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This is clumsy implementation of the Tiny World railroading technique often by a GM who self-deludes themselves into believing that they run sand boxes (often by GMs who do little prep). Typically such GMs are effusively dismissive of GMs that railroad. As a result, they remove from the Tiny...

I think there is a very compelling argument that a game becomes a railroad when the GMs track laying and railroading techniques are so artless and clumsy that they become obvious and grating to the players.

Sure but this can verge on the GM saying, "Your character wouldn't do that." Indeed, having a game system that encourages the players to take beliefs, bonds, goals ect. and then encourages the GM to invent scenarios specifically to "challenge" those beliefs, bonds, or goals is a pretty hard...

The problem with this is that either you have to accept a dungeon map is an example of railroading, or else accept that railroading is so ubiquitous and essential to RPGs that the term has no meaning. In real world, people don't have unlimited agency. You and I are rather constrained in what...

This is called a "Rowboat World". You can go anywhere but you have to put in all the effort and the vast majority of what you find will be just empty, meaningless and featureless. It's an example of a dysfunctional sandbox the way a railroad is an example of a dysfunctional adventure path.

Well, we seem to be on the same page. A good starting point for what I think is this thread: https://www.enworld.org/threads/techniques-for-railroading.298368/ The reason for this is that people treat "railroading" as a qualitative thing like, "Are you railroading or not?" It's actually a...

1) Skill system doesn't cover all the tasks someone can purpose to do, leading to squinting as to what skill should cover what. 2) Skill system conversely doesn't cleanly divide tasks so that there is lots of overlap, leading to either arguments over the skill to use or some skills being much...

I kind of come at the problem in the opposite direction. It's probably reasonable to assume that 75% of goblins are vicious cannibals who only want to kill, enslave, and eat everything that isn't a goblin. But the PC's are very unlikely to encounter that "representative goblin" as their first...

So now you approve and think something different has happened? This is why it is hard to take your argument seriously, But at the very least I think you have to recant your original claim: "Sure, you can have a tall, beautiful, pale-skinned race of monogamous philosophers who are inherently...

Maybe, but it is hard wired into elves. You definitely didn't do that.

I'm not. There is even literary precedence. Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Barsoom series wants to have a race that is obviously evil and can be slaughtered at will so he encodes them as a blond Aryan racial supremacists who are hypocritical religious fanatics. In the stories they are utterly...

Yes. In my game for example, elves are "usually" chaotic good. This doesn't mean that all elves are chaotic good only that they are by biological or spiritual inclination (which is the same thing in a fantasy) more inclined to be free spirited and altruistic by inherent nature than humans...

It's a theory. I don't think the theory holds up though, because my experience talking with 5e players is the lack of mechanical crunch to racial heritage doesn't get people to lean more into the question of "What would it be like to have a different biology or body or culture than my own" but...

Bioessentialism isn't wrong where it isn't false to facts. Indeed, where it is true to facts it inherently important. It's a taboo topic because too often people make assumptions about biological destiny for traits that aren't necessarily wholly or largely biological or where the assumed link...

I love D&D 3.0e and I will never be done with it. 5e felt shallow by comparison and while I respected a lot of its design chops, I felt that in the long run things like bounded accuracy and the proficiency system would feel too limiting, so I never tried to switch over to it. PF1e and 3.5e are...

Reasonable, but the alternative that I would accept is what you describe - a GM using "kid gloves" to minimize the number of deaths by avoiding doing the sort of things that kill PCs in 1e AD&D. If you do carefully select foes so that the maximum damage of an attack will generally be below the...

The good news is that if you did, you'd be in good company, in that it never bothered the official writers of the setting to introduce self-contradictory elements. I was always bothered by the fact that the planes were both supposedly absolutes and also solopist in that what you believed about...

Potions and scrolls and other temporary items were in 1e AD&D much easier to make and much more accessible than persistent magical items. Additionally, I had been exposed early on to an Alchemist class in Dragon that was an NPC specializing at making potions. So from a very early point...

I think it would be a mistake to imagine the authors of D&D as complex moral philosophers offering coherent takes. Probably the single biggest problem with alignment that has plagued it since the beginning is that it was a moral system without any real underpinnings or without a lot of...

It was a great tag line but I don't think they ever delivered on that. I felt DCC did better in making adventures that felt like they could have been published in 1e. But yes, I ran 3e as if it was a cleaned up 1e.