Why GMs Railroad… And Techniques To Avoid It!

I’ve seen even experienced Game Masters resort to railroading at the gaming table. Hell, I’ve been guilty of it myself, and on more than one occasion. But why would any GM stoop that low, when pretty much the one thing that everyone in this hobby agrees upon is that “railroading is bad”?

Contrary to what angry Redditors might claim, I don’t think it’s because those GMs are all crazy control freaks who want to rob players of their agency, and make them puppets in a pre-determined story.

I actually believe that 90% of railroading is born of good intentions. The GM has planned an epic encounter that is supposed to provide, or set up, the main tension and conflict of that day’s gaming session, and naturally they want it to play out in the most epic fashion possible.

But if the terrifying monster is banish-ed in round 1, or the players are able to steal the MacGuffin at the first attempt, or the villain isn’t able to escape to enact their devious plan (after foolishly appearing in order to bait the PCs), the rest of the encounter / adventure will be far too easy, and devoid of that all important drama.

The Three Types of Railroading

Before I go on, I should probably point out that there are three distinct forms of railroading, only two of which are truly offensive.

1. Railroading The Storyline (Very Bad)

The first is railroading an entire adventure. That means pushing the players down the tracks of a storyline where they have few to no choices to make. The ability to make meaningful choices is crucial to the experience of playing a game, so building a scenario with no decisions to make, or else shutting down any decisions that take the story in a new direction, is obviously very bad indeed. It’s debatable if you’re playing a TTRPG at all if you do this.

While this is clearly the worst form of railroading, I think there’s enough solid DM advice out there, along with examples on how to play the game, that no one really commits this crime any more, beyond maybe one or two novice DMs who’ve yet to understand the medium.

2. Railroading The Direction of Travel (Generally OK)

The second form of railroading involves pushing the players in the direction of an adventure, without giving them any agency to accept the quest or “go their own way” (this happens during any adventure which you start in media res!). This is a perfectly acceptable modus operandi IMHO.

A slightly contrived adventure beginning, or a moment where the players need to get on the train for one or two stations, won’t bother 99% of people. Players signed up for the game session in order to go on an adventure, and they don’t need the world’s most captivating hook or cast-iron character motivation to engage with the material that the GM spent hours preparing. They absolutely want the agency of deciding how they deal with situations, but, as long as they are not deathtraps, they generally don’t mind being railroaded into those situations to begin with.

(Note: there are certain RPG purists out there who object to type 2 railroading as well, believing that open sandbox play is the only way to roll. In this style of game the GM prepares an entire region to explore and dangles a variety of quest hooks in front of them, after which the players decide how they will embark on their adventuring career).

3. Railroading Specific Outcomes (Bad)

The third type of railroading is forcing certain results or outcomes, usually by fudging dice rolls, or making biased rulings, or artificially removing player choice. It’s a bit similar to type 1 railroading, in that if you dictate enough results, you are in fact railroading an entire adventure, but it’s worth making the distinction because, as I say, railroading entire adventures rarely happens beyond a new GM’s first rodeo. However, railroading results is a much more common occurrence, and something even experienced DMs need to guard against…

Before I dive into some tips and approaches to swerve this trap, let’s consider why GMs fall into it…

Understanding The Problem Key To Solving It

I think if we actually stop to understand why railroading results happens, instead of just calling it out as bad GMing, then we are better equipped to take effective steps to avoid it.

In my experience, as both a player and a GM, railroading results happens when the GM sees that the obstacles they prepared for the session are in danger of being blown away far too easily – either by some smart thinking by the PCs, or a couple of lucky rolls, or perhaps by a new spell the wizard got because they just levelled up (sucks to be the DM when suddenly the PC casts arcane eye and scouts the whole dungeon!).

Those obstacles were designed to provide the main conflict, tension and suspense of the entire session – in other words they were designed to provide the session’s essential drama – and if they are removed the GM is, understandably, concerned that the session is going to fall flat. Suddenly even a “good GM” is tempted to fudge dice rolls, reinterpret the rules, or change the scene in a way that feels impartial, leaving the players feeling cheated and breaking their immersion in the game world.

The Three Obstacle Rule?

Before I continue with some fairly uncontroversial advice, here’s a quick aside on a debatable GMing technique, that I’d appreciate readers’ thoughts on…

When I started thinking about solutions to the problem of railroading results, I was in the process of writing a mystery adventure using the Alexandrian’s node-based adventure design template, and in this process I was thinking about Justin’s famous “Three Clue Rule”. The Alexandrian uses this rule to mitigate for the fact that players may fail to find or correctly interpret a single vital clue. And so he provides three instead, to ensure that the mystery continues to unravel and the fun carries on.

This got me thinking that, if a party easily circumvents an encounter which you thought was going to provide a lot of tension, maybe the best solution is to have a back-up obstacle or complication prepared to ensure that the game has enough drama in it to be a fun experience for all?

