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There is little substantial difference between doing this by sheer fiat and doing it by exploiting the properties of a game system or setting.

I'm using all of the definitions I've seen. Also, you don't own the language.

No, I'm illustrating the absurdity of railroading as a concept. It's basically used as a rhetorical sling by people who find a certain game or group isn't meeting their expectations. Tailored encounters are "Illusionism" with some fancy moves to make people feel better. It's kind of like how in...

No, Alien is a film.

Have you read the parts of my posts other than the ones you're quoting, yet?

It applies to a roleplaying system when people decide they don't like the game and don't want you to like it, either. It doesn't apply to a roleplaying system when people discover that there are similarities between something they criticized and something they enjoy. Really, railroading is a...

Sure. Of course, to many players this bespeaks a radical distrust in their abilities. It demonstrates such little faith in the players' ability to build a story by their actions that you are literally throwing them in a box to deal with a premise. The difference between this and railroading is...

By this definition, it's not something any game system can make better or worse, so how it is relevant to discussing a game system? It's relevant to talking about what happened on the day you played. Plus of course, when meta-game decisions increase player enjoyment, it demonstrates that...

This is not supported by any system where the dungeon is the primary source of conflict unless the dungeon is designed to address a narrative premise. This of course is a type of dungeon that almost never exists when people actually play D&D. And yet, people enjoy it.

I can't make statements in the context of what happened at your table in a fashion that's fair to either of us. I will however address this in more general terms, though. There are many scenes in shows like House MD that neither develop the characters nor particularly resolve some element of...

Read.The Rest of. What I wrote. If you define railroading as something that restricts a choice that should be available according to the game, then a game's design can't have any effect on railroading.

Well, I just told you my usage. WRT always hitting the high points ("awesomeness") and brushing past other things, I think it generally deprives a game of meaning. Important things are only important in relation to other events, after all. In my experience, "boring" is often code for "doesn't...

well, if you're using my meaning, we're not talking about a capitalized "creative agenda" as much as approaching play from a particular point of view (after we accept the basic idea that we're fighting zombies, or in a dungeon, or whatever.) You can't really eliminate this, because this is...

This is really rephrasing my point as a feature, not a bug. There's nothing wrong with this, but you can't very well complain about "railroading" and support this, except to say that you like one version of railroading and don't like the others. This is valid for you, but it's not a broadly...

What do you mean by "agenda?"

I'm not sure that's a fair critique. I think the Big Model (and GNS before it) is pretty much about making games create peak experiences - but just because it's *about* that doesn't mean it *does* it reliably. There's also a problem with designing games to create "peak experiences" -- the whole...

D&D is all about railroading. In classic D&D the plot is a flowchart that is literally set in stone -- and I'm not misusing "literally." I mean that the flowchart is an underground stony maze called a dungeon. You really don't get much more arbitrarily restrictive than that. Other games are...

People have always approached playing games from different directions. Commercially successful games (which are not the be and end all of game design) generally support this kind of diversity. The vocal segment of a play community may fix on one or two ideas, but playing RPGs isn't about the...

Why do you want people to play in a way you enjoy, instead of a way they enjoy? Do you think gamers go for immersed role assumption because they're masochists, or because they're to dumb to follow their preferences? Neither possibility is especially optimistic about what gamers can accomplish...

I think your attempt to destroy the discussion is telling. To ignore that and move on, I think there's a bit of dissonance between the PHB and DMG. The PHB provides very little support for how class abilities are represented in the story. What might it look like when a fighter marks a target...