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The much, much bigger prejudice is about religion. The Merchant of Venice isn't about ethnicity, it's about Judaism. It's the reason why they hate Shylock, for example--and why Shylock's 100% ethnically-identical daughter Jessica marrying Antonio is completely acceptable. Because the critical...

Widespread racial prejudice is primarily an invention of the Renaissance or later, and it grew out of the extremely unfortunate interaction of multiple societal traditions that were not...that. Remember, Shakespeare had a "Blackamoor" character, and nobody thought that was particularly...

There seems to have been no more malice between actually different species than between regional groups of "our" species. We have some evidence of cohabitation, often at a mild distance, but inhabiting the same places and not seeing (for example) sudden increases in deaths caused by weapons in...

Part of my argument WRT tieflings is that they are, more than pretty much any other "frightening" race, extremely similar to regular humans. Because...they're regular humans with unusual skin tones and, sometimes, horns and tails. That's...basically it. They don't need to have been created by...

As a separate response from the above: If this is true, why do modern humans have neanderthal and denisovan DNA? We can prove--scientifically--that our ancestors met the only other groups of sapient beings that were not identical to us...and instead of destroying each other, they mated in...

Tieflings are simply more common because they're human-adjacent. I have no pro-tiefling bias. I have no anti-tiefling bias. The only race toward which I am biased is dragonborn. Notice how you already had to add an exception ("or transformed..."), and it's now descent, not just direct creator...

Tieflings: Probably not. They're not "common" per se, but they're hardly so rare that people would react with shock and fear. Besides...the vast majority of tieflings are literally just people with red, purple, or blue skin and maybe some other odd features. There isn't that much to fear! Gith...

I believe it's because they don't think you are "roleplaying" when you do that sort of thing. They would construe it either as "rollplaying", e.g. simply executing rules in a dry/robotic way, or as lacking the taking-on-of-a-role, and instead being merely a slightly improvised take on being an...

Well sure, but I did address that separately. "3: The first part is just false, sandboxes can surprise anyone. 'Narrative twist' requires an established narrative, so that's, again, 'Who likes dogs? They only bark, they never meow.' " If it were simply a desire for novelty and surprise, then...

Glad to have been of help, then. Now I can't help wondering what things shake out if someone tries to mix styles but bungles one of the two. Like if you try to inject a narrative arc into a well-done sandbox game, I imagine that wouldn't push things into "wasteland" territory--but it might...

Again, I don't accept this definition as phrased because it makes all sorts of things "metagaming" when they trivially obviously aren't. Personally I think you're getting massively hung up on calling this "metagaming" as though that were in any way useful. It isn't. The fault is that the player...

Does it? I'm surprised to hear that. I certainly think it has meanings--whether denotation or connotation--that mean folks avoid it because it doesn't fit their interests, but that's hardly the same thing. Well, responding to these in order... 1: That just means it was a badly-made sandbox...

All of these actions are a player being a jerk. The first is an example I specifically called out as unreasonable and unwarranted, and thus, it isn't railroading to tell the player "no, you can't do that". I specifically called that out because it is so commonly used as an example. The second...

I don't consider that railroading, no, and I have fairly high standards when it comes to this sort of thing. You did not take away choices. You chose to frame events in such a way that future action was required. You didn't invent entire new concepts just to make sure the players definitely...

I'm not entirely sure what you changed here. Did you...give them a reason to want to talk to these other people and see these other things? I don't really see how that's railroading. Similarly, if it is merely a matter of "I took an adventure where you only need to do one of A, B, C, D, E, or...

I find so often in this sort of thing, a controversial but earnest body of theory has something like a 60/40 or 70/30 ratio of wheat to chaff, but the folks who already had an entrenched view see it as 1/99 when they're feeling generous and thus pick the worst bits of the 30-40 chaff to write...

I never said you could. Alternatively, it's better to actually talk to your players and make sure the group is all on the same page, rather than barking orders.

Because everyone knows that 100% of players would both (a) obey this instruction without question, and (b) be happy that they received such a non-diegetic instruction on what to do. Unfortunately, the preceding sentence is false, and pretty much everyone knows so.

I don't see how that applies. If the action is reasonable, warranted, and within the scope of the rules, how could it "ruin a game for everyone"? I genuinely don't understand how this could apply. No. You are inserting something I never said. I did not say "clueless". I said information hidden...

It's one part. Another is that, even when two people completely agree about what "railroading" means, one will say it is a completely good and wonderful thing, and the other will say it is a horrible awful thing. I tend toward the latter camp myself. It's colloquial, but as a starting point...