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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9758592" data-attributes="member: 4937">If you want to be hard and fast about that claim, that is, it's not a railroad if the players consent to ride the rails, then we are at a point where we no longer have anything to argue about. I did address this explicitly earlier, in that I said I contended that it was still a railroad if the players never realized they were on the rails.  If I'm fudging but you don't catch me, it doesn't mean I didn't fudge.  If every choice created the same outcome, it doesn't matter that you never realized that because you don't do two playthroughs, it was still a railroad.  If the players believe that they are doing creative and unexpected things, when in fact they are doing exactly what the GM plotted for them to do, then I don't accept that no GM force was used even if the players brought consent to every choice.  The presence of GM force or not doesn't depend on whether it is noticed or whether it is rebelled against.  Just because you don't try to get off the choo choo doesn't mean you aren't on one.One of the first examples of a model explicitly written with heavy reliance on GM force to ensure the story goes as planned is "DL1: Dragons of Flame".  It has pretty much everything - tiny world, obdurium walls, hand waves, time skips, invincible NPCs.  Yet because it's written in a fairly naturalistic manner with plausible problems (like massive invading armies), a player who can't see the text of the module might not be aware that they are on rails through a good portion of the module.  They might be like a player early in Half-Life 2 that hasn't quite realized yet that there is only ever one path forward, because the hooks are so good for pulling you forward.  Yet the fact that they haven't yet realized that they are on a rail doesn't mean that the adventure isn't linear.But if you don't accept that and require that the GM force has to be obvious in order for it to exist, then we're stuck at the level of definitions.</blockquote>

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