In other words, instead of designing three clues to keep a mystery going, maybe we need to design three obstacles for any given session to ensure that something substantial always stands between the party and their goals?

For now, I’m not 100% sure what form “Three Obstacle Rule” might involve. Maybe it’s literally that…. prepare three obstacles on the understanding that at least one will be blown away or circumvented. Or perhaps it means preparing some optional obstacles that only come online if the first hindrance is dealt with too easily… For example, if the party easily defeat the troll and goblins guarding the bridge, when the GM was hoping for an epic combat, would it make the session better if the GM has some optional reinforcements up their sleeve for this scenario (but not the scenario where the party barely make it through the encounter)? Would it be good GMing to prep an optional “blow up bridge” device, which meant a new obstacle was put in the players’ path, but only if the combat obstacle is dealt with too easily?

Purists will say player agency is nullified by adding or removing difficulty according to how well the players do – and they would have a very good point. If managing an encounter well is “punished” by just adding a new optional encounter, what was the advantage to the players in playing smart?

You could argue it the other way though. The players aren’t being punished… they are being rewarded by an additional encounter, that makes the session more dramatic and more fun. As GMs we are always in charge of setting the difficulty anyway, so is prepping additional optional obstacles just an insurance plan for when we get the initial balance wrong?

I suspect this is one of opinion and personal preference, and it might even depend on how dextrously you disguise the technique in front of your table. Players that divine what you’re up to are likely to feel gamed… players immersed in your world of smoke and mirrors are likely to be entertained by the more dramatic turn of events.

Anyway, leaving this potentially divisive idea of optional back-up obstacles aside, there are plenty of other tried’n’tested techniques that DMs can employ whenever an encounter or obstacle is trivialised by the players’ decisions or abilities. There’s no need to railroad…

How Not To Railroad Stories & Outcomes

Experienced DMs are likely practicing many of these techniques already. But let me know how your DMing style stacks up against this list… and if you have any other tips!

1. Let Go Of Your Vision

You may have an idea for how a scene will unfold, and you may even have grown quite attached to that idea. You no doubt believe that the session will be more epic if this or that happens, but don’t force it. Never force it! Breaking immersion by shutting down player agency is much more damaging to your game than allowing the players to score an easy victory, even if the latter is lacking in drama. Players still tend to enjoy easy victories and the feeling of being powerful, so you don’t need to feel bad when everything goes their way. In fact, these moments provide the upbeats of your story pacing… which in turn will make those difficult downbeats feel more epic when they happen.

2. Roll Your Dice In The Open

If you roll your dice in front of your players a) you will never be tempted to fudge a roll and b) you are openly demonstrating that you are a truly impartial referee. Railroading results can be done in both directions: while fudging a boss’s saving throw is one temptation, GMs are probably more often guilty of manipulating the dice to save a player from death. Rolling in the open removes this temptation and makes the game world very real and uncaring. Which is great for immersion. This technique comes with a significant bonus: when something goes wrong for them, players are less likely to feel that you, the DM, killed their character, but rather the world did. In other words, rolling in the open actually takes the pressure off your shoulders. You are not dictating what happens, the dice are.

3. Be Sure To Provide Choices

Having said type 1 railroading doesn’t happen much, I did spend far too long of a recent one-shot strapped to the rails of a journey through the wilderness. The GM’s goal was clearly to build tension and fear, but the set up meant we couldn’t really do anything about the situation apart from follow the road to the nearest settlement as fast as we could go. If we had choices, they were not clear to us, and it would have been better if the GM had spelled them out. However, the simplest solution would have been to just make this creepy journey a lot shorter… moving the first meaningful decision (what to do when we arrived at a seemingly deserted settlement) to earlier in the session. It felt like two hours passed without a choice to make. The topic of choices is probably a subject for another post, but the best ones are informed choices, that carry consequences and which change the game. In this example, the GM could also have fixed the situation by providing an alternative path to the next settlement, which for example might be quicker to follow, but carried a greater chance of getting lost.

4. Play Your Monsters Smart

Don’t only prep the monsters’ stat blocks. Think in advance about how they might react to certain situations, including the situation of the players getting the upper hand early on in a fight. Maybe in my bridge encounter example earlier, if the troll is banish-ed or killed early in the fight, the goblins run to the other side and blow up the bridge. (This is better design than creating a dual reality, but has almost the same effect!). Also, monsters that run away are sometimes the most scary of all… because the players don’t know when they’ll be back, and with whom. If things go badly early on, consider having the monsters bug out and come back with reinforcements. Whenever the players seem to have the upper hand in a mechanical sense, consider if some smart thinking on the monsters part can still keep the tension high.

5. Check The Wording of Powerful Spells

Sometimes a player wheels out a spell that trivialises an encounter or obstacle…. but never take their word for what it does! Many spells have restrictions built into the small print, or require an expensive component, have a long casting time, or require concentration, so be sure to read the spell description carefully. And if a player pulls a trick like casting arcane eye outside a dungeon then you can always make a Wandering Monster check….

