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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9733559" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can see what you have in mind with your last scene point. I think, though, that the same sort of reasoning can create counter-examples to your replaceable PCs point. For instance, a given group of players might play through (say) White Plume Mountain pretty much the same regardless of party composition. But that wouldn't show that their play was a railroad. It would just show that, in classic dungeon play like WPM, character doesn't really matter (and there aren't really protagonists - the PCs are basically pawns).Maybe the real point isn't my (candidate) counter-example to what you say, but rather that it is difficult to talk about railroading in a way that generalises across the varieties of RPG play. Especially because the vocabulary for talking about that variety is a bit underdeveloped.Here's my tentative attempt to say what I think makes for railroading: If the GM is more-or-less unilaterally deciding the significant content of the presented scenes, and/or what is at stake, and/or what follows next, I will describe that as railroading. And so, conversely, non-railroad play (as I think of it) means that the players exercise real influence over the significant content of the presented scenes, and their stakes, and what follows next. One way that can play out is via the sort of character/protagonist importance you talk about. Another is via the sort of puzzle-solving and skilled play needed for WPM: the players' influence over scene and stakes is (obviously) not at the level of drawing the map and writing the key (the GM/module author does that) but rather in deciding which scenes to "activate" and shaping the stakes of those scenes (by "exploring", and then acting on the outcomes of that exploration).My sense is that, for a fixed last scene game to not be a railroad, the players must be exercising influence in the lead-up that establishes what is at stake in that scene, and probably also when it actually gets framed, at the table.</blockquote>

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