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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5904038" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think you've got me quite right, but you're by no means way off base either.I agree that railroading is about plot. But, in an RPG, how does a player influence the plot except by engaging a situation and changing its outcome?Trying to connect this to combat: if the outcome of combats, or even the way they unfold, isn't relevant to the broader plot, than in my view something is going wrong in the setup of the game - the participants are wasting their time on stuff that doesn't matter. (I posted fairly recently on another thread around here that I don't like "filler" encounters.)Coversely, if the combat does matter, because both the way it unfolds and the way it results link to the matters at stake more broadly in the plot, then the players need to have control over the situation within combat if they are to affect that plot.Sometimes this is just expressing a PC's flavour ("I'm the 'get all angry in their faces' guy", "I'm the 'wizard with subtle tricks' guy", etc). But sometimes (hopefully, often), it feeds into the relationships between the PCs and other story elements - whom do they hate, who hates them, what are their priorities, what moves them? It's also about the players investing emotionally in the situation, and therefore engaging it with their PCs - being able to control it, at least in my experience, encourages the sort of investment and therefore the sort of engagement that I want to GM for.Linking it back to the context of my exchanges with Neechen, I think that this sort of approach - from a player's point of view, the idea that "I can play my PC hard, give it all I've got, and it will matter to the way the game unfolds" - is what makes for an interesting game. And I also think that the surest way to stop it is for the GM to exercise a lot of force, to fudge or block or otherwise stop the players making their own calls and pushing their PCs as hard as they want to, to make the players' choices count only for colour.So whether or not the orc can be pushed into the fire is to be settled by the action resolution mechanics (which may, at certain points, call for GM adjudication as part of the process). But that the players are free to choose (within the mechanical parameters of the game, and the limits of the social contract) how their PCs deal with the orc - that's pretty central. And if one cost of a system that gives the players a lot of resources for making those choices is that all players describe their actions in the sort of language that the players of spellcasters have been using for years ("I fireball them", "I hit them all with Come and Get It"), that's fine. A little more colour wouldn't do anyone any harm, but for me it's a secondary priority.It follows from all of the above that I've got no interest in Adventure Paths - as far as I can see, all that a player gets to add to an AP is colour, because the plot is predetermined.It also goes without saying that there are other ways to do what I'm looking for from an RPG without putting so much weight on the combat mechanics - The Dying Earth focuses on social conflict as the core of the game, for example - and even if combat is the focus of conflict, it can be done in very different ways from how 4e does it (4e is its own special breed of crunchy combat mechanics).But for pretty banal reasons - I like fantasy, I like super hero comics, I grew up on Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and D&D and dodgy science-fantasy Flash Gordon cartoons - I enjoy combat as a site of conflict resolution in my RPGs. I like to think of my approach to 4e as a less gritty, more gonzo version of the sort of vibe given off by Burning Wheel or The Riddle of Steel.EDITED TO ADD: I don't know how bizarre my RPG orientation seems to you (Andor) or others. Sometimes I think it's pretty normal, but then I read other posts around here and think that some posters are playing on a different planet from me.But anyway, here are <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/313724-actual-play-pcs-successfully-negotiated-kas.html" target="_blank">some</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/319168-pcs-defeat-calastryx-get-up-some-other-hijinks.html" target="_blank">links</a> to descriptions of combats in my 4e game, which might give some idea of what I'm talking about.</blockquote>

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