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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8702377" data-attributes="member: 42582">That last clause seems false to me, unless a whole lot of further assumptions are being made which aren't true of RPGing in general, and probably don't make a lot of sense outside the context of hidden gameboard, map-and-key play.You seem to be suggesting that all or any of running into an important NPC or finding a certain treasure or finding a haunted house, regardless of where the PCs go, is per se a railroad. To me that's obviously false, and once again rests on assumptions that there's no good reason to cling to.Your other examples all have exactly the same structure - the PCs go to imaginary location X and find or encounter imaginary thing or person Y - and reflect the same obsession. It's as if the only meaningful choice posters can think of players making is the choice of where on the map to take their PCs, as if we were still all playing in the manner set out by Gygax and Moldvay 40+ years ago, when that hasn't been mainstream for decades.What's the way in which the choice is presented? Suppose that this is the first session, and we've all built our explorer-type PCs, and the GM asks "Would you guys be rappelling down the rock face, or going down via the narrow, circuitous path?" And we answer, and the GM incorporates that colour into the framing of the fall into the Lost World.I don't think that's a railroad: it's just inviting the players to introduce some colour into the framing.Or to put it another way: your example, on its own, doesn't reveal whether or not it's a railroad because doesn't reveal what, if anything, is at stake in the GM's invitation to the players to make a choice.Who decided this? To my mind, this is where the incipient railroad is being laid.The same question arises here. Who wrote all this backstory? How did the players come to know it? Of course there are non-railroad-y ways that something like this might come about (eg Burning Wheel play could lead to a situation like this) but when I see this example posted in this context the first thing it suggests to me is GM-dominated play in which the players' principle role is to provide a bit of colour.Sure, a GM could keep writing more and more stuff. Personally I would be out of the game you're describing here well before it got to this point.This sounds like it has the potential to involve clumsy GMing. But from the point of view of railroading, the real issue, again, is who decided to play a campaign about cursed artefacts? Also, how do "the others" turn out to be ordinary magic items? When do they come into play? If the PCs are obtaining them by killing and robbing the mysterious benefactor, it seems that the wheels have completely fallen off, and railroading is the least of this table's problems.Your last sentence makes little sense to me - the guilt and innocence are all in the fiction, and if whoever authors the fiction decides that whomever the players have fastened on is the killer, then no guilt is being pinned on any innocent person.You seem to be assuming that a murder mystery must be set up and run as a game in which the players try and work out the content of the GM's notes. That's one way to run a murder mystery - I've done it - but it's not the only way - I've done others too. The first approach was closer to a railroad than the second.</blockquote>

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