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.

 

[MGibster]

Being honest, I bristle when players act like I am trying to screw them over instead of trusting me. We have bene playing together since the mid 90s.

I also bristle, especially when it comes from a player I've been gaming with for years. It's a trauma response I think. Some of the people in my group have had some terrible experiences with jerk GMs in the past. I try not to take it personally.

Railroading is when you force the player characters onto a specific, narrow path from which they cannot deviate. The premise you outlined in the open post doesn't sound like rail roading to me. It's just the premise for the scenario.

 

[Distracted DM]

What's railroading to me as a player?

"OK it feels like this noble hiring us for the job isn't on the up and up- can I ask around town to see if he has a history of screwing over people that take jobs for him?"
"No, you accepted the quest so you need to go do that. You leave in the morning. The guards will stab you otherwise."

"So there's this cairn that we're supposed to get into but there are a bunch of goblins outside- can we look for another entrance? Can we try to distract them so we can get in without a fight, or lead them away from the entrance?"
"No, there's no other entrance. The goblins stay guard at the entrance and won't leave for anything, you have to fight them."

If the GM said "yes, you can try" to any of these questions, it's not railroading. If they need to stick to the adventure, we look for a second entrance to the cairn and there's nothing to find. Maybe they toss us a bone and we find some other clue, or something to help with the other plan of distracting the goblins.
If they let us ask around town, but we either didn't get anything useful from the townsfolk, or found that our suspicions were just paranoia, cool.

I've been largely fortunate, I haven't experienced much hard railroading within my memorable ttrpg history.

 

[mamba]

1) Do you specifically think what I did here was "railroading"?
and 2) In general, how do you define "railroading" or being railroaded as a player ina game?

so they think it is railroading because you ‘closed the borders’? No, I do not consider that railroading.

To me railroading is either not having many choices / being pushed in one direction or my decisions / actions not mattering to how things progress