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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9623098" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, actually, you didn't use the word "can". You said, as I quoted, that "You lose meaningful choices when the players can alter things in the setting/narrative outside their character." In ordinary English that is a general proposition.But then the player can do it. And the world, as played by the GM, responds in a certain way.Now I have some vocabulary do describe different examples of how this can play out. I can talk about the GM drawing on their notes to say how the world responds. I can talk about the GM manipulating the unrevealed, hence secret, backstory to narrate certain outcomes of action declarations. I can talk about the GM having regard to the player's evinced interests and concerns, or not, in deciding what scenes to frame.But that is all the vocabulary that you eschew. So I don't see how you are going to distinguish the railroading case from other cases where the obstacles and boringness that the GM serves up are appropriate.What you wrote was "Agency is about being able to have your character do things without the Gm placing constraints to railroad. If the GM isn’t placing limits on what your characters can try to pursue, most folks see that as a campaign respecting player agency". And I don't know what you are saying.Every episode of RPGing ever, that I'm aware of, put limits on what the PCs can try and pursue. My example was of the GM telling the players that their PCs have arrived in Hommlett and have heard rumours of the Moathouse. The player in that game cannot try to become ruler of the Bone March; nor can they try and woo Rosie Cotton and become a prosperous farmer. The whole set-up, within the broader context of being a 1st level D&D game, takes it for granted that the players will do some adventuring. Even if the players do some non-Moathouse-y stuff, it is still going to be constrained by the geography etc that the GM presents to them.But I don't see how you can say that everyone sitting down to play dungeon module T1 is a railroad. Hence why I say that I don't understand what you are saying. You seem to have some idea in mind of what distinguishes a railroad from a non-railroad, but from what you've posted I don't know what that idea is.What do you see as the key differences?</blockquote>

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