D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[Celebrim]

The difficulty with pinning down “railroading” is that the word isn’t just about technique—it’s about power dynamics inherited from the history of RPGs.

Early RPGs established a very GM-centric model. The GM built the world, enforced the rules, and delivered the experience. Players were positioned as recipients. This wasn’t just logistics—it was ideological. Designers defended their own work by elevating the GM’s authority and framing players as lucky participants.

Modern play culture, by contrast, often assumes collaboration and meaningful agency. Many players expect to co-create, not just receive. But the old assumptions never disappeared; they’re still embedded in published modules, adventure structures, and the language we use to talk about play.

That’s why “railroading” feels so slippery. When a GM nudges players toward the riot or the dungeon, are they facilitating a story or denying agency? It depends entirely on what both sides thought the GM’s job was in the first place.

Which is the point: the term “railroading” is rarely a precise critique of technique. It’s more of a diagnostic. When someone calls it out, what they’re really signaling is a mismatch between expectations—was the GM supposed to provide a prepared experience, or were the players supposed to help build it? Until that responsibility is clarified, the same debate will keep resurfacing.

I think that is a grotesquely simplified version of not only RPG history but the dynamics of play.

My reading of the very first RPG campaign as conducted by Dave Arneson is he very much wanted to run an open world sandbox with lots of player agency and player driven goals but that his players revolted against this open structure and vastly preferred the novel "Tiny World" of Castle Blackmoor to the simulationist politics heavy free form wargame framework he actually wanted to run. The players gravitated to a more constrained set of choices and a less book keeping heavy experience with more immediate narrative payoffs than what the sandbox they had been playing in provided.

But that sandbox build your own kingdom hex crawling open world never died as a concept and appears repeatedly in the games history.

I don't think there is any kind of clear trajectory here and the sort of collaborative play you talk about has been around a long time but has always been less popular because it puts more of a burden on the player while granting for most persons a smaller reward. Writing a book is rewarding but most people would rather read one. In the same way, most players want the GM to be the secret keeper because the thing they enjoy most is finding out the secrets, especially when the secrets are well constructed and full of interesting twists and turns. The idea that we just arbitrarily choose a style of play with a GM as the sole secret keeper for no reason and that you aren't losing anything aesthetically when you switch to some other model and that GMs horde power out of their own ego rather than to be a gracious host just needs to die.

 

[aco175]

There is no halfway between “prepped adventure” and “nonexistent adventure”

I'm not sure if you missed my meaning of the earlier text before the part of DM and players need to meet halfway. The DM should not just say to the players that the next adventure has you traveling to the town of X and going into the sewers if the players say that they want to go to the swamps of Y to look for an old tomb. The DM should meet the players and design something in the swamps. Same for the players though if they choose to go to the swamps and the DM makes something and everyone shows up and suddenly the players want to go someplace else. That is just poor table manners and the players should play what they agreed to.

Now, could there be something that happens that changes this- of course. As a general though, each should meet halfway with the other.

 

[overgeeked]

Honestly, this is 95% of railroading to me. Rails aren't a natural feature of the landscape, after all. They're put in place because trains are too clumsy to go anywhere else. Railroading is when the GMing is so clumsy (or uncaring) that it becomes obvious that things are only happening to compel the players to do something. Then my suspension of disbelief weakens. I'm not thinking about the landscape, anymore; I'm thinking about the rails.

(Metaphors are hard)

In every example of really egregious railroading I've seen or read about, I as a player would much prefer the GM simply breaking character for a second and going, "Hey, I really only have ___ prepared tonight. Is that okay?" And then I would either decide that __ is okay, and play along, or if it was really an absolute dealbreaker for some reason, I would excuse myself from the table.

Even if the referee is the most graceful and masterful at hiding the rails, they are still present. And that is the problem. That the rails exist is what makes it railroading.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Railroading is admittedly hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

I well remember when I ran modules for the Living Arcanis campaign during the 3.5E days. One module I ran was a high-level module. While the players are visiting someone, a riot breaks out in the streets. The players are encouraged by the NPC to go to a different NPC's house. The DM is explicitly instructed that he has an infinite number of 20th-level monks in the crowd to prevent the PCs from going anywhere else. Like, by this point you've done a bunch of modules in the city and could have a lot of friendly contacts you might be worried about or need the help of. But no.

