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Oh, well of course yeah! I'd never deny that! :D Roleplaying games are absolutely 100% meant to be a story-creation medium, not a board game. Which is why I couldn't care less about anyone's efforts to make sure the "board game" of D&D is balanced and works correctly. If I wanted that, I'd...

I mean, it's true... :)

There are no definitions of railroading that are useful because nobody will agree on a single one. As you and I can attest. :) To put it more plainly, it is not up to the DM or an outsider perspective to determine whether an adventure is a railroad or not, because they aren't the ones playing...

It's from the player's perspective, not the DMs. If they players feel they have no choices to make, then they are being railroaded. If the players feel they do have choices and it just so happens by complete coincidence that the authors of the adventure correctly predicted their choices and...

From the perspective of the people within the car (and assuming they do not have outside meta knowledge of what a real African Safari is "supposed" to look like)... yes, they are the same thing. Another way to look at it is that a sandbox adventure becomes a linear adventure after the fact when...

That's why I said 'linear adventure' and not 'railroad'. :)

Yes. As many other people have made plain. If you don't want to see (or can't see) a difference... that's fine. But other people do.

No one is actually establishing a taxonomy, because everyone refuses to change their own definitions to follow a single one. ;)

I didn't say 'railroad', I said 'linear adventure'. They are two different things.

A published linear adventure is merely a sandbox campaign where the author has correctly predicted the choices the players were going to make. :) If a scene ends and the players decide to 'go do X' because of it-- the next logical step they feel they should take because of what happened... and...

To me this specific part of your very good post isn't even that big a deal, because those 'tags' aren't even used "in-world"... they are purely tag words the game uses to distinguish creatures merely for game effects. Nobody "in-world" on Faerun could or would point to two different goblins and...

For my money, all of this comes down to a simple change in philosophy... Be pissed at what a person does, not at who they are. There's nothing wrong with playing a game with "evil humanoids"... but just take a few moments to decide what those specific humanoids did to make everyone else decry...

I only was suggesting subsets of players that are 100% in either direction, not that all players were that way.

At the end of the day, whether any style works or does not work comes down to the DM and the players being on the same page and playing the game for the most part the same way. If they all play in the same style and enjoy the same style of game... then 9 times out of 10 the game is going work...

Yes. That's what a multiverse is. Multiple universes. Every game is its own universe. And as they are all D&D, they are all D&D universes as part of the D&D Multiverse. Just because you don't want to admit that, doesn't mean that it's not true and that WotC doesn't treat everything that way.

Of course there are 600 different parallel Elminsters. In fact there are millions of different parallel Elminsters, because every single DM who has ever run a Forgotten Realms campaign has run a different parallel Faerun, with their own individual different parallel Elminsters. The Elminster...

Are you suggesting that no DMs are lazy? Considering there's an entire book series by one of our posters here about how to be just that, I would find it funny if that was indeed what you believed. ;)

Yes it does, because a lot of people disagree with you. Your opinion is not fact.

That's entirely up to that particular DM to make that decision for themselves. Some will not bother and instead look elsewhere, some enjoy the process of filling in the gaps. To each their own. It is not up to the adventure writer to create something that is all things to all DMs, because that...

If that kind of DM knows they can't make up names that they believe are quality... then that DM should have the foreknowledge and wherewithal to have a list of random names at hand. At some point, a DM does have to take personal responsibility if they know they need certain things to make the...