6. Have a Wandering Monster Table Ready

If players hang around in a dangerous area, like outside a dungeon, or take another route through the forest – having rolled a natural 20 on their Perception check to spot the bandit’s ambush you spent hours preparing – it’s a good idea to have them roll on a Wandering Monster table. You’re never too far from danger in the worlds of Dungeon & Dragons, and avoiding one danger often means dicing with another! (Note: a Wandering Monster check means there’s a chance of running into a monster… monsters that turn up directly on cue feel spammy).

7. Prep The Next Section of the Adventure

Let’s say the party avoid the bandit ambush in the example above, pass their Survival checks to navigate another route through the forest, and get lucky on the Wandering Monsters table… well this is where you could either use my “alternative obstacle” technique I hesitantly proposed earlier, or, if you’re philosophically opposed to that, then it’s simply time to move to the next part of the adventure, and the next big decisions and obstacles the party face. This likely means you need to prep two sessions ahead (see tip 8 for another solution), but the good news is that if the players managed to circumvent an encounter entirely you can probably find an opportunity to reskin it and use it in a future adventure (so that prep doesn’t go entirely to waste).

8. Run Campfire Tales Instead

So your players just circumvented your entire session prep…. time to punish them with some obligatory roleplaying instead! Running campfire tales (which can also be “hiking-through-the-wilderness tales”), is as easy as having a few conversational prompts ready and then encouraging your players to answer them in character. It’s a great way for the players to share some of their characters’ motivations and backstories, and demonstrate their personalties, and such scenes often provide a good change of pace to combat-heavy sessions. Plus, once you put your players through this a few times, they’ll gladly walk into the next ambush 🤣.

9. Have Some Extraordinary Locations On Hand…

If what you planned for a D&D session goes awry, or the players go off in a different direction than you anticipated, it can be handy to have some modular locations you can drop in to your game, opening up a new area of the map, or else presenting them totally off-grid but with a hook to visit. Such modular content can be deployed as a standalone distraction to get you through a session, or – with a little inspiration – as something you can tie in with your current adventure.

Ok so this particular anti-railroad tip is a shameless segue into some big news…

I Won An Ennie Nomination!

My book of Extraordinary Locations just won an ENNIE nomination for Best Supplement!

For those of you who don’t know, the ENNIES are the Oscars of the RPG world, and pretty much the most prestigious prize available to RPG designers, so I’m absolutely delighted to have won this nomination from the judges for my first published book (outside of my DMs Guild works).

Voting: If you bought the book, or if you’re confident it might just be the Best Supplement of 2026, please do go and vote for it here.

The voting is only open from 10th to 19th July. (The judging panel determine the nominees, and then it becomes a bit of a popularity contest to get your hands on the ENNIE itself!).

Tying the book back to today’s topic of railroading, and one of the great things about having this type of readymade content on your bookshelf is that it enables you too open up your world a bit and give the party more options about direction of travel etc.. You can even dangle these modular locations in front of your players as places they spot in the distance, giving them the agency of deciding whether to visit them not. And, if they don’t bite, you didn’t waste hours / days preparing the location’s map and the monsters / treasures within…. I did that for you!

I obviously penned these 30 locations with great love and care, with the goal of them providing the signature settings of your adventures…. but they also work great as stand-in content for when your players veer off the rails and into the unknown. So they are another tool in your arsenal for avoiding the railroad.

These locations don’t come with a prescribed story attached. Rather, they are living, functioning locations with open-ended adventure potential, and a great way to get GMs prepping situations not plots…. which is perhaps the best technique of all staying clear of the rails.

Railroading Conclusion

Depending on the game you’re running, the system, the occasion, and the expectations of the players, I think it’s often okay to gently steer the story to where the most fun is at, or give the players a slightly kinder or tougher ruling in key moments. It’s almost inhuman not to.

But there’s a thin line to be trodden. If the players feel you’re frequently biased in your rulings, or adjusting encounters on the fly, so that their actions and dice rolls don’t matter, your game will lose much of its magic and your players will feel like actors in a play that has already been written.

One of the most convincing arguments for a more resource-management, old school style of play is that virtually every decision matters, and there’s always another threat to deal with or avoid (dungeons just go deeper and deeper! It’s up to you when you bail!). In this way, the OSR style of play circumvents railroading altogether, as it never really promises balanced play and rarely strives towards heroic action scenes.

I think the best 5e also runs on those OSR principles, but some tensions can arise when the cinematic scenes that GMs plan (and players expect) don’t happen, as the players score an easy victory. But GMs can take a leaf from the book of my current 5e Dungeon Master: he is quite often surprised by how easily we deal with a major encounter…. but he’s always got another one to follow up his sleeve (see Tip 7), and it’s just down to our decisions – and the dice – as to which encounters end up being a cakewalk, and which (supposedly routine) encounters end up as the memorable knife-edge sessions. Nothing is predetermined. We play to find out what happens.

As always, do please share your own thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear them!