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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9756219" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Whereas, despite being a GM, I approach it almost purely from a player perspective.I'm a player.I want my choices to matter.When my choices don't matter, I feel frustrated.If I'm in a situation where it feels like I am bound to one and only one path, I will feel like my choices don't matter.The word I use for situations where I have that experience is "railroading".Like, your argument is analogous to a chef saying that "well I'm a good chef, so my food can't be overcooked" etc., to justify the idea that "overcooked" has a negative connotation it doesn't deserve. Sometimes, the point of a word is to be negative. That isn't a bad thing. It just means we need to apply it when it's appropriate. That's why I proposed (here or elsewhere, don't remember) various terms with different connotations:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Neutral "on a fixed path": linear</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Positive "on a fixed path": rollercoaster</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Neutral "free to roam": open</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Negative "free to roam": wasteland</li> </ul>I mean...yes? GM force being used is railroading. That's...what that is. Games exist that avoid the use of GM force or fiat for resolving things that players are interested in resolving. PbtA, for instance. It really isn't that hard to do this. PbtA ain't exactly unpopular, and we cannot use D&D as our lodestar because its dominance is not particularly related to its design. Unless you want to argue that actively instructing GMs to act passive-aggressively toward players was popular during the TSR years, which I doubt. D&D is popular for many many reasons and we simply cannot reason from "well D&D does it therefore it must be popular", that line of reasoning is invalid.It seems to me that the better choice, rather than trying to reclaim "railroad", is to seek new terms without the baggage, as said above.You should check out Ironsworn. None of this is true of it. Because you can 100% play without a GM at all.Critical issue: they may not produce equivalent results. Again, the issue of sleep, or using the bathroom, or eating an uneventful meal, or walking to a different location in a small town, or (etc.): these are thugs where the possibility of an event cropping up are low and generally outside the players' agency regardless, and where the characters are not really doing anything which offers much opportunity for agency.What agency is lost by not "playing out" sleeping for eight uneventful hours?Personally, I think trying to rehabilitate "railroad" is obfuscating, because it takes a word that is meant for being negative and says "well I mean it could be positive..."</blockquote>

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