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I think they're two different failure states, rather than two sides of the same coin. There's lots of ways to thread the needle between the two. Justin Alexander's three clue rule is one good example

I often think that railroading may be best understood as a subjective player state. The 'feeling of being railroaded' At least in that case, I think we could all agree that there is some sort of problem somewhere.

A few points on the general discussion. - People really need to be clear if railroad is inherently a dysfunctional state or not. The term was certainly invented to describe dysfunction so it seems a little bit weird with people saying "this type of gaming is a railroad and that's ok.". It's a...

The GM doesn't have to be, but the GM is usually going to be the one to fall into that position by default, especially with a group of players who don't know each other very well. Edit: But I did think after writing that I probably should have said it was an refusal of leadership rather than a...

My experience playing my Cavalier with Shield Master and Sentiel was that I could do the mechanical sticky part of things pretty well. Sure I would have been more sticky if I wasn't limited to one reaction, but I didn't find it to much of an issue. No the issue was that I just wasn't tough...

Well we'll have to disagree. As a player I'd be walking out of the door. EdIt: Well probably not as a first response. I'd instead be initating the conversation the GM should have done. But I'd have little expectation of coming back to the game.

You guy do realise that by neutral arbiter in this specific context I meant the GM should not just resolve all actions of a PC without any regard to how the rest of the group may feel about the situation. Player: "My Barbarian is going to rage and start killing everyone in this town, men women...

The reason for that is the 13 year campaign though. That's not a universal situation. Everyone knows each other really well. If I'm running an open game at a meet-up I'm a lot more pro-active in having the DM job be also a leadership position then I am with either of my longer term regular...

I'd be more along the lines of: "Is everyone else really cool with taking the game in this direction?"

Thing is with things like robbing shopkeepers, it's not just the GM's fun that is at stake. It's potentially destructive of the other players fun too. Of course there's better ways to handle that situation then railroading. But it isn't necessarily something the GM should just be a neutral...

The default rules do tie ability rolls to skills, but then they also don't include Endurance, so if we're changing things... To me the test of whether something should be a skill is "is there anyway to directly leverage this to accomplish your goals" as I suggested above in the city example. I...

Most of the situations in which you would roll Endurance are arguably passive. Generally running is Athletics - that's the active part - weathering conditions is pretty passive. If your having any kind of long distance running competition I would think it should be Con (Athletics), snowstorm...

Not convinced those are different enough to be worth two proficiencies.

To me this depends mostly on how it feels to the player. I'm not particularly interested in if it is railroading technically, but a Rakshasa is a monster the DM needs to handle with care, or it may feel like railroading. And in the end there is no neutral court the DM can appeal to.

The question is do these really happen often enough to justify having a skill? I say this as an endurance athlete who really likes playing characters who are good at endurance and did so quite often in 4e and still for all that found it very hard to actively make use of the skill. If I want to...

I'm sure it is. That "If" was intended to do a lot of work.

If the argument against illusionism is that players will always find out eventually then there's no point discussing specific examples. It could after all be theorectically fine in the abstract but practically a bad idea. If you're going to argue that illusionism is bad in the specific then it...

Something similar is, I've found, actually quite common. This is when the GM has something prepared and everything else is just dull. So you arrive in town and there's something happening in the noble quarter. If for some reason the party don't wan't to check it out they will wander around...

I could see Free League making an offer for Star Frontiers if they thought there was an audience. Kickstarter limits the risk somewhat, and they've already revived Twilight 2000. What I can't see is why they would want to buy the TSR name.

Just on random encounters. It's a common misconception that randomness is antithetical to linearity. If a game consists of A-Random Ecounter-B-Random Encounter-C etc, then from the players perspective it isn't really any different to the GM having prepped all those encounters and forced the...