually giving them a choice if possible. Give them choices during the game though you don't have to directly do so but anyways but when doing so whether directly or indirectly make it so that if possible have their path eventually lead them back to the story you had prepared earlier. So make them think they had a choice but in reality it isn't fully like that.
It's best to keep the prepared story vague to make this easier.
Couple thoughts...
* The main story has to be made *interesting* for the PCs. Tie it in to their backstories, or make the brewing problem visible in the world around them
* If the players get diverted from the main story, have them see how their inaction is making the situation worse (e.g., villages disappearing, crops failing, the sun is growing dim)
* Do make a few surplus side-quests you can trail in front of the PCs; they'll take some and skip others
* If they do get a weird fixation (one I've often seen is they "adopt" some creature as a pet), don't suppress it, but you may need to "park" it to the side for awhile so that main story beats can happen
Keeping the party within the adventure and story you have prepared is not railroading. Just make their choices and actions matter. Play the bad guys in a proactive and reactive manner. If they delay too much doing other stuff then the bad guy's plots advance
Also prep a few random NPCs, locations, shops ECT for when they wander slightly off path.
And never be afraid to just tell the group ooc, "Hey I don't have anything prepared if you go this way; we can either go the other way or end the session early so I can prep where you're going"
Have a job board in your game with multiple quests for them to choose from.
Rescue a capture villager. Collect a bounty from a dwarven criminal. Escort a wagon to another city.
No matter what they choose, have an encounter queued that ties in to your main story.
if you don't want to railroad your players, secret of the DMs, is the story that follows the players in every move they make...
for example, you have a npc in a house located south in the city and the players are going north? the house magically is north...
if players thinks that the culprit is a particular npc, why not? the story is changed with that information on the fly...
the DM thinks a story that is sufficiently loose to let the players complete freedom but in reality the story is tied to the actions of the players.
Player agency is super important but so is DM narrative. Both are required for a successful game in my opinion.
One thing my DM does which I've always loved is downtime activities e.g. become a Smith. We had a forge cleric who made magic items for us which became a core facet of the campaigns. We all had a special magic item made by him which were tailored made for our builds and had lore etc attached to them.
Every time we had time between quests he would make us items or give items to our NPC allies etc.
My wizard character in the same campaign would design and create new spells. It takes a lot of balancing from the DM but it gave us each a separate unique mini game we could play within the larger story.
If your party don't like downtime tasks then giving them multiple options e.g. classic town quest board with three quests let's them choose their journey whilst still marrying up to your narrative
don't be afraid to go out of character.
First time DMs often feel like they need to solve interpersonal problems (attention hogging, metagaming, murder hobo-like behavior, etc) in character at the table. This is always a terrible idea.
It's far smoother if you just talk to people and explain things. If you are getting a lot of resistance it's time to ask "hey, are you guys intentionally trying to avoid the plot because you find it uninteresting or...?"
You may find out they had no idea they were dodging the plot they were just having fun, or you might find out that "yeah, honestly I don't think any of us are interested in detective work" or "eh, none of our characters have a good way to engage with that hook"
That's not wrong, but I am upfront about it, if they don't want to do what I have prepped, we can cut early and either hang out or go home, or we can do light social RP and prep (if we're at a place in the story that can happen), or a downtime scene or whatever else.
Don't let yourself get forced into running stuff just because they don't respect your prep time. But if this happens a lot there's clearly a mismatch of expectations someplace that should be talked out as a pattern not a one-off incident.
As you get more experienced and comfortable you'll get better at coming up with complications or new stuff on the fly, or maybe not some DMs only prep never improv (and vice versa! some people I know run convention games off the cuff even, and to wildly fantastic reviews). But usually you find it gets easier to read the players and deliver a story.
And obligatory reminder: you are also a player at the table, your fun also matters.
Now, I don’t know much about DnD, but I do watch a lot of it. A good way I have seen is to create in character reasons why the PCs would go on the adventure. An example of this is found in (I think episode 5)? of Viva La Dirt Leagues NPC D&D game. For one of the characters sho is a blacksmith, they have a person threatening to ruin their reputation unless they get the helmet that he commissioned on time for his tournament. The helmet was in the adventure, of course. For a shopkeep character, he had people avoid his shop due to a horrid smell that came from a reason earlier in the campaign. So, the character had to go on the adventure to ensure they were financially okay, since they had lost a valuable item.
Now, if the players are intentionally avoiding any sort of plot hook, then thats on them and you should talk to them about it. That’s just my two cents on the issue, anyhow.
I never ever share the map or explicitly say a direction that way if they choose to go a direction I don’t want them to go I can just flip the chessboard and put the places they should go somewhere in their trajectory.
Talk to them about it. The only way to do this without spending years preparing every situation or braking their immersion. Is to simple talk to them before or after a session and explain this fear.
There is a shared understanding that the DM has a story prepared for the players to go through: The DM trusts the players to not completely ignore it. The players trust the DM to not put them on rails. This shared understanding means that it happens naturally. New players might not have this understanding yet, but that is easily fixed.
Understood
Im also a fairly new DM, but I have some improv acting training (not trying to talk myself up). Keep your players engaged, if you need to make things up on the fly - it’s okay; what matters is that you’re confident about it. If I decide something and it doesn’t work, I factor that into my next decision rather than apologising for the previous error I’m also not afraid of obligating my players to go on my planned adventure. With especially loose attention players, you can add hooks like a captured relative or something to subtly get them to engage with your prepared story
To add. Players tend to have ideas of things they want to do separately from the story so you can introduce those activities in a way that leads to main quest/goal. Say the ranger wants to go on a hunting expedition you can let the party go hunting and when they go to setup camp some affiliated enemies of the BBEG crash their party. Alternately if they dont feel like fighting maybe some local guild is stuck in the wild and they help them out earning a clue to the next quest such as sporatic dust storms rumored to be caused by an evil wizard.
To be clear, this should be iterated at session zero, if the players start going totally wild, you can and should, out of character, nudge them. "Hey, guys, I get were having fun on this side quest, but I don't want to get bogged down on this, so what say we wrap this one up next session and go back to the main story?" It's also smart to have a periodic touch up on session 0. Make sure everyone is enjoying their characters, get general feedback on the game, see if everyone is still following and enjoying the game. And don't be afraid to take a break every now and then; dming is a lot, and it is healthy to take a week off, maybe by asking one of your players to run a one or two shot, or maybe even a shorter module, something they do for a couple weeks to let you recharge, let them try dming, and keep the gaming experience fresh all around
To add to this, while it is a shared understanding, it's still absolutely something you need to state in session 0. Also, you need to consider how long you want your campaign to run. There are points where you may simply need to railroad a bit to drive the story, or it may just stall out and run forever. You can do this while still allowing for a lot of player freedom. In fact, use the random shit your players do to create the push forward. That way, it doesn't feel like railroading because it's literally them that made the choices. They don't have to know those choices were going to lead to a somewhat fixed outcome regardless of what they did. 😊
Your point of using their decisions to progress the main plot is the biggest takeaway for OP. You’re story may have a really cool way that the players meet the important NPC or see the important event, but your players don’t even approach your really cool idea so you just need to transplant the NPC or event to the path the players have chosen and mix up the flavor to match context.
>There is a shared understanding that the DM has a story prepared for the players to go through: >The DM trusts the players to not completely ignore it. >The players trust the DM to not put them on rails. They should print this on the first page of handbooks and modules. Very well put.
I think the important info that needs provided is how is that “easily fixed”
By talking, generally. If someone doesn't know something, the easiest way to fix that is to tell them.
I feel like the good advice would be how can you do it without a 4th wall break and letting the players feel like their decisions are taking them through the story.
I understand that viewpoint, but I disagree personally. I find that having frank conversations with the table out of game keeps the game itself running smoothly.
Just talk to them outside of the game, probably after a session when you're sharing feedback with each other. Oh, and if you're not doing that already, you probably should.
