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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 7394360" data-attributes="member: 46713">I agree that there are players who don't mind being railroaded. A few may even prefer it. It's a great way to play if you're in the mood for a beer & pretzl game and you don't want to exercise your brain. Over a hundred million people enjoy playing "Candy Crush", surely they can't all be wrong. However, why bother playing an RPG if you could just as well play "Candy Crush"?I recall an interesting ENWorld article about the different kinds of 'fun'. A quick search turns up an article by <a href="http://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/" target="_blank">AngryGM</a> about the same topic.Let's examine these kinds of fun:#1 Sensory Pleasure: can be had whether it's a linear dungeon or not.#2 Fantasy: unaffected by a railroad, unless it's overdone and too heavy-handed; then it might break the illusion.#3 Narrative: unless a players wants to tell her own story, a railroad may be even better suited for this.#4 Challenge: a gauntlet-style dungeon may appeal to a player looking mostly for a challenge, but there are other kinds of challenges that require a more sophisticated dungeon design; e.g. personally I enjoy trying to achieve my goals as efficiently as possible, and that means looking for and exploiting shortcuts.#5 Fellowship: probably the second-most important kind of fun for a 'beer & pretzl' player; matters of dungeon layout are clearly irrelevant for this.#6 Discovery: this is probably the kind of fun that is completely negated by railroady adventure design.#7 Expression: may be negatively affected by railroading (similar to #2, depending on how restrictive the DM is).#8 Submission: the kind of fun railroad-fans are mostly looking for. Non-linear dungeons would actually be bad for this kind of fun!So, apparently railroading isn't in such a bad place after all:There's almost exactly as many kinds of fun served well by rail-roading than by non-linear dungeon (or adventure) design!Well, humans have been using hand axes for over a million years. I wonder why anyone ever felt they needed to improve on the initial design? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Looking at the different kinds of fun has helped me to realize why I enjoy roleplaying games so much: Ideally they provide me with almost all the different kinds of fun. The one kind of fun I personally don't look for in an RPG is #8. For that I prefer 'Candy Crush' <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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