What is that except railroading, even if done in a mild way that the DM is sure will work?
Or does railroading in your mind have definition limitations that forcing by influencing doesn't?
I'm up to my armpits in a railroading debate
over on Industry, and so am hesitant to open up that can of worms here.
But I'll have a go at it.
I know of at least three ways to initiate the action in a fantasy RPG. (I'm sure there are others.)
One is that the players turn up to the first session, PCs generated, and they start wherever the GM tells them they are. And from then on, the players make all the decisions about where they go and what they do. The GM may influence this in various ways: first, by having the power to decide what is where in the gameworld; second, by getting to decide when to suspend or apply the action resolution rules (eg if the GM decides to handwave some overland travel then the players won't get the chance to decide to have their PCs explore the interesting whatever that they might have discovered en route had the normal action resolution rules been used).
Roughly speaking, this first approach is the sandbox.
The second is that the players turn up to the first session, PCs generated, and the GM says "We're playing adventure X tonight". The very moderately stealth version of this goes ingame rather than metagame - the GM describes some event happening ingame which is the "plot hook", and the players do their duty and pick up on it.
This second approach is what I think is pretty typical for a published module or adventure path. I think it is prone to railroading - that depends in part on what options are open to the players in the course of the adventure, but often it seems to me that those options are not all that much. The players get to contribute a bit of colour and characterisation of their PCs, and perhaps the odd sidequest, but the bulk of the significant events that unfold in the campaign, the question of who enemies and allies are, and so on, are determined by the GM's selection of modules.
A more sophisticated version of this approach is what The Alexandrian calls
node-based design - the idea that instead of the adventure involving a strictly linear series of events, the adventure is a bundle of nodes each containing leads to other nodes in the adventure, and the adventure is completed when all the nodes have been explored. The Alexandrian says
this:
Of course, the argument can be made that there’s no “meaningful choice” here because there are three nodes in the scenario and the PCs are going to visit all three nodes no matter what they do. In the big picture, the exact order in which they visit those nodes isn’t meaningful.
Or is it?
... [snipping complexities like the possibility of a timeline that makes the sequence in which the nodes are explored more significant for the overall storyline]
in my opinion, the fact that the players are being offered the driver’s seat is meaningful in its own right. Even if the choice doesn’t have any lasting impact on the final conclusion of “good guys win, bad guys lose”, the fact that the players were the ones who decided how the good guys were going to win is important.
The extent to which this is less railroady will turn quite a bit on how meaningful that "how" turns out to be. Merely killing the kobolds before the goblins - the "how" of mere sequence - doesn't seem that meaningful to me. If the players, by choosing the "how", can actually influence what is at stake - eg tackling the kobolds first will allow rescuing the prisoners, but leaves the village at the mercy of the goblins - then we are getting beyond colour and characterisation to more meaningful choices.
(One way of thinking of node-based design might be as a focused sandbox, with links between the nodes that the GM has predicted will be salient for the players.)
The third approach that I'm familiar with is one in which the players signal to the GM what sort of situations they want to have their PCs involved in - whether via backstory, or via actual play, or a combination of both - and the GM then frames scenes that respond to those signals, relying on the players' engagement to drive the game forward. This differs from the sandbox approach, because the players are not exploring the GM's world. Rather, the GM is creating a world - perhaps on the fly - that permits the players to engage in the way that they want to. It also differs from the "plot hook" approach, because it is the
players who are presenting the GM with hooks, and the GM who is responding to that in framing the situations.
For this third approach to work, it is important that the players be able to trust the GM to
frame situations that are worth anyone's time.
If the GM pushes scene framing too hard, relative to what the players want, then this may lead to railroading. Conversely, if the GM does succeed in framing scenes that are worth anyone's time, this approach avoids the problem that some people see in sandboxes of "having to search for the fun".
This third approach is obviously at odds with exploration-focused sandboxing. It suits either step-on-up gamism (the GM frames scenes that let the players do their thing!) or thematically-focused narrativism (the GM frames scenes that let the players address the thematic concerns that are interesting to them). It can also be used for non-sandbox exploration play (I say this
from experience).
Depending on what sort of play is going on at a given table, and what the expectations of the players are, GM nudging could be the most outrageous railroading, or a key part of making the game work in the way everyone wants. I don't think nudging can be classified one way or the other abstracted from this sort of context.
What if you have different personalities at the table, some in the first camp, some in the second camp, some in a third unmentioned camp, and some split?
Then there might be trouble.
My group has two players who are mostly interested in the thematic/story stuff, two who are interested in that stuff and in the mechanics in about equal measure (one of these is also a good mechanical optimiser), and one is generally less engaged overall (although I wouldn't say he's a "watcher" in the DMG's sense).
Because (in my view) 4e is a game in which attention to the mechanics is not at odds with thematic-focused play, but part of the mechanism for achieving it, I find that running a theme-focused game, with this group at least, doesn't cause problems. Occasionally the optimiser can get caught up in the minutiae of mechanical advantage to an extent that I find a bit annoying, but we negotiate around that when it happens. (The dynamics of my table are heavily influenced by the fact that everyone there has known everyone else there for something like 15+ years, except one player who's known only 3 of the other 5 of us for that long.)
Ron Edward's view is that in a situation of genuine conflict in styles, grief and bad roleplaying experiences will result. In my experience, back when I used to GM more varied groups with a wider range of expectations, as long as the GM and the dominant personalities among the players can get on the same page, the more passive players will follow along!
But I don't think there's any simple answer like "If the group is mixed, the the GM should be more restrained". Because if some members of the group are looking for the GM to actively push them in the game, they'll have a bad time just as much as the sandoxers in the group will have a bad time if the GM stats prodding and poking.
