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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6820949" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed.I'm not sure that I agree with your psychological hypothesis as to why pre-authorship can lead to railroading, but I think there is a very clear system reason: the GM is supposed to be using that pre-authored stuff (NPC motivations, metaplot, etc) to constrain the framing of scenes and the success of action declarations. That's what it's for. And multiple posters upthread have said that it's important that sometimes the PCs are thwarted by obstacles they didn't anticipate, because that's what makes the gameworld  "realistic" and not just "all about them".What I often find a bit weird in these discussions, though, is how games with Schroedinger's hit points and Schroedinger's gorge are conjectured at one and the same time to have some flaws or weakness resulting from that (eg a lack of a "living, breathing" world) but in all other respects play out exactly the same (eg in the way that GM force in determining backstory won't work any differently, and so railroading is just as likely). So that these games aren't really different, and the use of the alternative techniques has no helpful consequences; they're just slightly inferior versions of what we would otherwise be doing if we knew how to run sandboxes properly!</blockquote>