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<blockquote data-quote="FrozenNorth" data-source="post: 8335918" data-attributes="member: 7020832">To answer the OP, the reason that some people defend railroads is that the term railroad means different things to different people.&nbsp; As a continuum, from most restrictive of player agency to least restrictive of player agency:1. The adventure is a module.&nbsp; There are no meaningful choices along the way, and the DM actively prevents both sequence-breaking and non-standard ways of overcoming obstacles.2. The adventure is a module.&nbsp; The DM allows the players to use unorthodox methods to address the challenges or even sequence break (though they may do some rewriting in the background to ensure the characters don’t end up in a no-win scenario).3. The module serves as a backbone for the adventure.&nbsp; It is exactly as pressing as it would be in the fiction.&nbsp; The players are free to follow anything they find interesting, and encounters can be bypassed through clever play.4. Sandbox play.&nbsp; DM offers hooks, which players may or may not follow.Also worth noting that over a campaign, the amount of player agency may fluctuate.&nbsp; A campaign may generally run at level 3, but have individual moments where the players have to act in a certain way for the campaign to continue.&nbsp; Someone provided a good example of a level 4, where various adventure hooks were proposed, but the hooks themselves were tightly scripted.I have seen all of the above (except 4) be referred as railroading.&nbsp; I doubt there are many people defending 1, but there are quite a few defenders of 2 or 3.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FrozenNorth, post: 8335918, member: 7020832"] To answer the OP, the reason that some people defend railroads is that the term railroad means different things to different people. As a continuum, from most restrictive of player agency to least restrictive of player agency: 1. The adventure is a module. There are no meaningful choices along the way, and the DM actively prevents both sequence-breaking and non-standard ways of overcoming obstacles. 2. The adventure is a module. The DM allows the players to use unorthodox methods to address the challenges or even sequence break (though they may do some rewriting in the background to ensure the characters don’t end up in a no-win scenario). 3. The module serves as a backbone for the adventure. It is exactly as pressing as it would be in the fiction. The players are free to follow anything they find interesting, and encounters can be bypassed through clever play. 4. Sandbox play. DM offers hooks, which players may or may not follow. Also worth noting that over a campaign, the amount of player agency may fluctuate. A campaign may generally run at level 3, but have individual moments where the players have to act in a certain way for the campaign to continue. Someone provided a good example of a level 4, where various adventure hooks were proposed, but the hooks themselves were tightly scripted. I have seen all of the above (except 4) be referred as railroading. I doubt there are many people defending 1, but there are quite a few defenders of 2 or 3. [/QUOTE]

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