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General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?
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<blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 9854592" data-attributes="member: 6795602"><p>I think about it a bit differently.</p><p></p><p>In the extreme cases we all agree what is railroading. One way of resolving term ambiguity is to anything that even slightly has some element of the extreme cases is a railroad. I understand why that would be appealing, but it defeats the purpose of highlighting the extremely bad behaviors we wanted to highlight with the term railroad to begin with. </p><p></p><p>But if we don’t handle it that way then the cutoff point for what is close enough to those platonic ideal railroads to be deemed a railroad is very subjective. </p><p></p><p>One understandably appealing option for dealing with the ambiguity of different perspectives is to only accept the impacted players perspective of whether it was railroading as it removes the ambiguity. However, this does nothing to point out which specific behaviors are railroading, which makes discussion and shared understanding of the topic impossible.</p><p></p><p>That is, there’s no perfect definition of railroad. They all have their own problems. I think the most useful one is the one that defines railroad as the ideally extreme example and then expands the term to include examples that are ‘close enough’ to that ideal railroad. It preserves the purpose of the term to highlight something to be avoided while maintaining discussability even though the exact ‘close enough’ is subjective.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FrogReaver, post: 9854592, member: 6795602"] I think about it a bit differently. In the extreme cases we all agree what is railroading. One way of resolving term ambiguity is to anything that even slightly has some element of the extreme cases is a railroad. I understand why that would be appealing, but it defeats the purpose of highlighting the extremely bad behaviors we wanted to highlight with the term railroad to begin with. But if we don’t handle it that way then the cutoff point for what is close enough to those platonic ideal railroads to be deemed a railroad is very subjective. One understandably appealing option for dealing with the ambiguity of different perspectives is to only accept the impacted players perspective of whether it was railroading as it removes the ambiguity. However, this does nothing to point out which specific behaviors are railroading, which makes discussion and shared understanding of the topic impossible. That is, there’s no perfect definition of railroad. They all have their own problems. I think the most useful one is the one that defines railroad as the ideally extreme example and then expands the term to include examples that are ‘close enough’ to that ideal railroad. It preserves the purpose of the term to highlight something to be avoided while maintaining discussability even though the exact ‘close enough’ is subjective. [/QUOTE]
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What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?
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