All Aboard the Invisible Railroad!

What if I told you it was possible to lock your players on a tight railroad, but make them think every decision they made mattered?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

While this may sound like the evil GM speaking, I have my reasons. Firstly, not every GM has time to craft a massive campaign. There are also plenty of GMs who are daunted at the prospect of having to figure out every eventuality. So, this advice is offered to help people scale down the pressure of being a GM and give them options to reuse and recycle their ideas and channel players through an exciting adventure that just doesn’t have as many options as they thought it did. All I’m suggesting here is a way to make sure every choice the players make takes them to an awesome encounter, which is surly no bad thing.

A Caveat​

I should add that used too often this system can have the opposite effect. The important thing here is not to take away their feeling of agency. If players realise nothing they do changes the story, then the adventure will quickly lose its allure. But as long as they don’t realise what is happening they will think every choice matters and the story is entirely in their hands. However, I should add that some players are used to being led around by the nose, or even prefer it, so as long as no one points out the “emperor has no clothes” everyone will have a great game.

You See Three Doors…​

This is the most basic use of the invisible railroad: you offer a choice and whichever choice they pick it is the same result. Now, this only works if they don’t get to check out the other doors. So this sort of choice needs to only allow one option and no take backs. This might be that the players know certain death is behind the other two doors ("Phew, thank gods we picked the correct one there!"). The other option is for a monotone voice to announce “the choice has been made” and for the other doors to lock or disappear.

If you use this too often the players will start to realise what is going on. To a degree you are limiting their agency by making them unable to backtrack. So only lock out the other options if it looks likely they will check them out. If they never go and check then you don’t need to stop them doing so.

The Ten Room Dungeon​

This variant on the idea above works with any dungeon, although it might also apply to a village or any place with separate encounters. Essentially, you create ten encounters/rooms and whichever door the player character’s open leads to the next one on your list. You can create as complex a dungeon map as you like, and the player characters can try any door in any order. But whatever door they open after room four will always lead to room five.

In this way the players will think there is a whole complex they may have missed, and if they backtrack you always have a new room ready for them, it’s just the next one on the list. The downside is that all the rooms will need to fit to roughly the same dimensions if someone is mapping. But if no one is keeping track you can just go crazy.

Now, this may go against the noble art of dungeon design, but it does offer less wastage. There are also some GMs who create dungeons that force you to try every room, which is basically just visible railroading. This way the players can pick any door and still visit every encounter.

This idea also works for any area the player characters are wandering about randomly. You might populate a whole village with only ten NPCs because unless the characters are looking for someone specific that will just find the next one of your preset NPCs regardless of which door they knock on.

What Path Do You Take in the Wilderness?​

When you take away doors and corridors it might seem more complex, but actually it makes the invisible railroad a lot easier. The player characters can pick any direction (although they may still pick a physical path). However, it is unlikely they will cross into another environmental region even after a day’s walk. So as long as your encounters are not specific to a forest or mountain they should all suit “the next encounter.”

So, whichever direction the players decide to go, however strange and off the beaten path, they will encounter the same monster or ruins as if they went in any other direction. Essentially a wilderness is automatically a ‘ten room dungeon’ just with fewer walls.

As with any encounter you can keep things generic and add an environmentally appropriate skin depending on where you find it. So it might be forest trolls or mountain trolls depending on where they are found, but either way its trolls. When it comes to traps and ruins it’s even easier as pretty much anything can be built anywhere and either become iced up or overgrown depending on the environment.

Before You Leave the Village…​

Sometimes the easiest choice is no choice at all. If the player characters have done all they need to do in “the village” (or whatever area they are in) they will have to move on to the next one. So while they might procrastinate, explore, do some shopping, you know which major plot beat they are going to follow next. Anything they do beforehand will just be a side encounter you can probably improvise or draw from your backstock of generic ones. You need not spend too long on these as even the players know these are not important. The next piece of the “proper adventure” is whenever they leave the village so they won’t expect anything beyond short and sweet. In fact, the less detailed the encounters the more the GM will be assumed to be intimating it is time to move on.

Following the Clues​

Finally we come to the most common invisible railroad that isn’t ever considered railroading (ironically). Investigative adventures usually live and breathe by allowing the player characters to uncover clues that lead to other clues. Such adventures are actually openly railroading as each clue leads to another on a proscribed path. The players aren’t forced to follow the clues, but what else are they going to do? The players are making a point of following the railroad in the knowledge it will take them to the denouement of the adventure. What makes this type of railroading entertaining is that the players feel clever for having found the clues that lead them along the path. So if they start to divert too much the GM can put another clue on their path or let them find the next one a little easier and you are back on track.

