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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheSword" data-source="post: 8341706" data-attributes="member: 6879661">I find the whole debate very bemusing. My approach to DM led storytelling is to provide a set of interesting events and places and then provide clues and hooks to entice players to investigate and interact with those events.Most encounters will require players to perk up and take active interest. Either there is a quest giver of some form (If the town pays you will you go and investigate the tower with the strange lights.) Or clues will come to the PCs through rumours (Have you heard about the strange lights around the tower).Other encounters will come to PCs (Cultists using the tower try to kidnap the PCs on the road. Or an escapee from the tower flees into the PCs path).I don’t believe any of these methods of beginning encounters are railroading. The party can chose to engage or not. They can chose how to interact and that’s all the agency I expect as a PAs a DM I’m not a fan of end of the world gaming. Where it’s a case of accepting a quest or you die. That does seem like railroading. However I would also think it would extremely rare with experienced DM. (Even occasionally an apocalypse style campaign is fun too if you’re expecting it).The suggestion that because the chance of an encounter isn’t random, or has been picked by the DM it becomes railroading seems bizarre to me. That’s the game… encountering things and then responding to them for good or ill.On top of the plot based railroading, people then muddy in all these micro-railroads to coin a phrase of individual actions and dice rolls they think are shut down or made impossible. That seems to me to be a totally different thing and really ventures into the adversarial DM vs Player debate which is a whole different kettle of fish.</blockquote>

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