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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 8009331" data-attributes="member: 6993955">Dungeon choke points are not, IMO, railroading. Good dungeon design, especially for larger dungeons, usually requires some gating and separation of various areas. Sometimes that means there's a choke point. That says nothing about how the players should act, or how they can approach the dungeon as a whole. Sometimes the physical reality of a place limits options. Clever PCs might find a way around, and that's also a good thing too, but the place is the place. Walls have gates, so getting into the castle means that there will be limited options. In [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] 's example above, where all entries are blocked except one is maybe extreme, but it's not a railroad. It could be a railroad, but I think that has more to do with how the DM handles player actions than it does the physical space. If the DM is constantly ruling that actions X, Y and Z don't work to gain entry because he had already decided that only the one entry had any chance of success that's a railroad. If the DM is open to the unexpected then it's not, it's just a location that's bloody hard to get into.Generally speaking the whole idea of railroading centers on adjudication rather than adventure or encounter design. Liner plots, for example, can be railroads or not based on that measure, but aren't inherently railroads simply based on design. It is certainly the case that some linear plots are actually designed to be railroad-y to some extent, but that still doesn't enforce that play type. A focus on the logic of the fictional frame, and a certain commitment to playing to find out what happens will generally keep you off the tracks.</blockquote>

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