That's a railroad.

 

[payn]

Railroading is admittedly hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

I well remember when I ran modules for the Living Arcanis campaign during the 3.5E days. One module I ran was a high-level module. While the players are visiting someone, a riot breaks out in the streets. The players are encouraged by the NPC to go to a different NPC's house. The DM is explicitly instructed that he has an infinite number of 20th-level monks in the crowd to prevent the PCs from going anywhere else. Like, by this point you've done a bunch of modules in the city and could have a lot of friendly contacts you might be worried about or need the help of. But no.

That's a railroad.

Yeap, im seeing it here too. It's examples like this that lead folks to claiming any published adventure is a railroad, when its just an example of bad adventure writing. It's like the cousin of the inexperienced or clumsy GM mentioned earlier in the thread.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I think that is a grotesquely simplified version of not only RPG history but the dynamics of play.

I think you may be reading more into my comment than was there. I didn’t claim styles were chosen “arbitrarily,” or that GM authority is only about ego. What I said was that early RPG texts and discourse did codify a GM-centric model, and that framing has had lasting influence on how we still talk about agency and “railroading.” Whether that authority was exercised as adversarial control, as a gracious host, or as secret-keeper isn’t the issue—it’s that the structure itself was assumed and reinforced.

And the response here actually illustrates that dynamic—what looks like a critique of “railroading” often turns out to be a clash of expectations about responsibility, which is exactly the point I was making.

 

[CreamCloud0]

This is called a "Rowboat World". You can go anywhere but you have to put in all the effort and the vast majority of what you find will be just empty, meaningless and featureless. It's an example of a dysfunctional sandbox the way a railroad is an example of a dysfunctional adventure path.

interesting, not a term i believe i've come across before.

my own definition of railroading boils down to 'it's when the GM repeatedly negates or manipulates player choices and actions so that only their chosen outcomes will occur'

 

[RainOnTheSun]

Railroading is admittedly hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

I well remember when I ran modules for the Living Arcanis campaign during the 3.5E days. One module I ran was a high-level module. While the players are visiting someone, a riot breaks out in the streets. The players are encouraged by the NPC to go to a different NPC's house. The DM is explicitly instructed that he has an infinite number of 20th-level monks in the crowd to prevent the PCs from going anywhere else. Like, by this point you've done a bunch of modules in the city and could have a lot of friendly contacts you might be worried about or need the help of. But no.

That's a railroad.

Look, rent prices in Union are going up and all those 20th level guards have to move somewhere.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Look, rent prices in Union are going up and all those 20th level guards have to move somewhere.

I had the players try repeatedly to evade and defeat these rioters, who were surprisingly tough. Finally, I had to break character to just tell the PCs, "Look, we have twenty minutes left in this timeslot, and the module author has explicitly instructed me to do this. Please, let's just get to the conclusion." I hate, hate, HATE to do that, but in convention play if I go over the time allotted, someone is missing something else. I don't want to be the reason somebody missed the game they wanted to try, or the GM they remembered having a great time with the last convention.

If I ran that scenario in a home game (which some people did and do), I would have set up other elements ahead of time so I wouldn't have to railroad. ("A messenger fights his way through the crowd. He's says he's from Lady Stoneheart, asking if you need assistance." "If we need help? We were going to try to help her!") But at a convention game, you don't know which modules anybody else has played. If any -- they're supposed to be seasoned characters, but I know people just created high-level characters to play with their friends.

 

[Mort]

interesting, not a term i believe i've come across before.

my own definition of railroading boils down to 'it's when the GM repeatedly negates or manipulates player choices and actions so that only their chosen outcomes will occur'

This is the definition I go by as well.

As opposed to linear, where the players are fully aware that there may be only one choice and they're on board with that.