The "Good" Kind of Railroading​

Now, all this may all seem a little manipulative, but modifying events in reaction to what the players do is a part of many GM’s tools. Any trick you use is usually okay as long as you do it to serve the story and the player’s enjoyment.

That said, never take away player agency so you can ensure the story plays out the way you want it to. This sort of railroading should only be used just to make the game more manageable and free up the GM to concentrate on running a good game instead of desperately trying to create contingencies. So, remember that you must never restrict the choices and agency of the players, at least knowingly. But it is fine to make sure every road goes where you want it to, as long as that is to somewhere amazing.

Your Turn: How do you use railroading in your games?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because again, you are looking at it way too rigidly.

Lets say the party travels west. If they do so, they will likely meet the King of Arkenor, and PC 1 will be reuninted with his lost love. If they go north, they will find a people suffering a plague, and will have to decide how they want to intervene. But either way they go, the DM plans a bandit encounter.

Does this identical bandit encounter suddenly mean their choices don't matter? Of course not! Player choice can matter, without mattering in every single possible way. Maybe the DM pulls out a few of the tricks mentioned in the article, but at the end of the dungeon the players find a hostage situation in which their actions and words might be the difference of life and death for the young woman held hostage. Does that mean for that dungeon the player choices didn't matter? Of course not....it mattered a great deal....just not in every single possible way.

Its a spectrum. Just like a DM creates combat encounters that sometimes lets PC 1 shine, and sometimes lets PC 2 shine.... they craft adventurers and dungeons that are a combination of important player choices and just bits that move things along without being very impactful. and as long as you ensure that enough of the player choices are impactful and meaningful, then you have done your job. If you are railroading so much that the players feel like they are in a movie instead of an interactive story....than you have gone to far. It is a spectrum.

Why are the same bandits residing on two totally different roads? That's just bizarre to me. That makes no sense.

That there are other things which will matter further down the road does not mean that you haven't invalidated the meaning of the choice here and now.

It's not like this is hard! Just shelve the bandit encounter and do something else. Maybe there are basilisks to the west. I dunno! You have the freedom to do whatever you like. Why not just take the handful of minutes required to put together something else?

 

[jgsugden]

...Then you really over-sold how much preparation was required. MASSIVELY over-sold it. Your statements about "you don't have to prepare everything" very much came across as "you don't have to truly prepare everything...but you should always get as close as possible to preparing everything." This came from statements like: "Quality preparation can make sure that every moment at the table matters."

Go back and read again. I am not responsible for your reading comprehension issues.

If what you meant was, "Every DM does a mix of heavy impromptu improvisation, and heavy planning, and the exact balance point will vary from person to person and even from session to session," that....was not at all what I got from it. Particularly because your presentation offered zero-prep and very nearly zero-prep, and seemed to be making a very clear "more prep is essentially always better." You gave a fig leaf that "there is a point of diminishing returns" and basically never otherwise touched the possibility that one can over-prepare. Which is a serious issue for a lot of DMs...particularly those who feel they need to railroad.

I ... just ... can't ...

This discussion is about whether you're better off preparing it or winging it. Yes, if you prepare by lighting yourself on fire, putting your body parts in a meat grinder, and drinking rat poision you're going to be worse off than if you wing it. There are ways to prepare poorly. BUT I CONSISENTLY INCLUDED REFERENCES TO PREPARING SENSIBLY. That is the type of preparation I discuss. I mention the craft of preparation, and I mention tailoring to your players. Accordingly, overpreparing, self immolation, and all the other flawed ways of preparing are inherently irrelevant to the discussion in which I am participating. They're out of scope.

The comments I am making are that if you prepare sensibly, you are going to deliver a superior product over time to your players than if you wing it consistently by throwing things at them that are not planned out so that they make sense. It is as simple as that. It should not be controversial. It is the same advice we get in most areas of our life.

 

[Stalker0]

Why are the same bandits residing on two totally different roads? That's just bizarre to me. That makes no sense.

Well from the players perspective, there aren't bandits on both roads. There are bandits on the road west where they went, they have no idea what was on the north road because they didn't go that way.

