Is it railroading if I make the first enemy so that the only way for a low level party to defeat him is by killing him...

I'll keep that in mind, I'll add things to the flowchart for different results.

It depends on the circumstances.
Is... is that pic part of an imageset or something?
He's killed their families? In that case, it doesn't matter. While it would be railroading if they tried to spare him and you refused to let them do so, they won't, so who cares?

Create a situation in which they hate him and don't care that they have to kill him. Or have him attack with lethal force and create a situation in which killing him is needed so they don't die.

Oh, I've got another massive fucking problem with this setting. While I've designed the world, flowchart of events, and written descriptions of NPCs and their roles, I haven't assigned it to a plah system yet. Making the characters won't be hard, but the problem is what system to use. I like the characters and world way too much to bog it down with the pathfinder mechanics, but the most important class in the setting is only really any good in pathfinder. I'm too inexperienced at this point to properly balance a homebrew system.

Kind of but not really. My advise is to start off linear but then open things up more after the players have an objective

You should also try to hide your railroading as much as possible. You should let your players go down whatever path they want, but make sure that all of those paths lead to the same destination

Use GURPS.
Seriously though, could you be more specific about what exactly your issue is?
also, you should actually use Fate.

Fighter, clerics, and paladins will be their main enemies. While the party and their allies can be any class of any race, the force that opposes their main goal is composed of humans, holy knights of the god of law.

Unless the players try really hard (and could reasonably succeed) to spare the guy via restraining him and the dice back them up, no.
Also I recommend you keep a plan B to set the campaign in motion, just in case - even if it's a really shitty one. Like someone saw them knocking the guy out cold but they THOUGHT they killed him, so the events are set in motion nonetheless. Maybe the party really didn't kill the guy, but someone else finished the job after they restrained him/put him out.
If they hand the guy over to the authorities, someone can kill them while he's in the cell and bribe the officers to say the party killed him all along, etc. There are multiple ways to work around it.

tl;dr it will be railroading if you force the hand of the players even if they really want to avoid killing the guy

Just have him kill himself and the party get blamed if they refuse to off him.

Jesus christ, that sounds horribly more like railroading than any other suggestion. It's basically just "lop he ded" without even a half-baked justification.

Why not just use 5e? Or GURPS?

>lop he ded"
Please ignore this gibberish, "lol he died" was the intended text

Because I'm really bad at those systems and my players prefer D&D 2,3,3.5,3.pf

Do you think it is likely your players will want to spare him? If the party strongly trends towards pursing non-lethal resolutions, then you should probably avoid railroading them into a lethal one. Why is it important that he dies? Is it important that the players specifically kill him? Can you adjust the situation in such a way to compensate for him not dying, or for him dying in some other way (berserk minion, lawful execution, suicide)?

Party will probably kill him, it IS important that they kill him. I'm intending for them to be noticed by the authorities and a warrant put out for their elimination.

So from this it sounds like you want the god of law mad at them for commiting murder against this cleric-necromancer?Is he the servant of a death god? Or just an ex-cleric?

Okay, so the goal is to have the authorities mad at them. The means is the battle against the cleric. Let's suppose for a moment that the players decide not to kill him. This leads to two options. The players decide to try and turn him in to the authorities, or they don't and do something else with him. If they try to turn him into the authorities, is there any reason for the authorities to believe them over him? Because he can always say they're a bunch of nutso vigilantes who kidnapped him. If they take the other option and toss him in a cell somewhere, he's as good as dead with the bonus that he could potentially escape and fake his death.

Well, you have shitty players AND you're too stupid to be helped, then.

Go back to wherever you came from. We're full.

Nah, I'll probably end up using GURPS

Yes, no, maybe, it's complicated. A lawful good but very strictly religious theocracy rules the part of the world in which they will start, the cleric is a member of it. Being a vigilante is highly illegal, killing or harming a member of the order for any reason when you are not a rightful authority is punishable by death and only death regardless of the reason, until a heretic is excommunicated any harm done to them is treated as a sacriledge and high treason.

Don't laugh

It's only railroading if the players catch on.
If you make it seem natural, if you make it seem like THEY chose to do something, they have no complaints.
Manipulate their decision process.
Just know that they will be unpredictable.
If you place him in front of something that they want and give him a diehard reason for not wanting them to get it, you will probably see him killed.

It's really easy to get authorities upset over a bunch of adventurers. Set things up so that the PCs are likely to kill him by making him evil and dangerous, sure, but don't outright force them. If the party surprises you and handles it lawfully, go along with it.

Then the bigger baddy hires assassins to deal with these meddlers, and the PCs have to find what's up there. Authorities aren't going to be super helpful there probably so the PCs will go dealing with the criminal underworld, which is a very good place to get the PCs legitimately guilty of something that gets the ball rolling.

