Which games are you talking about?Those games like 4e ARE railroads. The players are on rails with no chance to avoid by choice, but they have chosen to get on that train with full knowledge that they will be railroaded.
The scene-framed games that I have GMed are 4e D&D, Prince Valiant, Burning Wheel, and MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. Probably the most influential scene-framed game is Dogs in the Vineyard.
None of these played in accordance with the instructions is a railroad except some possible approaches to Cortex+ Heroic.
A minimum requirement for something to be a railroad is that someone knows, in advance, what is coming up next. Given that none of these games (with the possible exception noted just above) has that property, they can't be railroads!
Telling the players You see a knight in a clearing, mounted on a horse- he looks like he's ready to joust isn't railroading any more than telling the players The sun is shining and a breeze is blowing. It is more interesting, but I don't think being interesting is a marker of being a railroad.
Why, then, assume that people are imagining a choice of direction to matter, or to seem to matter, if they're telling you that it doesn't?The point isn't making EVERY choice matter. The point is making choices that seem to matter actually matter. Sometimes, the player knows they're making choices that don't matter. What color their character's hair is, for example, is very likely to not matter very much. What color armor they wear or how they spell their name or a host of other aesthetic choices often don't matter at all. The player is given no illusion of these choices mattering when they truly don't.
See, to me this sounds like a game that I wouldn't enjoy, because from this description it sounds like everything in the shared fiction that matters is decided by the GM, and the role of the players is to declare various sorts of actions that will bring to light what exactly the GM has decided. If I was in this game I think I would describe it as a railroad, because the choices the players get to make - which bit of the GM's fiction to bring to light and foreground in play - aren't that meaningful to me as a RPGer. My interest is more in pursuing the goals/themes I've established for my PC and finding out (via the action resolution rules) how the world pushes back against that.I have a fairly plot-centric world. It's just not railroaded. Events happen. Things do not simply manifest out of the aether, they're well-grounded in fiction--and since I don't do anything unless it is well-grounded, I'm not allowed to just invoke whatever I like whenever I like. The players can, and do, research and prepare and investigate.
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I don't make them do much of anything, but I do dangle new hooks in front of them or have NPCs act in rationally-appropriate ways, both on and off camera. It's on them to capitalize on opportunities, prioritize threats, and accept that they can't be everywhere at once.
Presumably, though, the sorts of choices your game provides for are ones that your players do regard as meaningful.
Again, this seems to be describing a game I wouldn't enjoy. The notion of "breadcrumbs" to me seems very railroad-y (as metaphors they are hard for me to really distinguish). And I don't find the idea that play might be boring very appealing either.The setting fluff is both (a) absolutely essential, as in without it I would NEVER do this no matter how bored the players might seem, and (b) not something I can just change on a dime whenever I want to whatever degree I want. I have actual constraints on what I'm allowed to do. Yes, I can invent new things and proceed to demonstrate them in the fiction. But that's not the same as "the haunted house is EXACTLY wherever the players go, because I've decided that's where the players are going." It takes effort on my part, sometimes a lot of effort, to make these additions (or changes) happen--even in a world following the Dungeon World DM principle, "Draw Maps, Leave Blanks."
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As an example: if the party is looking bored while, say, on a sailing ship in the middle of the ocean? Nope, not gonna spring a random encounter on them, no matter how convenient that would be for me as DM, because there's literally nothing I've done that would establish that as a possibility. I would have to do real, serious work to establish it, and leave some breadcrumbs for the PCs to learn about it, and very specifically give them time to choose to follow up on that if it isn't just stated out in the open. E.g., openly stating it could be the captain of the ship they're on inviting them to a private dinner, regaling the party with tall tales...and then getting more serious and explaining how there are Things that come from the deep, such that the best sailors always carry a cutlass even on routine voyages...and a holy symbol just in case. Leaving breadcrumbs could be mentioning that there's been a sharp increase in demand for mercenaries on trading vessels, or that Waziri mages (who normally avoid the docks) have been spotted dockside, collecting reports from sailors about unusual phenomena. Stuff that's noticeable, and that the party could spend a little time investigating as long as they aren't on a super-tight time budget. That would give me a foundation to build on.
I can think of three water voyages that have figured in my games in the past dozen years. One was the river voyage in Night's Dark Terror: as per the module, the PCs had to defend against an attack from the Iron Ring. There were boats, and a sand-bar, and NPC ranged attacks from the safety of the shore. It wasn't boring.
One was a voyage on the Woolly Bay in a Burning Wheel campaign. I used an adaptation of the Penumbra module Maiden Voyage for this. When the PCs failed to save the ship from its haunting, they ended up in the drink. One of the players - playing an Elven Princess - made a successful Circles check, and by good fortune the Elven vessel that was searching for the missing Princess was able to find them (it had spotted the sorcerer PC flying above the ocean in falcon form, which mechanically had augmented the Circles check). Subsequent failed Duels of Wits between a couple of the PCs and the Elven captain resulted in him depositing them on the shore of the Bright Desert.
The third was the PCs trip from Britain to Cyprus in Prince Valiant. The trip across the Channel was narrated in a minute or so until they foundered on the French coast (my framing of the Bilgewater Brigands episode from the Episode Book). After overland travel to Marseilles, they then sailed to Sicily - the players were keen for a naval encounter and so I had them attacked by pirates sailing from islands off the North African coast, and the PCs' victory in this clash led into the The Feast of Sir Ainsel episode (as written, Sir Ainsel's motivations are pretty weak; I had him allied with pirates). After establishing a small outpost of their military order in Sicily the PCs then sailed east again, landing on the Dalmatian coast as I mentioned upthread - again that was probably a minute of narration. I've already mentioned the "dragon" encounter on the Black Sea. And after crossing Anatolia overland, they sailed to Cyprus which again would have been a few sentences of narration.
I've sketched these episodes of play because - while all involving the special case of a water voyage - they all illustrate my general thoughts on GMing: if in doubt, frame the PCs into conflict. As I see it, the meaningful decisions aren't about "finding the plot" or avoiding challenges - they're about what happens when conflict occurs. In 4e D&D this is a bit more 4-colour gonzo than in BW, where it can be pretty thematically laden (Prince Valiant sits somewhere in between in terms of tone). But the notion that I would hold back from framing into conflict because I have to do something else first in order to make it permissible is quite foreign - doubly so if that something else is laying "breadcrumbs" or dangling "hooks" for the players to follow. I prefer the players to hook the GM and lay the trails, rather than vice versa.