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But there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy to follow the lead and take the opportunity to play with the mechanics and do the incidental roleplaying along the way. Complicated decision making is the last thing they want.

Again, there's a distinction between "despite" and "because of".

Its entirely possible to view enjoyable gaming despite problem processes and not view it as because of them. There were a lot of things I did early in my GMing career that I don't think were exactly ideal ways to do things, and the fact I managed to pull out some good games while doing them in...

I think it matters when you do that. Its not a railroad if, at the start of the campaign the GM says "You need to all design characters who want to do X when it comes up, because that's what the campaign is about." That's constraining the initial character-set, but isn't forcing the point in...

But if only some characters have to use it for survivability, as far as I'm concerned that's a design flaw. When they're entangled, I'm going to talk about them together. If that upsets you, feel free to ignore me. You said most, but as far as I can tell it only follows if you accept that's...

For a more Watsonian explanation, its also extremely questionable that the tolerance for superheroic vigilantism would continue if they were regularly killing the people they were fighting against, especially when it isn't necessary. Most supers are perfectly capable of taking down opponents...

Well, for some people some of those things are so intimately connected in their view that they aren't really separate in the sense others would think.

You could set it up so, as the saying goes, "all roads lead to Rome" not in the sense where everything the PCs do will continue the plot as intended, but so that if they miss or destroy one node, there's other routes allowing them to reconnect. Its just that its both a pain in the behind to...

This ignores the case in a sandbox campaign where the players simply decide they're not going to engage with the problem at hand any further no matter what would do that and bail. In a linear adventure its sort of assumed they won't do that, that the players will attach motivations to their...

Usually it because the players understand how things are going and don't need to be forced at all once they've signed on. As I noted before when this came up, when I ran Scion 1e, in practice the PCs needed to stay in their lanes and the players were well aware up-front, because in their areas...

That's certainly a big one, but there's also the issue of how the PCs get from points A to B to C to D, which can, even if the overall experience is similar, make the details feel quite different.

Except the breadth they take it to is--startling. For example, if you're running a game where the PCs are part of a military unit, the first time a player decides his character is going to go AWOL and head over the hills, you're apparently supposed to continue running the game for him in...

Its not common, but I've hit it more than once. When I pointed out that there were whole genres of games that excluded, they outright said they might be games but since they constrained player choice, they weren't "real RPGs".

Though that requires everyone to be disciplined enough to stick to their lane.

An option that requires people to trade off their whole offensive is effectively useless most of the time; as I noted, it--at best--leaves the opponent to try again the next round, so it did--what? Its possible to construct that sort of thing so it sets up a counter strike or the like, but MSH...

I'm being conservative; usually spy stories try to stick somewhere near but just a bit beyond the extent technologies and the helicarriers were a bit beyond that, so I was qualifying in case someone jumped on them.

Oh, sure. Though I think the later in the AP it is, the harder this is as its likely to be based on earlier events.

I've seen people pretty actually claim that anything but a complete open sandbox wasn't even an RPG. Unsurprisingly, they were awfully old-school in other ways, too.

My point was in some cases the information to lead you further along in the AP is contained within one of the nodes a lot of time, and if you ignore or disrupt that node without getting it, you've effectively wandered away from the rest of the AP completely; its hard to see any other actions on...

I'm curious how you view typical Adventure Path and Plot Point style campaigns. I've played in a couple of Paizo's for PF2e, and while they technically weren't on rails, wandering far from it was going to be--largely pointless at least. In a few spots it was going to blow up the whole rest of...