Yesterday, I had a bad session, and I wish to have a second opinion.
There is railroading, a concept that you talked a lot about, and I wish to present to your wisdom this new concept that I will call : gagging.
Gagging is when a DM… talks to much. Maybe it’s describing every single action and consequence, maybe it’s overdescripting areas and people, maybe it’s not letting the players talk enough when it’s their time, it’s something in between these 3 and more.
Every player know not to interrupt the DM. So that also means that as the DM, you might want to consider if what you are saying matters enough, interests the players, is required or not, and if your players are receptive to it to some degree.
I think it’s a bigger problem whenever a DM is following a module… badly. By badly, I mean they want to convey everything the module tells them to convey, but they also try to put their spin on it, making them talk more hesitantly, slower, with more pauses. If they would just read the descriptions aloud, it would be smoother and faster. If it were their creation, they probably could give details and descriptions easier since it’s theirs. But when DMs try to go in between and don’t prepare enough, it makes every description a crawl that you stop listening to midpoint because you know it won’t really matter enough to force yourself to listen to it.
The main point of gagging as a concept to me is not so much to force players down a specific path without their input, as railroading is more or less that but with nuances, but more a way to keep the players from talking and inputing their choices, dialog or interactions into the game.
Since DMs have the mike when they talk, and since interrupting them is taboo (which I fully agree with), it then becomes very important to weight what they say and how they say it in a way that don’t turn players off.
And yes, yesterday I had what I would call a gagging DM. It wasn’t the first session with them, but probably the last, as I lost complete interest in the campaign. Not only because of the gagging of course. But it fucking sucks for me to leave a campaign in which I had some amount of fun, but not enough to stick around.