Every GM struggles in the beginning balancing between authoring a compelling story and giving players freedom. Go too far into authorship and you start railroading players and denying player agency. Swing towards giving you much freedom and there will be a lack of cohesive story and a big problem with trying to prep for the game. To cover this were going to use an analogy of trains versus bumper cars.
Trains are a pretty simple idea. You connect major points via a path. There is no deviating from this path. Anytime anything stats to lead us off the orphaned path, something pushes back in the right direction. This is the perfect model for describing how not to put together a campaign, hence the name railroading. Railroading can deny entire potential plot lines. It can also deny actions that players want to take because they lead off track. This is very frustrating to players who want to be driving the story.
Still, we need a way to keep players in some rough limits so we can prepare for the game and knit together subplots, plots, and overarching storylines into something epic. If we let players just wander around randomly, rolling for encounters on random encounter tables, there won't really be a story. Instead of letting our players go free-range and wander off into the weeds, what we're going to do is add some bumpers. Then the players can go on their merry way until something is going to give them a shove to get them going in the right direction in our defined plot region again. PCs become bumper cars in our little plot region.
So what is a plot region? Plot regions are areas where motivation, conflict, locations, and characters converge. For example, if I put the sister of a PC as a hostage in a tower, I have a motivation and a location. If I now put that tower in a neighboring kingdom that is warring with the kingdom where the PCs are currently located, I have added characters, locations, and conflict. Together these things form a plot region that I prepare and add detail to. I don't have to define how the PCs will interact with these things, but I can be assured that a story will arise from it. The PCs control that story.
Bumpers, in this case, are the plot points we add to keep the PCs "in bounds". For example, if the PCs try to run away from the scenario, we might have them captured by one of the kingdoms and pulled back in. We aren't dictating at all what the PCs do or how they react, but we are giving them continual motivation to get involved however they choose. Some of these bumpers may give them biases that we can later break. Everything is dynamic as it plays out.
Preparation of plot regions is actually pretty simple. Assume that the PCs can do anything they choose. Now prepare for it. This ultimately means fleshing out the locations, placing people / creatures in these locations, giving these people / creatures motivations and information, and stat everything out for combat and non-combat encounters.
This is surprisingly easy in most cases. After all, we are GM, and we don't need to follow all the details of a PC stat block or even a full monster stat block. Stats for a creature might be copy/paste or even just jotting down a Monster Manual page number. We don't need to build a full character for the evil necromancer king -- we can give him some cool spells, some minions, and some basic stats. I even use libraries of character sheets to grab stats from so all I need is to paste a link.
Motivations and information are by far the most important party of the whole build. After all, the motivation and knowledge of an NPC dictates how they act, how they negotiate, and how and when they will fight. The challenge for the GM is being able to take a few words about motivation and knowledge and turn them into effective roleplay. Often adding some notes about inspiration (This character is Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman".) or about the voice used ("Use the shrek voice.") can help you a lot in remembering where to go with a character.
In the end, bumpers have their limits in these plot regions. The game is always about what the players and GM make it about, so sometimes you have to throw the bumpers away and start a new journey. They key with this is to never get too far ahead with your prep that you feel like you can't throw something away. Besides, nothing every truly gets thrown away -- you can always recycle it and reuse it later. After all, there is no guarantee that everything in a plot region is going to get used. Just build and save the unused for the next one.
Bumper cars are the way to go. Save railroads for Monopoly games. You and your players will be happier.
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