And the reason for using the same encounter, not every DM is great at just whipping up encounters. Or maybe the DM puts in some real oomph into this encounter, really puts in the work....creates some interesting terrain, maybe a cool bandit captain to taunt the players, really tries to make the encounter interesting and cool. Or....they could just throw a few random monsters that will be a speed bump.

DM encounter design takes time and effort, and not every DM has time to spare. So why not use the same encounter on either road (that the players will never know about) and make it a really cool encounter that the players will probably greatly enjoy, versus just ad hocing some basic encounter because you couldn't bare to invalidate one piece of the player's choice that isn't even that important to the story, when you have plenty of fun impactful choices just waiting for them when they get to town.

 

[bloodtide]

Right, but see, the Clueless, when they find out that the magic wasn’t real, sometimes feel deeply betrayed by the deception. See: any child when they learn Santa Claus isn’t real. This doesn’t always happen, but it can. The “invisible railroad” is a problem because it attempts to preserve the cluelessness of the players, at the risk of creating this feeling of betrayal. The problem isn’t the illusionism itself, it’s the lack of disclosure that it’s indeed an illusion that’s being performed.

I guess some kids are upset to learn Santa or the Easter Bunny is not real. But they are kids. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a clueless adult that thinks magic is "real", show them that it's all fake and they have been tricked, and have them get upset.

The railroad does not preserve anything, half of all clueless are stuck there, and the other half want to be there. The railroad is invisible as the player can't, or won't see it.

But DMing is completely different. In fact, diametrically opposite. The illusion IS NOT necessary. It is completely, 100% optional.

This compares the non-railroad game to a cheese sandwich, and the railroad game to a massive stacked sandwich with many meats, cheeses and vegetables. Sure there are people that eat cheese sandwiches and love them, but a lot more people like sandwiches with more.

With railroading, as @Charlaquin said, the goal is to prevent the players from ever finding out that there was an illusion. It is to enforce upon all players that they be, as @bloodtide put it, "the clueless."

You might have missed a post, but the DM does not make players clueless. People make themselves clueless. They either can't understand or don't want to understand.

Thing is? People don't like being made to be "the clueless." In fact, a lot of people really, really hate being made to be "the clueless." It makes them feel hurt and angry.

I lot of things in life rely on trickery and deception, even other games. Poker is a great example of such a game: players attempt to deceive and trick. Yet one one walks away from a poker game made at the player that bluffed: they get mad at themselves for not seeing it. Same with a lot of sports: the quarterback "looks to you" like he will be throwing to the right, so you move to the right to block and.....woah, he threw the ball to the left. Does that player go home all mad at the quarterback?

The same way a player that had a good fun time in the game does not complain about the railroading.

And I find that games in which the GM prepares a story and railroads the players through it is less fun than one in which the players contribute to the shared fiction.

So, and any one can answer here, how do players contribute to the shared fiction?

Lets take a simple adventure: small town has some bandits nearby. The players and characters both agree to help the town and stop the bandits. So the DM has a simple railroad flow chart for the characters to find the bandit camp. Very simple. So what can't the players do to "contribute to the shared fiction" on the railroad. Keep in mind both the players and characters agreed to do this adventure, so doing anything else except this adventure is disrupting the game.

 

[Remathilis]

Now, part of the problem here is that you're inserting a module (the Isle of Dread) into an otherwise (AIUI) non-module game. That's always going to be tricky because modules are inherently a bit railroad-y, but that's usually not a problem because the game is presented as being module-based. Unfortunately, in order to insert the module, you have to properly "trigger" it, and you are choosing to use a method that requires a fairly strong degree of DM force in order to guarantee it. Personally, I would have approached it differently, as follows:

1. Next time the players are looking for information or exposed to appropriate sources of gossip (essentially guaranteed in most games), they overhear rumors about the Isle of Dread or something relating to it (rumors of treasure, for instance). Make mention of the stormy seas of late as well.
2. If the players follow up on those rumors, awesome, the plot is on and you can have a nasty storm hit them. If they don't, then perhaps a wealthy client seeks them out to ask for help finding this island, or some other adventure hook finds its way to them.
3. At this point, if the players still avoid or ignore the hook, they clearly don't want to go to the Isle right now. Keep it in your back pocket, perhaps as a negative consequence of a bad sequence of rolls or the like, but allow the issue to rest. It's okay for the players to decide that they aren't interested in something you think would be cool.
4. If the conditions become right for the Isle story to happen, awesome, you have a fun thing to do, and you will have respected the players' agency. If it doesn't happen, oh well. That's life. The road not taken, as Frost put it.

