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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9543477" data-attributes="member: 4937">Thirty years of arguing RPG theory I've learned that some of the biggest misunderstandings come from the fact that someone heard some term of art somewhere and knew only from some context and whatever loan words were involved what the word meant and so evolved their own private definition.  It's not like railroading as RPG term of art is found in a dictionary.  If you look it up in a dictionary you'll find a common definition of it like: "to force somebody to do something before they have had enough time to decide whether or not they want to do it."   In a tabletop RPG setting, that's not even "railroading" as the term is usually meant.  That's just time pressure, and time pressure may be a perfectly valid thing for a GM to do if the player is taking too long to make a decision in a scene where the character would only have a few moments to decide what to do.  If the player is dithering and losing the excitement of the game you may well need to "railroad" them according to the Oxford English dictionary version for the good of the game.Twenty or so years ago after the upteenth argument on EnWorld as to what constituted railroading where it seemed literally no one was using the same definition and half of them couldn't even coherently articulate what they meant, I started thinking seriously about what the term actually meant and whether it meant anything at all other than "badwrongfun".  If you aren't interested in what I discovered, OK.  If you have something to add to what I'm saying, or some corrective thought to introduce, then even better.   But as it stands, you don't seem to be doing either one.</blockquote>

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