What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?

[Maxperson]

No sorry but if a GM goes out of the way to make 1 spell not work, then I assume other similar uses of magic do not work if not its just annoying GMing.

Either you make no magic work to port out from there, or you dont do anything. Yes I am assuming GMs do things with intention and not just random nerf 1 spell, which is silly, since if you can teleport out with a spell than GM could have been not annoying and say "you dont have the spell components for that but you could still cast wish".

Okay. In my opinion that's just silly. I can make an area where minor fire magic doesn't work without it being railroading or stopping more powerful fire spells. A library for instance might want to stop candles and other minor magical fire effects, but wouldn't see a need to stop meteor swarm or flamestrike. I can make an area where teleport doesn't work, without stopping spells like dimension door that don't leave the area. And so on.

This idea that you have to allow every similar type of spell or stop every similar type spell isn't one that I've seen anyone other than you ascribe to, and nobody else I know would make that same assumption. They'd just try other spells like the OP's players did.

 

[LordEntrails]

1) No. Its a situation, it's not a predetermined outcome.
2) Railroading, to me, is when player actions don't matter. Such as Dragon Lance where the party is captured by kender AND no matter what they do while captured are automatically "rescued" by NPCs. Doesn't matter what the party does, how creative or interesting the players are, or incompetent and just wait for their fate, NPCs come along and rescue them by fiat.

Or when the party is tasked with killing a dragon and no matter what, winning or losing, a noble dragon slaying knight shows up at the last minute and either saves the party or steals the kill.

When the party, and especially player actions are irrelevant to what happens, then that's a railroad.