All Aboard?

Why hello there. Its your favorite step-dad DM, here to whine about another aspect of gaming with his step-kids. Today's grand topic: Railroading.
What is railroading? I'll shove you down the abyss of TV Tropes and cite what morsels they have for our topic.

"In short, the GM takes any measure necessary to ensure there is only one direction the campaign may proceed — his planned direction. This can manifest in any number of imaginable ways; some of them subtle, others ... not so much."

Shamelessly stolen from TV Trope's topic.

Historically, railroading has been a nasty word in the tabletop community... Type1ninja has even resorted to referring to it as by saying, "If there’s a word for 'hissing, foaming at the mouth, smashing through walls, tearing out my own hair,”' then that word." Being pulled by the nose to get something accomplished is something I admit I absolutely hate... Final Fantasy XIII comes to mind.

So, you'd think as a DM, you go through all these lengths to avoid a linear plot and allow your players to have whatever agency they so desire. You'd think the PCs would get so immersed that someone knocking on your door would make them jump out of their seats. And, you'd think nobody would say they're bored.

But yet again, we're dealing with The Growly Goats™, and we get to throw all we assume about tabletop gaming out the window- unless it was incorporated in Candyland.

I've done a great deal to read through published adventures to try and adapt them to a flexible, off-the-rails style, but I'm not really having much luck. My kids won't take any hooks that these modules cast, no matter how tempting they are to follow. Piles of gold to kill a goblin chief? Nope, not tasty. Free reign to a castle if you do a fetch quest? Bass Pro customers get better luck flinging their strings out of their pontoons to catch bass.

Let's look at our first example, with Risk - our nine-year-old thief- and Scooby the Red - our five-year-old fighter. They recently had turned in a small fetch quest (don't look at me at how I got them to actually get into the dungeon) and were hanging out around a tavern, and I hadn't a whole lot of ideas as to what to do next. The party was goofing around and I had nothing planned at the end of the quest, but had wanted to set up a lead for them. Scooby looked out the window in boredom, and saw a random villager dragging a huge bag down the street.

Scooby goes to inquire, and my mook tells her someone paid him about ten gold to dump this bag into the lake, no questions asked. I'm not sure what was in her head, but my youngster inquired how much he'd sell that bag for. He asked for double the price, and it easily whittled down their coffers. Couldn't sell lemonade this easily.

The fox is in the henhouse, repeat, the fox is in the henhouse- my players have a hook, and they're eager to investigate something strange. Scooby takes the bag, returns to the tavern, and the party gathers around the bag in the main hall. Cue the creepy music - they find a gruesome bag of satyr legs, arms, and heads. You'd think, "Whoa, this is super creepy, mafia style stuff going on here!" and you'd have a ton of questions.

This guy is about as surprised as the average gamer would be at a bag full of body parts.

But we're dealing with The Growly Goats™ here, and we get to throw our baby out with the bathwater. So, what does our glorious party do? They ditched the bag in their room for some poor sod to deal with, as its too damn gross. Seems our hook wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.

Its been two sessions later, and the party doesn't even remember our bag of corpse parts. I hope they're not going to go back to that tavern... else they're gonna have a lot of explaining to do. Then again, maybe I do hope they go back. I'd love to see what they do. Maybe this plot hook still has a juicy worm wriggling on it.

Perttu Vedenoja has suggested "giving the players an interesting NPC to buy those supplies from as a hook recommended though - showing instead of telling what this roleplaying part of the game is and so on." I've tried doing that suggestion too. I had thrown them into Dunnsmouth, and there was a crazy cat lady who had poison lining our walls. Shadowneko, our resident magic-user, was able to read all the mason jars' labels, and noped the hell out of there. "She's got about a gallon of arsenic, and there's no way I'm going to stick around!"

The only real way my kids will get anything done is if I throw them in a new spot and don't let them leave. After they've recovered from jet lag, I plop down a few scene elements. My most recent incursion was a bench that, when sat upon, throws you into the ethereal with a failed spell save. They absolutely loved that, interacting with a device and trying to figure it out.

Honestly, I really don't know what to do for the rugrats here. At least they're not offended when they go Amtrak.