Railroading has always been an issue at game tables. Once adventures moved out of dungeons and added more elements from genre fiction, one common fashion in which GMs fail involves trying to force PCs along a set plot line. Some of this may arise from the early published adventure modules being for tournament play and assuming the party followed an expected line of play from one round to the next. Modules published after those also assumed a general sequence of events contained in the descriptions of encounters.

The problem with this is that good play involves player choices on how to pursue goals, not a script that they have to follow. Thus, we’ve always heard lamentations about GMs precluding player choices by railroading parties. I maintain that a sign of good classic play is that there are no railroads.

Now, adding situations of the sort found in genre literature expands the RPG experience well beyond dungeon delving and the types of stories that can arise. A classic approach to stories is to let them play out as they will, based solely on the player choices, and avoid forcing specific developments. Setting up supposed climactic scenes is possible *only* when actual play has lead to them…and certainly not possible before the PCs have even begun play. So, any adventure material written with expected climaxes just doesn’t work in classic play, at all.

Classic style play is all about following trails from one situation to another, without any idea about which trail the PCs are going to follow at any given time. The party isn’t pushed to enter the Haunted Forest at point X and then encounter Y, Z, V, and Q in that order, though it could play that way. The party could just as easily, based on previous play, enter somewhere else and run into V, then Z, and never run into Y and Q.

This is all part of playing to find out what happens. The players have to be able to choose what their characters do in the world, without outcomes being preordained. They don’t have to end up fighting the evil sorceror if they don’t want to and the GM shouldn’t be trying to force the issue.