I don't see it as being much different from having an ancient red dragon who will attack if she catches the PCs trying to steal anything from her hoard. Is there anyone who considers that unfair?
Let's say the players notice a sleeping dragon while exploring a series of caves. They walk over to the dragon, waking it, and demand its hoard. Without a roll, the dragon declines the request. Have the players been railroaded? I think not.
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I don't see how that has anything to do with railroading. It's railroading in the same sense that putting walls in your dungeon is railroading.
Let's set aside for the moment the conversational equivalent of the moon arrow, which includes things like asking the dragon to give you his horde for no reason, or asking an implacable and evil foe to start putting flowers in the barrels of guns. Before we set those examples aside, it's worth noting that they are already different from the chasm jump in one important respect - the rules do not say the action is impossible, and there is thus no rules-mandated failure state. We have moved into the realm of ultimate power - DM fiat. For the most part, those extremely unlikely examples we are setting aside are not impossible due to the rules, but rather for reasons that might be branded common sense - Dragons do not generally give away their hordes. I would submit that this is still broadly similar to the chasm jump though, as most players should realize that its not going to happen on a simple ask, no matter how charming you are, and I don't think that's really an example of an intractable NPC either.
In many, perhaps most, D&D games, a big part of the game is
gathering treasure by using player-side resources to overcome obstacles. That's why talking a dragon out of its horde is not a feasible action declaration.
In a game with a different premise - eg Cortex+ Heroic - suddenly talking a dragon out of its horde becomes quite feasible. In that system there is no resource or resolution difference between fighting and talking - the difference is purely in the fiction - and winning a treasure is just adding another trait to your PC sheet. I haven't had a dragon talked out of its treasure in that system, but I have had a PC talk the dark elves at the bottom of a dungeon out of their treasure. It was pretty amusing at the time - the trickster PC escaping with the treasure while the other PCs were locked in battle with a group of dark elves.
Are walls in dungeons railroading? Often not - they frame the challenge. The players expect them, and have them narrated to them
in advance of action declarations. They are part of the framing and provide the expected ground for action resolution.
Are secret doors railroading? It depends on the details, but they can be.
Shift the context slightly: can walls and secret doors be railroading in an urban intrigue adventure? Absolutely! Because in that sort of adventure - which doesn't have the exploration-and-map-every-square aspect of a classic dungeon - narrating walls, secret doors etc can essentially become a tool that the GM uses to shape all transitions from scene to scene, block certain approaches to resolution, etc.
So intractable only really applies up to the point where the NPC's motivation to accede to a request overcomes their natural reluctance to follow the rules, or to put it another way, it applies until the fictional frame is shifted enough that their intractable trait is no longer the primary objection. In addition to reframing to overcome objections, there is also the idea of leverage, which comes into play much more strongly in the case of neutral or hostile NPCs. The easy example there is that fear for one's life is leverage that can overcome a lot of seemingly intractable character traits, but also in the mix are fear of embarrassment, greed, threats to cherished possessions/people, the prospect of advancement, appeals to authority, and a bunch of other things.
Given the rather long list of methods the PCs might use to circumvent, modify, or otherwise overcome even the most intractable NPC, I don't think it makes a lot of sense for the DM to rule by fiat that the action is impossible.
I certainly agree that if you can come up with a clever way to circumvent an intractable trait, then success becomes a possibility.
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When I was speaking of auto-failure, I wasn't including all possibilities. Just the ones that try to overcome the trait directly. If you try to convince the baron to do what you want by insulting him, you'll fail. Of course, insulting someone is rarely a good way to get someone to do what you want.
Re the last sentence: bullies use that particular technique all the time. And there's plenty of them in the world!
On the bigger picture: focusing on
leverage and ono
clever ways to circumvent encourages expedient play.
@FrogReaver already made this point.
What about
passionate play? I remember when I ran Bastion of Broken Souls (mechanically adapted to RM and integrated into an ongoing campaign): I ignored all the stuff in the module that said (in effect) the only way to deal with this NPC is to fight him/her. In one case there was an angel who was a living lock to the gate the PCs wanted to pass through: they could only open the gate by killing the angel. The PCs didn't want to
fight the angel. One of the PCs, through an impassioned oration (as reflected in strong checks using the RM social resolution framework, which is not that sophisticated), persuaded the angel that the only way for her to fulfill her duty was to allow the PC to kill her. Which he then did. It was both more dramatic and more tragic than a PC-vs-angel fight. The fact that the module writer forbade it in his text just tells me that either (i) he doesn't have a very good eye for drama or (ii) he thinks that the game will break down if it drifts away from expedient play, in which NPCs are just obstacles and/or puzzles.
But expedient play will never really resemble the source fiction, because very little of the source fiction is about expedient characters. Certainly not LotR. And not REH Conan (despite the occasional assertion one sees to the contrary.)
