What players want vs what they actually want

I completely railroad my player and they don't even realize it. I make them believe I have a lot of things prepared, but they are from the World of warcraft generation, so they don't think a lot and have a good time. I can enjoy world building, advancing my complex campaign that we played every week for three years and working mostly on the "cinematography". I use musics a lot and visual to immerse them in the adventure.

I think not everybody look for the same thing in a tabletop rpg. They just look for a video game ++ that adapt to their decision. Then it's just imagination and story.

I may be a bad DM, but at least we all had fun for a long time, and the only player I lost was for medical reason.

As an aspiring DM, how do you railroad your players without them seeing the tracks?

Different user, but you should ideally make a plot that the players want to get on the tracks for. Give them a good bait, and then hook and reel them all the while they say more. If you make your campaign interesting enough, engaging enough, and in line with the general whims of your players, you'll be able to railroad them.
An example of a bad railroad is forcing a political intrigue campaign on a group that want to be barbarians. Try instead to make the campaign have the same objective of your original idea, then adapt it to the barbarian group, i.e. the players must rally the tribes to conquer the kingdom.

Different user, but the easiest trick is in the way you describe things as a DM. Players can feasibly go anywhere and do anything, but they're reliant on you for their "senses" - direct them towards things that you've got (even vaguely) planned. If players roll up into a town, and you've got a plot about a missing blacksmith, a murder in a tavern and a corrupt merchant group, describe the town in such a way as to point towards those.

>a game that very skillfully hides that it railroads you.
The railroad is pretty obvious in metro user, just look down.

This is what I mean, a lot players will either make poor decisions or are unsure. The GM should get them on the tracks. Once on the tracks they wont want to leave. And obviously it's nice to have some flexibility

It really depend on the player. Mine aren't to hard to railroad. If you have docile player, just having an interesting story will do the trick. They are curious, and when they are on track, they are just following the story, trying to resolve the current plot. It can be tricky to move them from a plot hook to another.

My players, as the adventure become more and more dangerous are becoming more and more coward (they want to leave the ride). Last time I cleverly tricked them into accepting as a reward a plot of land and a title in the kingdom they had helped.

But the reward was at the same time the poison, as the king appealed directly to their new duty as "lords" of the kingdom, to send them on a mission. If they wanted the land (where they wanted to retire) they would have to do a last mission. On the paper, it wasn't anything dangerous (obviously was) but, they felt compelled to continue.

Most of the time I had to appeal to their greed. Promise of vast reward at the end of the journey were enough.

And some "I didn't expect you to do that", "wew, I thought we were going for the TPK", "that was some interesting choices, I like where we are going" at the end of the game always help.

Most players are limp-dicked faggots with no real sense of agency. They have no drive outside of of moments of indignation when they decide to shit on everything out of pure spite. But good god, if it works, it works.
Our current game is basically Jet Set Radio on a Space Station. Our GM has set the stage and there's a ton of factions and characters with their own plans and plots which the GM runs past or at us, but at the same time we can also do our own shit. Just yesterday, we decided to save a rivaling gang leader from an assassination plot of the ruler of the station, but also to go to the neighboring territory and fuck another gangs shit up and take their turf. Good lord, it's a ton of fun.

>Most players are limp-dicked faggots with no real sense of agency. They have no drive outside of of moments of indignation when they decide to shit on everything out of pure spite.
I've found this to be untrue. You just have to present their options properly.

a map can help with that. Don't even need to go all out. A few ash lands, here be demons, elfy sounding locations in the woods and places with very literal names (Orc Fort) can give people some idea of the world.

I find characters to be more important. They can be a bigger draw if they're appealing, they can have a solid link to whatever part of the setting you wish to present, and it's easy and rewarding to interact with them.

As a DM I use the quantum adventure.

The plot is mostly the same, but if they want to roam hills, they'll find goblin raid camps. If forests, bandit hideout. Caves? Kobolds. All working for the BBEG. The camp, hideout and cave have the same layout of rooms, and enemies are mostly skin change.

If done right, everyone gets happy at the end.

I'm seeing a lot of evidence that GMs are really good at railroading

Open world is hard to do right, because most GMs get stuck in a creative mindset similar to writing a story, or maybe a shooter video game. In video game mindset, players can take little detours, solve problems in different ways, etc, but they're still basically running down a hallway towards a preset goal.

Open world games are an interactive environment, with no set goals. You populate a map with briefly described factions, friends, foes, obstacles, dangers etc and the players decide how to engage it with the limited information they have. The GM only fleshes out game elements as the players direct their attention to them. There's no "BBEG", but they may find themselves constantly running up against the Mad Baron of Yrkos if they're both pursuing the same piece of treasure.

Another thing about running open world games is that they don't necessarily have to be spontaneous, mad cap adventure. There's nothing wrong with telling players they need to give you a rough idea of what they're going to do next, so you can prepare. My players know they can sail off the map any time they like, as long as they give me a heads up one session ahead of time.