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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4864463" data-attributes="member: 2205">Again; if you assume that the players find that negative.  Which, in my experience, is often a flawed assumption.  If your players demand a world with the illusion of reality, as opposed to the illusion of being a big video game environment, then they don't feel slapped on the nose when the environment marches on without them.  In fact, I've got players who essentially demand that the world do just that, and give me negative reinforcement behavior about a game world that doesn't do anything, or feel at all "real."Players also offer reinforcement to the GM too, in terms of how much they engage with and enjoy elements of his game.Also, yeah... why, as a GM, must I always decide everything?  I'm perfectly willing and in fact quite happy to incorporate player designed elements into any campaign I run.  I think you're making too big a deal on who's got the "final word."  Yeah, as GM, when I run I have the "final word."  That's not nearly as important as the fact that I don't necessarily always have the "initial word."  That's usually a more powerful and important word anyway; if players start postulating likely sequences of events, and I think it sounds cool, yeah, I'll grab it and integrate it in a heartbeat.This is a taste thing, but to me, it's merely more trite.  Because they could just walk away from it, and who cares?  It's only personal if the dangers have sufficient motivation to make them personal.  I've never yet played in a sandbox style static world where I thought that was the case.  Our motivation was, "we're bored---let's got over here and see if anything interesting happens."  That's not what I call a game that's personal.Yes, I realize that, and I said so in the question that you... answered.  My point is, they can't realistically sit in the tavern for the whole game, because that's a sucky game that would almost certainly bore everyone involved, including yourself, after an hour or two.No, that's not what I've ever implied at any point.  What I'm implying is that your insistence that anything other than a complete and total site-based sandbox is a railroad is, frankly, absurd, and it's hampering our ability to have a meaningful conversation.  Sandbox and railroads are endpoints on a spectrum, and a game that is not one endpoint is not necessarily the other endpoint.  Most likely it's somewhere on the spectrum.  You keep trying to create a false binary by implying that anything other than a complete and total sandbox takes away player freedom; but your own examples seem less "free" to me than many of my event-based games.  Or maybe you're just expressing yourself poorly.  Or maybe we're focusing too much on "corner cases" so we're not seeing the forest for the trees.Still, let's take an example.  Let's say the PCs are in this tavern, and they take to disliking a disreputable looking character at one table.  Since they're free to do so, let's say they take incredible insult to this guy, and attack him, killing him in the bar.  They find out he's got some gold on him.  Plus, they get XP for killing him.  "Hey, we're being positively reinforced in this behavior!  let's start killing everyone else in the tavern!"  What is your "sandbox" approach to this?  What if they decide that's all they want to go; to from town to town killing people in taverns?I know the situation sounds vaguely absurd, but frankly, so do most of your pronouncements, so I'm trying to posit an exaggerated situation to see if that can't help me to understand where you're coming from.I don't know who "tvtropes" is, but it's too bad they mis-used those labels.  What they call 'heroic fantasy' is what most people call 'sword & sorcery'.  Heroic fantasy isn't really a recognized subgenre label, but when it is used, it's most often an umbrella term that's broad enough to include both S&S and high fantasy.Neither has any bearing whatsoever on railroading or not.  I suspect that you're not using the word 'railroading' in the same way that I've always heard it used before, though, and we're not even talking about the same thing.</blockquote>

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