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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9760552" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Some people like linear adventures.Not all linear adventures are railroads.The first group of people would be people who want a linear adventure and are not even attempting to exert their own choices, yes.The bolded part makes all the difference, imagine that.Except that that's not what I'm talking about, and never have been.You may have noticed, for example, my question about coercion. Which, I guess, I now need to say "coercive or manipulative". I don't personally see much difference between those things, but others have articulated one, so I'm expanding it to both.Is railroading always coercive or manipulative? I argue 100% yes.Are linear adventures always coercive or manipulative? Trivally no.That's the difference here. You want "railroad" to be expanded to cover all possible linear adventures no matter what. I disagree with that choice and think it is profoundly unhelpful.I disagree. Because, again, this is a question of whether that is being done in a coercive or manipulative way.If the GM forces their players to consistently do this no matter what the players want, then yes, that would be a problem. If it is done with full player buy-in, clearly, there's no problem.Railroading is enforced somehow; that the players might coincidentally not bump into it is irrelevant. Linearity, on the other hand, is simply a property of an adventure; it may be railroading or not railroading. Linear adventures have no strong negative connotations nor positive ones. (In fact, most prewritten adventures are more linear than not!) And, as I've previously argued (possibly in this thread?), we can even have a term for virtuous, well-constructed linear adventures: rollercoaster. You can't choose anything about how a coaster works, and yet people can find them quite thrilling if they're constructed well. But the people who find it thrillilng are, more or less always, people who knowingly sought out that experience. Hence the thread remains in common: well-executed with buy-in, it's great; unknown execution with unknown buy-in, it's neutral; with flawed execution and (especially) lacking buy-in, it's bad.This seems a quite effective description. It's not like having good, bad, and neutral words for the same overall concept is somehow weird or wrong. "Fragrant", for example, generally means a good smell, ignoring things like sarcastic usage. "Smell" is generally neutral but may have negative connotations (e.g. "smelly" is usually bad). "Stink" is clearly negative, again ignoring sarcastic/ironic usage. Should we, then, start arguing that things that "stink" actually smell good? That it's unfair to say that "stink" is bad because some people think sweat stinks and others enjoy it? Are we really going to start eliminating words with clear, useful, critical applicability, when other neutral words already exist, solely because some people get upset about the term being used pejoratively?</blockquote>

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