I want to address this specific part.

I used Isle of Dread (and clearly the footnote didn't help) to express a scenario style, not the actual module. But to be fair, it doesn't really matter if it's the actual module of a lovingly created scenario made from scratch. (Actually, I think it's WORSE if it's not the module, since then I've wasted time creating an adventure locale that the PCs will never see.) Yes, it's a scenario that requires a lot of force by the DM, but fiction is full of events outside the decision process of the protagonist. Odysseus didn't want to stop at half the islands he ended up on, and I'm pretty sure if he heard rumors of a powerful sea witch that turned people into swine, he'd probably give that island as wide a berth as possible.

As for the numbered list: I believe 1 and 2 are fine plot hooks. However, if the PCs are opting to avoid the hook, they are forfeiting the privilege of any meaningful adventure that session and have accepted either a series of random encounters or a premature end while the DM stops to start prepping for the next session. My prep time as a DM is limited by other factors in my life, so preparing multiple scenarios which may never see the light of play is a colossal waste of time. My players know this, so they are generally good at biting on the presented plot. Is this a railroad? Maybe not, but there is a whole lot of nothing between plot depots, so take that for what you will.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But you seem to have weirdly specific rules about how GM is allowed to make stuff up. Why it is allowed to make up "a wild beast will break loose at the market 09:00 AM, Thursday" and not allowed make up "a wild beast will break loose at the market next time the PCs go there"?

Because the former reflects an imagined world that exists independently of the players' choices, and in which the consequences of those choices are durable and meaningful.

The latter is exactly equivalent to Skyrim, where the monsters level up to match you whenever you enter a dungeon and the market-stall assassination (or at least the attempt thereof) of an NPC only occurs the second you arrive because it's a scripted event.

You make a great deal out of the fact that it's a live DM there doing the thing.

GM is not telling the players the choice either matters or doesn't matter.

Sure they are. You've repeatedly said they are: that they put forward an illusion, not merely an imagined world that doesn't exist but a false description of that world, ensuring that the players' beliefs about what occurred are in fact false, not merely imaginary. You've agreed when people have described it that way, as an illusion disguising the true state of affairs (namely, that the choice involved wasn't a choice at all). Why is it suddenly not that now? What changed?

Well from the players perspective, there aren't bandits on both roads. There are bandits on the road west where they went, they have no idea what was on the north road because they didn't go that way.

And the reason for using the same encounter, not every DM is great and just whipping up encounters. Maybe the DM puts in some real oomph into this encounter, really puts in the work....creates some interesting terrain, maybe a cool bandit captain to taunt the players, really tries to make the encounter interesting and cool. Or....they could just throw a few random monsters that will be a speed bump.

DM encounter design takes time and effort, and not every DM has time to spare. So why not use the same encounter on either road (that the players will never know about) and make it a really cool encounter that the players will probably greatly enjoy, versus just ad hocing some basic encounter because you couldn't bare to invalidate one piece of the player's choice that isn't even that important to the story.

DMs should be brave enough to accept that the things they create will not always come up in play. Like...if a DM literally can't accept that the thing he thought was super duper ultra cool just didn't interest the party, or (by pure coincidence) didn't end up being what the players wanted to investigate even if they were ignorant of that specific part, the problem is that DM, not the players.

DMs, like artists, must learn how to let go of their art at least some of the time. Learn that sometimes, even the things you think are masterpieces...aren't. Using trickery and deception to ensure that your masterpieces always end up in front of the players means intentionally ignoring this extremely important lesson. That's both unwise and counterproductive.

I get, very much, the disappointment of seeing something you prepared go up in smoke because the players (coincidentally, totally by accident) didn't happen to play ball. That's a learning experience....assuming you don't slap the lesson away and force it to happen the way you want. And yes, this has happened to me. Two or three times now, at least. Probably more I'm forgetting. I've mentioned one in various places before (the molten obsidian golem my players cleverly shut down with no fighting at all, despite me having geared it up to be a huge epic battle.) I've had at least one dungeon and at least one NPC, totally separately, which I put a lot of work into making. They never came up, and the game moved on. I can accept that that happens sometimes. It seems to me that the pro-railroad crowd is saying, in effect, "But this thing that was important to me is more important than being respectful to my players."

