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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5401022" data-attributes="member: 55271">Absolutely.Not necessarily. There are lots of published scenarios that aren't  railroads. Masks of Nyarlathotep, Keep on the Borderlands,  Isle of Dread, and the Banewarrens all leap to mind (with  varying degrees of non-linearity).The ability to choose which opportunities to pursue is pretty much the definition of a sandbox campaign. So, yes, if the DM predetermines what scenario the PCs are going to engage with each week then you are not, in fact, running a sandbox campaign.With that being said, most people consider enforced scenario selection to be the lightest form of railroading and pretty much inoffensive (assuming you didn't promise a sandbox campaign).Pretty much everything else you described isn't a railroad (although it's not really a sandbox, either), with one possible exception.The "Armageddon scenario" is kind of a tricky one to judge.If I said: "I totally gave them a choice: They either do what I want them to do or their PC will definitely die." Then it's not particularly difficult to see that I'm not really offering any sort of legitimate choice.The Armageddon scenario similarly says: "I totally gave them a choice: They either do what I want them to do or I blow up the entire world with them in it." It seems like a similar dishonest is being manifested in this so-called "choice".OTOH, I don't think "I'm threatening something you care about" automatically equates to "I'm railroading you".There's a legitimate grey area here. But if you sat me down and forced me to pass judgment on some hypothetical example the first thing I'd look at is the specificity of the action being "forced". There's a scale between (1) "you've found the One Ring, Sauron is seeking it"(2) "you've found the One Ring and Frodo, specifically, must carry it to Mt. Doom"(3) "you've found the One Ring, Frodo must carry it, and he must go to Bree, Rivendell, Moria, and Lothlorien in that order"With less (or no) railroading at one end and a lot of railroading at the other.What I will say is that Armageddon scenarios tend to preclude sandbox play specifically because the priority demanded by the Armageddon scenario tends to preclude freedom in scenario selection. (Although this doesn't necessarily have to be true: For example, World War II can be going on in the background without the PCs feeling as if they're personally responsible for stopping Hitler.)Huh? I don't remember that in B2 nor can I seem to find any reference to it now that I'm reviewing the module. Is this something from Return to the Keep on the Borderlands perhaps?Final note: I think part of your confusion is probably stemming from treating "sandbox" as being the polar opposite of "railroading". This isn't particularly true. The defining trait of a sandbox campaign is freedom in scenario selection; but, as I noted above, this is generally considered the lightest form of railroading, not the most severe form.The other source of your confusion may lie in trying to determine whether something is a "railroad" by trying to identify whether it has a "plot"; and then specifically trying to identify the "plot" by describing the sequence of events as it occurred at the game table. The problem here is that everything has a plot after the fact. Railroading happens when the GM attempts to enforce a sequence of events which has been pre-plotted.</blockquote>

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