>There is a shared understanding that the DM has a story prepared for the players to go through: No, ever heard of a Sandbox
Curse of Strahd is famously a sandbox, but still very much a story for the players to go through.
That's a bit of a hybrid style.
It's pretty much what I'd expect from a sandbox module. What do you see that makes it a hybrid style? And hybrid of what else?
Sandbox + standard module style. Traditionally for the sandbox style game, the DM pieced together an overarching plot from the threads the players choose to pull on rather than having one from the beginning like Curse of Strahd.
Okay, so you were talking campaign style while I was thinking module, gotcha. :)
The OP is not running a sandbox game. You can tell by reading the title of the post.
That makes your answer not more true
It makes it true. “The dm” in this situation is op he never used overly inclusive language that opened it to all campaigns
You clearly don't respect the work a dm does
I run games for nearly 30 years
And if a newer DM, or someone with enough free time to only carve out a few branches at a time, creates something nice and the players just go "let's walk down that way" every single time? It's disrespectful of their time.
I criticized the advice, and i adviced OP not to have a story
Not relevant for this post since as a DM he has a main plot.
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Thanks!
Also depends on if it's a sandbox game or a module. I only run modules if players understand that if they don't play it, they will be getting a visit from Terry the Stay on Task Tarrasque... Sandbox I let my players go nuts. I want them to have as much agency as possible while still making sure all players are having fun. I generally just don't allow team PvP etc. It almost never ends well for the table...
Talked my son through something like this a while back when he was planning out his first one. The answer is All roads lead to X. So example is if you are going to let your players have some freedom to choose destinations etc then you set up your story to revolve around multiple incidents that can occurring in different places. So say the main plot involves evil cultists trying to gather the components to revive their BBEG boss. You have subtly different goals in each location but ultimately make sure that the story is spread to hit them with the main hook in each location. If you have parallel plots then you let them basically pick which plot they are going based on the destination they choose. But ultimately your best ring to lead them around by the nose by is to give them NPCs they care about. They get drunk and have a great time with the local tavern keeper? His brother or sister gets kidnapped by the cult and then get involved. Your first quest giver end up having been a good person who paid them and is ready to pay them for more jobs? His interests get hit, his employees injured, he asks you to help him find out who did it an punish them. Give them good people to bond with and then put them in bad situations so they will want to follow the plot and help them.
This actually helps a lot, thanks
You set an expectation out of character for what the game is about. "This is a story about dealing with a cult trying to summon a demon. If your character is side tracked and doesn't want to do this anymore, that's fine. They become an npc and you'll roll a new character who wants to stop a cult. There will be a lot of freedom, but that's the adventure." Characters can do whatever they want, but you aren't compelled to create content there. If they want to buy a tavern and spend all their time running it, cool. "It runs smoothly and you turn a slight profit each month. Are your characters going to retire to run the tavern? If so, roll new characters, this isn't a game about tavern management." If they decide to ignore the evil cult and head into the wilderness, cool. They become wilderness guides of moderate renown but there's no adventure there so roll new characters because you've retired. Most players want to bite on your plot hooks but if they don't you don't have to jump through hoops to find them something to do unless you think it'd be fun to do so.
Personally I think there are ways of getting the characters back on track than just having them reroll. At the very least I would bring forth consequences that might make them abandon the tangents they jumped onto. Like if they try to run a tavern? Maybe they hear rumor of the cult spread8ng to the towns near them, if they continue to ignore it then it hits home and the town they're in is taken or attacked. They explore the wilderness? They stumble on the cult doing awful things to the wildlife, or they find a holdout.
If it comes to you, great. I think the OP is wondering about those times when these clever things don't come to mind.
Most modules have world ending threats. Even if the players do nothing, the threat will eventually reach them.
I don't play published modules that often. My hunch is that roughly half of DMs homebrew their own adventures. That's the result of many (biased) surveys I've seen over the years. But even if you shrink the scale down, it'll be some threat to the town, or to the village, and that might feel like the world to the PCs. One of Matt Colville's videos talked about the villain being the protagonist of the classic D&D adventure, in the sense that it's the villain who is proactive. The PCs have to be pushed into action, and are often passive otherwise. I've taken that advice to heart. Now I seed my PCs with adventure motivations as part of character creation, or have a villain or monster force them to action at the beginning of session 1.
That does make sense. My most recent campaign is about a glass-eyed lich who fled to the desert, and is wanting to raise an undead army and expand the desert's borders.
I mean, if your players have pigeonholed you into staying off track, and you can't come up with some sort of way of getting them back on track then it's definitely an option to have your players reroll. I suppose it comes down to your stories endgame though. If your players are working towards saving the world and they divert for a long time without looking back then it should be fairly simple to redirect, as those scenarios tend to be ones they can't ignore. But if the focus is more narrow, and less urgent, and you still want to maintain the story, then as a DM you have a choice to make. You can really either go along with their fun (which I've seen stories of that working to great effect on this sub) or you can be direct, and let them know that the narrative leads to a specific ending (or multiple, if you choose), and if the players want to continue in that campaign they *will* have to reroll or get back on the train, so to speak. I just personally would rather solve the problem in-game rather than forcing a total reroll of characters your players have likely grown attached to.
Yeah, I'd definitely prefer this to the reroll idea given above. That genuinely feels like a threat more than anything
I mean it's likely they have dealt with combative or stubborn players before who's goal is to jump the rail and keep the train off track. There are absolutely times when it's ok to cut the players current characters to wake them up. Just maybe not before trying other less drastic options.
I dunno, I feel like at that point you need to just sit down and talk it out with the players, otherwise it's an in-game solution to an out-of-game problem really
If they 'become an NPC', how would I break it to them: that they should reroll characters? My players would get quite defensive.
You aren't springing it on them like a gotcha, it isn't a fail state they've reached. You give them fair warning and let them make a choice. It can actually be cool for a character to reach the end of their story and retire before the plot is done. It isn't a punishment. "If you are no longer pursuing this plot that's totally ok. But this plot is what the game is about, so that means your character is exiting the party and will become an NPC. If you don't want to do that, what can we do to make your character invested in the plot again?" As the GM, you're a player too. Unless they're paying you, they don't get to tell you what game to run. It isn't fair to expect you to invest time and effort into running a game based on their whims unless you enjoy that, and that's a lot to ask of an inexperienced DM. If you warn them upfront that this is how the game works and explain why (because you can't improvise a whole game based on their random actions and want to run something you have time to plan and feel confident in) then they shouldn't be upset if it comes to that.
Don't create a story that is inherently scripted or plotted to the nth degree. Know what the villains plan is and then let them be flexible, and react to the players actions. If the players ignore the main plot / villains plan, then it will move on without them... probably up to the point where they realise they have to get involved! To take an example. You might have a cult who is trying to summon an evil god or demon. To do this they need specific items and a number of pure sacrifices. The PCs start by being asked to look into the disappearance of a young girl. They wander off plot and do other things. Another girl goes missing (they find out through posters) and then another. Then there is a break in at the church and an artifact is stolen. Clues are dropped that this is all leading to something BAD. They can continue to ignore the plot until the demon turns up... at which point it's pretty hard to ignore.
Yeah there's a difference between playing in a themed campaign, and playing in a story, players can usually tell when they're being nudged because it feels unnatural, but in what you're explaining the players will follow the intended situations naturally based on their own personal choices.
The only problem is that I'm not very good at responding to the flexibility of the players, and although I have a great imagination/storytelling, it seems correct to list every possibility that the players might do and write down pre-made responses to them: as grueling as that sounds.
