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

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I don't really know enough about the situation and the way you communicated, but as a player, I could see the following reason why it feels like a railroad:

• You present an option to escape a certain situation by traveling to a place that only leads to the Feywild
• The first option that comes to the player's mind does not work, because critical gear for that purpose has been stolen from them.

It can give the impression you really want them to be stuck in the Feywild and do your Feywild adventure idea with them. That might not be at all what your intention is.
But I would find it quite odd that suddenly some gear - specifically the gear needed to get out of the Feywild ,and apparently not their purses, rations or magic items. They were not aware of anyone that wants to trap them in the Feywild and has the knowledge and means to do that by disapearing their stuff. And the players couldn't do anything about it - it just happened. Maybe you secretly but honestly rolled Stealth or Sleight of Hand checks for the thieves or Will Saving throws against someone's enchantments or illusions, but they don't seem to know that*. I can see why this feels intrusive and breaks player trust in the DM, making them conclude: "Ah, this is a railroad, the GM wants me to do this Feywild thing and the world is conspiring so that it happens, regardless of what we do."

(* an interesting problem considering that having players roll Perception checks and then revealing nothing is also a way to make them paranoid and can trigger them to take actions they wouldn't take if they didn't think they just failed a Perception check.)

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

It looks to me like a bad case of assumption clash and the player believing you to be acting in bad faith. The player may have an unstated assumption, for example, that burning a wish to leave the plane would be arbitrarily ruled to fail with the wish being wasted - and that would be a railroad.

What makes it (or would make it) not-a-railroad IMHO is that locking down the plane is something the Winter Court would do and could legitimately be able to do - and also something that could be defeated or bypassed, without the party having to do the One Planned Thing you have set up to resolve the adventure.

 

[cranberry]

1. IMO, you were not railroading. Getting stuck there is the WHOLE reason for the adventure. If they could just leave, the session and adventure ends.

2. IMO, railroading is the classic case of "every door leads to the same path". Their situation doesn't really qualify because only one choice has been taken off the table. The choices they make to solve their predicament is wide open.

 

[Cergorach]

@Reynard The issue is not if you're right about it not being railroading or the player is that it is railroading. It's about what the player is experiencing.

A couple of points:

• Your pnp RPG sessions do not exist in a vacuum, people have lives outside the game that will heavily influence how they play, perceive, and act in your game. That might not be apparent, but it might be there none the less. As an example, I myself was by the end of 2024 not a nice person to play with, it took a while to figure this out myself and I bowed out of our D&D game for months until the stress that was causing my behaviour was past and I had recovered a bit.
• What DMs often forget is that how you see the situation, is not how the players see the situation, due to lack of information. And it might not be entirely realistic for the players to have that information, but it might not make the situation more fun for them, it might make the situation less fun. You could give them directly more information as a DM that might be a bit unrealistic for them to have or you can introduce an NPC that provides that information. I have the tendency to want to surprise players in my games, but I'm not playing with 3 clones of myself, different people are different, so I need to balance that with my own tendencies.

How exactly did the locking down of the plane work? Was it in-game mechanics at play that interacted with the players or was it a 'magical' resolution with no player interaction? Did the item that was stolen from plane hoppers actually stolen via in-game mechanics? As in the NPC rolled for pick-pocketing vs. the players passive perception? Did you roll that openly (without telling the players what it was for)? Or some other mechanical system (like a spell that does the same)?

Clearly the player is experiencing the situation that they are in a room where 'suddenly' all the rooms are mysteriously locked, but one. And no matter what they do through normal mechanical means, nothing that should be able to open the doors works anymore. That's how (at least) one player perceives the situation, that player can't change their perception without additional input. You're in charge of that input as the DM. And you can claim 30-40 years of being friends or at least player/DM and they should afford you some trust, you need to realize that they have trusted you up till that point, and you've already spent all the trust with that player without noticing that...

People change, especially over decades you know them, as a DM you need to change with them. So even if your DMing was good enough in the past, it might no longer be. It's up to you (as the DM) to make that player not feel like they're stuck on a rollercoaster, which they clearly don't want to be on. Discuss with the group out of character before you start the next session, that they are stuck in plane X, that there are ways out. Some will take adventuring, others are quicker, and are withing reach, but they haven't puzzeled it out yet. Then ask if they even want to adventure there, you think you've made a cool adventure, but if they don't want to you can skip it and reveal the quick way out (Wish spell). This gives the players power and might dispel the feeling of being railroaded the the other player(s).

Yes, this has the possibility that the work you did for the adventure is lost, but those are the risks of being a DM. I've done extensive prep work for essentially years at this point for the campaign I'm currently running, I have and am willing to further change things in how I run that campaign. But I always kew there was a risk that they didn't like the entire premise, because I was going to start colloring outside the lines of adventures we're used to.

