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I'm a bit baffled by this. It's obviously about agency. The issue is how do you have agency as a player if the GM is effectively all powerful and capable of using fiat to shape the fiction. That's the core issue. And the issue is that because of bias - which you've agreed on all my examples...

So I have been thinking hard about the question of whether it's possible to have a time skip or hand wave that is not an act of railroading, and I do think that I have a scenario where it wouldn't be. The GM accepts the intention to handwave away an event or time skip over something knowing...

So first of all, I really like how you are thinking about this. Well, maybe everything does then. Let's look at a concrete example. Mass Effect 1 is IMO certainly one of the greatest if not the actual greatest cRPG ever made. After a tutorial section that is quite linear, it appears at...

I think it's really interesting to see how different systems deal with this problem. In trad systems (which is what I run), I have particular processes of preparation to play and in play that are designed to limit my own bias. For example, I might say before the game that the vile Necromancer...

Once again, stuck on the qualitative fallacy. And that's another fallacy. You've here substituted "getting what they want" (what I said) for "winning" which is a hugely fallacious substitution especially when going from a cooperative game with a fiction to a competitive game that just have...

Or maybe a big part of GMing is managing your own power to railroad. Or at least, that's one of the hats you are wearing. So everyone can get what they want all the time? What a wonderful world in which you live in! You've spent a lot of time saying that, but not much time demonstrating...

I mean, OK, I'll bite. What do you mean by that? I can think of some specific ways of talking like metagame direction, "Are you sure you want to do that?" which is railroading, but what do you mean? Yes. Why not? I've already given examples of how it could be. I mean the goal of most...

GMing is about a lot of things, but I agree with you that a lot of the things that are most important about GMing are the things that are hard to automate and which separate at TTRPG experience from a cRPG experience. Potentially yes. There are a lot of railroading techniques in your prep...

Brevity is great. Pithiness is always something you should strive for. I'm not attacked at all if you say the obvious thing that "Your writing would be stronger if it was more pithy." It's just that that is hard. The only thing harder than being clear when using many words is being clear...

No, because I can give you counter examples. If you have a consistent procedure of play that isn't influenced by the GMs judgment where the GM adheres to the procedure of play in such a way that he is forced to accept the outcome, then that's not railroading. For example, if our tables always...

They were at the point in the story where they were running out of food so as in the essay above, the packs were getting lighter. They then with light packs made it to Lorien, where when the packs were full again they were in boats. After the breaking of the fellowship, they left a lot behind...

Not by you. You've repeatedly failed to address any of the substance of the post you are supposedly responding to. Ok let's jump back and I'll repeat myself. Mostly agreed. "Blocking" is a very general term here and I don't want it understood as only "saying "no"". A GM can railroad for...

Sam and Bill the Pony can be hired cheaply - just 2 s.p. per day. Then if the goblins ever do kill and eat Bill the Pony (or Sam!) it's like killing John Wick's dog.

Yes, pretty much exactly. And in Celebrim's theory this is railroading via the "Small World" technique where the available choices are actually much smaller than they seem. At some point if the world gets too small, players start noting how confined they are. For example, in the worst case...

No, so that is mistaking the question here. MtG is definitely moving towards being more 'railroady' but not because it has strict rules. Application of the rules is not what makes something railroady. What makes it railroady is how many meaningful choices do you get to make per turn. So...

So many people just don't want to engage with what I'm saying. Arguments by analogy are almost always wrong. I used to make them all the time but then I realized I was usually doing this because my thinking about the subject was fuzzy. But it doesn't get any less fuzzy by bringing an...

No, that's not the case. It just may be the case that we can't easily measure it. Typically you see this in sociological issues where people realizing that something is a spectrum come up with some formula that takes different inputs that they are think are relevant and then attempt to use...

"Railroad" is a metaphor. In a game, the tracks never go everywhere, and the tracks can very much mostly go somewhere. Truly facilitating the tracks going everywhere may not be possible. I thought you were disagreeing with me. Those two statements are a big part of the basis of my argument...

A hit as the term suggests hits the target, doing some amount of physical damage. The amount of physical damage depends on a number of factors. If you are hitting a brontosaurus, then the physical damage scales about what you'd expect. You have to do a tremendous amount of physical trauma to...

I don't know that I hate them, but I do think that after 4 years of play, the lack of hit points in WEG D6 is starting to ruin the game for me as a GM. It's just so impossible to provide balanced encounters. The difference between mooks that will go down without trouble and an utterly lethal...