Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 5409347" data-attributes="member: 99817">That's exactly the point I'm making as well. Defining 'railroad' as purely the point of conflict (the subjective experience, in your words) separates it from techniques which may produce that experience, or may not.It's confusing to call false choice 'railroading' and a bad play experience arising from a false choice 'railroading'. It's as confusing as calling snow on the road 'a car crash'.We have the vocabulary in place to avoid any confusion. Once you define the railroad as the conflict and identify the cause by the technique which produced it. 'The players ended up railroaded because the DM kept giving them false choices'. Then there's no ambiguity.The definition I'm using is well known in game theory. It's been on The Forge for 10 years, and is in the GNS glossary. Adopting it more widely would clear up a lot of misunderstanding, IMO.In the absence of that, I'll continue to use it that way myself, because it limits my use of the word 'railroad' to those occasions when the game turned sour and minimises the risk of inadvertently annoying anyone else.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="chaochou, post: 5409347, member: 99817"] That's exactly the point I'm making as well. Defining 'railroad' as purely the point of conflict (the subjective experience, in your words) separates it from techniques which may produce that experience, or may not. It's confusing to call false choice 'railroading' and a bad play experience arising from a false choice 'railroading'. It's as confusing as calling snow on the road 'a car crash'. We have the vocabulary in place to avoid any confusion. Once you define the railroad as the conflict and identify the cause by the technique which produced it. 'The players ended up railroaded because the DM kept giving them false choices'. Then there's no ambiguity. The definition I'm using is well known in game theory. It's been on The Forge for 10 years, and is in the GNS glossary. Adopting it more widely would clear up a lot of misunderstanding, IMO. In the absence of that, I'll continue to use it that way myself, because it limits my use of the word 'railroad' to those occasions when the game turned sour and minimises the risk of inadvertently annoying anyone else. [/QUOTE]

Verification