I will openly, freely, and shamelessly admit that I am as railroady a GM as is possible...

Your players are extremely chill and mainly focus on their feelings or reactions to stimuli rather than being proactive and looking for opportunities to advance.

I'm not so sure about that, though. OP never mentioned whether his players are explicitly aware of the railroad or not. Either way, it's as says: they either don't know or don't care, but they're still having fun. It depends on how blunt the GM is about the appearance of the railroad. If he pulls something like
>We go west through the forest
>Can't, dragons flying overhead
>Then, we'll head north
>Can't, large orc camp you can't sneak around
>South
>Impassable toxic swamp
>Then...east
>You make it to the town without incident
then that's a REALLY poorly disguised railroad.

Good for you, OP. Player choice is overrated. When you give them freedom to choose they'll invariably choose wrong and blame you for it anyway, so if you're going to get blamed for for something you might as well actually be responsible for it.

>I'm not so sure about that, though.

I'd say it's pretty clear:

>I will openly, freely, and shamelessly admit that I am as railroady a GM as is possible, and an incorrigible control freak. My storylines are heavily structured.
>I do not even bother presenting an illusion of choice

He's not even trying to hide it, which IMO is the only way to make this kind of thing acceptable. If I sign up for a campaign, it goes without saying that my choices will affect things, because that is the default assumption in a TTRPG. If that's not the case, the DM should tell me up front, otherwise it's basically a bait-and-switch and when I catch on to what he's doing I will be pissed. People who say it's okay if players don't know are full of shit. It's more correct to say that it won't destroy the group's trust of you if you don't get caught, but that doesn't make it okay to be doing it.

I'm sorry your players hurt you, user.

As long as players get to play their characters and make the choices that they would have made then they are happy.
Players after my experience don't inherently hate being railroaded as long it makes sense for the story and they don't FEEL pushed.
If the next stop on the railroad feels natural and interesting, then they will enjoy it, but if you deny from choosing their actions without providing a sound reasoning it feels pushed.

I mean, the important thing is that everyone is having fun.

Your players are an anomaly, to be sure, but if they're having fun and you're having fun then that's all that matters.

I am that kind of player. I don't really care about decision making and proactivity or whatever, because with a sufficiently well-"simulated" character in my head, I don't even have to think out decisions: it's usually intuitively clear what the character would do.

But emotions and experiencing stuff in general is what I play trpgs for. I'm much more of an experiencer IRL too, I more often than not find myself spectating unfolding situations, or at least my inner PoV is such that it's more like a camera providing a panoramic view-point , even if the actor is me myself. So, I'm completely fine with railroading, provided the situations and the story are worth experiencing.

On the contrary, sandboxes always kind of leave me wondering the fuck I'm supposed to be doing. and what for.

This. I recently started playing Skyrim and Oblivion again and it’s a totally different play style to Fallout.
TES: well I can kill the necromancer as requested or I can betray and kill the priest that asked me to help.
Fallout:well I could kill one of these two people OR I can try and get them to realise they have the same goal and they should be friends.
Neither one is truly better than the other, it’s just what the players respond to better

Did the players have fun?

Win/win. End of debate.

I find most people have no idea they're on rails, unless it's pointed out to them. Veeky Forums can claim that they'll never let a DM railroad them, however, most people are sheep and will ride the rails in absolute ignorance.

>It's okay to spit in your players' food as long as they never find out

Save us from the shitty GMs, Saint Gary!

>Save us from the shitty GMs, Saint Gary!
This is ironic given that every adventure "Saint Gary" sold was a rollercoaster.

>according to my post-session evaluation surveys,
You play online a lot? One can assume your players do too. Many players that like rail-roady stories are only that kind that prefer linear driven VG stories.
> fluffy-tailed devil
Such as the kinds of single track stories you find in many many many JRPGs

So it looks like you've found your crowd.
RUN WITH THAT OP! Be happy.

That's kind of a meme, dude. The railroady stuff didn't start coming in heavy until Dragonlance, by which time Gary was being pushed out.
Gary was actually surprised that Judge's Guild was able to sell the first module back in the day, at first he didn't see why people would want to have other people design adventures for them when they could run anything they could think of.

What's wrong with fluffy-tailed devils?

>That's kind of a meme, dude
I dare you to read "his" modules then, instead of trying to defend that hack.
Seriously, why people still try to treat Gygax as anything else than incompetent hack 40 fucking years after the fact he was exposed as such?!

You mean the tournament modules? You do understand what those were meant for, right?

The more I read about Gygax and what he wrote and did, the more I respect the guy.

