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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6307942" data-attributes="member: 4937">You can, and I didn't leave out that possibility, but that approach is fraught with danger.   The danger is that this relationship has been inverted by your choice of diegesis.  You aren't really asking what they do next.  Rather, now you are training your players to ask you what to do next.  By opening a door for them, you're risking a situation where the party only knows how to advance by prompting you to tell them how they should advance.  They've become passengers.  It might be appropriate to provide prompting about how they can interact with the environment, but you have to understand that in doing so, you are more or less communicating to the players, "This is what you should do." or "This is what I want you to do."   Neither is necessarily the case, and in the later case, what I really want them to do is learn to take some initiative on their own or move the scene on in some manner.  Worse, the very situation where it might be most appropriate to prompt the character how they might interact with something, that is - you have inexperienced players - is the very case where they might learn from this example not to do anything without prompting.All of this is why I suggested looking for something organic to the environment as a means of prompting the change of scene.This is also potentially a tool in the toolbox.  It could be the sewer is a distraction, a blind hunt because they missed important clues earlier, a wild goose chase, a red herring, or just the players thinking that because there is a sewer you must intend for them to go down to it (after all, every exit of a cRPG is just exactly that, something you are supposed to find and explore and will be rewarded for doing so).   So yes, you may need to do a scene bang of some sort to move the game along if it has stalled.  But that to carries dangers.  Hard scene framing are one important railroading technique, because again, you are effectively telling the players what they choose to do.  The players are once again passengers that you are picking up and moving along to their destination with no chance of disembarking from the ride save where you intend them do so.  Again, I'm not even arguing that railroading is always bad.  But you ought to be cognizant of when you are doing it and what the potential pitfalls are.<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading</a></blockquote>

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