A common complaint among game masters and a reason why some choose to railroad their players is they hate to “waste” their prep. Time is valuable. Spending a lot of time preparing something your players ignore can be disheartening. This can be especially challenging if you are not very good at improvising when players go completely off the map.

I do want to address the way some game masters prep. What they prep and the quantity of it causes most of the problem. They write a history of the dungeon or give major NPC’s origin stories that the players are not going to discover and probably has no bearing on the outcome of the game. They write mostly useless material and they write a lot of it. The result is that they feel like they wasted their time, which they did. That’s a different topic that I’ll address in another post.

What I’m talking about is when you’ve done good prep and for some unknown reason your players go off in another direction. That material is not wasted. The way you get better at doing something is doing it, deliberately and in a focused way. If you are doing good prep then that’s practice, and your game mastering will have improved for it. Secondly, you can put the material into a folder and use later with a different campaign, at a convention or later on in the same campaign it might be valuable.

Avoid the temptation to railroad your players to the cool thing you made up. They’ll see what you’ve done and it will annoy them. No matter how clever you think you are, your players will figure out that you are railroading. Your work wasn’t wasted. It is just has a different value than what you originally anticipated.