>Village of Hommlet wasn't a fantastic sandbox, it was a "railroad" written by "a hack"
>Same goes for "Shrine of the Kuo-Toa"
>And "Vault of the Drow" too

Sure, right. And you expect us to believe you've read Gygax's modules, huh? (You) have probably never even played a game that didn't have "video" in front of it.

To be fair New Vegas quests were a lot more open ended

How would you deal with players intentionally attempting to avoid being railroaded? You know, killing important NPC's, refusing to go near the big neon sign saying "please go here," etc.

You don't let them.

What, you gonna pull out a gun and scream at them every time they say "I go the opposite direction of where the obvious quest important npc is pointing?"

Then you kick them out. Players are pretty irrelevant to a railroad.

a) you know their tendencies, you should be able to usually outplay them
quantum ogres also work. they thought they killed an important npc? haha, no, it was just a clone/illusion, and now, the players have revealed their hand.

you literally have an infinitely large bag of tricks to fuck over your players and you cant figure out how to do it. im glad for your players sake, and somewhat incredulous at the same time

They do not do such things to begin with.

By just not railroading them in the first place? Jesus, you people act like it's impossible to GM without deciding what's going to happen long before the session begins. Railroading is completely unnecessary, a crutch for bad gms to avoid improving, and you'd see that if you scrubs would just git gud.

I'm asking what you would if they did, because I'm interesting in knowing what such a control freak (your own words) would do if you ran into players who weren't too hot on doing things exactly the way you wanted them to do it

Play-based theater is more popular than improv theater because the quality of pre-planned dialogue and plot tends to be higher. The same applies to RPGs.

The problem being you're basically the only one with a script while all the other actors are expected to improv

That only matters if you're playing for an audience.

...

Generally, I construct scenarios in such a way that there are only one to three logical ways to go about things that actually work.

Attempting methods outside of these will probably lead to being funneled back to one of these three methods as a natural outgrowth of the new method.

>I construct scenarios in such a way that there are only one to three logical ways to go about things that actually work
Have you accounted for roving packs of murderhobo's who will quite literally rape quest giving npc's before they can even speak? Just saying man, if I played a few games with someone who made it so obvious that I was being railroaded, my first instinct would be to try to completely break the GM's plans.

True but then again having a script doesn't mean you might not be thrust into improv at times.

That doesn't follow. Quality of dialogue and plot is just as important for the entertainment value of a RPG session.

I accept your lack of argument as your concession speech.

You don't need a railroad to have quality dialogue and plot. Good planning isn't the same thing.

Your "argument" is just a thinly veiled rationalization. Theatrical troupes don't lie to their audience and tell them "you can affect the story!" when they can't. RPGs are not theater, you are supposed to be playing a game together.
You know what you're doing is wrong, too. That's why you have to hide it from your players. OP doesn't have to hide anything, because he's doing it the right way and being upfront about what he's doing.

You sound like a faggot who can't get with the program.

In case you didn't get it: I wasn't arguing for railroading, I was highlighting the problems of improvisation in RPGs.

Then is it not railroading to define the villain as the villain?

Player here; GM accounts for it by having two players in this campaign, neither of which are murderhobos and are willing to go along with the entertaining plot, particularly since all the tasks on the railroad are tasks that the characters would actually want to do.

Really, it's not actual railroading since there are multiple ways to solve problems, and the "logical ways to go about things that actually work" are pretty broad, like "interacting with this NPC is the key to solving it" and both diplomacy, shaming and bamboozlement would all receive positive results if done right.

The only significant issue was where we were offered to do important research on a threat to the entire land, and our characters went "nah, let the maids do it"

tl;dr a good railroading GM works out what you want out of a game, then puts things that you want in your path so you do them. If you're someone who hates railroads, would you notice when the obvious thing to do is the thing you want to do and also the only path forward?

well, you have to give players agency for the sake of character development but the outcome must eventually lead from A to D, ireggardless of B and C that could have been omitted.

What I find is that this approach not only gives incredibly rich and real PCs but also antagonists which react to them believably.

Not to mention all the plot hooks and delicious drama.

Fuck yeah, hidden railroads!

Dude, you clearly never did either. Stop generalizing.

Amateur theater might or might not use plays in the end. It generally does, 'cause the public prefers that and it's easier to prepare yourself (as a group) for that as a perfomance (basically the more you have a script the more you can be sure to get it right). As for the actual "training" (that often gets more time than the final play) it generally doesn't really give much of a fuck about dialogue either, so plays aren't really even considered.

So.... yeah, there is no "same" that applies to both.

In general it's VERY retarded to think the two hobbies have the same objectives and constraints.

