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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9065868" data-attributes="member: 42582">Whether or not this goal of play is achieved has zero to do with player agency. Many players find railroaded play quite satisfying. That does not mean that they exercised agency. But generally, in successful railroaded play, the players know what they need to do because the GM sends the appropriate signals.How are the players meant to know that they have to look for this information? Or to put it another way, how are the players meant to know that you are running a scenario which has the basic structure of a Call of Cthulhu scenario, rather than (say) Keep on the Borderlands or some other basic D&D-ish structure?If the quest that is given is bring me the body, how are the players expected to work out that the real scenario is uncover the secrets of the necromantic family? These are not merely rhetorical questions - as you describe the game, in your OP and subsequent posts, the players didn't work these things out, and as a result the session was not entirely satisfactory. My advice remains: if you are going to run a CoC-esque railroad, you need to use techniques appropriate to that, of which the most fundamental is letting the players know what they need to do in order to make the scenario work. In CoC this is normally done by narrating things like mysterious letters turning up in the post, or noticing something in the waste paper bin just as the PCs are about to leave the room, or an urgent telegram from a mentor. In PF/D&D, you can do this by narrating things like visions or dreams sent by the gods, by having mysterious informants turn up on the PCs' doorstep, or even using omens and portents and other fantastic imagery.No one disagrees with you on this point.But players have no agency if everything that is at stake, every potential consequence, is decided by the GM.You as GM decided the stakes - ie that the consequence of the paladin not interfering was completion of the ritual, hence bringing the curse to its culmination, hence all the other family being killed.What consequence would flow from the ritual being performed was decided entirely by you.The impression the player had that they were participating in a railroad was also established by you, as you "gave" the players a quest for their PCs. Having done that, my advice - as stated above, and also upthread - is follow through. Let the players know what they need to have their PCs do.On the other hand, there are ways of avoiding railroading, if someone wishes to do so. That is the second line of advice that has been given in this thread, mostly by [USER=1282]@darkbard[/USER], [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] and me.Some of us are discussing this. We are suggesting a diagnosis as to why they felt "cheated" - ie that they were railroaded into an unsatisfactory outcome - and we are pointing to some techniques for avoiding that. In my case, I'm giving advice on how to run a satisfactory railroad - don't leave the players hanging and adrift and not knowing what they need to do next - and I'm also giving advice on alternatives to railroading. It's your prerogative, obviously, to ignore what I and others are saying, and to continue to use the same techniques that you used before.You seem to think the contrast is either railroading or whose line is it anyway and other meaningless hijnks. This reinforces my impression that you have little or no familiarity with RPGs like Apocalypse World and the many games it has influenced (Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark etc), with Burning Wheel, with Sorcerer, with In A Wicked Age, etc.Upthread I posted a fairly lengthy extract of Burning Wheel play. It did not resemble "whose line is it anyway". But it did not involve railroading either. There was no planning or prep, other than PC gen. But in two or three hours of play we had a cursed angel feather, various encounters with Jabal of the Cabal culminating in banishment from the city, an infiltration of Jabal's tower, and the PCs following a mysterious NPC onto a ship that was leaving town.There are well-known techniques for making these games work - they are not all identical, but they share some fundamentals along the lines that [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] has been setting out. Mechanical transparency to players is one of them. The players exercising a high degree of influence - either directly or indirectly - over what is at stake in action declarations is another. I think either [USER=1282]@darkbard[/USER] or I already linked to this recent thread saying a bit more about how to approach this sort of RPGing from the GM side: <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/advice-for-new-story-now-gms.698281/" target="_blank">https://www.enworld.org/threads/advice-for-new-story-now-gms.698281/</a>The reason for talking about particular RPG systems is because agency is about shaping the shared fiction, and different RPGs provide illustrations of different techniques for doing that.For instance, in Prince Valiant the GM decides whether or not a PC dies when their Brawn is reduced to zero by injury, and decides (if the PC doesn't die) how badly injured they are and hence how severe and lingering any incapacitation is. Straight away, therefore, we can see that in Prince Valiant the players do not exercise agency by managing hit point recovery like they do in D&D or PF. In Prince Valiant, that is all the domain of the GM.Or consider Agon 2e, in which each scenario begins with the GM narrating the "signs of the gods" - certain omens - but it is the job of the players to decide, over the course of the session, what the meaning of those signs is. And their success in pleasing the gods is then determined by reference to the interpretation of the signs that they come up with. This also contrasts with D&D or PF, in which - at least most often - it is the GM who decides the meaning of divine omens.The techniques that you have described in your OP - the GM provides a quest, the GM established secret backstory, the GM decides what happens when the players make choices for their PCs around the quest and the quest-giver - is one particular approach to RPGing, that became pretty widespread in the early to mid 80s and has remained pretty mainstream since then. But if we want to talk about high-player-agency play then we need to talk about alternatives to those techniques, as exemplified by RPGs that depart from that mainstream.Player characters are imaginary beings, part of a shared imaginary world. Sometimes they have agency (eg when they are wandering around doing stuff). Sometimes they do not (eg when they are subject to domination magic). Sometimes their agency is compromised (eg when they are forced to do things at gunpoint). These are all elements of the shared, imagined, ficition.Players are real people in the real world. They exercise agency, in RPGing, by contributing to the shaping of the shared fiction.The most basic way they do that is by deciding what play will be about - eg in the case of the Torchbearer session that you referred to above, one player had determined that play would be about the missing ranger Glothfindel, and also about the significance of dreams; while another player had determined that play would be about dwarves and their fates, and how those are connected to explosives.Who at the table established what is at stake? Who decided that a consequence that will flow from taking part in the ritual is being struck by divine lightning? If the answer is the GM, then there is no player agency present.If it's the player, then there is agency present. As an example: in my 4e D&D campaign, one of the PCs was an invoker who served (among other gods) both the Raven Queen and Vecna. At one point, the PC placed the Eye of Vecna into his imp familiar. On a later occasion, the PCs destroyed the god Torog's Soul Abattoir, and this PC had to decide what to do with the flow of souls that were no longer being fed into the Abattoir. Vecna wanted them for himself. The player declared actions to achieve a different outcome - the souls would flow to the Raven Queen! At that point, I narrated that the imp familiar was struck lifeless, a result of Vecna exercising his power via his Eye. (Subsequently the PC regained control over his imp, and the Eye, by using a ritual to confine Vecna's power and then drawing a secret from Vecna's mind without Vecna realising it.)In the scenario just described, the player did not experience any "violation" of agency. He had established the stakes, including the dual loyalty to the Raven Queen and Vecna. He had chosen to implant the Eye into his imp, thereby drawing on Vecna's power. He knew that, by choosing to have his PC send the flow of souls to the Raven Queen, he was going to upset Vecna. He also went on to conceive of and perform the rituals that restored his PC's control over his imp and over the Eye.The scenario is one illustration of what it means for the players to establish the stakes of their action declarations.How can we tell from the description you've given? Who established what was at stake? What role, if any, did the player have in that respect?If play will become aimless or pointless unless the players follow the GM's quest, that's a good sign that the play is low on player agency. Which then puts a significant onus on the GM to tell the players what they are meant to be doing.In this respect, the quest is not like a dungeon, because a dungeon in D&D (or similar RPGS) establishes a whole series of default expectations and possible action declarations: inspecting the architecture, inspecting the furniture, looking for treasure guarded by denizens, etc. The quest does not generate a comparable context for default action declarations. As your OP demonstrates.</blockquote>

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