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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6701412" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have defined 'railroading' in an Aristotelian fashion (with a list), because the satisfying Socratic definition escapes me.  The two techniques you describe are both forms of railroading.The first you mention "the DM redirecting that to whatever the nearest adventure site is" is Schrödinger’s Map.  When you use vagueness in the map to steer the PC's into finding what you want them to find, that's Schrödinger’s Map.  You haven't really given them a choice but to find the thing that you want, which most people will recognize as a railroad at least from the outside perspective.  An equivalent note would be something like, "Regardless of the specific direction that they set out in, if the party journeys a day in a generally northward direction, they'll find the Dragon Mount.  Read boxed text for area #3, and place a note of the location on your campaign map."   Clearly railroading once you read the note.It's not really a bad technique, and like most railroading techniques, everyone uses it just a little without thinking about it - which is why a complete but simple definition of railroading evades me.  For example, one way to do this is make your hexes like 24 or 36 miles across, but whenever they are entered the PC's invariably stumble on the 100 yard wide detailed encounter area out of all the possible places they could go in the hex.  In this case, the vagueness in the simulation allows you to justify what you want the PC's to find and you can get away with having rather small islands in your large ocean because the islands are so unavoidable.  If you were to employ the same rule that a hex contains a fixed encounter with 1 mile hexes, chances are that encounters with the same spatial density would never be found.  You'd need more 'road signs' saying, "This way to the content."The second you mention is "the handwave".  The handwave to a certain extent is to time what Schrödinger’s Map is to space.  You are steering the players to the temporal content - "the good stuff'How bad railroading is depends on whether or not you are removing real agency from the players.  If all you are doing is making the informed choice to skip contentless activity that the player's aren't or need not be invested in, then I don't have a problem with it.  What's even better is that you can use railroading techniques to keep players informed, especially early on when they have zero information to go on.  Much like the author of a novel may determine that he needs to spend a few early pages or chapters on exposition so that the reader will have understanding, and will disguise that exposition through some art to make it seem natural to the story, you can railroad players into expository encounters rather than dumping a load of dry background on them and monologue a long introduction.   It's worthwhile study to look at published modules and see which authors are doing interesting exposition through play in their introduction, and which are info dumping pages and pages of monologue and background on the players with no expectation of interaction.  Both are a sort of railroading - player's generally don't have a choice but to have at least the first encounter - but one is artful and the other isn't.With a little practice at railroading, player's won't see the rails, and you'll actually get a better indication of where the player's want to go by what 'ticket' they buy, than you would with them randomly rowing about lost.  The later is painful for everyone.Now if I could figure out how to inform the players without the players receiving the signal that this is what they are 'supposed' to do...Sometimes its a bit frustration when your players act like they are on rails, when really, they aren't.</blockquote>

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