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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 9760447" data-attributes="member: 75787">I really am unsure what you mean here. In a game that is a railroad, the tracks very much do go somewhere. If they only mostly go somewhere, that's exactly what every single game in the world does and so cannot be railroading unless everything does.I absolutely believe that people ere always biased and I do agree with you that their biases come out. I am nearly completely in agreement with you. Our only disagreement (I believe) is that you think that you should call a game where the GM makes several efforts to suggest that a town might be a good place to go a game "with some degree of railroading" and I would just call it a "game where the GM really wants something, but isn't going to force it on you"I think I see where you have misunderstood me -- you took my statement it's not a question of having "less" freedom -- it's about no freedom to apply to the whole game. We are in agreement that that is an extreme position, and I do not take it. My statement applies to the individual cases of player agency. So if a player wants to go to sea, and the GM makes it impossible, then that is railroading regardless of how much other freedoms are allowed. My argument is that railroading is the complete absence of ability for a player to choose a certain action. It is a qualitative thing, but, like all qualitative things you could turn it into a quantitive scale by counting the number of qualitative incidents. For example, you duo exactly that!Excellent reference, yes. This helps explain my position well. The major plot points are railroading (you have "no freedom"), but other things are not.Your statement is exactly my argument -- you have split things into two categories when you describe this adventure, and each of them is either railroading or not -- either free action or no action. So ..... if your quantitative measure "railroading" is defined as a count / ratio / weighted whatever of the number of times that a railroading situation occurs, I think we are in agreement. If you assert that putting pressure on a player, either consciously or unconsciously to bias them to a certain decision is railroading to any degree at all, I'm not with you. As soon as a GM allows the players to take reasonable courses of action, even with possibly unfair costs, it's not railroading.</blockquote>

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