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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6703577" data-attributes="member: 4937">Then I rest my case on your own terms.  The railroad to Mount Fire negates a players choice in order enforce a preconceived outcome.  You rationalized using some fuzziness in the player's proposition to "go generally" north to move the player to your desired location Mount Fire.  You were not required to rule thusly or handle the fuzziness in this manner.  You did so precisely because you wished to negate player choice, because you feared their choice would be less interesting for everyone than your own ideas.Since you refuse to distinguish between the act of railroading and railroad as a category of thing, you are both railroading and the campaign is a railroad under your own terms.I think we can both agree that a GM can't plead the excuse, "But the module made me do it.  I was just following orders."  The module is just a thing.  The GM is the one making the decisions.I think I've already explained that.  Because the standard one is predicated on several assumptions I believe are false, and consequently in my opinion leads to shallow thinking that hinders the hobby and harms the enjoyment of individual tables.Incidentally, the link you link to is March 13, 2015.  My essay predates it by years.  I don't even concede that my definition is the less  standard one or did not influence The Alexandrian's manifesto, nor for that matter do I concede that The Alexandrian has offered a definition that is incongruent with mine.  In fact, reading the essay, we much more disagree over the definition of a Sandbox than we do over a Railroad, and indeed I have to smile that The Alexandrian has an agenda in redefining Sandbox at least as tangential to the normal use of the word as my agenda with my existing definition of Railroad.I tend to loathe argument through analogy, as analogies almost invariably end up being less clear than the thing that they describe, but I'll humor you by saying that the auto-drive facility would indeed be described by mean as railroading me, if it choses its own destinations based on its own preferences.If you don't know what I haven't considered, how do you know there are things I haven't considered beyond what I've admitted to?  I mean as a general rule, yes, most people haven't considered everything, but people don't usually go around giving that as advice unless they have something in mind.Or was it just snark?</blockquote>

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