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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8720431" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's railroading precisely because you are asking for clarification because someone chose "a harder way".  You aren't seeking clarification because you don't know the specific intent.  You are seeking clarification because you are surprised by or skeptical of the stated intent.  This seems innocuous and can have very good motives, but it is a form of railroading.  See a description of railroading here:[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.enworld.org/threads/techniques-for-railroading.298368/[/URL]As I outline in the above essay, one of the ways of keeping players on the "right path" is hint to them that they are making the "wrong" choices by saying things like, "Are you sure you want to do that?"  It's not wrong to say to players, "Are you sure you want to do that?", but it is railroading.  I do it sometimes myself when I think the proposition may wreck the game, especially with younger players who seem to not understand that there are no "save points" to reload the game after they do something crazy.  But, to say things like, "Are you sure you want to do that?" or "Make a Wisdom check...Your character realizes that would be a very bad idea." is a disguised Metagame Director stance which is railroading.  One thing you have to understand is that I'm not saying that railroading the players is wrong.  Too many people use the term "railroading" as a pure pejorative, when in fact many players like having some rails.  Having rails makes it easier to keep the game moving forward and makes the game less stressful.  Many players want to have signals as to what they should do next and do want to experience the GM's story.  The important thing is understanding the aesthetic of play of your players and providing them opportunities to do the thing they consider fun.  A lot of players get burned by bad GMing and then they adopt these really extreme absolutist positions.  They got railroaded badly by a metagame director that refused to let them get off the rails so they wouldn't wreck "his game" and now they think railroading is the worst thing ever and fume when they see any sign of it and hurl lots of invective and "GMs who railroad their players".  And I get that, especially after listening to horror stories about what they endured.  But that position isn't rational, because all games depend on at least a little bit of railroading.  Player just accept and expect that "coincidentally" things happen to them, the way if you are Batman watching a dark alley there will be a mugging in it while you happen to be watching it.  Players just accept the tiny world because they know ultimately no DM can really build anything but a tiny world.  But this is the GM asserting narrative force to constrain and control their actions, it's just so mild and so "normal" that they don't think about it.  I think about it.You think I'm mainly criticizing like you think I think you are "doing it wrong".  Mostly, I'm just trying to understand how your game works.   I don't think there is anything at all wrong with doing Fortune at the Beginning over Fortune in the Middle.  I don't think there is anything wrong with doing a greater portion of character testing over player testing.  Those are just styles to achieve certain goals.I do however have a strong preference for stating propositions in the form of fictional positioning rather than Moves, even when the fictional positioning is mostly color.  It's just good narration and story building, something all table participants should be doing.  And concrete fictional positioning is almost always good.I do have a strong preference for demanding social interactions be done in the form of in character role play, but even then I don't think it's necessarily wrong not to do those things just less... skillful, and I try to push players and GMs toward more skillful play because it's more entertaining ultimately for everyone involved.Like when I go to a con and there is a guy there that clearly has been gaming for 30 years or something and he literally can't Role Play in character, he's always in pawn stance and he's only focused on "winning", that makes me sad both because it detracts from my experience and because he's devoted his life to a hobby he's not actually very good at.  (And if he's also a jerk to the GM and my daughter, well that's even worse.)Depends on how long they've been playing with me.  If they've never fallen before and they try to jump off a great height, I'll remind them that in the real-world heights are dangerous.  My expectation is that my players will make propositions based off casual understanding of realism.  If the player really doesn't seem to understand the consequences of their proposition and they are new, I might in fact railroad them a bit by saying things like, "You think a 40-foot fall will probably kill you." or explaining to them the rules for falling in my game if they've never encountered them before.  But ultimately, if you don't let the players choose freely to do things that are unwise, then you aren't really letting them play the game.  At some point they have to learn not to push the Red Buttons, even if it takes losing a few characters.I've got one kid (he's like 25 at this point, so not really a kid) in my current group that has never quite learned that.  He's lost more characters than the rest of the group combined.  It seems like every few sessions he does something despite the warnings of everyone else in the group, and then he goes, "I didn't think it would be THAT bad."  But, maybe he just likes dying spectacular deaths and making new characters.An experienced player tells me that he wants to jump off or into something, well, hopefully he has a plan.</blockquote>

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