Railroading and Puppeting: The Two Ways an AI RPG Takes Your Character Away
There are two entirely different ways an AI RPG can take your character away from you, and almost every review of these products only notices one.
The obvious one is railroading: the world quietly steering you back onto the path it intended, closing off the door you tried, making the road you chose lead where the other road went. Players complain about it constantly and reviewers score it.
The second one is puppeting: the narrator acting or speaking as your character. You type that you approach the merchant, and the reply includes what you said to him, how you felt about his price, and the deal you accepted. You never typed any of that. Nobody asked you.
We score both on one axis, because the outcome is identical — you have stopped being the author of your own character — and across 28 products measured on seven axes from first-hand play — 16 platforms and 12 prompt-games — Player Agency is the most compressed of the seven. It averages 2.25 out of 5. Fifteen of 28 products score exactly 2. Nothing scores 5.
Freedom Is Not Agency
The reason puppeting goes unnoticed is that it hides inside generous games.
It is natural to assume that a permissive AI RPG must have good agency — if it lets you do anything, surely it isn’t taking control? But permissiveness and authorship are different properties, and one does not guarantee the other.
FableAI is the clearest case in our directory. It gives you a great deal of freedom and real narrative depth. Nothing railroads you back onto a plotted path. It scores Player Agency — 2 anyway, because it occasionally acts or speaks on your behalf: narrating your character doing something you never typed, or answering for them mid-scene.
That is the whole distinction in one product. Freedom is how much the game permits. Agency is whether you remain the author. A game can hand you the entire world and still take the pen out of your hand for a sentence at a time — and because everything else feels expansive, you tend to blame yourself for the vague sense that the story is happening slightly without you.
Why Models Puppet
Puppeting isn’t a design decision anyone made. It’s what a text predictor does when you leave it a gap.
A language model completes the most plausible continuation. When your input ends at “I approach the merchant,” the most plausible continuation of a story is the full scene — the greeting, the haggling, the outcome. Stopping to ask what you say next is, in narrative terms, an odd thing for a text to do. The model isn’t overriding you. It’s finishing the paragraph, because finishing paragraphs is the entire job.
This is also why puppeting gets worse as sessions get longer. The agency rule you set in your opening message competes with hours of subsequent prose in which the model has been writing complete scenes uninterrupted. Recent behaviour is the strongest signal available, so its own past output becomes the pattern it follows — the same distance problem behind campaigns falling apart at turn 50.
The Four Shapes It Takes
Worth learning to recognise, because they escalate.
Narrated action. The mildest and most common. “You draw your sword and step between them.” You had not decided to.
Invented dialogue. Your character speaks in quotation marks, saying something you did not write. This one stings most, because voice is the largest part of a character.
Assigned emotion. “You feel a chill of recognition.” The game has told you what your character thinks about something. Subtle, and it accumulates: a character whose reactions are assigned isn’t yours any more.
Pre-resolved action. The worst, and the one that overlaps with fairness. You state an intention and the reply contains both the attempt and its outcome, so there was never a moment where it could have gone differently. Your action was reported rather than adjudicated.
The Two Extremes, and What They Cost
The ends of this axis are the most useful illustration in our whole dataset, because two products sitting near the same genre land at opposite poles.
| Product | Player Agency | Determinism & Fairness | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Dungeon | 4 | 2 | Accepts anything you bring it |
| Dunia | 0 | 1 | Refuses actions outright |
AI Dungeon holds the highest Player Agency score we have awarded, above every structured platform. It goes with whatever you type, however absurd, which is exactly why its reputation rests on surreal, dreamlike storytelling. It scores 4 rather than 5 because the same design that grants the freedom removes the pushback — nothing is ever hard — which is why its Determinism & Fairness sits at 2.
Dunia holds the only 0. It refuses to let your character take certain actions at all. Not “you try and fail” — you may not try. And notably it does not buy anything with that restriction: its fairness score is 1, the joint-lowest. This is the point we make at length in why your AI dungeon master is too generous: restricting the player does not purchase consistency.
The gap between those two rows is the axis. Everything else in the directory is somewhere in the compressed middle, and the fact that nothing has scored 5 tells you this is unsolved rather than merely uneven.
The third case: a 1 with no restriction anywhere
There is a way to score near the bottom of this axis without refusing the player anything, and WyrdTale is the clearest example we have measured. It scores Player Agency — 1 while imposing almost no limits on what you may attempt. It simply keeps writing your character — dialogue you never typed, attributed to you, and often enough the action itself resolved before you chose it.
This is the entire argument of this page in one product. Dunia takes your agency by telling you no. WyrdTale takes it while saying yes to everything. Judged on freedom alone the second one looks like the generous option, and a player who only reads permissiveness would never see the difference — which is why we score authorship rather than permission.
