Railroading is 100% Necessary In Your D&D/TTRPG Adventure!

Groggy, you come to your senses. Your head hurts like you had too much schnapps the night before. You’re lying on your back, staring up at a circle of torchlight high above, something dangling down from it. This chamber is full of shadows, but you smell lamp oil and smoke, noting two or three torches burning in the corners of what … looks like … a library?

There are other figures groaning awake near you. You hear the rustle and creak of old leather scraping on cracked stone. You notice a bit of movement, try to focus through the dull ache in your head as the last few feet of what might be a rope ladder snakes up into that circle of torchlight, which seems to actually be some kind hatch in the vaulted ceiling thirty feet above you. 

And looking around with a bit more clarity, it dawns on you that this chamber there appears to have no windows and no doors. What do these other figures stirring in the room see when they look at you. Describe yourself for the party.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy where we’re doing our first Part 2! Yep, I told ya I had some further ideas at the end of episode 25 – jingle jangle. Nope. Just trying to workshop new trademark-able call outs, and that ain’t it. And yep, I’m calling these videos episodes. Does it make sense? Not at all. Does it make me feel like I’m a producer. 100%. It’s also just a handy file-naming structure for keeping stuff organized in the old Mac. But now I can also thank my patrons for supporting the show! That’s got a nice ring to it. Thank you very much.

Oh, and further and, let’s hear from today’s sponsor.

All right, I hope that wasn’t too cheesy. 

All right, enough shenanigans, let’s get to it.

Let’s talk about what can make a good first session adventure for players – or a DM – that are brand new to DnD. Really brand new to tabletop RPGs in general. We talked in episode 25 about removing every possible obstacle from a brand new player’s path to the table and now I want to suggest something way more controversial. 

Your first adventure for brand new players should be 100% railroaded!

All right, that’s a bit on the facetious side, but I think it’s mostly true. Technically what I want to say is “strategic railroading” is perfect for brand new players.

In the past I’ve started new players with an in medias res opening to the session and as you heard in the intro, wherever they start there ain’t no windows and there ain’t no doors – and consider this dismaying observation. 

If you’ve been to Disneyland or Disney World, I’m sure you’ve enjoyed the Autopia ride, right? Where you get to drive these cool little mini cars and a single track runs down the middle of the lane between the car’s wheels, so while you do actually get to steer the car, you don’t get to go road-raging across traffic. And you get to apply the gas and the brakes, you know, to an extent. This is the kind of railroading I’m talking about.

Another useful metaphor is the lab rat and the lab rat’s maze. 

When you design your map with these metaphors in mind, you’re basically designing a linear level as opposed to an open world level. I mean, open worlds don’t really have “levels” but you get what I mean. I design a pretty straightforward path, but of course include some areas where new players can “choose a direction”, places where they can make decisions, et cetera.

Here’s a map I made a while ago for just such an adventure, specifically for a group of players who’d never played DnD before, or any tabletop RPG for that matter. They start in chamber A and there’s only one way out of that room, these stairs that descend. That stairwell leads to a trap door that opens into a hallway, and so when the players arrive here, they have their first in-game decision moment – head south to check out this closed doorway at the end of the hall or head north to where they can see the corridor has a blind turn. For first time players, this is plenty for them to deal with. 

Side note, it’s pretty funny how I always spend so much time building maps in Photoshop or whatever that are typically only gonna be seen by … me. We’re gonna ignore what that might say about my narcissistic state and chalk it up to having fun being creative. Don’t judge me! 

The key to this first adventure is to not overwhelm the newbies with too many choices. Don’t take away their agency, just give ‘em some simple walls to play within. You don’t set the first graders loose in Disneyland all on their own, you set ‘em loose in the McDonald’s playhouse. 

Actually, never do that either, those things are gross.

Your players will have all kinds of fun making choices and fighting monsters and investigating small contained spaces with a very simple story for their first game. They’re gonna be learning game rules and character abilities and just getting to know what playing an RPG is like during this time. I think it’s important they’re given a clear goal and then have time to explore whatever aspects of DnD come up, from combat to exploration to role play. 

And an in-story or in-game time limit is probably a good thing to incorporate as well, something to give them a sense to urgency that drives them toward whatever that goal is. This is a pretty typical bit of DM advice from across the internet.

For this little adventure here, which I called Gravesgarde, the player characters wake up on the floor of an underground library. They’ve been shanghaied and thrown down here and a vaguely sinister bishop, talking to them from the ceiling trap door, informs them they’ve been “volunteered” by the city watch for this little quest. There’s an escaped convict hiding in the catacombs below that needs catching and the bishop would much prefer to have the convict returned alive with the macguffin they stole intact, but the macguffin is too important to let fall into anyone else’s hands, so if that convict cannot be caught, well, in four hours, he’s set to unleash a torrent of the cathedral’s holy witch-hunting spiders to clear out the whole place of anything living. And if the characters succeed in subduing and returning the convict, they’ll be granted a generous sack of gold along with their freedom. If not, good luck with the eight-legged freaks.

So the players have a goal: find and capture a runaway, and a time limit: four hours. I usually give a little description of these nightmare spiders, each as big as a wolf, sort of crowding around the bishop and the trap door with their spiky hairy legs and too many eyes, just to impart a bit of squeamishness about what failure is gonna look and feel like. Then the trap door slams shut and the players are on their own.

Down in the catacombs, which turn out to be the ruins of an ancient church that apparently the town’s cathedral has been built over the top of, I’ve placed a simple trap for the players to encounter and made sure there are some spots where they can make some decisions, like these doors here or here, et cetera. But as you can easily see, no matter where they end up going, they can only ever end up at the end of the maze. And they can’t go backwards. I mean they could, but they already know there are no windows and no doors behind them.

This map might look too small for a typical game night, and it almost certainly is for regular players, but for a group of total noobs, this is more than enough. And I would say that another thing to consider is the real-world time your session takes. A dnd session for brand new players that lasts only 2 or two and a half hours is way better than a session lasting five plus hours. I mean unless you can gauge they’re really into it. Because new players are contending with not only playing the game but also learning the game, their mental fatigue is likely to climb much faster than normal. And in my opinion the end goal of this first adventure has nothing to with the adventure itself, the end goal is to hopefully have these new players wanting to play again, simple as that. 

I only have like four combat encounters in this whole map, and those are only dealing with one or two adversaries at a time. There’s a dark mantle in here and a couple of skeletons in these little rooms and there’s the main convict they’re after, which they’ll encounter somewhere in this area. That convict turns out to be possessed by a demon, and the demon is what the bishop actually wants in the end. So the convict is basically the “big bad guy” of this little adventure. 

Putting your new players in a simple sorta lab-rat style maze like this gives you and them the time and freedom to learn the basics of DnD and have fun without being stressed by too much information or too many choices. Always remember that when you understand or are familiar with something, things you don’t even think about at all are all brand new and unknown to someone who’s new to that thing, and they’ll need some time to absorb the new concepts and all that stuff, even the most basic ones.

So, we all know the saying right? Keep it simple, stupid, that’s what I say to myself every day and every day, I fail in some way to do that. Keeping things simple can actually be more difficult than it sounds. It’s kinda like writing, shorter is better, but shorter is almost certainly more difficult.

So, go make a maze for new players and see if you can lure some new folks into it with a piece of expensive cheese. Or, you know, maybe some wine. And always have fun.

See ya!