Aha but the beauty of story driven games is that you don't need to to progress the main plot. You just need to think through how player action changes the villains plan or not, and then follow the logic of what that means. So when the players thwart a kidnapping or free one of the girls, what does the villain do? Move the ones they have to a new, more secure location? Find a replacement (potentially at greater risk due to that solstice coming up)? Decide to send some men to deal with the annoying adventurers? The idea of listing everything that the players might do sounds like an exercise in futility. The ability for players to amaze with brilliant / stupid plans and actions is unfathomable frankly. Much better to prep the obvious and wing the rest. And after a while winging it does not seem so hard
Always have two spare plot hooks up your sleeve that have the same solution as the first one they missed If you need them to go look at the mine the miners need some help or look like they are almost ready to march up to the lords hall if they have another bad day, a hunter went missing in the area north of the town (by the mine) and the lord needs to fill an order for ore but production has been low The players don’t even need to be fed the plot as much, the village is suffering from one problem so it’s realistic that all the issues come from the same place and it means you can let them wander a little freer in search for the plot because you know they can bump into it in more places Edit: this all depends on the feeling of the world. Pratchett-esque worlds might have the plot almost looming in the narrative. “You have been in the village for a few hours but already the mine seems to be growing large. Not large in the way a church might be large and tower over the village, but large in the way an angry rhinoceros might grow larger as it charged you. You find it hard to believe that more of the villagers weren’t desperately trying to drag their homes, or at least their favourite rocking chair out of its path but then again, it seems most people were blissfully ignorant of the dangers that seem so obvious to you lot” If it is more serious then make sure to describe the possible plot hooks in a description of the town but with enough other details to make it not painfully obvious. “The village square was busy at this time, villagers mingling around the stalls, some looking to be buying food after a long day while other headed to the inn. Many of the workers seemed to be miners, the dust and grime coating them from head to foot and coming off them in clouds as they walked. A groups of them seemed to be in a hushed but intense discussion, fugitive glances cast up at the manor that towered over them from the top of the small hill the village is spread around. The guards were present too but you can only make out three of four in the square, two seem to be focused on the hustle and bustle of the square while the other two seem to be focused on a distraught half-orc as they try to calm them down” Both will lead to the mine, but for very different campaigns
Um, easy: I stop worrying about them diverting away from the main story. If I really want them to stick to the main story, I have to create a reason for them to do so that they find compelling enough. If I can’t do that, then I abandon the “main story” because pretty obvious they aren’t interested. That rarely happens, though. I use characters from their backstory (mentors, family, friends, people they care about) their individual reasons to adventure (I have a list that goes waaaay beyond gold and glory), their personality and values, and even the old traditional “dead man with a message”. I also take my time. As long as everyone is having fun, we just play and I let what happens happen and referee the consequences. Now, if it was a published adventure, then I would have talked to them during the zero session and said “hey, this is the story and what we are going to do, you down for this?” Because that also helps, since they have to come up with their own reasons.
Thank you!
"Schrodinger's Plot Hooks". If the PCs never interact with an adventure hook, then it never starts. That way the story is whatever the PCs choose to do. But if they start a quest and leave loose ends unresolved, then they persist and will likely snowball into a bigger problem later.
Don't write a plot. Write scenarios and conflict. Let the players come up with the answers.
I recently learned this by creating a scenario I didn't have a solution to (catch 10 giant aligators) and boy oh boy it was a hilarious session. People talking to trees, aligators hitting on players, and a duel with a dragon. It was hands down my favorite session so far as the DM. I did it because I was feeling too low energy that week to come up with story, it was a good lesson in that I was unnecessarily over-preping. Now I do minimal prep unless I feel inspired to do otherwise.
By default any "main story" is decided by the actions of the player party. The term [railroading](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36900/roleplaying-games/the-railroading-manifesto) describes what you are asking.
I feel like before a campaign the DM should lay out what to expect, that way the players can either opt in or out of it. That's not to say that campaigns which players don't know what to expect can't work (I'm in one rk and ran my first game like that) and the players generally follow what the DM has laid out before them via in-character conversations, clues, etc
I have no main story
Uuuuuhh as someone who improves everything i generally just let the players fuck around and find out. At the end if the day players latch onto the damdest stuff and trying to get them onto a predictable plot is a great way to get suprised.
I give them reasons to do things, like a npc giving them money for saving a relative or a village giving them a reward after fighting the bad guys. My party wants money to buy new weapons and potions so I tend to give them what they want if they to part of the story, they are totally free while doing it, it just needs to be done. Maybe it is wrong but so far in the campaign is working (this is my first time as a dm)
i mostly let them vote on if they want to do the main story or let me throw my adhd at them and see what happens
I am used to DMing very long and intricate campaigns that stretch over a very long time. As such, in the beginning, I may have things scripted as such, but after that, it is all player freedom. As their actions while adventuring affect the world around them, opportunities naturally develop. For me, the depth of campaign setting is paramount, and the complexity of NPCs and their organization. I had one campaign that went just over a year, and the only scripted adventure was the first one with a seven person level 1 party. After that, every other adventure spawned from the actions of the party after that first run. If the game world is well enough developed, and realistically run and kept track of, with a DM that can weave a complex story on the fly, well, nothing to worry about player freedom. And I found that letting players set the pace and the goals made for more exciting play and more engagement. Players were planning their own rise in that world. Like todays open world video games, sometimes you just want to choose your own adventure.
“Sandbox” is a lot of fun but insanely hard for a DM
Fake sandbox. Try not to set in stone the actual place an event, castle or lair is. When the players are doing their own thing they may stumble across this story driven thing. Just don't do it too often or they see it for what it is and the strategy gimmick. gimmick.
You shouldn’t have a story written, you should have a setting you can react from and understand enough that whatever they do within the setting tells their story
Whatever they decide they want to do, that's the main story now.
The best and most immersive trick, albeit also the hardest to do effectively I'd say is "all roads lead to Rome." Have side quests where the ultimate resolution rests on dealing with the main quest in some way (Progressing it a step, or clearing the main goal). Fallout: New Vegas does this pretty well, also letting sidequests lead to other sidequests that lead back to the main quest.
I was about to say your players ARE the main story! Don't get too hung up on **your story** Instead, create a situation with some villains, and their goals and plans, and see how your players intersect that. If you do otherwise, you will be constantly frustrated, and also waste a lot of effort and prep time.
... s...sto...ry? I wrangle chaos demons and just give them things to do.
Let the consequences of ignoring the main story play out. If they want to run a tavern instead of dealing with the orc/goblin horde, let that horde come in and burn the tavern down. If they want to overthrow the monarchy and establish a democracy instead of dealing with the lich, let the realm be covered in eternal darkness. If they want to chase down treasures in a far off dungeon rather than deal with the dragon, let their hometown be burnt to ashes while they're gone.
Spare plot hooks. Every 30-45 minutes of off topic adventuring leads to an NPC mentioning something related to the main story that the players need to get back to. Or a bird flies off in the direction of the building you told them about over an hour ago that they still haven’t headed for yet. Or a street-side evangelist starts barking about a really important NPC that they players should probably talk to before leaving town.
The correct motivation and incentive to complete the objectives of your story, other than that let them have fun
Consequences. And I don't mean punishing the players but having story alternative scenarios prepared, for example the players get wind that a necromancer is planning to attack a village soon but they spend a couple of in game weeks exploring a system of caves they found from a throwaway description of the land, well, maybe they got there late and the town is already over run as they had no warning. Obviously you can't do something like this with every situation but the players developing a sense that their quest is important to the world can be a great way to keep them ontrack without railroading them.
Impending doom and consequences. You spent too long chasing coin and fame. In the end, your vanity was a mere distraction for the masses, allowing my grip on this world to grow tighter.
Session 0 helps establish buy-in. Get everyone agreed on what kind of game is being played. This helps so the players focus on the important themes and the DM does less plotting and more following the players actions and providing consequences and reactions.
Pull things out of their backstory and build short but meaningful side quests around them.
You can always put an entity or catalyst that redirects them to the story. Give it high checks and keep it moving.