What “Quest Design” Actually Means Here
The design consequence lands hardest on quests, because a quest is where a game’s intentions are most concentrated.
Most AI RPG quests are written as sequences: go here, talk to this person, retrieve the thing. That structure works perfectly until the player does something the sequence didn’t anticipate — at which point the game has two bad options. It can railroad, quietly making your alternative lead back to step three. Or it can abandon the quest entirely, which is why so many AI campaigns accumulate half-finished threads nobody resolves.
The version that survives contact with a player is a quest defined by state rather than steps: a goal, a set of obstacles, and a record of what has changed. Then going off-path isn’t a deviation to be corrected, because there was no path — there was a situation, and situations accommodate arbitrary approaches by construction.
That requires somewhere to keep the state, which is the same requirement underneath real mechanics and NPCs with their own goals. Three of the seven axes turn out to bottleneck on the same missing thing.
How to Take the Pen Back
Agency is the axis a player can most effectively defend without the product’s help.
- State the rule in your opening message. The AI describes the world and other characters; it never narrates your character’s thoughts, words or actions. Explicit, in the first message, before any pattern is set.
- Correct the first slip immediately. “Don’t narrate my action — ask me what I do.” One correction usually holds for a long stretch. An uncorrected slip becomes the baseline, and by the tenth instance you are arguing with a habit rather than a mistake.
- End your turns on the intention, not the outcome. “I try to pick the lock” leaves the result open. “I pick the lock and slip inside” hands over the resolution and invites the model to keep going.
- Ask before it resolves. If a reply pre-resolves something important, roll it back and ask what would determine the outcome. Most models will produce a reasonable answer and then honour it.
Our guide to running an RPG in a plain chat covers the full set of habits, and the prompt builder writes the agency rule into an opening prompt for you.
If agency is what you care about most, rank the directory by that axis directly, and the per-axis winners guide names who takes each one.
Agency is one of seven problems an AI RPG has to solve, and three of them turn out to share a bottleneck — the seven problems, ranked by how badly the field handles them sets out which and why.
How We Measured This
Player Agency is defined on methodology v1.0 as two failures on one axis: whether you can act outside the offered path without being railroaded back onto it, and whether the narrator stays out of your character’s mouth. A GM that decides what you do, says what you said, or resolves your action before you have taken it has removed you from your own story just as surely as one that blocks the route.
Scores are 0–5 from first-hand play by Rukka, using a fixed probe set. The agency probes deliberately attempt actions outside any offered path — which is how Dunia’s refusals were found at all. In ordinary play the same product had read as merely guided, because when a game gently steers you, you tend to go where it steers.
A 0 means the capability is absent rather than poor, and we don’t score pre-release software. The figures here cover all 28 scored products; the Arcanum AI RPG Benchmark publishes the platform half, all 16, every axis. If a number here doesn’t match your experience of the same product, tell us: [email protected].
Frequently Asked Questions
What is puppeting in an AI RPG? Puppeting is when the narrator acts or speaks for your character — narrating you doing something you never typed, answering a question on your behalf, or resolving your action before you have taken it. It is distinct from railroading, which is the world pushing you back onto an intended path. Both remove you from your own story, which is why we score them on the same axis, but puppeting is far easier to miss because it can happen inside a game that otherwise feels generous and open.
How do I stop an AI from controlling my character? State an explicit agency rule in your opening message: the AI describes the world and other characters, but never narrates your character’s thoughts, words or actions. Then correct the first violation the moment it happens — something as short as ‘don’t narrate my action, ask me what I do’ usually holds for a long stretch afterwards. Correcting immediately matters because an uncorrected slip becomes the new baseline the model builds on.
Which AI RPG gives the most player freedom? AI Dungeon, at 4 on Player Agency — the highest we have awarded, and above every structured platform in our directory. It goes with whatever you bring it, however absurd, which is the origin of its surreal reputation. It scores 4 rather than 5 because the same design that grants the freedom removes the pushback, which is why its Determinism & Fairness sits at 2. Nothing in our directory scores 5 on player agency.
Is a game that refuses my actions broken? It depends what it refuses. Refusing an unearned success is a fairness system working correctly. Refusing to let your character attempt something they should simply be able to try is an agency failure, and we score it as one — Dunia holds the only 0 on this axis for exactly that. The distinction is whether the game is adjudicating your action or preventing it.
Does more freedom mean better agency? No, and conflating the two is the most common mistake in this category. Freedom is how much the game permits. Agency is whether you remain the author of your own character. FableAI is the clearest case of the gap: it offers real narrative freedom and nothing railroads you, yet it scores 2 because it occasionally acts or speaks on your behalf. A game can hand you the whole world and still take the pen out of your hand for a sentence at a time.