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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9761060" data-attributes="member: 4937">As a software developer, I feel compelled to ask you, what first paragraph do you mean by that?  Also what thing is it that you do?I believe so.  We've been doing it for like 14 years.Seems like a strange question to me.  Whether or not someone is "onboard with the game" is pretty irrelevant to me.  A player can enjoy the game because they've never known an alternative and they just think "this is the way it is".  A player can show up to a game that they usually don't enjoy because this is their most important social outlet and most important friend group and they don't want to exclude themselves from that.  Whether we have consent is both hardly even useful to know and also such a low bar that it tells us nothing that we exceeded it.  People watch bad movies because they are bored with full consent yet that doesn't mean we should make bad movies or that they enjoyed the experience particularly.  If our goal is to be entertaining and to succeed at our art and maximize the fun, there is so much more going on than "consent" that it's hardly even a useful paradigm to consider.  Ok, yeah, let's have consent, but that's a terribly low bar.Well, you aren't me. There are two important things to realize about the dialogue I am trying to have.  First, just because I'm talking about how to railroad players doesn't mean that I think it's a particular good idea to do so.  And secondly, unlike the claims of posters who keep going, "But that can't be right because I do that!", I am actually exploring the "common sense" definition of the term "railroading" that we all at some level agree on and trying to put my finger on what that means, why it describes a real problem, and what if anything we are to learn from it.  I don't actually have a private definition except to the extent that I also offer an Aristotelean definition to go along with the conventional Socratic one, and I don't really care about the word but I do care about the idea behind the word - what the word points to.  And yes, I could replace the word with some other word of my own devising while keeping the definition, but first "why?", and secondly that would just end up being recognized as a euphemism for "railroading" and we'd be back in the same position.</blockquote>

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