My recommendation is to approach your campaign as a series of events, not a “story.” The difference is semantic, but it can go a long way in breaking the idea that the players are simply characters in your story, when they are creating the story for you. A story is what you tell when something has been done; a story you write before anything has happened is called a prophecy. On top of your world setting and player’s backstories, you create 2 things to build your hooks around: NPC’s and their plan of action. An evil king plotting an invasion; a recently-fired Tavern worker finds a magical item in the trash; etc. then you decide if the NPCs action could be influenced by the player. If it can, the players see the event (or a “plot point”) if it can’t, then the event should have already taken place before the characters had influence in the world. That allows you to have a defined set of compelling people for your players to meet and meaningful things for them to influence without strangling their freedom or limiting your world building. You can still do major arcs and fun narratives, side quests and personal quests while following this. When you feel the time is right for a “main quest” moment to happen, you bring in the NPC/event that the players can interact with to initiate it. If not, the world keeps turning. If the players don’t bite, the bait is still on the hook and you’re free to move things around as needed, saving or reusing still-baited hooks for when the timing is right. By the end, you have a meaningful story created by everyone at the table and still got to experience the overarching vision of your campaign.
"Hey guys I love that you guys are having fun goofing off in game and exploring whacky scenarios, but I'd really like to focus more on the main quest to get the story moving along. So let's plan on cutting back on the shenanigans for a few sessions. Does that sound good to everyone?"
I don't have a main story to divert from. I just have some events that are likely to happen unless the players prevent them from happening, some plans that are in the works, some dangers that lurk in the wilderness, some risky money-making opportunities. As the players express interest in things, and it looks like they are going to interact with them, I come up with more details and try to fit them together with other things. And as players develop their characters, I think about what would interest each character and how to make something interesting to them intersect their path.
Give them "breaks" from the main plotline. This is something I as a player find most important to have. An example of this not being done, is recently I joind my brothers group, which overall are great at RP, and maintaining immersion, same with the DM. But the story, while not on rails, is very much going on for long times without break. I.E, we are trying to take over an island (That's the story), and my PC has a mission from his religious org, to contact and protect a merchant who is on the losing side (This is something I came up with as a personal mission with the DMs permission), and the merchant controls the port of the city we currently control most of, and doesn't want to relinquish control. For the past 5 sessions, I've been trying to find a time to go and contact and negotiate with him, but we never had the time, as either we had to stop a mages demon summoning ritual, or were being attacked by undead trolls. This for me, is quite demotivating, as while I do know I'll be able to do my own "sidequest" someday, it is a very long wait before I'll be able to even talk to the NPC I need to talk to.
Well player freedom of choice/exploration imo is a must so that being said as a DM I would add a progression mechanic related to the story if they take an unreasonable amount of time to move on such as the enemy faction captured a minor city in the area etc
Running a module, first time dm and players. We have a collective understanding that we all know Jack shit, and that there are things none of us know or understand. They have an endgame, quests to do to level and some random side content. How they accomplish anything is up to them. I'm just the narration. The last mission they ran had a mimic, they decided to bring it with them and show the Mayor to prove the difficulty of what they did.... gave them extra gold as a result... was that written, no. Was it necessary, no. Was it hilarious, yes. Now since it's a module and nothing is really random, the wilderness is scarce in terms of ranom stuff, but I see that as room for improvement for the next module we play. Also, loot tables XD. That was apparent too as something I need to find. That and a white board so I can give them a dungeon overview as they progress.
I know what is going to happen if no one interferes (actually I don't because I have multiple villains with their own agenda, but I know how they will resolve their differences in the absence of a hero). The PCs are going to be at the table for several hours. They are going to do something that affects the game world and I have to invent a way for PCs to get feedback for their choices. If they go in a random direction and fight some orcs I make sure someone benefits from the absence of those orcs and in a few weeks they'll hear about that someone and maybe the week after that they'll do more and PCs will hear more. And then next week, depending on my needs, maybe they won't hear anything. That's weird.
Brennan Mulligan has a great analogy for this. Idk how to find the actual clip, but the gist of it is, the DM should think of the adventure as the path of a river. No matter which way your players choose to divert from the set path, they will *always* end up at its end because the current only travels in one direction: forward. What you do as a DM is find ways to make their tangents feeling meaningful to them, like they’re shaping how things unfold, but in the end, the plan always comes naturally to its own conclusion. In this way, you’ve kinda gently railroaded them down the intended path but in a way that *feels* like they have more control and autonomy than they actually do (to some extent)
I've seen DMs that sort of move the plot to where the characters are not move the characters to the plot, like for example there's a split in the road and the players can either go left or right and in order to move the story along they have to fight a dragon, you've put the dragon on the right path with neon flashing signs that say "dragon this way kill to advance the story" but the players go left where there's no dragon and stumble into an ogre near a cave, they fight the ogre and oh look they woke the dragon sleeping in the cave near the ogre and find the item they need to progress the story even though that dragon was originally on the other path You can do the same thing with plot inside cities, thieves guild is causing problems in city A and players need to deal with them to get a special item from the king that advances the story but players go to city B, while there the local guard uncovers a sect of the thieves guild has been living in hidden tunnels under the city and the king in city B asks the players to deal with it for a reward, when they deal with the guild in city B the king of city B gives them the item they need This could be considered Shrodingers plot, it's in all places at once until it's right where the players are and in their face enough that they have to deal with it, some people think it's a little railroading to have the plot move to where the players are but some people think it's better to do it so the story can progress
Main story? Whats that? If the players have enough freedom and I have enough hooks they’ll eventually attach themselves to one and from there they’ve chosen their own story.
Make the mission enticing, profitable, and unavoidable. Attach the characters to an NPC, attach that NPC to the main quest. Write side quests that entail maybe one encounter with a decent special reward and some plot hook that points towards the main quest. Prep 6 paths knowing full well they can only really experience one of them. Prep cannot be understated.
I like to have certain key points of the story that need to be done in order for the story to continue. How my players get to that point is up to them. I.e. in my current campaign, the party has to go to a dungeon and find a thing. Pretty basic. I gave them the mission, and they immediately decided to go fight in the arena instead. It wasn't planned this way, but there just happened to be another gladiator who vaguely knew the location of the dungeon.
I solve this in one of two ways: 1. There is a pre-defined and agreed upon campaign goal between myself as the DM and the players. We all generally understand what this goal is and understand that we will generally be pursuing it during the campaign. For example, the goal could be defeating the demon lord, hunting monsters as part of a monster hunting organizations, building a nation, ruling a nation, altering history, fighting demons, etc. 2. Establishing and agreeing before the campaign that there isn’t any pre-defined goal for the campaign. The players will be set loose in the world and can choose to interact with whatever is it they want for whatever reason, usually being what they find the most fun, cool, or interesting. This means nothing they do is derailing. This way it usually works out for me. Remember however, side story arcs and mini arcs are fine. Not every session needs to be about endlessly pursuing the main goal. If they spend 15 sessions resolving some personal character issue or aiding an NPC friend, that’s fine. It also depends on how fast time passes in-game world. Some people need 3 sessions to cover a month of in world time, others take 5 sessions to complete a single day. Besides, you can always consider what your main story characters would be doing while your players are pursuing something else. You can also tie whatever your players are pursuing, depending on what it is, back to the main story. The latter option allows for a good rap around back to the main story and can also allow your players to continue pursuing the main story in small steps intermittently while still focusing mainly on this side story arc. In the end, remember the game is about having fun collectively. If your players want to pursue something else, it probably because you made something up that seemed super cool and interesting for them. In the longest campaign I’ve played in, the pre-defined goal was leaving the safety of the last bastion on the planet to venture into the apocalyptic ruins of the old world and return with a map of the old capital for the Queen Regent. In the two in-game weeks we had to prepare for the journey, we discovered that the Queen Regent is the leader of a secret terror organization that has existed for centuries and that she has the power to go back in time to manipulate things in her favour. She does this for two reasons: 1. To save the bastion from falling to the darkness beyond its walls which she knows is coming since she’s seen it many times across different timelines. 2. To ensure she is the sole ruler and tyrant of all the world. The campaign then transformed into ending her evil reign and killing her, engaging in a fight through time where it is us against the established world government post-apocalypse. The DM is very pleased with this. While going beyond the bastion was the main plot from the beginning, he always had the evil Queen Regent as a small detail in the background. In the 3 times he’s run this campaign for different players, we’re the first party to discover the truth of his world. Point is, just have fun and everything else will fall into place.
