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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8694324" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Prewritten modules are understood to be inherently more railroad-y than things developed "live" (or, well, pseudo-live) by the DM. At least, I would certainly hope that if the players have agreed to play a module or adventure path, they understand that certain events are expected to happen and thus certain things are "fixed points" even if they're allowed to color outside the lines etc.Again, for me the issue is the deception, not the rails per se. If the players know and consent, awesome, more power to you, do what you like.In this case, the coverup isn't just worse than the crime, it IS the crime.Yeah I was gonna say, I remember when that thread went up, and hearing the full context of the quote was...revelatory, to say the least. They're speaking of "railroading" in a context that makes it....pretty much not at all "railroading" in the usual sense. Like, it's "railroading" that...is literally based on the personal backstory and information created by the player. So...the player literally already put their buy-in and agency into it. They WANT to go where that train is headed, wherever that might be. That's so radically different from what most people refer to as "railroading"--and what this thread refers to as "railroading"--that I don't really agree with the classification at all.There's a difference between "having a plot" and "being on (invisible) rails." The former means you know the state of affairs and plausible dramatic moments/events/concepts/themes. The latter means you have a fixed sequence of events that will definitely occur no matter what (and, if invisible, that you'll ensure they happen even if the players think they have control.) The two are not the same.I mean...if you just make the one tiny step of actually (in-story) making sure that all three paths actually do lead to the same place, then you've done no railroading at all. Sometimes, paths converge IRL. That's a perfectly natural event. It's even something you can foreshadow/telegraph/explicitly state, depending on context. (E.g. our party Druid, before the character's soft retirement, would probably notice that the path they're on curved away at first before curving back, allowing the party to guess "hmm, maybe these three paths all converge at the same point!") This is one aspect of what I mean by saying that these techniques aren't necessary. You can have the choice still have consequences (as you say, changing the party's condition or the condition of other things as a result of the choice), even if all three result in reaching the same physical destination.There's no need for an illusion here, if you're actually adding consequences. You literally just need to be slightly more informative to the players, and suddenly it's not even illusionism anymore, it's not a soft railroad, it's just....exploring through a defined space.</blockquote>

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