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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7607986" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>A lot of terms get tossed around without a clear definition of what they mean, to the point that I've become highly skeptical of jargon that consists of multiple everyday ordinary words which when put together form a new idea that means something special and technical. It seems to be the goal of a great many fields of study to coin one of these phrases, or just repurpose a single ordinary word, and use it to describe something, and have that phrase become common parlance in a sub-community, and I'm beginning to find the whole concept a bit corrosive and obnoxious. Invariably these phrases, because they are composed of ordinary words, will be encountered by the layman in a context outside of the essay the phrase was coined in, and the laymen will think that because they know the words they understand the term, when in fact what was meant is something completely different. It would be better to invent gibberish to describe the thing than compound together a phrase.</p><p></p><p>Worse, sometimes it seems that the inventors of the jargon do so deliberately to corrode peoples understanding of the word's the phrase is made of, and then I feel like we're being taught Newspeak by a Ministry of Truth official.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, I digress. The point I'm getting at is words like "railroading" and "metagaming" are words that could have specific meanings, but mostly they are used as catch-alls to mean, "Anything I don't like." I'm not sure that any good definition for either actually exists (although I could attempt a few, I'm not perfectly happy with any of them) which is why in my essay I didn't even attempt a Socratic definition but attempted to define "railroading" imperfectly by example. </p><p></p><p>Here it is: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading</a>.</p><p></p><p>(As for how influential it is, it probably isn't, but I have on a couple of occasions had someone quote other writers about railroading, where the ideas seemed suspiciously similar to what I'd outlined in the essay.)</p><p></p><p>The purpose of the essay was in part frustration at having conversations where if something didn't quite fit into what the person was familiar with, they'd engage in some mental gymnastics to call it railroading. Truth is, something may well be bad, without being either "metagaming" or "railroading", and I'd even go so far as to say "metagaming" and "railroading" aren't always bad. (Indeed, the more I've thought about metagaming, the more I've concluded that metagaming is generally more a positive than a negative, and if a negative tends to be something the GM and not the players are doing.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7607986, member: 4937"] A lot of terms get tossed around without a clear definition of what they mean, to the point that I've become highly skeptical of jargon that consists of multiple everyday ordinary words which when put together form a new idea that means something special and technical. It seems to be the goal of a great many fields of study to coin one of these phrases, or just repurpose a single ordinary word, and use it to describe something, and have that phrase become common parlance in a sub-community, and I'm beginning to find the whole concept a bit corrosive and obnoxious. Invariably these phrases, because they are composed of ordinary words, will be encountered by the layman in a context outside of the essay the phrase was coined in, and the laymen will think that because they know the words they understand the term, when in fact what was meant is something completely different. It would be better to invent gibberish to describe the thing than compound together a phrase. Worse, sometimes it seems that the inventors of the jargon do so deliberately to corrode peoples understanding of the word's the phrase is made of, and then I feel like we're being taught Newspeak by a Ministry of Truth official. Anyway, I digress. The point I'm getting at is words like "railroading" and "metagaming" are words that could have specific meanings, but mostly they are used as catch-alls to mean, "Anything I don't like." I'm not sure that any good definition for either actually exists (although I could attempt a few, I'm not perfectly happy with any of them) which is why in my essay I didn't even attempt a Socratic definition but attempted to define "railroading" imperfectly by example. Here it is: [url]http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading[/url]. (As for how influential it is, it probably isn't, but I have on a couple of occasions had someone quote other writers about railroading, where the ideas seemed suspiciously similar to what I'd outlined in the essay.) The purpose of the essay was in part frustration at having conversations where if something didn't quite fit into what the person was familiar with, they'd engage in some mental gymnastics to call it railroading. Truth is, something may well be bad, without being either "metagaming" or "railroading", and I'd even go so far as to say "metagaming" and "railroading" aren't always bad. (Indeed, the more I've thought about metagaming, the more I've concluded that metagaming is generally more a positive than a negative, and if a negative tends to be something the GM and not the players are doing.) [/QUOTE]
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