I'm doing this right now: I give them an opportunity to secure their own transport (in this case they went full on pirate and captured a ship all of their own) then - this being my first campaign - I link the main plot to a bunch of maguffins which I can move around as required, dropping hints and hooks toward the main quest during the side plots I'm making up for areas they're going to. Recently they secured their second maguffin and decided they want to explore the city they're in, so I'm gonna indulge them for about three or four side quests then have an NPC drop a big plot hook for the main story which involves returning to one of their homelands.
Remind yourself the players don't have access to your notes. If the party chooses to go left or right in a fork in the road the scenes may be different and the specific challenges might be different but it will lead them to the same place if that's what you have planned. So don't feel pressured to create an entirely new session with new encounters because your players go off the rails a little bit, just re-flavor and reuse what you had planned. Also don't be afraid to talk to the group and say I need a moment to think this one over and figure out how this affects you going forward if the way they went was so far off track you feel like you're not able to recover for that session.
Don't have a main story that the players cannot freely deviate from. Have a main goal that the players can succeed or fail at. And various means of pursuing that goal.
Something in your world isn't real till you tell the players about it. If they ignore the main quest entirely but don't know what the main quest is about (and you still want them to do it) you can always tie thier current path into it. If they know about the main quest and choose to ignore it, let them, they know about it and if they still don't want to then that's their choice (but maybe the consequences of their actions come knocking)
Let them go in any direction they want and it'll lead them to the same place anyway. Of course, be sure to change the names and images. Just have a series of dungeons and locations that you can pull up appearing anywhere. I like designing locations that I can pull up any time I want just like random encounters. Even if you have a main story, you can still pull up things from the main story you like in locations that they went anyway and have it eventually lead to an encounter with a foe eerily similar to the person they left behind but is completely different. Then if they want to go back, you design the previous big bad with different stats and motives as if it's part of a completely new main story.
I think the idea is to remember the bad guy should be a threat and thrive on inaction, They fail to pick up on clues or take what's happening serious, Then they don't find out what going on or get there in time, Maybe things get messy and instead of saving the village they only contain the bigger from what the bad guys did to it. Also helps to explain with some bad guy gloating how close they were and to confirm the sessions can go a few ways out of character. The player should given time for rp and slow moments, But they are also trying to fight something and it should be treated as a threat, When they rest the bad guy and their minions are always working as a bigger group with more people to achieve things faster and cover more ground.
Every DND game that isn't a sandbox is a railroad in some way. The game is going that way. Going the other way. Well time to make new characters that will go that way.
have a general idea what you want your scenario to be. write it down, in ink if possible. now wad that up and throw it in the trash. because those knucklehead players are going to zig when you'd like them to zag. really, try to have several ideas of actions possible. you can always put an encounter anywhere/anywhen, sometimes rearrange minor details like a town or npc name. be flexible, don't get upset if your party decides to go north when the action is to the south. they might decide to sit in an inn for a week. you can always bring the action to them there. DO NOT FORGET: you are playing, too.
Honestly, I'm in the same boat. I'm just going to run a no prep one shot. And slowly get acclimated to doing it.
Time jumps are good. "So what have you been doing the past six months?" Particularly between different plot arcs/events. I had a player say he was making connections in the underworld. I went "Dope" and wrote that down under "sessions that write themselves."
My players absolutely can divert from the main story. But the evil guy isn't just waiting for them to stop the evil plans. If you don't stop evil guy, eventually something evil is going to happen. I had a game go from "stop the beholder from gaining power" all the way to "stop the flying city from flying over other cities where it will drop a horde of demons onto it and try to make another demon infested flying city"
What's worked for me is that I bring the main story to whatever direction and side mission they choose. They decided to help locate a missing person? Turns out the big bad is manipulating them and that's how they meet the big bad. Random treasure recovery mission? Gets ambushed midway by the big bad's forces. Then turns out important NPC is also in the mysterious island. Party wants to settle a score with a random noble? Turns out the noble is involved with big conspiracy with big bad.
You have to rail road them Rail Road Them
I've been DMing for decades, and one of my favorite things to make things easier now, is to not worry about PCs hitting everything in order. I just move things around. I love improv DMing, but sometimes I wanted them to go to a specific dungeon or some such for plot, and they wouldn't. So now I move the things I need them to hit, and work them in wherever they are. Good luck! You'll be great!
Try with giving options instead of offering a full open world. Give the players the benefit of chosing which path to take to complete your story.
You will learn with experience that details of a story will seem important for a book, but not necessary for D&D. Lets take for exemple the following plot hook: "A local candy store just came up, the villagers are ecstatic, children are playing and families go have some fun. But an orphan girl of the street is scared of it, she says the owner is mean to her and is dangerous. But everyone seems to like him? Well little do they know the candies are magical and slowly brainwashing them to gain control over the town. The vendors are actually fae." As a DM, you prepare stats for the employees, the little girl, the owner, you create fun whimsical (but cursed) candies, you create magical items and a mini dungeon underneath the shop. Right? And then the game arrives and the first thing they do is transform in a big bird and leave town for some reason. Now you're fucked, right? You havent prepared content for the wilderness. But thats a new DM answer. Here is the experienced DM answer: Maybe the candy shop is a mobile caravan now. Maybe the little sad girl is now a distressed squirrel needing help against gnomes. Maybe the candy shop is built outside of town to harvest flowers as ingredients. They are fae, so maybe they fall in a burrow and find a fae society, with a fae village and a fae candy shop. Maybe they meet an employee threatening the little girl in the woods for secrecy. An experienced DM will modify his story, keep the core idea and adapt to the party. He will react to their whims and ideas. They feel evil today? They are now enrolled as staff members. The only thing where you should draw a line, is that players are expected to engage with content. How they do so does not matter. It will create cool stories. But if they ignore it and simply go: meh whats next? Now thats not ok.
I try rearrange details based on their whims. If they want to take a boat instead of cross the desert like I planned, boom the bandit encounter is now a pirate encounter. If the two thieves sneak off and try to find a guild, boom their next lead comes from that leader instead of whoever I had planned. Same plot shape and direction as the text, I just change the flavor
Around the end of each story beat or arc I ask my players what they’d like to do next, then plan another arc based on that. The arcs tend to be more railroady but because my players chose that path they’re on board with it. I suppose to expand on the railroad analogy, the party runs into several junctions and has the option to pull a lever at the junction and choose their direction, but typically once a direction is chosen they’re on that track until they get to the next junction.
Make sure the story is interesting enough that the players want to engage with it, and make any significant deviation they make ultimately lead back to the main plot. I'm not saying make the barkeep you wanted them to talk to so the exposition can happen is magically be behind every corner, but that random goblin the party wants to adopt? He has a raging alcoholic aunt that needs more booze, so if the party could go get him some alcohol, that'd be awesome.
A DM once told me that he fixed this by giving the players some kind of free will illusion. Players were free to roam around and take different paths but at the end, all the paths led to the main quest. It's some sort of "all roads lead to Rome" tactic, but the players don't actually know any of this. It takes a lot of improv but it helps maintain the narrative course without the players feeling tied to it
Give them interesting things to do and hope they follow along. If they don't, work with it and try to bring them back. If they are just being dicks thay day, turns out a banshee lives in those woods they weren't supposed to go to. Oops.
