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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6189880" data-attributes="member: 42582">The response to this question is contentious, and I think very playstyle dependent.My impression - from reading posts, from knowing that Paizo sells a lot of Adventure Paths, etc - is that there are many D&Ders who play games in which the "BBEG" is determined from the start of the campaign by the GM. Is that a railroad? Or is that the players agreeing to join in with the story th GM has in mind?Different players and different tables will answer the question differently."Story" is also variable across tables. Some posters vehemently insist that story is nothing more than the retelling of the events of play after the event, and that any decision by the GM in the course of play that takes story into account is railroading.In my own game, I prefer that the questions of who are the PCs allies, and who their true enemies, be worked out in the course of play as a result of player choices (so in my current 4e campaign it turned out that the players are allied with duergar and with Kas, which weren't results expected at the start of the campaign); I find the BBEG style of game too railroady. But in my game, also, the events that occur to the PCs, and the surprises that they stumble upon, are inserted by me as GM not on the basis of random tables or setting-verisimilitude considerations, but on the basis of "story" considerations. So, for instance, when the PCs in a recent session explored an abandoned oubliette on an Abyssal layer where all lost things come to rest, and I had no notes on what might be in it, I had to quickly make something up - and I decided that it was the oubliette in which the soul of Elidyr, last king of Nerath, had been trapped. I made this decision becasue the fate of Elidyr and of Nerath has been a recurring theme in the game, and therefore by framing the oubliette in these terms I would keep pushing those themese forward and make the players (via their PCs) make choices about them. (In this case, the upshot was <a href="http://" target="_blank">a struggle with an Exarch of the Raven Queen/url] over the fate of Elidyr's soul.)</a><a href="http://" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://" target="_blank">What I've just described about my own game is "indie style" 101. But I know that there are posters on these boards who regard it as railroading to run a game in this sort of way, in which the PCs (and players) can't escape from but rather are constantly pushed by the GM to confront the thematic issues that their past play has given rise to. It's cetainly not sandboxing.</a><a href="http://" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://" target="_blank">That's the sort of thing I had in mind, yes.</a></blockquote>

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