I guess some kids are upset to learn Santa or the Easter Bunny is not real. But they are kids. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a clueless adult that thinks magic is "real", show them that it's all fake and they have been tricked, and have them get upset.

I have met such people. I don't really think they're all that relevant here.

The railroad does not preserve anything, half of all clueless are stuck there, and the other half want to be there. The railroad is invisible as the player can't, or won't see it.

No. It's invisible because the DM hides away all the evidence that might reveal it. That's the point. That's my WHOLE point here. You keep acting like every player is some dumb rube, too stupid to figure out when they're being hoodwinked. That's both an incredibly disrespectful view of players, and in my experience completely, dead wrong.

My players are sharp. Being perfectly honest, none of them is as intelligent as I am, but that doesn't mean they are anything less than highly intelligent. They have more than once made me sweat bullets because I was worried they would feel disappointed by "seeing through" some events or secrets or the like. Collectively, they are absolutely smarter than I am.

This compares the non-railroad game to a cheese sandwich, and the railroad game to a massive stacked sandwich with many meats, cheeses and vegetables. Sure there are people that eat cheese sandwiches and love them, but a lot more people like sandwiches with more.

If you're going to claim it's a dissimile, it is beholden on you to actually show why it's a dissimile, not just use some other dissimile to...argue by analogy that the analogy is bad. So please, tell me why what I actually said was incorrect, don't just tell me the comparison is like some other bad comparison. Otherwise, this whole paragraph was just a non-sequitur that said nothing more than "I don't like your argument, it reminds me of a bad argument."

In fact, in general, you keep using arguments by analogy, and those arguments by analogy end up having problems. I don't think that tactic is serving you very well, and it certainly didn't serve you well here.

You might have missed a post, but the DM does not make players clueless. People make themselves clueless. They either can't understand or don't want to understand.

The DM sure as heck does. Why else are they concealing things from the players?

With a magic trick, anyone with even a modicum of education knows it's not real. The illusionism-using DM is specifically ensuring that their players believe it IS real, and moreover, actively hiding any information which could have suggested otherwise. Since you seem to like these arguments by analogy: It would be like a magician trying to "prove" that their magic is in fact completely legitimate, by providing edited and manipulated video tapes that appear to show the magic being physically real, and destroying all other records that could contradict those manipulated tapes.

I lot of things in life rely on trickery and deception, even other games. Poker is a great example of such a game: players attempt to deceive and trick. Yet one one walks away from a poker game made at the player that bluffed: they get mad at themselves for not seeing it. Same with a lot of sports: the quarterback "looks to you" like he will be throwing to the right, so you move to the right to block and.....woah, he threw the ball to the left. Does that player go home all mad at the quarterback?

This is the repeated problem your analogies keep having: the deception is explicitly part of play here. In poker, bluffing is explicitly a component of the experience. You choose to play, knowing that other players will try to play mind games with you in order to get an advantage. Likewise, in sports, you are explicitly competing against the other team. You are aware that you need to accurately predict the opponent's actions and obfuscate your own actions. (As with most competitive sports and games, this is what makes it similar to warfare, and is a major component of why strategic games are an important part of military education.)

Again: with the illusionism DM, they do not want the player to ever think that sleight of hand is happening. They want the player to genuinely believe that the superficial situation--choices that actually do matter--is in fact the true situation, when it isn't. And they will actively hide away any evidence that this isn't the case. Go looking just about anywhere and you'll see that nearly everyone who advocates for fudging, for example (which isn't railroading per se, but absolutely is a form of illusionism) will expressly say that you SHOULD fudge, but IF you do, NEVER EVER let the players find out. The deception is NOT explicitly part of play, and is in fact kept very hush-hush, hidden away, denying the players even the opportunity to discover that a deception might occur at all while specifically leading them on so they'll believe what they're told.

In other words...make your players be "the clueless." Make them think the rolls are real, when they aren't, in the case of fudging. Matt Colville even explicitly said that in his games, he will pre-roll dice and hide them behind his screen, so that if players challenge him over whether he actually rolled a certain value or not, he can lift the screen and "show" them that that's what the die really said.

This is what I mean by making the players be "the clueless." This is actively deceiving.

So, and any one can answer here, how do players contribute to the shared fiction?

Lets take a simple adventure: small town has some bandits nearby. The players and characters both agree to help the town and stop the bandits. So the DM has a simple railroad flow chart for the characters to find the bandit camp. Very simple. So what can't the players do to "contribute to the shared fiction" on the railroad. Keep in mind both the players and characters agreed to do this adventure, so doing anything else except this adventure is disrupting the game.

