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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7404282" data-attributes="member: 16814"><img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> Irony, thy name is [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION].  Sorry, should I <snip> your post to make the irony clear?As for your question, I find that to be a banality and so I ignored it.  However, since you seem to insist:I can see the tortuous logic you're using.  You're literally claiming the right to continue to call the example railroading, and use that in future arguments, because you claim it's railroading to you.  You've defined railroading as something that is unique to each individual; an aesthetic; a preference.  But, right at that moment, it ceases to have any use as a diagnostic for analysis.  You literally just told everyone in this thread that when you say something is railroading, it's equivalent to saying you think it's pretty.  Railroading is now, thanks to your definition, utterly useless for you to use as a criticism of another playstyle that has any more weight than 'I don't like it.'Which would normally be fine, if self-defeating to your larger stated purposes of analyzing playstyle differences (what's the use of an aesthetic for analysis?) if, and this is key, railroading wasn't already a pejorative term.  So, you can't just declare that railroading is only an aesthetic consideration and thereby remove the pejorative aspects of the term, which is exactly what you're doing.   You're providing the defense that others shouldn't take offense to you saying something is a railroad because you think the term should only be used as an aesthetic description and so you lack the authority to make others see something as a railroad.  So, then, as long as they don't see what their doing as railroading, you should be free to use the term because it only describes your opinion of the thing and that can't be seen as you saying it's a railroad in fact.  But, railroad still a pejorative and has a general meaning that most people accept and use.  Redefining a pejorative doesn't work.  As Ken White of popehat fame often says, if you ironically screw a goat, you're still a goat-screwer.  Since I think you're a reasonably smart person I have a hard time allowing that you've concocted this elaborate defense and yet don't recognize that you're using a pejorative term in a way guaranteed to evoke it usually understood pejorative meaning.  And then claiming that it's other people's fault for taking offense because you really define that term (that you used in it's usual meaning, mind) in as a relational property.  That doesn't work, man.  Sadly, there was an easy out to this, one I pointed out earlier, and that is, under Story Now, the example would be a railroad because it's the GM overriding the play procedures to abridge player agency (as allowed by the system) and enforce the GM's preferred outcome.  Had you struck this argument, instead of the ones you chose instead, then you'd be standing on strong ground.  However, this would require admitting that the playstyles differ enough in core assumptions that maybe you cannot use the same metrics to analyze them both, and that's a point you've not conceded and seem strongly adverse to conceding.  So, instead, we get this, which halfway makes the point, but fails to frame it in terms of the actual, concrete differences between the playstyles and, instead, attempts an end-run around logic to arrive at the conclusion that you can continue to call it railroading but others should not take that to mean that they railroad because the impression of railroading is deeply personal and cannot be transferred, like the idea of beauty.  It's exhausting, really.</blockquote>

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