How would you GM a Metal Gear (-ish) campaign without railroading

Paranoia.
The party are the mission-control.

>>51337336
Everyone is John would suit that better, thought. The voices are the mission control, etc.

For an operatives game I'd probably use GURPS with psionics and lotsa military and espionage supplemets or Shadowrun. Still, have exactly no idea how not to railroad operatives.

I've played one over roll20. We were kinda railroaded in that HQ decided what mission we were sent on, but the missions were more like "There's some fucker in some warlord's basement in Uzbekistan, figure out a way to get to him, and get him out of the country alive." So I guess you could say we were railroaded?

We used heavily modified Only War, psionics rules were much simpler than DH psykers.

>>51336857
Depends on which Metal Gear games you model your campaign after.

MGS 1 to 3 were kind of railroady by design since the entire thing is one mission that takes place in real time.
Peace Walker and especially The Phantom Pain on the other hand were more focused on player freedom, you select your tools of choice before jumping into a shorter mission that you can tackle however you want.

I'm sure by making a few modifications to the core concept you could make a campaign based on the earlier games less railroady but the easiest thing would probably be to base it around the later games.

The players get a few outlines on what a mission will be about along some disposable cash/ressources provided by the employer and they get their own choice of how to proceed from there.

It probably wouldn't hurt if there was also some common plot threads that connect those missions together, go completely crazy here it wouldn't be Metal Gear without a recurring philosophical motiv and multiple twists about the government being somehow involved and characters actually being double/tripple/quadruple agents.

Shit now I wish I still had all my bookmarks for the previous threads /tg/ has talked about Metal Gear, there have been tons of pretty great discussions about this already.
I'll see if I can maybe find it again.

Some single stand alone ideas for inspiration that I still remember from those threads:
>the PCs are a black ops team similar to Foxhound employed by the government
>the PCs are part of a PMC which gets regular lucrative missions but has to compete agains other PMCs. (can be set during either the Diamond Dogs and MSF era or during the War Economy if you want futuristic elements
>PCs are a black ops team that decides to go rogue, they have to fortify a defensive position and hold out against soldiers and agents send to stop them while negotiating demands. Basically MGS1 and 2 but from the perspective of the bad guys.

>>51337868
Minor thing I forgot to mention is also that the power level you want your players to have is a factor.

If they are a Foxhound style team then they're probably also about as strong as Foxhound, a group of people with combined peak human and super human abilities.

On the other hand if they are just some people on the payrole of a PMC they are probably only slightly above average humans with real weaknesses that depend on each other to succeed in their missions.