My players have contributed to the shared fiction in the following ways, all of which either came because I prompted it, or they volunteered it and I enthusiastically embraced it (because I LOVE it when they do so):
1. Inventing an organization or society that is active in the world. For example, the of Robin Hood-esque Silver Thread thieves/pickpockets/etc., who work to keep the shadows safe for the common man and fight against the oppression of the poor by high society. This included Rahim, the dashing prince of thieves who leads them. Lovely character. I always enjoy portraying him, all suave and good-humored.
2. Establishing historical characters of significance, such as long-dead saints, former rulers, particular ancient genies, etc.
3. Mythopoeia, telling us the nursery rhyme or Nomad Tribe story-ritual or bawdy tavern song where the character heard about something.
4. Personal connections, e.g. loved ones, rivals, former friends, etc. One character, for example, has a vast extended family, who are willing to provide help, so long as it reflects well on them within the clan.
5. Requests, such as wanting to find a teacher of the Dance of the Wizard's Blade (a magical martial art) or wanting to find lost or apocryphal books of strategic theory and practice.
6. On-the-spot NPCs invented to explain how or why the character knows a particular fact or has been to a particular place etc.

I'm sure there are other ways. As I said, I LOVE it when my players do this, because it means they're engaged and enthusiastic enough to want to contribute their own things, make their own mark on the world. Several organizations and concepts in this world wouldn't exist without player input, and I strive to keep them as close to the player's original concept as possible, out of respect for them and their ideas. In return, my players know not to abuse this, contributing things they're sincerely enthusiastic about, not just memelord crap or silly pop-culture references. (Though we do occasionally do silly things in game, to maintain a certain sense of levity.)

 

[DEFCON 1]

Meh. Player choice is overrated.

 

[Stalker0]

So I do want to codify something, as the "Railroad is always bad" camp has used the common argument that "there is no benefit to railroading, you could always just not do it".

The fundamental benefit of Railroad is.... DM time savings. If I make one combat encounter that the party will encounter if they go down any of 3 paths, versus crafting a different encounter for each of those paths....I have saved a good amount of my time. Maybe that's time I spend enhancing another part of the game, maybe its time I spend working on the garage at home. But that is a benefit.

Now you can argue that you would rather spend more time on your game and not railroad, and that is your choice. But it doesn't invalidate that there is an inherent benefit to railroading for the DM, and not railroading has a cost.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So I do want to codify something, as the "Railroad is always bad" camp has used the common argument that "there is no benefit to railroading, you could always just not do it".

The fundamental benefit of Railroad is.... DM time savings. If I make one combat encounter that the party will encounter if they go down any of 3 paths, versus crafting a different encounter for each of those paths....I have saved a good amount of my time. Maybe that's time I spend enhancing another part of the game, maybe its time I spend working on the garage at home. But that is a benefit.

Now you can argue that you would rather spend more time on your game and not railroad, and that is your choice. But it doesn't invalidate that there is an inherent benefit to railroading for the DM, and not railroading has a cost.

Except that you have to put so much effort into hiding the railroading. Preventing the players from finding out. Covering it up when it happens. Etc.

And with your three paths thing...again, why not just have one path? That's the solution that doesn't give any false impression of multiple distinct paths. It by definition cannot take any more time than preparing three paths would, and should essentially always take less.

Between the added (and at least for me extremely significant) burden of constantly having to cover up, and just...the whole technique of skipping over fake choices entirely (or just, y'know, being honest with your players; my players appreciate that I am very forthright with them), you may actually spend more time railroading than you would avoiding it!

 

[Stalker0]

DMs should be brave enough to accept that the things they create will not always come up in play. Like...if a DM literally can't accept that the thing he thought was super duper ultra cool just didn't interest the party, or (by pure coincidence) didn't end up being what the players wanted to investigate even if they were ignorant of that specific part, the problem is that DM, not the players.

And once again your absolutism is your downfall. You are correct, that DMs should on occasion be willing to let things they created go in the interest of player choice. We share that belief.

The issue is that you believe it MUST be true all the time, and this is why you are incorrect. There are cases where a DM should let the thing go, and there are times where the DM knows he's players are itching for some combat and so intends to make it happen for them. Both are useful tools. You are denying tools in your DM toolbox with the absolute position, and so it weakens you, not strengthens you.