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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8335635" data-attributes="member: 6790260">For my part, "railroading" means that, when the players want to do something that is (a) reasonable for their characters' abilities, (b) appropriate to the established fiction of the world and past behavior of those characters, and (c) something that an outside observer would consider a logical choice given the situation at hand, the players are (1) denied the ability to do so, (2) for ad-hoc reasons, (3) in order to have specific events occur.Miss any of the aforementioned things, and you've diverged from "railroading" proper, regardless of whether the adventure is linear, nonlinear, or whatever else. If it's unreasonable for the characters' abilities, then they shouldn't be doing it to begin with, no matter how logical it might sound. If its wildly out of character or incongruous with the established world, then it isn't justified regardless. If it's only "reasonable" because the players are exploiting metagame knowledge or otherwise engaging in something hinky, that an outsider wouldn't know about, it's still totally fair for the DM to say no.If the players aren't actually denied the ability to do reasonable things, even if that's because they didn't bother to ask, that's presumptively non-railroad. (I'm setting aside the "DM has trained the players never to bother" scenario; that's the product of having already railroaded so much the players have adjusted to it, so the railroading still happened.) If the reasoning isn't ad-hoc, but rather well-grounded even if it wasn't known in advance, that's presumptively non-railroad. I've had to say "no" to some of my players' schemes, not because I wasn't supportive--rather the opposite!--but because there was world-lore they hadn't discovered yet that would prevent it. Instead of just having nothing happen, though, I always try to turn this into a learning opportunity so they can understand more about the world. And then finally, if there's no specific goal in mind, the DM is just arbitrarily saying no for some other reason, it's not railroading, though it's still not a good thing.Now, I know some folks see "railroading" as meaning "absolutely any time the DM has an intent ever," and thus find it hard to believe that any game can go long without some railroading. I, personally, think this definition is over-broad, because it lumps together one behavior that is pretty clearly a problem (dismissing valid, reasonable player choices/efforts unfairly) with another that is clearly not (helping a group maintain focus). The former is dismissive, by intent, while the latter is supportive, again by intent.</blockquote>

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