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

[Reynard]

It's not only this; you can design a linear adventure, but still run it as wide open and reacting to the full range of player expression and agency. The players can absolutely hop off the tracks. You can put signposts to help the players get back on the tracks, but if you're not telling the players "no, you can't actually do that" when they try to leave the beaten path, you aren't really railroading.

Sure, but that is beside the point of the comment I was replying to.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's not only this; you can design a linear adventure, but still run it as wide open and reacting to the full range of player expression and agency. The players can absolutely hop off the tracks. You can put signposts to help the players get back on the tracks, but if you're not telling the players "no, you can't actually do that" when they try to leave the beaten path, you aren't really railroading.

The usual issue is that those are kind of what I think of as 'side tracks"; you can absolutely go off on them and do something that even may be of interest--but they won't lead you to anything else, and the GM probably isn't going to feel obliged to supply anything interesting to be found where you ended up. So you'll end up back and the main line at some point anyway.

That may not be hard-edged, but I suspect some people in this thread would consider it a railroad anyway. Of course they probably see game structure in a very binary way here.