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You can have story-oriented games, it's writing them out ahead of time and not altering the story to fit player actions that's the problem. A too-detailed outline is like a straitjacket: if you as the DM spent 8 hours preparing this material, you'll probably try your damnedest to make sure it...

For anyone who wants to try this, the check would be your choice of Dexterity + Expression or Presence + Expression. If you succeed at it, we'll assume that you had piano lessons at some point, rather that worry about "OMG it's not on your charsheet you can't!!1"

A deep-seated hunger in my soul to feel what I felt when I first opened up the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook and felt like a new world of possibilities had opened up to me for the first time, that I was on the brink of experiencing a new awesome, as I had never awesome'd before. That, and the...

I make it all up as I go, and my players love it. No railroading, no illusionism (beyond re-skinning NPC stats). Player actions matter, fun times are had. Railroading is a crutch for those who can't pull off my zen-like state of lazy creativity. :lol:

Rrrooooouussse!!

I run Mage: The Awakening, so my NPCs always want something weird, inscrutibly magical, and horrific in exchange for favors. Some favorites: *Fourteen toes from stillborn children. *Dispose of the results of a magical experiment gone horribly awry: a young man whose mind was replaced with that...

Thorn. music theory: Intelligence (2) + Academics (1) = 3 dice, 0 successes. The sheet music had two sets of bars, one with a kind of giant apostrophe, and one with kind of a weird "G" at the front. In between, words were written, probably lyrics. They were strangely specific; they described...

Yeah, me too. I calculate the PCs' average hit bonus, damage, hit points and such, then make a stock NPC that the average PC can hit 70% of the time, dies in an average of 1 hit per PC in the group, etc. Games like D&D do that work for you with Challenge Ratings and monster levels, so I don't...

"I am a catalog of the events of The Alpha," replied the voice of a warm, kindly old man. Spirit: 7 dice, 1 success. Thorn: Resolve (2) + Composure (3) = 5 dice, 1 success. Briefly, Thorn considered picking up the pen on the piano and taking notes on what the spirit was saying, using the sheet...

It sounds like your DM failed at Illusionism, then, because you figured it out. Like a lot of posts in this thread, you've essentially said that Illusionism is bad when it fails, and you've never seen it succeed. But maybe it's been used on you before, and you didn't notice--meaning it worked...

There are plenty of things you can do to get past the lock that don't involve picking it. For instance, you know that the lock and piano both extend into the Twilight, which is not the usual state of affairs. With Prime, you could analyze the items, and perhaps end that effect. Also, the lock...

Five people are sitting around a table at their Friendly Local Gaming Shop, each with a sheet of paper in front of them and a 20-sided die in hand. One of them is describing a cackling maniac in a lab coat, riding a giant robotic dinosaur climbing up the Empire State Building. Suddenly, Greg...

Dexterity + Larceny +/- Tools. You should also take a Wits + Larceny to see if you either brought tools along to pick locks (with 3+ successes) or can find something around you, like a bobby pin and pen knife (with 1 or more successes). It'll be at a -2 because it's kind of an unlikely thing...

Janx and CharlesRyan are brilliant people and I endorse the things they say.

No problem at all. Absolutely everyone I game with in real life is a serious, straight-A 18 credit type of student, so I completely understand that school takes priority. My catch phrase has always been, "It's a game, not an obligation." I'll have Levanna help out the other three mages while...

Mitchell heard the spirit's rambling gibberish, since he still has Spirit Tongue up, but Levanna's the only one who has spoken to it.

See, I don't think it counts as Illusionism if the players know what's going on. It's just railroading that the players are in on. Illusionism, to me, means there's an illusion going on--the players don't know they're being railroaded, so it doesn't matter. It seems to me that you're arguing...

I haven't really tried to pull off Illusionism myself, so I can't really say. Maybe the DMs who tried it on you were bad at it, or maybe it's nigh-impossible to do. Fund the research project! Grad students all over America are very hungry. :p Yeah, this is exactly how I run games. Well...

Well, the core premise of Illusionism is that the difference is indecipherable from the players' side of the screen. If the players don't know that the pre-determined occurrence was pre-determined, then it can't affect their enjoyment of the game, can it?

Me, too. I throw a bunch of stuff out there for players to investigate, and when they come up with cool ideas for what they think the plot is--turns out they were right! They're such great detectives. ;) Not everything they brainstorm is right, of course, but when they get close to what I was...