# Railroading vs Story Gaming tags: #thoughts Once again, it's time to convert the ephemeral into the long-lasting by taking a complicated response written on Twitter and making sure that it survives in the digital garden. It does no good if this wisdom left in social media stays there and is lost to the ages, right? ---  Except, of course, that it's wrong in the case of story gaming. Story gaming, as it has been known since the early '90s at least, doesn't have anything to do with predetermined conclusions. In fact, it is pretty much anathema to predetermined conclusions. The response to railroading is so negative that you could see the story gaming movement as a direct response to railroading. Railroading is viewed with the utmost disdain. To support this, I refer you to the old archive of The Forge, which was really the seat of story gaming as a movement and as a methodology. http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php (This is my Aslan moment. "Don't tell me the deep lore. I was there when it was written," sort of thing.) It is precisely the absence of "in advance" which defines story gaming as a movement. While the early days still did cling to a lot of the traditional architecture of RPG design, the intention of how it was to be executed beyond the setup was utterly different. In the later evolution of story games as a movement, you see a much higher prevalence of GM-less play, which eliminates the possibility of deciding what the story should be when you start playing. It is literally impossible at that point. If one traces the origin of published story gaming to Apocalypse World (which would be reasonable if technically inaccurate), one of the axioms which AW introduced and which has been maintained faithfully throughout the movement is, "play to find out." I would say that may be the most important axiom, as it turns out. In that simple statement, you find the exact opposite of railroading. It eliminates the possibility of railroading if you stick to it. It seems to be one of the iron pillars around which story gaming is built. To put this in a way that the original story game community would find horrific, but I find very useful when talking to people outside of that community, if you think of D&D and its near derivatives as strongly gamist/simulationist, then the story gaming movement was strongly narrativist/simulationist, except that the simulation was not of physical processes, but of fictive/storytelling processes. This is why you see a lot of uses of screenwriting terms through one of the branches that came out of story gaming. The idea of beats, shots, scenes, arcs, A story, B story, all of those terms all originated with a desire to simulate the actions of storytelling within the context of media. A lot of that language still exists within parts of what the story gaming community splintered into, and it always amuses/pleases me to run into them. But at no point in story gaming is there ever a predetermined conclusion, except insofar as Powered by the Apocalypse playbooks tend to have a fixed number of total advancements available to any given playbook, which can be read as the character having an eventual end, but that's no more a predetermined end than realizing that your game system maxes out at level 20—and so there's an asymmetrical line across the graph there. Hopefully, this has been helpful. —Signed, the last story gamer on X. ---   Exactly so. Believing that giving the players authorship lets them bend the world toward what they want, not what is randomly decided with dice or GM judgment, is to reveal an actual absence of knowledge about how such games play. If this were 1995 or 2004, that would probably be excusable, if not acceptable, but it's not. We have well more than 20 years of actual game releases, many of them quite popular, which fly directly in the face of that as a descriptor. In fact, I would point out that many modern narrative/story games lean more heavily on what is randomly decided with dice and individual judgment than most OSR games, which are now headed back into more encounter tables and random resolution. Or, if I wanted to phrase it more cynically: "Tell me you've never actually read a story game without actually telling me you've never read a story game." Crescendo has it exactly right. OSR games, classically, focus a whole lot more on deliberately directing a story, no matter what the players want, than story gaming. Definitionally. That's part of the reason that I've been so amused over the last several years at seeing OSR, classically D&D-adjacent game designs pivot away from GM prep and more toward doing what story games have been doing for over 20 years in random generation and random interpretation. From my perspective, OSR is becoming less D&D and more story games while simultaneously crowing about how they are completely unlike story games. We get to moments like this where it's clear many of the core proponents who carry the torch for OSR have never actually played a story game or understand how they differ or even what they were ever about. Most of the people who have played story games have definitely played more classically, traditionally designed RPGs. The reverse cannot be seen or said. There's a reason that I refer so many people to playing Ironsworn, which is probably the best manifestation of story game architecture available right now, outside of specific Blades in the Dark derivatives. Being GM-less, it combines two branches of the story game architecture evolution back into a single unified mode of play. On the one hand, you have the influence from Apocalypse World through the Powered by the Apocalypse games down through Blades in the Dark and Forged in the Dark, with a little bit of a swerve with the shift to an action value compared to two challenge dice in order to generate a random result with a potential trinary outcome: miss, weak hit, or strong hit. On the other hand, you have the GM-less games, which were an alternate branch parallel to the Powered by the Apocalypse descent and went through several interesting evolutionary turns with spurs that sometimes shifted over into not just diceless games, but randomlessness games with outcomes dependent on fictional positioning rather than external randomness injection. In Ironsworn, you have both of these lines coming back together into a single influence where intentionality manifests as play to find out, and the GM-lessness comes in with the emphasized focus of fictional positioning, informing the interpretation of the injected randomness. Combine this with the increased emphasis on the oracle—that is, random tables—which are intended to inspire rather than direct, in many cases. And it comes together in one straightforward package, which you don't have to drop a whole bunch of money to somebody for. You can have it for free right now. I think this actually highlights one of the problems with the OSR as a movement. They've never really played anything else. They've never stepped foot outside of the architecture. They've never experimented with playstyles which have nothing to do with what they think all other games must and will always do. From my perspective this is actively painful, as someone who broadly rejected the tenets of OSR from the beginning of my gaming career, way back many, many years ago, because as much as people are uncomfortable with acknowledging this outside of the story gaming community, there were a lot of games that were not descendants of D&D. There were games that came along which were deliberately constructed in a reactionary way to D&D. Hell, you can look at my RPG a Day entry from the 13th to see story gaming in action. https://grimtokens.garden/Articles/RPG+a+Day/2025/Day+13+-+Darkness I started that off with nothing more than a character, which I had the very barest idea of who they were and what they were capable of. The knowledge that I wanted to go into a derelict spaceship and a certain amount of creativity. The rest generated from random prompts on the fly and working the actual exploration system that you find in Starforged. With no GM, I point out. That's not me making decisions from an authorial point of view. That's me making interpretations based on the injection of external random factors. Inspirational roles on the provided oracles and a consideration of the fictional positioning as it happens. It's the exact opposite of what story games were defined as in this thread, but it is exactly what story games actually are.