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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8342865" data-attributes="member: 42582">I won't tackle sandboxes in this post, just "linear adventures".As I see the term used, a linear adventure mostly refers to an adventure where the sequence of events is pre-scripted largely independently of the choices the players make in the play of their PCs during the course of the adventure. A module like Speaker in Dreams I think would be an example. Looking beyond D&D, I think the typical CoC adventure is like this.If "railroading" is to have a non-pejorative use, which presumably it is going to if anyone is going to defend railroading, then I would be happy to apply it to that sort of adventure. Basically everything that matters in the fiction - who is the antagonist, what happens next, how do the NPCs behave, etc - is determined independently of play. If the adventure is a published one, there will often by suggestions to the GM as to how to make sure the prescribed events happen (eg back-ups if players initially miss a clue; replacement villains if the PCs kill a leading villain in an early fight; etc).Playing such adventures may be fun, or not - obviously different people enjoy different things on different occasions! - but to me they look like a railroad. The core of the fiction is pre-determined; the main contribution the players make is to characterise their PCs.</blockquote>