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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9470447" data-attributes="member: 42582">If the GM is the one who is deciding what is happening, and what's at stake, then I regard it as a railroad. The fact that the players might be making some decisions - eg to go west rather than east - won't change that, if it is still the GM who is deciding what is happening and what is at stake.If the players can make meaningful choices about how to take risks and establish stakes - as in a certain sort of classic dungeon-crawling - then it's not railroading. But it's very hard to achieve this sort of play in a larger, non-dungeon framework.The players can't have their PCs give up and go home if the GM won't present relevant opportunities and resolve such action declarations."Follow the GM's breadcrumbs" and "walk around and get random encounters" are not the only two possibilities. The GM can follow the players' "breadcrumbs".It's not illusionism if there is no illusion.Who is in charge of establishing what scenes the PCs find themselves in - the players, or the GM? If everyone at the table knows the answer to this, then there's no illusion.And what is the basis on which those scenes are framed? And what is at stake in those scenes? If everyone at the table knows the answers to these, there's no illusion. And if it is the players who exert significant or principal influence over the logic or the stakes of the scene-framing, or if those things are part of the agreed game (say in a knight errantry or martial arts schools game), then there is no railroading.Conversely, when the GM keeps the basis of scene-framing and the stakes secret, and under their unilateral control, then there is railroading and possibly illusionism also.Relating this to the "quantum ogre" - we can't say anything meaningful about the "quantum ogre", as far as illusionism and railroading are concerned, until we know how those decisions about framing and stakes are being made.Just as one illustration of the point: If the GM is following the players' "breadcrumbs" - so placing the ogre is not the GM's imposition of their vision, but the GM responding to the players' vision - then there is no illusion (everyone knows why the ogre is being made a part of play) and no railroading (everyone knows why the ogre matters and what is at stake).</blockquote>

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