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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9756389" data-attributes="member: 4937">That sounds reasonable except for that part "feels like".  Something either is or isn't, regardless of whether you feel it or not.  If you as a player don't realize you are on and bound to one path because you never try to get off, then you'll probably have a blast and might even think you are being clever and creative, but that doesn't mean you actually had real agency.  That's high illusionism, where the player thinks that they have agency but really the GM is just fudging so well that no matter what they do, the GM tells them the story that the GM thinks they will enjoy.  Conversely, if a player feels like they have no agency and they are on rails, but there are no rails and the problem is the player is terrible at thinking outside the box, doesn't try to negotiate or parley, doesn't try to run away, or whatever and is just approaching all problems head on, that might be the GMs fault but the problem probably isn't that it is a railroad if there are legitimately many possible solutions the GM would allow to win.So you think my analogy is bad so you are going to make an analogy about my analogy that is worse to prove that, is that how we are going to approach this?  Your analogy misses the point.  But if I must make do with it, while I do agree that it's objectively worse to cook a steak to well done, that doesn't mean rare is the best way to cook a steak and everyone will agree with it.  But here is the problem, 'cooked' is a purely objective thing.  I can judge doneness by internal temperature.  So you aren't really making a good analogy anyway.Yeah I get all that, but the problem is that (almost) no one does apply 'railroading' in an appropriate way because they think that they can distinguish between good GM fiat and bad GM railroading as if there is a hard and sharp objective line in that which will work for everyone, or as if they are not themselves actually applying railroading techniques to limit player agency at all.I tend to use linear, railroad, sandbox, rowboat world but yeah, I've been making that distinction like 18 years or so.Except now you are redefining what railroading is from your first player centric definition where it was about experience.  Now you've offered me two different definitions.  What do you really mean?No.  Because if you actually try to say, "Well, how does someone railroad (verb) the players?", you quickly realize that what they are doing is not qualitatively different than good GMing (or what most people would experience as good GM) but quantitatively different.  What matters to whether something is a railroad/roller coaster (noun) is how much railroading actually went on and from a player experience perspective, how much they noticed or cared.  Well, yes, and I have; but, I already started this conversation by saying that railroading only applies in the context of a game with a GM.  If you have some way to play without one then you have other issues like there is no secret keeper and the experience is more like writing a book than reading one, which is fun, but perhaps not for everyone or as fun for more people.  But yes, no GM makes it really hard to railroad.As I tried to explain earlier, the hand wave isn't "You slept for eight hours."  The handwave is "Do you agree to be asleep?"  That is to say, "Do you agree to let me have you in this particular and situation during those eight hours?"  The time skip here isn't over the sleeping, since we presumably play out everything (nothing) that happened during the sleep.  The time skip is how much time we are skipping to get to that point where everyone is asleep.</blockquote>

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