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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8695599" data-attributes="member: 42582">This one is a strange example to cause such a stark split.[USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER]: in your treatment of this matter, who at the table decided that what was at stake in choosing to go to the library, rather than go to the market, was that the players wouldn't see and confront the escaped beast? As best I can tell, the answer is the GM. Did the GM tell this to the players? As best I can tell, the answer is No. So the players made a choice - to have their PCs go to the library rather than the market - which had a consequence that they didn't, and couldn't, have known about. That looks to me like straight-out GM control over the fiction, and the meaning of the players' choices. Which I thought was exactly the thing you've been complaining about in your posts!The more general point, it seems to me, is this: If the GM frames a scene or encounter, and in that framing does not negate or override something that the players chose to make a focus or stakes of play, than no meaning that the players introduced into the game is being overridden or disregarded. So it can't be railroading.There is an approach to play that slightly - but only slightly - complicates the preceding: the "hidden gameboard/secret notes" approach, where the players know that the GM is referring to secret material to tell them what happens next, and a big part of the point of play is for the players to learn these secrets and exploit that knowledge to do well in the game. Gygaxian dungeon crawling is a paradigm of this; procedural hex crawls can be seen as a variant. In these games the players make choices that have stakes/consequences they are ignorant of - by design - but the skill of play is in overcoming that ignorance and gradually, as a player, taking control of the direction of play. These games also work best when the players have resources (like detection spells, or scouting abilities) that make it clear how they can acquire knowledge of the GM's secrets without just blundering around and risking losing the game (eg by having all their PCs swallowed by the devil mouth).But the sort of thing that @CrimsonLonginus has described - where the PCs are doing research at libraries, shopping at market places, etc, and may or may not encounter escaped wild beasts - does not look to me like an example of hidden gameboard play. The very fact that the GM is not sticking rigidly to a prepared gameboard or set of notes reveals as much! So there seems to be no particular virtue in having secret consequences of the players' decision-making that only the GM knows, and can know, about. That would just be the GM telling a story to themself.Are you assuming "hidden gameboard" play? Crimson Longinus, it seems to me, is not.In non-hidden-gameboard play, why would the players assume that the stakes of going first to the library then to the market are different from those of going first to the market then to the library? And if the players have made no such assumption, then in what way is the meaning of their choice vitiated by the GM deciding to frame their trip to the market as an exciting encounter with a wild beast? How is that railroading? What choice which was presented as meaningful has been rendered meaningless?Well, this is the crux, isn't it?If it is the GM who is deciding what is west, north etc, and the only way the players learn any of that is by declaring their movement and having the GM tell them, there is no meaningful choice. It's just the GM telling a story, treating the players' action declarations as cues. The GM is presenting these as "supposed to matter" only in the sense that the players have some vague sense that what the GM tells them might differ depending on what actions they declare.Again, if we're talking "hidden gameboard" play then things are slightly different, but nothing you have posted makes me think that that's the sort of RPGing you're doing.</blockquote>

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