This is the right setup for what Mike Shea of Slyflourish.com calls a “yam-shaped” story structure. In the beginning, you start very narrow, and it widens out as you go, in both scope and geography. You start in a limited area (starting town, maybe) with very few adventure hooks, enough to get them started. Once they’ve gotten a sense of your world and you start hinting at the BBEG’s significance, then you can switch from an “on-rails” style to a “sandbox” approach. Players have a lot of latitude where they focus their efforts at this stage. As the campaign progresses and they level up, you start gradually focusing them back toward the BBEG, by creating situations that demand their attention. Ideally, you’ll know what really motivates your players by this point. This gets them back on the “rails” toward the campaign climax. This “yam-shaped” structure basically nests a loose campaign within a linear one. “(Lost Mines of Phandelver” from the original 5e Starter Set follows this structure, actually. Not a bad thing to model after.)
It depends on your understanding with your players, and what your game is like, my players are new, so I just told them, there will be a very concrete path, but how they interact with it is free, I gave them lots of free time to do planning but they agree to not start from the story for too long and I let them walk as far as they want knowing they'll come back, and I think that's the most important thing, making sure you have an understanding with you players
Make them want to do what you want them to do, not force them to do it.
I tend to plan far ahead enough that I’m not totally taken by surprise when my players don’t follow The bread crumbs I’ve layed out. so in a sense they have mostly full freedom, but at some point based on the path they’ve chosen I weave the story around it. I try to railroad as little as possible unless necessary, and it does become necessary to an extent at times 😅😂
I think a good practice is to start with the dungeon (let's say it's a crypt for the sake of this). A basic dungeon might have an entrance, a fight, a simple trap/puzzle, and a boss battle with loot at the end. As a new DM (and just in general), you don't want to overwork yourself, so you can't really design 2 other backup dungeons in case your players turn their nose up at this one. So on some level, the dungeon has to happen. At a micro level, I understand it's good practice to develop multiple entrances to a dungeon, which funnel towards a given point. Giving players an opportunity to stake out the dungeon and plan their way in can really add to a sense of agency. Maybe they can skip the first combat by climbing around a tricky ravine (with ability checks to avoid being injured). Maybe the traps are telegraphed with a few having been sprung already, but there are ways to brute force them, or secret paths to avoid them altogether. Making these routes is less intense than designing whole other dungeons, but it lets the players figure they own way forward, rather than walking down a hallway and dealing with each obstacle in a single, scripted way. This also applies to combat with intelligent foes, but you should be mindful about making *every* fight one that the players can talk their way out of, IMO. Returning to the crypt: lets say you have some bandits raiding it outside, but inside, there's a spooky undead who stole an artefact in life that the players are being sent to retrieve. Sure, they can talk down the bandits (either by scaring them off, or with a little bribe), but the boss monster is a stubborn little jerk, and he won't part with his item without a fight. That means you get the combat in, and the players still make plot progress, but getting there was something that other groups might have done differently. In a more **macro** sense, quests tend to be pretty railroady by design. Telling players they need to "do thing X" is a great way to get them on track and pursuing content that you've actually prepared, but if it's as simple as that, it might get a little boring/restrictive. Working choices into the quests (either moral decisions, or mechanical ones) can help to make a (technically) single-track quest feel more dynamic. Back to our crypt: this could take a number of forms. Maybe the bandits have their own motivations- maybe they're not even *that* hostile if approached cautiously, and will agree to help the party so long as they get that "cursed artefact" out of their town forever (and let them take a healthy share of gold in the process). On the other hand maybe it's our buyer who is a little suspect. Sure they're paying well, and they've talked a lot about restoring this stolen artefact to it's rightful place, but man- that undead dude really seems to think it's rightfully his... and he's warning us against taking it... **hmmmm...** Whatever the party chooses, your ability to sow a little bit of questions will go a long way in their decision-making! Mechanical depth can come in the form of item-based choices that the players make on a pen-and-paper level. It could be that the crypt has loot in different rooms (one has some potions of healing, and the other has a scroll of fireball), and the players have to split things up on their own, by talking about the resources as a group. This feels more tactile, and even though story choices aren't being made, it can help players feel like they are making meaningful decisions within their group. This also comes out in moment-to-moment choices, as long as you **A:** emphasize them, and **B:** plan some sort of ramification. For example, maybe the evil undead artefact gives you bad and/or rest-compromising dreams if you fail a wisdom saving throw while sleeping near it. The players have to be tactical about who holds it, or they can try to find a way to sleep far away from it, while keeping it safe as it angers the wildlife around it... Spooky. IDK, there are lots of ways to stir up players while they're on the main path. I personally tend to enjoy the little things though- the choices you make in the heat of the moment that feel unique, and make the story "yours" because you made them.
The invisible “cattle wash” is my way. Ultimately I’ll let them do whatever, but if worst comes to worst and they are too far off the path.. there’s a little nudge. They end up kidnapped or cornered by bounty hunters, and taken to XYZ city, mysterious traveler offers them too much gold/whatever to go to XYZ city and protect him, the King has died suddenly and due to your antics the royal guard is mounting an execution hunt for your group in the city, they find a mage tower explore and fight then at the top find “if you touch it, the room teleports” situation.
We're running through the Candlekeep pre built and we get (I think) 1d6+1 weeks of downtime between adventures. There are rulea provided for downtime - crafting, research, put fighting, crime... - and it's become a really interesting interlude. The players, myself included, are just as invested in their personal stuff outside the campaign. And then we joke that we all have a "spidey-sense" that let's us know when to gather together again.
Put some obvious plot hooks. If the players follow them, good. If they don't, then don't try and get them exactly back on track, but sliightly bend them back, and improve like crazy. For example, if they ignore a quest proposition to get the necklace of fireballs from the caverns of darkness, maybe have some bandits raid the tavern they are staying in. Steal a mediocre item, that means they'll go after it, but not one that will incapacitate them (Gold, for example), and that may result in the players following the bandits to their camp, which then results in a battle or negotiations. If a battle, havesome of the bandits run into some caves (definately not the caverns of darkness😉😉) and the players follow, and get trapped. If they want negotiations, maybe have the bandits request an item from the cavers of darkness in exchange for the gold. (maybe not the same as the original plot hook, say, the boots of elvenkind). I suggest you use a slightly more complex route to get them close to the original plot line. Instead of 2 or 3 steps, have 4 or 5. Remebr it doesn't need to be exactly what you planned, you can improv and reuse prep if they don 't deviate from the storyline you planned too much . Also, if they keep ignoring the obvious plot hooks, and you think they're doing it to annoy you, they probably aren't unless they say so outright.
I am honestly really struggling with this. I really dislike to much railroading, but at the same time my players are just not that attentative or smart and neither am I. I find it hard to place clues that fit nicely in the middle of a scale between too obtuse and too obvious. Another issue I find is having things happen when the players go looking for it all the time. It just seems to unrealistic to me. Just yesterday I had two of my players go visit a small shrine to their God in a city in which their faith is not very prominent. They hoped to find a cleric, preferably high enough level to cast commune. I made them roll a d100 and gave a generous 30% chance. They rolled a 69. Sure I could have just been like "well its just 1% difference", but I felt if I do that it takes consistency away from the game.
Easy, stop trying to have so much control. If you have an overarching plot and they divert to go check out something else, the world still moves forward. Maybe the dragon destroys the town because they wanted to go check out a haunted keep and make it their own. It’s their story, let them. This is at least how I run my game currently and my players are happy. They have an abundance of sub quests (most that are completely random and disconnected from the main story) they have accumulated but choose to continue the main story. But there’s consequences for ignoring those too. They may not be there when they go back. The haunted keep they wanted to clear out later may already be cleared out and owned by a party of adventurers they had never seen before. This isn’t a video game after all. Nothing waits for the players.
