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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9760015" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, that's not the case.  It just may be the case that we can't easily measure it.  Typically you see this in sociological issues where people realizing that something is a spectrum come up with some formula that takes different inputs that they are think are relevant and then attempt to use this formula to get a rough measurement of the thing they are interested in.  For example, they may be concerned with how free citizens of a country are, how transparent the government is, how corrupt the voting process or the judiciary system is, or how happy people are in the nation.  They'll take surveys and attempt to use them as a basis of comparison.Pick what you like.  If you can say some thing is "more" than something else, even if you don't have an objective way to measure it, that thing can be quantitative.  Have you ever felt more happy than some other time you were happy, or more sad than at some other time you were sad?  Can you come up with a measurable unit for happy or sad?  Possibly, by examining brain chemistry if you really knew how those emotions were created.  But absence of full understanding of the thing doesn't mean that it isn't quantitative.Anyone who has been a player in a sufficiently large number of games knows that player agency comes in a spectrum.  That's hardly a novel or revolutionary claim.  What I am saying is that people arbitrarily assign to games that lack agency to a certain degree (or in certain ways that they are familiar with) the term "railroad", as in "Everything with less agency than I'm used to is a railroad".  And they treat that as a qualitative assignment even though everyone is assigning it to a different level.I get around that by saying what's important is the techniques that you use at the table. Those techniques need to either be lightly employed or mitigated - such as for example as you do to be careful to get consent before hand waving or time skipping and by being careful not to hand wave or time skip away important decision points or by allowing a certain amount of retconning if the party immediately decides that the handwave went against their interests.  That minimizes the loss of agency created by a time skip, and is all good things and indicates to me that you at some level are aware of the potential problem.</blockquote>

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