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<blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 4312644" data-attributes="member: 21169"><p>As a GM I've certainly messed up in the past by allowing the PCs to go wherever, talk to whoever they want, without making it clear enough where the plot lay. Really the players wanted plot, they were looking for plot, they wanted to be entertained, but I was mistakenly hiding plot. I've played in games like that too. Ofc if everyone is enjoying the 'meandering' then all well and good but I sensed that wasn't the case.</p><p></p><p>These days I'm thinking about adopting a different method of adventure design - prepare some interesting, but not tightly connected, scenes and then connect them in actual play via whatever way the players approach the situation. For example if the players question a faceless NPC I'd made up no details about whatsoever, he'll suddenly turn out to have useful info pointing to prepared encounter #3.</p><p></p><p>Some might call this latter approach railroading because in a sense it doesn't matter what the PCs do, they'll always get to scene #3. It's a continuum, not a hard-and-fast distinction between railroading and perfect freedom. The PCs probably do have the power to avoid certain scenes if they take very unexpected actions or come up with a brilliant plan to cut to end scene #8. Otoh prepared scenes are usually better than improvised ones, so the GM doesn't want to throw away his prep work if it can be avoided.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Doug McCrae, post: 4312644, member: 21169"] As a GM I've certainly messed up in the past by allowing the PCs to go wherever, talk to whoever they want, without making it clear enough where the plot lay. Really the players wanted plot, they were looking for plot, they wanted to be entertained, but I was mistakenly hiding plot. I've played in games like that too. Ofc if everyone is enjoying the 'meandering' then all well and good but I sensed that wasn't the case. These days I'm thinking about adopting a different method of adventure design - prepare some interesting, but not tightly connected, scenes and then connect them in actual play via whatever way the players approach the situation. For example if the players question a faceless NPC I'd made up no details about whatsoever, he'll suddenly turn out to have useful info pointing to prepared encounter #3. Some might call this latter approach railroading because in a sense it doesn't matter what the PCs do, they'll always get to scene #3. It's a continuum, not a hard-and-fast distinction between railroading and perfect freedom. The PCs probably do have the power to avoid certain scenes if they take very unexpected actions or come up with a brilliant plan to cut to end scene #8. Otoh prepared scenes are usually better than improvised ones, so the GM doesn't want to throw away his prep work if it can be avoided. [/QUOTE]
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