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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8153096" data-attributes="member: 16814">Deja vu!  I made this exact argument -- like nearly verbatim -- to [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] a few years ago.  I went looking for it, but couldn't find it, but I did find the thread where I started to realize I was missing something.  That featured [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER], [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER], and [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] patiently explaining it to me.  I think [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] was near the same place as me in that thread.  It was another long one, Judgement Calls vs "railroading", from March 2017.  Man, I read me then and see someone that has started to think there may be something outside of the valley, but hasn't yet climbed the mountains to see.Anyway, remanence aside, this is a very similar argument to what I made.  And, it makes sense, if you don't really synthesis the entire play process (which is hard coming from a D&D mindset!).  The reality is that it's impossible to railroad the game -- it's glaringly obvious and the players can just step all over you.  This is because the players are the ones that determine what the game is about -- they pick the scores, they pick the ways they free play investigations, they pick the actions.  The GM is powerless to even have a say until and unless the players have picked what play will be about.  Sure, the GM might try to use the failure conditions to direct play, but this becomes obvious if they're introducing entirely new elements to the fiction that aren't related to what the player is about.  Same with framing -- if you're dragging in unrelated elements to a score frame, it's blindingly obvious.  There is no subtle way to direct play because your opportunities to do so aren't reliable or often available.  The players really do drive what happens -- the GM is reacting to the players, there's little to no opportunity to direct the players.Really?  I mean, my intent was convey "haunted house."  I usually reach for cliches because they do the job very quickly in these cases.  So, peeling wallpaper, dilapidated furniture, odd creaks and groans, the feeling everything is slightly askew, and paintings whose eyes seem to follow you.  This is pretty unoriginal stuff, and I don't see how you can say that this directly players to investigate the paintings.  The only reason the painting was even looked at a second time was because one player decided it was a good opportunity to engage in their personal mission and made it important.  The painting was a detail in the "theme" description.  The entire other half of that scene setting was describing the guard at the end of the hallway with a candle on a table, muttering about how creepy the house was and that he was between the PCs and their goal.  This is another critical point about how Blades and similar games frame scenes -- there isn't any "empty" framing, which it's just a description of an area or room.  Scenes are about action, so the focus of the scene is the obstacle or threat that's present.  You add flavor to the scene to bring it to life or encourage a larger theme (like a score in a haunted house), but the focus is the obstacle.  So, yeah, this wasn't a description of a hallway where the players then decided which direction they go down the hallway, this was a scene featuring a guard blocking further progress that included a description of the hallway the guard was in and some details to reinforce the larger theme of the score location.</blockquote>

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