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But then it wouldn't be a failure to offer a meaningful choice. The example there is of what happens when the DM tries to pace a game through interaction without having a meaningful choice. It fundemantally fails. You can't pace that way. You either have to punctuate things with some kind of...

This is why I said earlier in the thread that there are two ways to look at railroading, from the perspective of DM practice, and the perspective of subjective player experience. Only the second is necessarily bad. If I feel railroaded, then something has definitely gone wrong.

To a degree. But characterisation basically becomes more meaningful when it informs choices. Is it more meaningful to have your Paladin spout moral platitudes, or to have him make the choice to do the right thing, even if it's not to his own advantage. To a degree. But they tend, I find to...

Meaningful choices are basically the currency of role-playing games run on. If you don't have meaningful choices, you don't just have an issue with railroading you have weird pacing issues. This is why so many DMs struggle with journeys. DM: So you start out on the journey to Fallcrest...

I'm kind of curious. I can see DMs who are happy to restrict any races on the grounds of thematic appropriateness I can also see DMs who feel that if it's in the PHB it must be available for players. I can also see DMs who really don't like Tieflings and Dragonborn because they're not...

If you pull out any charcacter sheet for a race that we haven't discussed is present in the setting it would raise an eyebrow. My last game didn't have halflings

It's the internet. Where would we be without hyperbole?

I'd bet they do. But I'd bet they also include Tieflings and Dragonborn even tough they are uncommon. I'm sceptical that the common/uncommon distinction will carry weight there.

I think I would have a tendency to interpret Druids in the same way as Hussar. In 2e druids were nature priests, they were a specialist type of the same class as an example of how to do other specialists. In 5e they are a completely different class and there is a seperate nature domain. If...

Well I agree that halflings shouldn't be added to new settings just because... But what about the Magic: the Gathering crossovers? They don't have halflings do they? On the other hand we saw with 4e that Wizards of the Coast wanted every PHB race in a setting, regardless of the history of...

There's probably two ways to think about railroading. 1) It's something that the GM does, either deliberately or through enacting bad design from an adventure module. In this case it generally means either never offering the players meaningful decisions or invalidating their decisions by...

See? It can mean anything!

1) Railroading is ill defined, so people aren't always thinking the same thing when the word comes up. 2) People see other people talking about railroading and decide that it applies to the way they run their game. This means they can then take umbrage and defend themselves, something people on...

Nostalgia, and the current conservative (small c) moment in popular culture is the real issue here.

Ok so. Halflings are common, and other things are unfairly uncommon. Do we go back in time to 2014 and change that?* Or go forward in time to 6th Edition? At which point the question seems moot because that very distinction needs to be abolished. *If we're presuming that we can influence...

Perhaps it has. I think I largely disregarded it as a rhetorical flourish "...and they're a core race too". Because it seems so obviously trivial. It also seems weird that people are now declaring that the problem is specifically that halflings are a "Core" race, when I remember pages on...

I'm not. Why would I care? Shuffle the deck chairs however you like.

I had an incident in one game when the party rogue followed a masked NPC into a build, got spotted and got into a fight with the NPC and then reduced him to 0 HP. He then took off the NPCs mark realised that the party was potentially in big trouble and there followed 3 rounds of failed attempts...

Actually that works really well as something to do with halflings. Forget the halfling gods (because like all demi-human gods they're boring and make fantasy religion more boring) have the halflings be recent converts to some kind of new religion. Perhaps their whole farming schtick is...

It seems...awkward. It strongly incentivises a long rest right before a final battle, which strongly favours long rest over short rest classes - and kind of removes any point of wearing players down over time before that final battle. I've had exhaustion for a short rest as a once only deal...