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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5414505" data-attributes="member: 4937">I reject the notion that the opposite of sandboxing is railroading.  The two terms aren't directly comparable.  The opposite of railroading is what I call rowboating.  The opposite of a sandbox is what is usually called now an adventure path.  For example, GDQ is not a sandbox but rather a recognizable adventure path, but for the most part fans of 'classic play' do not claim that it is a railroad either.As I said, not everything that is called a railroad is actually a railroad.  Sometimes players with strong sandbox preferences (or what they think are sandbox preferences) will call a game a railroad if it isn't sufficiently sandbox-y for them.  Sometimes players will perjure a game as a 'railroad' in an effort to take narrative authority from the GM.  For example, I've seen players who would try to brow beat a DM by narrating not what he did but its intended outcome, and who would then call 'railroad' if the outcome of his propositions wasn't what he'd imagined it would be (that, or he'd call for a retcon, claiming his character would have done something different had he understood the situation better).  The comic Knights of the Dinner Table is marked by the fact that the players consider pretty much everything the DM does to be a 'railroad', whether it is or not.   That BA attempts to control their dysfunctional behavior by actually railroading them tends to only, and comicly (or tragicly), make it worse.All that being said, I think that either you have an adventure path, or you have a sandbox, or you have some complex mix of the two ('narrow-broad-narrow' or 'Theme Parks' or whatever).  I don't agree that just because you can plot a game on a separate axis of player empowerment or narrative authority (whatever you want to call it), that such games lose their 'linear coordinates'.   What is true is that on a graph of 'linearity' vs. 'player empowerment', games that feature alot of railroading tend to cluster in the corner marked by high linearity and low player empowerment.  High player empowerment is definately a way to avoid a railroad, but it isn't necessarily a way to avoid linearity.   If you want to use a 'railroad' analogy, it's something like the railroad in China Miéville's 'Iron Council' - yes, you are on a train, but the players have some authority to decide where to lay the rails (or more accurately, they have some authority to do the landscaping around the train).</blockquote>

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