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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 9732380" data-attributes="member: 7025508">Having "plot hooks" or prepared situations is not railroad, as long as the players have agency to choose what to do with those. Some situations might be pretty linear in a sense that there is a very likely way they will play out. This is probably what people mean with "linear," and whilst not most interesting way to play, it doesn't become a proper railroad until the GM starts to take steps to block actions that would cause the situation to take other than the GM's predicted path. That being said, I can certainly see why this is contentious as it is blurry. What actions the PCs can plausibly take depends on the framed fiction, and if the GM constantly frames fiction in such way that there are no real choices, then it starts to become pretty railroady even no actions were technically blocked. And by "no real choices" in this context I mean that the PCs could in theory choose to do insane things no sensible character would really do, or to do boring things that lead to nowhere, but only "choice" that leads to anywhere is to follow the tracks. The most frustrating forms of this is a situation where there are "tracks", the things GM wants the players to do, but they are hidden and the players have mock agency to aimlessly wander poking at things but nothing of consequence happens until they finally manage to to accidentally do the specific thing the GM expected. This sort of pixel hunting is among the most frustrating play structures to me and I would take clearly marked tracks over it any day.</blockquote>

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