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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9857999" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is why these discussions about terms of art never have any consensus.  People hear the term, they use the term, but they never really know what the term means and so they end up inevitably with either no definition or a private definition.  Then we can do nothing but talk past each other because it's almost impossible to understand what the other person is trying to say, until they actually define their terms. I see where you are coming from here, but I went the opposite way in analyzing the term.To me the verb "to railroad" or "railroading" is not particularly obnoxious.  Everyone does it a little, even if they are trying not to because it's not possible to run a perfect process simulation using something as limited as the human mind - even if a perfect simulation was desirable.  Every GM uses at least a little bit of force some of the time to push things in a specific direction.  The most common and most benevolent form of this is that whatever the players choose to do, they'll find something heroic and interesting to engage with.  The game universe is filled with little coincidences to make the PCs important to the game universe.  GMs can have a perfectly reasonable observation or impulse when they see the game is starting to become boring to use force to pick the pace up or steer the PCs toward something interesting or useful for achieving whatever goal they have, or for giving them a new goal if they've accomplished their current goals or their remaining goals are too remote for the moment.  Absolutely, push things in a direction and if the players don't resist, things are great.  The pacing picks back up and they get engaged again and the story moves forward.  "Hey guys, the content is over that way.", just done subtly and in character.  The PC's find a previously unplanned map or a letter or see some villain they've been tracking coincidentally meeting with some other character in the marketplace.  The meet a drunk guy in the bar which lets slip a rumor or some other clue they've hitherto missed.  That's all GM force.  And I can step up the examples with increasingly intrusive agency wrecking things you can do if the game is going "wrong" and people aren't enjoying it or you know they really won't enjoy what's going to happen and you need a way to make this encounter work.But the noun "a railroad" on the other hand is something that annoys me as a player.  It's when the adventure has too much "railroading" going on so that the whole adventure can be characterized by a lot of hard, clunky, and unnecessary GM force to get the poorly conceived adventure to work because the adventure was predicated on a series of choices the players aren't making and actions they don't cooperate with.Even in cases where what the players choose is less fun, sometimes you have to let them do it.  They burn down the haunted house rather than exploring it and finding the clues and treasure, and the bad guy escapes through the tunnel the basement unopposed because they weren't in combat with them.  It's dumb on their part, but my bad for not making the house flameproof in the first place like a noob GM.  They figure out ahead of time the corrupt cop is going to have them arrested and so they don't, turning an exciting adventure into something that happens off stage as lawyers from both sides hash it out.  More boring than what would have happened, but they have to have agency.  I'm not going to punish them for having foresight.  They were losing but it felt to them like winning, so I let it happen.  Conflict tends to happen when the player realizes he's being railroaded, decides to get off the rails, and then you don't let them.  Most players can't tell when they are being railroaded (unless you are a noob), might not even categorize what you are doing as railroading, and even if they did generally are OK with it if they think you are steering them toward something they want.  As such, most players who aren't GMs I imagine define railroading as, "GM force when I don't like it."  As a player who is also a GM, I define it differently because I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to GM and realize that at some level there is always GM fiat influencing the game.</blockquote>

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