Alternatively, the guy gets busted or bailed out of jail and causes more problems leading to him getting put down on the second engagement.

What you should be concerned about is not a railroad but a gotcha. Players usually kill stuff to defeat it, so I don't think you have to worry about that. However, it's still a dick move to say, "Oh, you killed this guy? Well now everyone hates you and three civil wars started up."

Prepare alternate reasons for the events of the campaign to be set in motion. And if you want brownie points, make these apparent before the PCs go off to kill the necromancer dude. I would caution you against using railroading and telling yourself "It's all okay because the players won't notice!" because they will. Unless they're drooling idiots, that is. They might not tell you that they're pissed off, but it'll simmer and sour things later down the road. Feel free to ignore all of this advice if you know for a fact that your players don't care about this. But try it anyway because new things can be fun!

This

Depending on what your planning you can give them the option for the party to capture said villain and a guard or NPC pull a Jack Ruby on him and kill him. You still get the villain dead in the end but give the PC players a choice.

>Oh, you killed this guy? Well now everyone hates you and three civil wars started up
It won't be THAT badly written more like, a continously escalating conflict that will, very far down the road, force them to take the aid of the kingdoms sworn enemies, or something of a similar equivalent depending on what they do.

>It won't be THAT badly written

No shit you think that.

You're the one writing it. Of course your own farts will smell heavenly to you.

You're being told that you're wrong.

>don't laugh
It's a pretty normal fantasy story. Not sure what you think I'd be laughing at.

And it sounds like no matter what they do the authorities will get mad (they're vigilante-ing it up). If they go to turn the guy in, you can just have the authorities arrest all of them and then have a jailbreak scenario.

Players notice plot railroading most of the time, but if you're subtle about it they rarely recognize the quantum railroad. For those unfamiliar: you let them do what they want, and then whenever they go to do X you pick something out of your premade material and that's what is at X now.

Tell me what to do right then.

Read this
thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots
Read this, keeping in mind it's written with tongue firmly in cheek
hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2012/01/on-superiority-of-railroad-method-over.html
And if you're feeling masochistic, read
thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7949/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-1-the-plotted-approach
and
hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/search/label/series (Quantum Ogre)
If you manage to get through all of those without having your brain come dribbling out of your ears, you'll be good to go.

That is cancer of the highest degree. You might as well not be playing a game if you aren't going to allow any deviance from your plotline.

Because the party will always do exactly what you expect them to, and they won't notice the rails when you "but thou must them"

The problem with railroading is the lack of consequences. The game just gets boring if my character is expected to survive the entire game. What's the point of not trying to fight the dragon when you won't get your ass kicked because the DM needs you for his story.

>my players prefer 3.pf

oh no
oh no no no no no

Well, they'll probably be fine with railroading because character creation is so tedious.

Is he notGarland?

>The Alexandrian
How do you type with dicks in your hands?

Quantum railroading isn't about forcing a story direction, it's about not wasting content you spent 5 hours working on. In fact, the whole point is that you can use the same content in multiple context. Sorry you've never read about it, it's really useful.

>Quantum railroading isn't about forcing a story direction, it's about not wasting content you spent 5 hours working on. In fact, the whole point is that you can use the same content in multiple context. Sorry you've never read about it, it's really useful.

The thing is, you're lying to your players, and betting that they won't catch you every time you do it. Quantum ogres work to a point; and that's the point when you get caught.

If you already know what's going to happen, why play it out? Especially if it's the very first thing they're going to do(that matters). Why not just start with them having just killed the enemy?

Sounds like it's EXACTLY that badly written.

>it won't be that badly written

Have you run it by anyone besides your Mom or something?

You aren't as good a writer as you think you are.

Please tell me how exactly that's going to happen.

>How do you type with dicks in your hands?
What do you have against the guy? I'd agree with you if he was solely linking to -C's stuff. That guy is a pain in the ass to read.

I dunno, why don't you tell me why you think it won't. Better safe than sorry.

Unless I'm deeply misremembering something, he's the dipshit who circlejerks about how fantastically realistic D&D is and used to sperg out constantly about FORGITES. He'd be a joke if he didn't have such a rabid fanbase.

Forgies and Ron Edwards dickriders were pretty obnoxious in the early and mid 2000s.

Oh, huh, I only read his articles on preparing for games. They were pretty good. I guess I'm glad I didn't see all that shit and get a bad first impression.

I suggest semi-quantum railroading. The PCs can choose to go wherever, but certain events are bound to happen sooner or later.

>The thing is, you're lying to your players
We're playing a game that's entirely the product of my demented mind, if they didn't want me to be making stuff up they should run it themselves.

