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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 9855649" data-attributes="member: 57112">The presence of tracks, whether visible or invisible, does not a railroad make. Neither does adding one-off bottlenecks (like a "puzzle"). This is the thing I think that most people get wrong about "railroading" as a concept; railroading is exclusively a GM practice, not a design flaw. An adventure cannot be a railroad. It can be linear. It can even fail to account for any alternative solutions to any of its bottleneck moments. That can be frustrating, but an adventure cannot have infinite space to cover all possible player actions. There will always be an upper limit. The trick is understanding that in a TTRPG, there's no such thing as an actual bottleneck. The classic example is the locked door. Right away, you've got two possible solutions for the lock: you find the key, or you pick the lock. But here's the thing; the lock isn't the obstacle, the door is. So that adds more options: you can kick the door down, you can hack at it with an axe, Jack Torrance-style. If we're talking D&D, you've got magic added to the mix. The obvious magical option is Knock. But it's not the only one. Maybe a divination spell helps you find the key. Maybe you cast a spell to teleport to the other side, or walk through the walls. Or hell, just launch a Fire Bolt at the door to try to blow it up/burn it down. And those are just the kinds of solutions that actually work in Baldur's Gate 3, a video game without a human GM, who can respond to the infinite range of ideas the players can come up with, no matter how outlandish and/or stupid they are (and we are talking about players here, so you know it's going to be extremely outlandish and stupid).Here is what is railroading: the GM insisting on a single path forward. That's it. There can be tracks, but a TTRPG will always provide infinite options for players to hop off those tracks. If the GM says "No, you can't do that.", that's railroading. Plain and simple.One caveat that sometimes comes up that has nothing to do with railroading: a TTRPG involves a social contract, whether explicit or implicit, to fully participate in the game that the GM is running. If your attempt to "hop the tracks" involves directly avoiding any content the GM has brought to the table (whether a pre-written adventure or something homebrew), that's breaking the social contract. I personally always make sure to make "buy-in" an explicit part of any session zero, as in "you are not allowed to create a character who would not buy-in to the adventure/campaign we're planning on running" because why are you even here otherwise? To ruin everyone else's fun? An example of this was the common complaint of the beginning of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. For those unaware, this is an adventure that starts with the party heading towards a town when they see that town being attacked by, among other things, a dragon. "What if my character would not run towards a town being attacked by a dragon to help out?" My answer to that problem is easy: then leave the table and come back with a new character that will. That's not railroading, that's an expectation of buy-in.</blockquote>

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