Recent content by Hriston

My party is first level and has just emerged from an eight hour dungeon crawl. Their choices are to seek shelter in the nearby abandoned castle where a family of wild boars awaits in the courtyard, camp in the wilderness and risk a random encounter with ogres, or head to a village a short...

I wasn't directly attempting to answer your question because I'm not really interested in limiting the roleplaying choices of players based on ability scores, but I was interested in what you said about prohibiting "participation in some aspect of the game" and that "finding and proposing...

Okay, well, for you, what ability does a character depend on to explore the setting, and what is the minimum score needed to do so?

It was meant to address this question from the post to which you were responding: Since you prioritize exploration of the setting over more challenge-oriented play (focusing on exploration of situation), I was suggesting an expectation might exist that PCs with low Wisdom would be considered...

I think the expectation in RPGs that individual players are the ones who get to play their particular characters is pretty much universal. This is probably why force often gets labeled as railroading.

Well yeah, the basis of calling the use of force railroading is that table expectations are such that it's perceived as a violation by the player whose character is on the receiving end. I don't know if that means "they just get to", but it does mean there's a general understanding that force is...

That's correct. Your low Wisdom prevents you from hearing even my narration about the setting.

If you wanted to avoid being my personal torture victim for all of eternity, you should have put a higher score in Wisdom. Now play the character you've chosen to play.

Your character's Wisdom is too low to perceive the setting. Everything looks, sounds, and feels like a fuzzy grey blob. What do you do?

I love this example! Al Czervik (played by Rodney Dangerfield) is extremely effective socially. It's clear the background characters find him funny and entertaining, even lovable. He's a natural leader and life of the party. The main impact on the plot of his nouveau riche boorishness is to...

I don't know what the GM's reason is for violating table expectations to control my character's choices. Why do you assume it's aesthetic, and why would it matter? And yes, it's the very definition of railroading.

I have a hard time imagining the sort of play that would make it desirable for any participant to violate table expectations to control the choices of another player's character. What do you have in mind?

My post wasn't about the OP.

I have no problem with non-physical stats mattering, and, the way I play, they do, but I think enforcing certain decisions by the character by force is a terrible way to make them matter (if you feel like they don't for some reason).