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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9733853" data-attributes="member: 7006">There are no definitions of railroading that are useful because nobody will agree on a single one.  As you and I can attest.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />To put it more plainly, it is not up to the DM or an outsider perspective to determine whether an adventure is a railroad or not, because they aren't the ones playing through it.  It's the players for whom a "railroad" matters, because they are the one who are seeing and feeling that their choices are being ignored and thus are being "railroaded".  They are the ones feeling the negative effects of the decisions the DM is making.That being said... I will agree with you to a certain extent in terms of perspective, in that because to me whether something is a railroad or not comes down to whether the players feel they are being railroaded... the "illusion of choice" to me is a completely valid way of playing from the DM's perspective because the players do not know the difference.  The players still get to make choices and feel good about their decisions, even if those decisions result in the same thing happening. Basically an extension that also goes into the "fudging die rolls" and "Quantum Ogres" perspective as well.I personally couldn't care less about the top-down look from other people about how I run my game, I only care about how my players feel.  And because every single type of game becomes a 'linear adventure' (or 'linear plot') after the fact... the actual game type used doesn't actually matter.  Whether that's an Adventure Path, a Lego Sandbox, an Open Sandbox, or any other so-called type of game.  All that actually matters is that my players feel as though they are allowed to make decisions on what to do and that those decisions result in further action.  And if they are happy with those further actions, then how it was that I as DM determined what those further actions were doesn't matter.  Because if I do my job correctly, they will have no idea.(The big issue for some other DMs of course are that they might not be skilled enough yet to actually do their job correctly.  They might not be able to pull off the magic trick to the satisfaction of their players.  But it's thus on them to work to get better at it.)</blockquote>

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