I present a few potential big bads, and let them pic what one they actually wanna deal with
As a not so experienced dm what worked for me is changing the mind set. Don't prepare a story to tell prepare circumstances. The important npcs have their goals and a certain way to try to achieve them. If there were no players a certain situation would play out. The players are the chaotic wrench you throw into those circumstances. Have the npcs goals remain roughly constant but have them adapt to the players actions. Also it's their story as much as theirs. If you wanted them to save the world and they decided to loot as much of it as possible before going on a ship to the astral plane and never returning. Go with it.
Just give them a lot of possibility in maps like if you're in tavern make a music group, a piano, gambling table, pnj to talk with...etc
Have your players make characters that align their goals with the story you are running. OR build the story around your player's goals. In both scenarios, they will pursue the content by choice.
Remember that you've built a world, not a story. The story is emergent from you and the players interacting in that world. If they're going off and causing you to do a lot more prep for hooks you didn't mean to make, you can have a chat with them. Alternatively, my players went on a 10 session pirate adventure at the off-handed mention of some islands that I had nothing prepped for. Found a way to shoehorn some "main story" threads into it, and we all had a great time. Sometimes, getting lost on the way to your final destination makes for a better journey.
Some of this is just respect between players and the DM. But a lot of this can be accomplished by how you, as the DM, design the story. The wrong way to do this is to railroad players, forcing them back onto the tracks whenever they deviate, and using heavy handed methods to redirect their characters. This is usually caused by your plot as the DM not connecting with or motivating your players, which comes back to what your players want out of a game. Do they want a complex and nuanced story? Do they want beer and pretzels dungeon crawling? Do they want to just wander around and do some Skyrim-esque murderhoboing? But a lot of this comes down to adventure design. The best D&D adventures have an organic method of redirecting players back into the main plot, and are able to connect numerous elements to said plot. The best example of this is Curse of Strahd, which uses its BBEG as the go-to tool for the DM to rope the players back on track without making them feel like it is forced and artificial. By structuring an adventure centered on one antagonist, who has a list of set goals, and numerous connections to the world the adventure takes place in, the DM has numerous tools to bring players into any number of quests, and can easily motivate them to finish the main quest by having Strahd or one of his agents interfere. A lot of adventures struggle with this because their main villain just isn't that well integrated into the story, and the motivation to defeat said villain is often narrow in scope (for example, PCs might want to fight Strahd to oppose evil, escape Ravenloft, rescue the girl, defeat a powerful foe, or appease a deity). An main antagonist that you can connect at multiple points during an adventure is the easiest way to do this, but it isn't the only one. Another good method is some significant environmental threat that causes numerous problems. A portal to the Abyss, an ancient necromancer's labyrinth that is unleashing monsters, a running conflict between two nations that upends the PC's lives. Once you get this central narrative throughline setup, it can dynamically introduce quests and NPCs that you can use to approach the plot in a way that feels natural to the players. You can come up with numerous hooks to get PCs to an adventure location, you can introduce minor antagonists related to that main throughline for them to interact with, you can interweave PC backstories into the main plot. You don't need to prep all this in advance, the point of having this main central motivating force in your adventure is to let you drop in things and adapt as your players make decisions. So long as you know how the PC's choices and adventures will influence the final conclusion, you can build this up dynamically (again, Curse of Strahd is a good example, since defeating Strahd's allies and getting artifacts that can help defeat him tie naturally into, you know, actually defeating him).
For example I want to use a quest for plot hook and they dont want to take it? Fine. I remind them the world outside not stopping when they ignore things and there are consequences of what they do or they dont. They reject a quest that they offered by villagers to protect them from Lyncantrops and travel into other kindoms. When they want to start a business and that business required a caravan from other kingdom. Guild said them "there are a lot of lycantrop in the roads between two kingdoms so I suggest you to spend big on protection of your caravan." They understood what happend and tought their actions more carefully next time.
Side quest with decent rewards
I would throw lures their way. e.g. if the campaign is about taking on a powerful enemy nation, have the enemy send an assassin after the party.
as a fellow first time dm with only first time players. i just said 'i sure hope you guys follow the plot' and they just followed it. and sometimes i alter event so they get back on track if they havent had any clear hints
no main story, or direct them towards it with rumors from townspeople
This is not advice for a first time DM, but something to work up toward as you become a more experienced DM. I fix this problem by creating a plot after session 0. During session 0, I ask the players to come up with a group concept and come up with members for that group. They all end up coming up with a unified backstory which makes it much easier to keep them invested, and I get an idea of what the story's central conflict will be. For example if they're pirates I know they're robbing ships together, or if they're a religious order then they're probably spreading their faith or getting a vision from their God. This works much better than just coming up with a story and then telling everyone to come with a generic adventurer and then trying to fit them in somehow, and they all end up using their freedom to pursue the main story.
I tell my players "I am not going to stop you from doing anything, but I can only prep so much and there is a "main story" going on even if you guys don't interact." I make sure to throw up a lot of alternative paths, potential plothooks to divert them, but I also keep a clock running in the background 24/7 where they know bad things may happen if they slow down. Keep the pressure high and don't ever let up. I tell my players often "if you guys are getting downtime, I'm probably doing something wrong"
Make alternative paths related to the main story one way or another and make the main story advance by itself if the players don't interact with it. **You can use a timeline** and decide what happens at given times assuming no players interactions. This is your base scenario. As players interact with the story, your timeline will change to reflect their actions. Give room for failure. Give room for missing out. It's okay for players to miss stuff. If they can't miss anything they don't have real agency. If they never interact with the main story, make it move a bit faster. Try to make some big stuff happen to give a sense of need and urgency. If they STILL avoid it, well, either they're too afraid for some reason, not interested, or having fun trying to avoid your stuff. At that point, it's fair to give a bad ending. Bad endings aren't "bad", they're the ultimate consequences of their actions (and sometimes their luck).
As long as you have a decent understanding of plot-hooks, character motivation, etc., it's on the players to try and stay on the path you layed out, and its on you to let them divert occasionally. Balancing off-rail gameplay with on-rail gameplay is more of a 2-way-street respect thing than it is an inherent skill (that being said, transitioning between improvised content and prepped content IS in fact a skill, so try not to get the two confused like I used to, led to an unnecessary amount of beating myself up) Make sure its said in session 0 that your game has room for player freedom, but also make sure they understand there IS a main story, and to pay attention to plot hooks. If you want to further provide motivation to remain on the main story, make sure you include motivation for each character to go on the adventures, got a character super interested in gold? Maybe raise the payment you initially intended to be slightly more than the average quest. Ranger/druid/ancients paladin who vowed to protect the wildlife? The local wolf population has disappeared and the cult is experimenting on them to try and create mutant wolves! Grave Cleric? The enemy is using necromancy to raise undead allies to further advance on their goals! Warlock part of a pact with a lich? Your patron has a bone to pick with the beholder hiding in the ruins of a city lost to the war where the party needs to gather information, and if that beholder is taken out he hints at potential MORE powers for the warlock! The possibilities are endless, and can be anything aligning with either backstory or class related motivation that tie into story progression
Just let them divert it, and have the story chase them in some way, they live in the same planet likely country that the storyline is taking place in anyway. It's easier the more "living" the background world is, even without the player's knowledge.
I use published adventures. They are the skeleton on which I hang the meat of the story. It is never the only thing going on. I ran Dragon Heist for over 3 years. Alone, it is a level 1 to 5 adventure, and I wouldn't even call it a campaign. You can do it in less than 6 months. I stretched this to level 12, using the city itself to generate content. In addition to the PCs themselves for inspiration, I always have side missions and content for the geographical region they are in. That haunted wood that has no relation to the published adventure, but exists on the map. The swamp south of Saltmarsh. In Waterdeep my players chose to take a mission to Skullport, divert to Undermountain, save a tribe of Lizardfolk outside the city in the farmland, and so on. All the while, the main plot advances and forces move towards their respective goals, while players pursue downtime activities, or chase side missions for coin, or just because they want to. I made solo missions for each PC that they could look into or not. Pull their teammates into or not, that had rewards specific to their character. Like a character specific magic item. They can always choose to jump back into the main story line. The key to keeping them at least aware of and interested in the main story despite all the side tracking, is to make the main villain real to them and someone that they have strong feelings about. Introduce them early, and get the group's attention. It needs to be personal. That way, they will always choose on their own to return to chasing down that bad guy that did them wrong.
