Gorgon Zee
Hero
Oh, I read the OP carefully. It's all about Illusionism, which is what I wrote about. Your response then equated that style with railroading (which, despite your personal definition, is a pejorative term). Your definition of railroading is so fundamentally far from the common use that I rejected it; there's no point reading an article "How to cook meat" when the author's definition of meat doesn't match my supermarkets.But mostly here I'm annoyed that I suggested you go back and read the OP as well as the linked essay on railroading and you clearly didn't do so, and are so now off on a tangent of your own making
So ... the difference between "transcript of the encounter" and "record of the encounter" is so fundamental that if I use one rather than another, it makes your position completely different?I never would have said "record of the encounter". The term I use for that would be "transcript". So, what you are half remembering here is not an accurate account of what I wrote, or what we discussed, or really anything. It's a mixed up jumble of half-remembered thoughts taken out of context that has nothing at all to do with my actual use of game terms or how I define them.
If there is one thing I definitely have learned from 30+ years of internet debate, it's that anytime someone starts saying they have special meanings for common words that are different from standard use, there is little point conversing with them.
It's not that I don't think it occurs to you, it's just that you say it, and then post as if you have never read that yourself! Let me be very specific -- My example of the GPC campaign with a fixed position of "Arthur dies in the final battle" which I falls under the first definition, you then characterize as "a game running on rails" which is your second definition. This lack of ability to draw the distinction is exactly why your position comes off as extreme; you see one trace of "railroading" and the next thing you define the campaign as running on rails, and then sum up your post with "[players] play a grand campaign in which the PCs can do whatever they like, but they can only observe great events and never change them."But if you had actually read the essay I suggested, you would have noted that right at the beginning I wrote:
"Some distinction should be made in my opinion between the act of limiting player choice (“railroading”) and a game which has limited or no player choice as its most salient feature (a “railroad”)."
If you had read that and understood it, then you would never have preached to me about the following as if that had never occurred to me:
Please re-read how you are doing this; read exactly what (three times now) I have stated exactly one fixed point for the GPC example campaign and how you consistently conflate that with a game where the PCs "can only observe great events and never change them". You have moved from my single example of restricting player agency to asserting that I restrict player agency for every great event. And you have done so even when I made it abundantly clear that I do not.
If you do that, can you see why I feel you are pushing things to extremes?