>In fact, according to my post-session evaluation surveys, my single most well-received session recently has been a purely linear session with absolutely no meaningful choices whatsoever to be made from the players. The first scene involved talking to a single NPC, the second scene entailed talking to a second NPC, and the rest of the scenes revolved around physically finding and then talking to a third NPC, but there was only one possible outcome in each of those scenes. The players still seemed to like it.

You play gamist. Pretty simple, really.

Both involve story-telling and acting. If anything is retarded, then it's the assumption that spontaneously created plot and dialogue is ON AVERAGE on the same quality level as carefully crafted plot and dialogue by a skilled writer/actor.

As for GMing, you can't plan for the exact dialogue but you can plan for voice, inflection, gestures, stance, etc. Which, btw, is quite obviously what Matt Mercer does. You can plan for snippets to use in any conversation with the PCs. You can plan on mechanics interwoven with the dialogue. If done properly, it will result on average in a more compelling scene than a scene relying entirely on spur-of-the-moment improv.
Solid preparation pays off, in any field. To deny the obvious would be completely stupid.

Dude, let me repeat it.

You didn't do it, so you don't know shit.

As a a matter of fact, you almost never "create plot" in amateur theater. It's not an objective. And what the director doesn't really do is planning for voice, inflection and shit: he lets the actors try it and selects (with them) what is best for THAT scene. Every character in the scene. So, basically something that never happens in RPGs.

And the "quality of dialogue" is not really something you care about, believe it or not. It's trivial to select a play, basically, the problem is how you get these phrases out (to just artificially select the "vocal" qualities, in truth it's perhaps 15% of what you aim for).
From this it descends that it's very common -even from time to time in PROFESSIONAL theater, mind you- to do small and not so small variations on the text of the most famous authors. Mostly cut and paste, but even something deeper.

You don't prepare AT ALL like in RPGs, even if you're retarded enough to do RR.

Stop embarassing yourself.

>skilled
Here is the issue, anyone good enough to make a railroad work is good enough to not need railroads at all.

Also you are comparing basic preparation of key scenes and characters with railroading and they are not the same in any way.

It's pronounced segway, but spelled segue

>As a a matter of fact, you almost never "create plot" in amateur theater.
Task #1: Show me where I talked about amateur theater.
Task #2: Show me where I talked about creating plot in amateur theater. Plot is created by the playwright.
>And what the director doesn't really do is planning for voice, inflection and shit: he lets the actors try it and selects (with them) what is best for THAT scene. Every character in the scene. So, basically something that never happens in RPGs.
Whereas in RPGs, the director adopts the role of the entire cast save for the main characters and either has to develop these details in advance or improvise on the spot. My assertion was that the results are better on average if they have been developed in advance than in the spur of the moment. Your statement that these details get selected for each scene prior to the actual performance validate that. Especially since that "training" takes often more time than the actual play.
At this point, you should rather step back and reread what I was actually saying, instead of addressing what you THINK I am saying, lest I will be forced to raise the issue of a strawman argument.

>And the "quality of dialogue" is not really something you care about, believe it or not. It's trivial to select a play,
That implies that there aren't plays you would never select because they're awful and/or awfully written. Lel.

>small and not so small variations on the text of the most famous authors.
Well, naturally. The same happens in music and interpretations of songs from the Great American Songbook.

>You don't prepare AT ALL like in RPGs, even if you're retarded enough to do RR.
Of course you do prepare for RPGs. I will refer you over to published scenarios like The Dying of St Margaret's which includes information how to portray a given NPC. In preparation for this scenario, of course, you go on then and try to find your own interpretation for each, using those hints as loose guidelines.

>Stop embarassing yourself.
I'm not sure what position of mine you're fighting, I'm not even sure if you know. But it's pretty clear that your talking past my points is pretty embarrassing in and of itself desu.

Again, I am not arguing in favor of railroading; I am pointing out the drawbacks of improv in play vis-a-vis content that has been prepared well in advance of actual play. On average.
Sometimes improv comes out just flat amazing.

Let them think they're going off-road, all the while laying the ground work that leads them back to the end-goal.

Task 1: Task 2: It will be enough, the rest of this big pile of retardation for the sake of humiliating yourself isn't worth it.

This

Task #1: Improv theater varies in the degree of professionalism widely. At no point did I refer to amateurism but solely compared improv versus scripted play.
Task #2: Nothing in that post states anything about plot created in amateur theater.

>It will be enough, the rest of this big pile of retardation for the sake of humiliating yourself isn't worth it.
>Asked to provide evidence. Does not provide evidence.
Uh-huh, you sure showed me, buddy.

Dipshit letsplayer improvising 100% of their content while playing a game are millions of times more popular than theater or other YouTube content

>but the outcome must eventually lead from A to D, ireggardless of B and C that could have been omitted.

>must

I think you've spent too much time playing premade modules. There is no "must" there.