NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8342859" data-attributes="member: 42582">The first thing needn't be a trick, though.In many FRPGs players are able to choose what colour their cloaks are. This almost never matters to what happens next. But is it a trick? Or a railroad? - whatever colour of cloak I chose for my PC, the game plays out the same! I don't think so - everyone knows that choosing your PC's cloak colour is just for fun.In a game where choosing whether to go East or West or whatever is just for fun - eg like [USER=7025508]@Crimson Longinus[/USER], it's just a way of making the world feel big - then there's no railroad. And there can be intermediate cases too. In my Prince Valiant game, the PCs chose to cross the upper part of the Balkan Peninsula, from the Dalmatian coast to the Black Sea. The landing of the vessels the PCs and warband were traveling on the Dalmation coast was sheer GM stipulation: I told them that storms made their ship captains seek port. This was because I had an "episode" (the Prince Valiant terminology for scenes and short scenarios) that I wanted to run, and that would make sense in Dacia/Transylvania. I think it was the players that chose to proceed to the Black Sea and from there to Constantinople, rather than heading overland directly. After resolving interactions with soldiers in a border town, I used an encounter with a "dragon" (a giant crocodile) because that worked for a boat trip. If they'd not gone on boats at that point, I might have used it later instead, when they sailed from Anatolia to Cyprus.Railroading in Prince Valiant would mean (as examples only, not necessarily exhaustive) deciding how NPCs - even the Emperor in Constantinople - act, regardless of player action declarations to influence them or change their minds; or arbitrarily taking away a PC's horse or armour or special item. But details of geography just aren't very important: the whole point of the game is for the GM to serve up episodes that will allow the players to exemplify their conceptions of their character's errantry (if a knight) or connection to the Arthurian world more generally. Whether the episode occurs in Scotland or Dacia is just not that significant.</blockquote>

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