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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr Simon" data-source="post: 1898542" data-attributes="member: 21938">Probably in these discussions on rail-roading we are being hampered by inefficient language.Most RP adventures start with a hook of some sort, right? As a campaign matures that hook can come from the characters, but I've found that campaigns that start with the GM saying "So what do you want to do?" tend to be tricky, as the parameters of what there is to do have not yet been set.So, a DM opening a session with "The local Lord wants some adventurers to clear the nearby mines of goblins" (etc...) isn't rail-roading, at least in the pejorative sense. 99% of players will realise that they will probably get the best game that evening if they agree to go to the mines and kill goblins. There's always one who decides it would be better to assassinate the local lord and get to his gold that way, or set fire to the local tavern, or run off and ask to join the goblins.Rail-roading would be when the GM deals in a high- or over-handed fashion so that such a player's  character could not do such things, no matter what (even going so far as to say "You can't and I say so"). Different groups have different levels of acceptability of off-tangent play. If everyone else in the group was playing LG retainers of the local lord, I think the group would be justified in having and OOG discussion to say that, yes, it might be a laugh but it's going to bog the game down or take it in a direction that we don't want to go. That's the sort of thing that requires a sensible approach and a lack of DM vs. Player mentality (on behalf of either party). There is a subset of rail-roading, and that is the situation where the DM devises a trap or puzzle with only one solution (so he thinks) and then comes up with inventive ways to thwart any other plan that the players might concoct. *That* is probably more annoying and destructive than assuming that the players will take the adventure hook.If you find that you may as well be playing an old text-based computer adventure game "I'm sorry I don't understand", "You can't go that way", "That doesn't work", then you can be pretty sure you are being railroaded!</blockquote>

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