A while ago, I raised the topic of the sacred cows in roleplaying – those things which often generate a (negative) knee jerk response - and one of those is predetermined plot direction, or ‘railroading’. So, in the interests of challenging such truisms: when is it okay to railroad a little? How do you go about it?
While I don’t advocate tying a whole campaign down to an immutable path, I do think that when you want to run a certain type of session, or set up a game in a certain way, it may require a little ‘railroading’ to achieve this. I think this is especially the case when you are running more episodic or ‘vignette’ style games (as opposed to those campaigns which every session flows into the next without any individual session having its own encapsulated story).
Let’s say you want the players to get caught by the fuzz. Perhaps you want to run a ‘prison’ game, or have them brought before a local potentate. There are different ways of going about this – and sure you could create a hook or ‘macguffin’ for your players that gets them to go in voluntarily, but that can take time (as you coax the players around to the idea, or wait while they vacillate and plan) and sometimes you just want them to be genuine prisoners!