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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1513463" data-attributes="member: 2205">In my experience, most experienced roleplayers recognize obvious hooks and take to them gladly, thus making railroading unnecessary.  Mostly.My style is to give some hooks, the players usually react to them in terms of at least doing what I want them to to progress whatever adventure I had in mind, but how they do so is completely up to them, and I have no idea what specific things the PCs will be doing.So I tend to be extremely light on details for preparation, and wing large sections of play.  As long as I know who the NPCs are, what they're going to be up to, and what the setting itself is doing as an interactive environment, then no railroading is necessary or desirable.  In fact, I quite like seeing what my players would do that I didn't anticipate.One of the biggest culprits of railroading is overplanning.  If you plan too many details, you'll be almost certain to railroad, because otherwise your plans may not come into play.Peskara's also hit on a strategy that I actually quite like; I think using part of the first session as a chargen session, where everyone sits down together to generate their characters and make something that works out.For instance, in my last game, I asked everyone to make sure they were out-of-towners, so it didn't matter where they were from necessarily, but that they were all travelling to the same place to "seek their fortunes" so to speak, and that they all had to actually be reasonably good people who actually cared about stuff that might happen around them.So, railroading can be minimized even with the "wrong" gamers by a little up front work.But I have met gamers who literally wanted to be railroaded.  They didn't play to think too hard, they played to just hang around and kick some butt now and again.</blockquote>

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