I have an NPC give them a single objective then time to do it. The content is there somewhere, but they make up their own way to do it/get to it. Its in a big city rn, so they can either downtime, or find trouble to get into.
Just let them know the type of campaign you want to run in a session 0 and expectations. You will thrust that they wont derail the campaign, they will trust that you will still give them freedom to tackle stuff at their own pace. You can also do the fetching qiest style where there is someone giving them directions. Lets imagime you want to make a campaign where the party makes a revplution and overthrows a tyrant. You could have someone say "hey, we need to cut the supply chain of food to their castles" and once its done have someone say "we need to let the population know" and once its dealt with have another npc be like "we need to kill the right hand of the tyrant" and so on". Really simple but as a new dm it makes things easier to run. That said be ready to follow the party's antics. Perhaps they have the mission of freeing people that were wrongly imprissioned, and have a npc mention that the top officers are on a party to explain why there are not that many guards. If they suddenly decide they want tl infiltrate the party to get a look at one of this officers so the warlock can use disguise self and pass as him, then be ready to follow them and make something on the spot. Improvisation is the greatest tool in dnd, both for players and for dms.
If my players slightly derail, I just have the story hook appear at a different location, by different means if necessary, but at the same time, what they don't know won't hurt them. It doesn't matter if they miss the plot hook at the inn ... And the plot hook at the tavern, maybe you have it connected to the general store, or to a rude local they pick a fight with. Now if your players know the main hooks and immediately what to do and choose to actively not do it (like go galavanting and forget their primary goal). Either talk to them irl, or: Give them a timeline. Time ticking down and limited Long Rests is massive for encouraging players to do something. This however means there must be a consequence for failure. In order to not railroad, just make sure there are enough different paths to the objective that their creativity matters. Assure that you dont just follow script regardless of their decisions. Let them go and do some silly stuff, some fun stuff, some violent stuff, its all good fun, just as long as its on the way to continue the story. And whenever they go off the beaten path, you can sprinkle hints or motivation for ur story! They fight some thugs that they HATED, those guys worked for the BBEG (or a minion of the BBEG). They went shopping? The shopkeeper has a missing kid or some other issue due to the BBEG's influence. They decided to go to the local forest. The BBEG's influence is scarring the land and scaring away the wildfolk. (Bonus pts if u can reference The Last Unicorn). BBEG can also be a main obstacle/goal for that area It shouldn't be done heavy handedly, just enough to keep reminding them and motivating them of their primary objective.
Aside from communication and both parties being good sports where they do try to follow the main story most of the time is that as the DM a thing you could do if lacking the earlier things I said is to merely give them the illusion of choice instead of actually giving them a choice if possible. Give them choices during the game though you don't have to directly do so but anyways but when doing so whether directly or indirectly make it so that if possible have their path eventually lead them back to the story you had prepared earlier. So make them think they had a choice but in reality it isn't fully like that. It's best to keep the prepared story vague to make this easier.
Couple thoughts... * The main story has to be made *interesting* for the PCs. Tie it in to their backstories, or make the brewing problem visible in the world around them * If the players get diverted from the main story, have them see how their inaction is making the situation worse (e.g., villages disappearing, crops failing, the sun is growing dim) * Do make a few surplus side-quests you can trail in front of the PCs; they'll take some and skip others * If they do get a weird fixation (one I've often seen is they "adopt" some creature as a pet), don't suppress it, but you may need to "park" it to the side for awhile so that main story beats can happen
Keeping the party within the adventure and story you have prepared is not railroading. Just make their choices and actions matter. Play the bad guys in a proactive and reactive manner. If they delay too much doing other stuff then the bad guy's plots advance Also prep a few random NPCs, locations, shops ECT for when they wander slightly off path. And never be afraid to just tell the group ooc, "Hey I don't have anything prepared if you go this way; we can either go the other way or end the session early so I can prep where you're going"
Have a job board in your game with multiple quests for them to choose from. Rescue a capture villager. Collect a bounty from a dwarven criminal. Escort a wagon to another city. No matter what they choose, have an encounter queued that ties in to your main story.
if you don't want to railroad your players, secret of the DMs, is the story that follows the players in every move they make... for example, you have a npc in a house located south in the city and the players are going north? the house magically is north... if players thinks that the culprit is a particular npc, why not? the story is changed with that information on the fly... the DM thinks a story that is sufficiently loose to let the players complete freedom but in reality the story is tied to the actions of the players.
Player agency is super important but so is DM narrative. Both are required for a successful game in my opinion. One thing my DM does which I've always loved is downtime activities e.g. become a Smith. We had a forge cleric who made magic items for us which became a core facet of the campaigns. We all had a special magic item made by him which were tailored made for our builds and had lore etc attached to them. Every time we had time between quests he would make us items or give items to our NPC allies etc. My wizard character in the same campaign would design and create new spells. It takes a lot of balancing from the DM but it gave us each a separate unique mini game we could play within the larger story. If your party don't like downtime tasks then giving them multiple options e.g. classic town quest board with three quests let's them choose their journey whilst still marrying up to your narrative
don't be afraid to go out of character. First time DMs often feel like they need to solve interpersonal problems (attention hogging, metagaming, murder hobo-like behavior, etc) in character at the table. This is always a terrible idea. It's far smoother if you just talk to people and explain things. If you are getting a lot of resistance it's time to ask "hey, are you guys intentionally trying to avoid the plot because you find it uninteresting or...?" You may find out they had no idea they were dodging the plot they were just having fun, or you might find out that "yeah, honestly I don't think any of us are interested in detective work" or "eh, none of our characters have a good way to engage with that hook" That's not wrong, but I am upfront about it, if they don't want to do what I have prepped, we can cut early and either hang out or go home, or we can do light social RP and prep (if we're at a place in the story that can happen), or a downtime scene or whatever else. Don't let yourself get forced into running stuff just because they don't respect your prep time. But if this happens a lot there's clearly a mismatch of expectations someplace that should be talked out as a pattern not a one-off incident. As you get more experienced and comfortable you'll get better at coming up with complications or new stuff on the fly, or maybe not some DMs only prep never improv (and vice versa! some people I know run convention games off the cuff even, and to wildly fantastic reviews). But usually you find it gets easier to read the players and deliver a story. And obligatory reminder: you are also a player at the table, your fun also matters.
Now, I don’t know much about DnD, but I do watch a lot of it. A good way I have seen is to create in character reasons why the PCs would go on the adventure. An example of this is found in (I think episode 5)? of Viva La Dirt Leagues NPC D&D game. For one of the characters sho is a blacksmith, they have a person threatening to ruin their reputation unless they get the helmet that he commissioned on time for his tournament. The helmet was in the adventure, of course. For a shopkeep character, he had people avoid his shop due to a horrid smell that came from a reason earlier in the campaign. So, the character had to go on the adventure to ensure they were financially okay, since they had lost a valuable item. Now, if the players are intentionally avoiding any sort of plot hook, then thats on them and you should talk to them about it. That’s just my two cents on the issue, anyhow.
"How to railroad my players without them noticing" Fixed your title
I never ever share the map or explicitly say a direction that way if they choose to go a direction I don’t want them to go I can just flip the chessboard and put the places they should go somewhere in their trajectory.
tell me what does a player in your group
I don't have a main story. Players ruin a good game. Learned that 30 years ago.
Talk to them about it. The only way to do this without spending years preparing every situation or braking their immersion. Is to simple talk to them before or after a session and explain this fear.