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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7403316" data-attributes="member: 42582">Three intial things.First, it's neither my job nor my place to draw inferences from general propositions to individual posters' games. Even if I could (and few posters in this thread have posted many actual play examples), that's really up to them.Second, railroading is a relational property - of a game to its participants. If I was to play in [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s game, I suspect I would find it railroad-y. But I don't. Presumably his players emjoy it, and don't find it railroad-y.I even posted a definition to this effect upthread of your post. Did you read it, do you disagree with it, or are you just "dishonestly" ignoring it?!Third, there is the use of guilty. Running games I wouldn't emjoy is not a crime.Now to pull back a bit - Lanefan and Maxperson clearly think I run a game that is degenerate in some sense. That's fine - it's their prerogative to dislimke someone else's creative endeavour. My response is to respond to their posts and further explain whatever techniques I thinik they are misunderstanding or misdescribing.It's clear that those two posters, and probably some others, think that a game in which a player is free to declare "I search for a secret door" is not a railroad, even if the GM has already decided there is no secret door to be found, because the player got to choose what action to declare. My view is that it is a railroad, because the outcome of the choice has already been determined by the GM, and - assuming (as I am) that there is something actually at stake in the situation (such as avoiding capture by pursuers) - the range of options available to the players in responding to the situatoin has been narrowed by an unrvealed element of the GM's framing.(If the game was a puzzle-solving game, where the whole idea is to guess the GM's unrevealed secrets, then things would be different. Railroading doesn't really have application in that context, I don't think. As best I can tell, this puzzle-solving element is a bigger thing in [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s game than [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]s's.)This is not a disagreement over the definition of railroad. It's a disagreement over what should be the meaningful dimensions of player choice in RPGing. But "should" here is obviously not a universal moral judgement. We're discussing hobby gaming, not the fate of humanity. It's a type of aesthetic should. but also connected to the enjoyment of RPGing. I take that to be sufficient to show that it is relational in the way I described above.</blockquote>

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