So long since I've posted here, I'm kinda scared to come back out and post again, but needs must.
And really, our session have been going kind of slow recently, alongside people unable to make it on the day, my lack of active roleplay, and a little bit (read: a lot) of actual get paid to live work, there's not been much to post.
However, here's a question to anyone who reads this: What do you think constitutes a Railroad Plot?
This goes back to my creative differences with A, the guy who runs the campaign where I'm playing Seltyiel, but his premise was "It'll be a very open Sandbox Campaign, free to go where you want, with a heavy 'Game of Thrones' influence", so given the fact that the party has been forced into dealing with a cult of 7 Deadly Sins that are tearing the land apart from within, inciting civil war, using the political chaos to pull in more recruits, and spread pain and fear, we don't quite have the freedom of choice advertised, but it's his first campaign, and I'm hardly innocent of forcing people onto rail when I run my games, for the sake of moving things forward, even if it was little (read: a lot) out of the ordinary.
The problem was I'd come up with something that sounded really interesting as setting dressing, such as an underwater cthonian city, populated by Skum who had a trade agreement with several nearby towns to trade fish for breeding stock (women) (look I might not be the most progressive of people, treating women as an item to be traded, but it was a 5 minute idea, Skum need to kidnap women to breed, they have no females of their own, and it raised an interesting, if ethically odd, reason for there to be very little farming) which the player wanted to go and investigate, despite the fact it would've taken them drastically away from the plot. (They didn't have any way of breathing underwater was the way I kept them moving).
These side-paths would take them away from the main motivation, which was a Ring was sucking the soul from a party member, and they only had so much time to get rid of it before he died, and while I tried to keep them motivated the set dressing would often than not, either completely catch their interest against what I had planned, or be so uninteresting that they'd ignore what I had written for the session, and go down the main plot road.
Contrast to A's campaign, where the set dressing is very interesting and the world is extremely complete and fleshed out, but to the point where we can spend almost 45 minutes of session time on NOTHING, if he has written up a character he is going to roleplay them, whether or not we like it, he had V and S, travelling on a cart to their destination (over 2 days of nothing but travel, with 1 fight) take 2 & 1/2 sessions because he would roleplay each morning with a 15 minute conversation between the NPC's, and then another 15 minute conversation between the PC's and the NPC, before settling into a purple prose description of the landscape (he's a good writer, just so very wordy). But beyond those character's he has written up, there's nothing.
We are on the plot railroad, going at the grand speed of "Hold up guys, I'm going to roleplay with myself some-more for the next 30 minutes" and if we try to go off of the rails he brings us back on by the sheer virtue of there's nothing else to do, "we want to go explore an old abandoned castle", "sorry you're being smuggled into enemy territory via crate, no time", "I'd like to go the city where my family's killer is rumoured to be" "You're a prisoner of the Hellknight, and you're not going anywhere my Hellknight NPC isn't going" "Can I go explore and pick up wild herbs for my alchemy" "sure, if you don't mind the rest of the party leaving you behind, you're in a rush after all"
I suppose it comes down to the word "SANDBOX" here, I thought we'd be acting as courtly agents, politics, intrigue, assassination, choosing which house to foster for the realm, and all that jazz, you know, free will.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is I would give, all of my characters levels, gold, and gear, for the chance to have a choice in what we do, and how we do it, especially in a supposedly sandbox campaign, but at the same time I can imagine how my player's would feel the same, so it's less an issue of avoiding writing a railroading campaign plot, and more of making sure that your Players, and their Characters, are invested in the story, motivated to see it through, and that their interests are being met.
This can only be done by talking to your players, asking what they'd like to see more of, and trying your hardest to balance all of this, and still fucking up because it's impossible to please everyone, every session.
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Unless you happen to be me.
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In which case nobody likes your sessions
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Cause I'm just awesome like that
