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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8039013" data-attributes="member: 18">It kind of depends on what you mean by making stuff up. I would say that "railroad" is pretty subjective, certainly when it comes to DMing - with it adventures it can be a little more objective and factual. If the DM was making up stuff to suggest they go a certain path, but they were willingly going with that, and he wasn't having to hard-block them, that sounds more like illusionism rather than true railroading to me. Illusionism of course makes some people even angrier than railroading, but a lot of people just don't care.If he was hard-blocking them, and they still had an amazing time, and didn't feel railroaded, well, okay first off do you have his email address? Because I need to get some tips from this guy. The level of skill and subtlety it would take to do that as a DM, against intelligent players is very significant. So I guess even if he was, I kinda wanna know how he did it. It's hard for me to get past that.My real problem with your definition is that it requires DM fiat specifically though so excludes pre-determined railroads of all kinds which are, in my experience, both the worst kind and most common kind of railroad. I.e. as discussed, where an adventure just requires the PCs to make a choice that they are very far from certain (or in some cases even likely) to make. Whether that's because the DM wrote a problematic adventure, or because he bought an adventure which just has a railroad element in it (which was not all uncommon in 1980s and 1990s adventures and still regularly appears).I don't think what you're describing is really a railroad at all, but it is worth noting you can have a railroad with multiple paths. It usually only becomes noticeable if the paths just don't make sense to the players (and sometimes even the DM) though. I know there was a Shadowrun adventure I played long ago where this happened - it went smoothly and then there's this point where you're expected to pick a side and go with them for the rest of the adventure, except why in god's name would you? One side have said they won't pay you, the other side literally just ripped you off, they're both creeps, and you're going to help one of them? The adventure was absolutely certain you would. It made no provision for doing otherwise whatsoever, or considered that as a possibility. Obviously we did the Shadowrun classic and just left them to kill each other and stole their cars whilst they were about it, but the DM was pretty flummoxed (he was somewhat newer) and that was the end of that.</blockquote>

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