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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6702152" data-attributes="member: 4937">There is no need.  I got what you are saying the first time.  Rather than restating it to you, let me start over and go in a different direction.  First of all, what I'm writing is in the context of <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading" target="_blank">this essay</a>.   Reading that may clarify my position.Secondly, although I admit it might not be obvious, I'm not actually off topic.  I'm actually describing what I think is a core set of assumptions about gaming style that don't make sense.  I have an agenda here.One core assumption I see people make is that there are things called 'sand boxes' and things called 'railroads' and that these things are qualitatively rather than quantitatively different.  In order words, they think 'sand box' is a category and 'railroad' is a category, and that the two are diametrically opposed things you can put in boxes.   In reality, even things like 'light' and 'dark' or 'red' and 'blue' are categories defined by quantitative differences.  We have really good ways now to measure 'redness' or 'blueness' and see that they differ 'only' by quantifiable qualities (as if measurable qualities weren't real differences!).  My agenda is that railroad and sandbox are actually idealized forms that can't or at least usually aren't realized in play, and everything we have is actually only 'mostly a railroad' or 'largely a sandbox', and as a practical matter most things are complex mixed and in between.  Along with that assumption is the idea that one of these categories is 'good' and the other category is 'bad'.  For example, it's common to assert that 'sandbox is good' and 'railroad is bad'.  In fact, this is not true and is a style assumption that doesn't make sense.  The 'goodness' or 'badness' of a railroad or a sandbox is actually an entirely different axis, and much of the confusion here is similar to trying to treat 'law' as 'good' and 'chaos' as 'evil'.  In fact we can have both functional and dysfunctional railroads and functional and dysfunctional sandboxes.  We call the functional 'mostly railroading' 'Adventure Paths'.  We call the dysfunctional 'mostly railroading' 'Railroads'.   In fact however, we have impoverished language.  We don't have a good commonly understood word for the quality of making a story more linear that doesn't carry a negative connotation.  We tend to call that thing 'railroading' as if it was always dysfunctional.  We don't have a good commonly understood term for a dysfunctional sandbox, and so consequently there is a very low degree of recognition that such a thing is even possible.As such, it's not my definition of railroading that I think is useless, but yours.  It's your idea of what 'railroading' means that I'm trying to hijack and make more nuanced, and its you that I think aren't examining your assumptions.There wrong about a subjective quality?  How can I assert that in fairness?  Keep in mind that the amount of linearity and the amount of choice removal that a player is willing to tolerate varies from player to play as a preference.  It's a continuum here and not two boxes, and the continuum isn't actually a spectrum from good to bad.  It's not an objective fact that more linearity or less linearity is necessarily bad.   It's a preference whether you prefer 'Adventure Path [Functional Railroad]' over 'Functional Sandbox'.   Neither is more good than the other.  If you can't tolerate the linearity, the tendency will be to treat all linearity as dysfunctional and 'bad', and act as if that is an objective fact and not a subjective preference.  That is the closest you are getting to understanding me.One thing is clear.  If I'm really going to explain what I thinking here, I'm going to have to coin a bunch more terms.  'Railroad' is just too loaded, and there are lots of other pieces of this I don't have good words for.</blockquote>

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