I'll give you that, but this guy took it a crazy extreme. And he continued it well after the Forge stopped existing. Maybe he's cooled on it now?

He's kinda nuts. I'm sure he has some good advice amongst the insanity, but I'd never recommend him to anyone. Even when he's not just plain wrong (D&D's stats being an excellent model of reality, including IQ!), he's pretty fanatically insistent on how the game should be played, and if you disagree with him you're a horrible Forgite who's out to ruin the hobby.

Just give the person you want them to kill a really cool hat.

Their days will be numbered.

So what.

Zak Smith is an arrogant motherfucker that tries to ruin people's careers and really deserves to have someone break his nose, but that doesn't mean he hasn't written some advice for playing the game.

Ah, I finally get it. I'm not creating a series of events to send players through, I'm creating a world for players to interact with.

>How do you type with dicks in your hands?
Not him, but I'm friends with someone who does ERP, and asked them. Apparently either you type normally for one side of the keyboard and switch to hunt and peck for the other, you hunt and peck throughout, or you, horror of horrors, remove your dick from your hand for a short period of time.
Not him, but if you link someone to Jackass X and say "Jackass X's opinions are good" this is assumed to apply to all of Jackass X's opinions instead of just Jackass X's opinions on any one given thing. Anyway, the moral of the story is you should always have a disclaimer like "this person is an asshole but this one specific thing they say is good advice."

I did some googling and it turns out I was misremembering him - was conflating him with Tarnowski. In my defense, they've both realismfags who have written dumb "D&D is realistic" articles. Alexander is still too much grognard for my tastes, but I retract my accusations of foreign dicks in hands.

This, being a GM is all about learning to railroad so that your players don't notice. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. This is the hard truth.

The meat of ttrpgs is decision making. If a party is just playing though the GM's story it isn't a game, it's just a bunch of jerks rolling dice. The ability for stories to emerge from play is the greatest benefit of table top games. When you force your preconceived plot over top of that you rob the game of it's most interesting opportunities.
Obviously preparation is important, creating characters and situations a head of time is needed for a GM to sanely handle any game of scope. But once the scenario hits the table it should be allowed to progress however it does. Maybe it's a disaster, maybe your surprised, maybe it happens exactly as planned but whatever goes down is the responsibility of everyone at the table and there is something thrilling about that.

Players are often idiots, GMs are often idiots with great responsibility. But neither side can grow if they are constantly stifled by preconceptions. A player has no reason to become better if they're actions aren't there own and a GM will never learn to deal with players if they always assume full control.

The game, most or even all games I think, are about action and reaction. The back and forth of players and GM. If the events are going one way and not the other then one side has no reason to be at the table.

If I'm a player I'm not really needed in a railroad campaign, I might as well read a book. If I'm a GM why would I bother running a railroad campaign I might as well sit my friend down and tell them a story I wrote.

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Except it's not an all or nothing affair. One can have situations where decisions are not being made and ones where decisions are being made in the same campaign.

Every good GM does that to a degree. This is because even best improvised storytellers need to plan their story before for it to make sense and be consistent.

An RPG with no railroading at all wouldn't have any real story.

Some people are fine with that. For every way in which you can play D&D there is probably someone somewhere who prefers it.

>Every good GM does that to a degree. This is because even best improvised storytellers need to plan their story before for it to make sense and be consistent.

With mythic solo roleplaying this is not needed

Striderscribe on tumblr

Thanks.

This is a well thought out, yet incredibly long-winded way of saying, "Prepare plot points and characters, then adjust according to player action."

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>How would I get caught?
>I dunno, tell me how you'd get caught
user...

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>ambiguous language
Oops.
Tell me why you think you wouldn't get caught.

Not even the dude you're talking to man, just pointing out how stupid you are for basically asking someone to give you the answer that proves your position right.

That's not how an argument works.

The only time I've ever seen any form of railroading being a problem, is when playing with faceless anons.

Okay, so I totally fucked up. Forget about making up a polt, I should just create a world with the conflict going on and give the players a reason to start adventuring.

I don't know, having somebody come to their own conclusions why your point is right seems like a valid tactic.

I'm just a random asshole though, don't mind me. I barely even followed the chain.

but that's not how lawful good works.
>regardless of the reason
is NEVER EVER a phrase that would appear in a lawful good code of conduct

Alright OP here's what you do. Opening scene: "You killed the guy, here's some background now we're going to go around and each mad lib in some of the details of what's going on (ie. Where are you? How'd you kill him? Complicating factors, etc. etc.)" Then you give each of the players a thing they get to decide on regarding what happened which gives them ownership and investment into the game while preserving whatever railroad you've got planned.

It kinda is. But railroading is not always a bad thing.

Sweet goodness those thighs.