What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?

[Bill Zebub]

I mean, just going around the table and asking someoe to describe their character, especially a specific part of their character like their boots, still takes quite a lot of players a good amount of time to come up with something creative.

I was working with a small (10-12) person, virtual company, and I proposed we kick off our weekly all-team Zoom meetingswith "Victory, Challenge, Shout-Out" where we go around and each person would take THIRTY SECONDS to say something that went well in the last week, something they were struggling with, and a shout-out to somebody else on the team.

It remained our ritual (until the company was acquired and dismembered...) but you can imagine how well people stuck to the 30 seconds. I even found a Zoom addon that let me run a stop-watch that everybody could see. No effect. Some people regularly spoke for 3-5 minutes on their turn.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It occurred to me that a cool use for AI would be to generate "topic histograms" illustrating what any given thread is actually about, over time (or "over posts"). These longer threads keep evolving into totally different topics.

And the next task would then be to figure out which topics (metagaming! NPCs using social skills! fighters suck! AI sucks more than fighters! warlords!) get touched on by the most threads.