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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8996225" data-attributes="member: 4937">No.  This is basic session zero stuff, and when they accept the premise you are all good. No.  This is just a basic start of campaign or adventure bang.  You haven't really taken any agency away at this point.  It's at this point that the players start making choices.  Whether they decide as a group to go along with the plot and how far they go along with it, who knows.  I have plenty of times had players zag when I expected a zig and utterly refuse a hook and go their own way.  Before I know it they are making friends with the guy who is secretly the BBEG and they've decided to take a personal dislike to the Duke.  Recently, I had the players decide that rather than do the adventure in order to smooth things over with an NPC they'd just hire a lawyer and sue him.  Yes.  That's railroading.  Because if you jump back a week's time, during that week all sorts of things could happen, including the party deciding they don't want to help the Duke, finding and killing the assassin before the planned time, and so forth.  You've not only exercised metagame direction in basically telling the players "If you don't play along with my plot you'll ruin the game", but you are also going to need to have cleverly constructed the scenario to get it to play out such that what you intend to have happen will happen.And in my case, I'd probably need to smooth this over out of game and explain to the players out of game what was going on, because my players would probably have the first inclination when I did a flashback that they had literally jumped back in time and that they were stuck in a "Cause and Effect" time loop of some sort and that they game would keep going in circles until they figured out how to break the loop.  Yes.  That's railroading.  If the players like idea and buy into it, then it's "All aboard, choo choo!"  My players would probably literally make that sound.You're committed to your idea that "railroading" is a pejorative all the time and that seems to color how you are phrasing things.  Further, you don't seem to distinguish between the verb "railroad" and the noun "railroad".  The result is that you are trying to have a binary where either something is "a railroad" or it is "not a railroad" rather than having like a scale of 0-100 on how much "railroading" is going on in a campaign.This is "metagame direction" technique in my essay on railroading.  You are telling the players how they will play out the scene and maybe even the whole campaign.  If you get agreement, great, but it's still railroading.  For me, as a GM I spend the whole time thinking that probably at least one player is very unhappy with the premise but is keeping quiet and going along with it because they don't want to spoil the game.  I'd never advise a novice GM to use the technique because my suspicion is that it would just end up with GMs bullying players into getting aboard their railroads.</blockquote>

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