I would also advise that you keep talking to each other, discussing wants, needs, expectations, etc. And doing that open and honestly. Again an example, for the last month one of our players was going on vacation and we didn't want to continue our current campaign without them, so we paused the current campaign. Another player/DM did a two session Heist adventure, a theme we normally don't play. So there was a lot of discussion before on how to do that, between sessions, and after the second session we did an evaluation of those two sessions. And to be that was increadibly worthwhile, maybe even as good as the Heist game. We all learned stuff as both players and DMs, and that lead to maybe new ideas (to us) on how our RPGs in the future for the better. Our next session with everyone back will start with discussing with everyone present, some of the conclusions some of us reached and if others think those are good ideas. Then we play a bit and then I also want to do an evaluation of my current campaign, I have some specific questions and am open to harsh critisism from the players...

 

[Reynard]

@Reynard The issue is not if you're right about it not being railroading or the player is that it is railroading. It's about what the player is experiencing.

A couple of points:

• Your pnp RPG sessions do not exist in a vacuum, people have lives outside the game that will heavily influence how they play, perceive, and act in your game. That might not be apparent, but it might be there none the less. As an example, I myself was by the end of 2024 not a nice person to play with, it took a while to figure this out myself and I bowed out of our D&D game for months until the stress that was causing my behaviour was past and I had recovered a bit.
• What DMs often forget is that how you see the situation, is not how the players see the situation, due to lack of information. And it might not be entirely realistic for the players to have that information, but it might not make the situation more fun for them, it might make the situation less fun. You could give them directly more information as a DM that might be a bit unrealistic for them to have or you can introduce an NPC that provides that information. I have the tendency to want to surprise players in my games, but I'm not playing with 3 clones of myself, different people are different, so I need to balance that with my own tendencies.

How exactly did the locking down of the plane work? Was it in-game mechanics at play that interacted with the players or was it a 'magical' resolution with no player interaction? Did the item that was stolen from plane hoppers actually stolen via in-game mechanics? As in the NPC rolled for pick-pocketing vs. the players passive perception? Did you roll that openly (without telling the players what it was for)? Or some other mechanical system (like a spell that does the same)?

Clearly the player is experiencing the situation that they are in a room where 'suddenly' all the rooms are mysteriously locked, but one. And no matter what they do through normal mechanical means, nothing that should be able to open the doors works anymore. That's how (at least) one player perceives the situation, that player can't change their perception without additional input. You're in charge of that input as the DM. And you can claim 30-40 years of being friends or at least player/DM and they should afford you some trust, you need to realize that they have trusted you up till that point, and you've already spent all the trust with that player without noticing that...

People change, especially over decades you know them, as a DM you need to change with them. So even if your DMing was good enough in the past, it might no longer be. It's up to you (as the DM) to make that player not feel like they're stuck on a rollercoaster, which they clearly don't want to be on. Discuss with the group out of character before you start the next session, that they are stuck in plane X, that there are ways out. Some will take adventuring, others are quicker, and are withing reach, but they haven't puzzeled it out yet. Then ask if they even want to adventure there, you think you've made a cool adventure, but if they don't want to you can skip it and reveal the quick way out (Wish spell). This gives the players power and might dispel the feeling of being railroaded the the other player(s).

Yes, this has the possibility that the work you did for the adventure is lost, but those are the risks of being a DM. I've done extensive prep work for essentially years at this point for the campaign I'm currently running, I have and am willing to further change things in how I run that campaign. But I always kew there was a risk that they didn't like the entire premise, because I was going to start colloring outside the lines of adventures we're used to.

I would also advise that you keep talking to each other, discussing wants, needs, expectations, etc. And doing that open and honestly. Again an example, for the last month one of our players was going on vacation and we didn't want to continue our current campaign without them, so we paused the current campaign. Another player/DM did a two session Heist adventure, a theme we normally don't play. So there was a lot of discussion before on how to do that, between sessions, and after the second session we did an evaluation of those two sessions. And to be that was increadibly worthwhile, maybe even as good as the Heist game. We all learned stuff as both players and DMs, and that lead to maybe new ideas (to us) on how our RPGs in the future for the better. Our next session with everyone back will start with discussing with everyone present, some of the conclusions some of us reached and if others think those are good ideas. Then we play a bit and then I also want to do an evaluation of my current campaign, I have some specific questions and am open to harsh critisism from the players...

While appreciate you making an effort to help me figure out "what went wrong" I have a bunch of follow up posts in this thread that, if you had read them (or if you did, absorbed them), invalidates a good chunk of your response. I think maybe you are projecting a little bit based on your own recent struggles at the tble?

In any case, the situation is resolved. The players now have the freedom to chart their own course.

Not due to this specific situation but previous issues in this campaign, my next campaign will be much more linear, and the players will know ahead of time they are signing up for a theme park.