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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8995733" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's not my impression.  I try to use game terms in a very accurate way rather than relying on subjective sentiment.  And I try to use the terms consistently.  But very often my position is far less extreme than those that base their definitions on feelings and opinions.  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 where you try to tell me what I believe in ways that are clearly at odds with what I actually wrote.This is a good example, because I use fudging in a very technical way to mean "ignoring or altering the fortune mechanic by fiat".  Fudging is one participant in the game - whether player or GM - ignores the result of the fortune mechanic and reports something different for whatever reason.  And 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.I have rarely offered a Socratic definition of railroading, as I prefer to define railroading by example.  But to the extent that I offer a Socratic definition, it generally has to do with techniques the GM employs in order to reduce player agency in order to get the story to go where the GM wants it to go.  Note that if you actually read anything I wrote and were actually reporting on it and actually understood it, you would realize that this can include the world definition!  (See examples like "Omnipotent NPCs", "Endurium Walls" and "Small World").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:Duh!  I said so 13 years ago now!  The distinction between employing railroading and actually having a railroad is highly important to understanding what I'm talking about both in this essay and generally.  Now you are trying to lecture me on something that is core to the actual thing I wrote!  And then having absolutely and completely ignored everything I wrote, and having set up a straw man, you proceed to call me an extremist in my opinions?HAHAHAHAHA!  The reason I find this funny is in the 13 years since I wrote the essay on railroading techniques, I repeatedly get in conversations with people who try to direct me off to community discussions of railroading which were clearly influenced by and in some cases plagiarize the ideas in the original discussion.I grant that that my claim is a very strange and not intuitive one especially since I defined "railroading" as limiting player agency for a particular purpose, but since you didn't even read the essay much less the discussion, allow me to explain.   I claim that there are times that railroading can on the net increase player agency.  That is to say that there are times when the players are lost and lack information, where at that moment railroading them to a transportation hub with maps, kiosks, and various ticket agents selling different destinations can in the long run increase their overall agency.  I make this argument by noting that uninformed decisions are basically random and lack real agency, whereas informed decisions can have real agency.   Now obviously, the same technique of steering the players to a railway station could be used to provide "False Choice" and "Small World" situations where the player now has to buy a ticket and get on the one train that is available (or all trains actually go to the same place, "Schrodinger's Map" style), but if the new location really does provide more choice then that's better than leaving the party in a rowboat with no landmarks and no map.Does anyone not think it does?  The implication of "fade to 3 days previously" is that no matter what you do, in three days the foretold encounter is going to take place without fail.  It forces the players to buy into the scene as a goal of their activities, with the recognition that they can't significantly alter the course of preplanned events, only play out and discover what those events are.   There is a huge amount of social pressure to conform that pulling that trick does.  Like any time a GM offers a hook up, there is social pressure at the table to go along with the GM and play the offered adventure.  But this takes it a step further, because now there is social pressure to not only play the adventure, but to play it in such a manner that it leads to the desired conclusion.  Maybe.  It's hard to know without more details to see what was behind the screen.  Ideally, this leads to a narrow, broad, narrow structure where it just so happens that the narrow entry point is the narrow exit point!   Practically though, this is much much more constrained than a typical narrow, broad, narrow structure because the GM has essentially told you through subtle metagame direction how you are supposed to behave.  You've been put on rails.  And, oddly, you seem to recognize this.Again, I don't use "railroading" as a pejorative term.  Indeed, much of the impetus of the original essay was to call out the people who only used the term in a pejorative fashion and basically meant only by it "things I don't like" to show that in reality railroading if objectively defined extended to include many techniques that most people would agree are at times cool and fun.  The intention was to get people to objectively look at those techniques and decide for themselves when they would be appropriate and justified and when they would not.  After all, almost all of them are used by almost all GMs some of the time, and the real issue is not the technique but the overuse and over employment of the technique by the GM.Oh for the love of...  I didn't ask you because I didn't agree with you over that point.  I asked you out of genuine curiosity because as much as I don't like John Wick's gaming philosophy, I do admire his technique at times and wanted concrete examples I could potentially learn from and apply in my own games.  I could go into great detail on that, but that is extremely subtle both as railroading technique and over whether or not it actually puts you on rails or as in my example, took you to a transportation hub to let you make informed choices.  However, I think it more interesting if I just leave you to chew over it.To get to a final fixed scene after 5 years time requires by some mechanism that the players not be allowed to mess with the timeline in important ways.  You can't for example kill Arthur before that point, or kill any of the major villains (Mordred for example), or keep alive Arthur's heirs, or generally change the actions or opinions of the major characters.  Or else you the conductor must no matter what happens rearrange everything so that basically the same thing happens.  And the longer you run the game, the harder it will be to ensure any fixed point.  I don't know that I do feel that way, and it's certainly not how I would state it.  What I would state is that if you are going to have some fixed point in the future that the campaign is going to go through, you need to a lot of railroading to ensure it happens.  And the more narrow that fixed point, and the more distant it is, the more railroading you need to do to stay on target.   So the fixed point might be, "The PC's enter some room in a long forgotten dungeon" and that could work with minimal railroading if the dungeon exists in basically a static state until the PCs enter it, such that no matter what happens in the world, that encounter is always available in future.  But if the fixed point is dependent on complex dynastic politics and the PC's are actually going to be or potentially be important figures and not merely observers of important events, then you REALLY have to railroad to get there.   If you for example run major battles in the campaign using Battle System and with the PCs the determining factor in whether the battle is won or lost, and without NPC plot armor, and so forth, well you could potentially hew very far from Mallory and the GPC.  In my opinion, I'd rather run the game with the PC's more influential than not, perhaps a little less CoC hopelessness than is implied by the base rules and the base campaign, and actually let the PC's and their dynasty flourish and alter the course of events (if they choose to) rather than play a grand campaign in which the PCs can do whatever they like, but they can only observe great events and never change them.</blockquote>

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