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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Heathen72" data-source="post: 3036998" data-attributes="member: 7029">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!  Often the response of GM’s is to just present the players with unassailable odds (there are dozens of coppers with powerful wizards at their disposal) but this is unsatisfactory to my mind as 1) It is essentially railroading anyway, and 2) The players can be very upset when they realize they were ‘intended’ to lose the fight all along. This happened to me playing the one of the Freeport modules, and it pissed me off! I prefer a more honest approach to the situation; The GM lets the players know that he is going to be a little heavy handed and then hands them back some ownership of the situation. It could be fun when both can describe together how, say, one by one the PC’s are picked up by the fuzz – sort of like in The Usual Suspects! Obviously this all requires the trust of the players – not least of which that you aren’t going to enforce terrible consequences on their character; I don’t think they would appreciate having their characters molested in their cells or being told “Yeah, you got prison rot. Sorry, but you shouldn’t have let yourself get caught!” Nor should they be left in prison if they didn’t manage to escape. It’s important that once they have allowed you to control over the destinies that you treat their character concepts with respect. Ideally it shouldn’t be something you do every session – players like to have power over their character’s lives, and you don’t want them feeling like they are puppets swung left and right by the forces of fate and destiny (unless they want to feel that way) but once in a while, with their permission, you can put the dice down and set up a fun story for the players. So, what are your thoughts on predetermined plot direction?</blockquote>

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