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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9758374" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't claim that in the general case the players choosing something is a loss of agency.  I do claim that time skips (or hand waves generally) are a technique for railroading.The idea behind a time skip is (ideally) that everyone at the table agrees that they want to move past the "scenary" and get to a certain destination because that is the "good stuff".  So yes, the player is in the ideal case choosing something.  But what they are choosing to do is willingly board the choo choo train.  I suppose we could make an exception for time skips that were specifically to a destination the GM didn't want the players to go to, but even that is questionable.  It could be that the GM is agreeing to that time skip precisely because it shortens the amount of game time that is wasted before the players are back on the railroad he wants them to be on.I'm not saying either as a player or a GM that willingly getting aboard the choo choo train is a bad idea.  It could be that when you get to where you are going you are dropped into some sort of environment where you have and are allowed to have agency.  But the whole point of a time skip is to get you from point A to point B without being derailed, and that's a hugely powerful railroading technique.    Yes, I absolutely agree.  I think it should be telling that if the GMs "ends" require things to happen on the journey that the time skip won't hold, but fundamentally getting players to agree to a time skip is a hugely powerful way to ensure players get to a particular place in the fictional game state.Agreed.  (Well, mostly, there are other techniques you could probably use to railroad them even then, but they'd be a lot more subtle.)Agreed.  But did you even notice that what you just proved in the last two sentences was "not time skipping is not railroading".  And why shouldn't I agree to that?The thing is that I actually haven't done this.  I was fully willing to use your definition that you offered here: "Railroading is negating player choice specifically to achieve the DMs ends and push the players to where the DM wants them to be."And I'm not understanding how you don't understand that a time skip is a powerful way to do that.</blockquote>

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