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"Railroading" is just a pejorative term for...
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<blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 5397980" data-attributes="member: 2303"><p>There is a spectrum of almost everything. In this case, from extreme railroading to extreme sandbox. Lets make a hypotetical scale of 0-100, where 0 is zero freedom and 100 is no direction at all and complete freedom. Each player/DM has a part of this spectrum where they are comfortable. Things enough outside the comfort zone on the high end is railroading, things enough out of the comfort zone on the low end is... some other pejorative term.</p><p></p><p>A word like "railroading" has little absolute meaning. For most of us it simply means "too much plot structure". And anything "too much" is by definition not good. But as always with pejoratives, some people will identify with them and feel a need to defend them. This guy had probably been in some unstructured games and didn't like it; in opposition to that he defends railroading. This means his comfort zone is a bit higher on the spectrum, maybe he had some bad sandbox experiences. He choose to identify with railroading, a controversial term, as a means to get attention. It seems to have worked too.</p><p></p><p>Notice that the 0-100 spectrum of values are of course completely arbitrary. For any proposed value of zero, you can always make up some even more "free" and unstructured game. The same goes for the complete railroad, there is no "absolute 100".</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Starfox, post: 5397980, member: 2303"] There is a spectrum of almost everything. In this case, from extreme railroading to extreme sandbox. Lets make a hypotetical scale of 0-100, where 0 is zero freedom and 100 is no direction at all and complete freedom. Each player/DM has a part of this spectrum where they are comfortable. Things enough outside the comfort zone on the high end is railroading, things enough out of the comfort zone on the low end is... some other pejorative term. A word like "railroading" has little absolute meaning. For most of us it simply means "too much plot structure". And anything "too much" is by definition not good. But as always with pejoratives, some people will identify with them and feel a need to defend them. This guy had probably been in some unstructured games and didn't like it; in opposition to that he defends railroading. This means his comfort zone is a bit higher on the spectrum, maybe he had some bad sandbox experiences. He choose to identify with railroading, a controversial term, as a means to get attention. It seems to have worked too. Notice that the 0-100 spectrum of values are of course completely arbitrary. For any proposed value of zero, you can always make up some even more "free" and unstructured game. The same goes for the complete railroad, there is no "absolute 100". [/QUOTE]
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