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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5654904" data-attributes="member: 55271">As you discovered with the word "game", if you keep broadening the definition of a word, eventually that word loses all practical meaning and utility.Similarly, the word illusionism was created to describe a situation in which the GM is railroading players by offering a false choice. With that definition, it's a useful term for distinguishing one form of gameplay. If you broaden that definition to include everything a GM does, then you're robbing the word of any practical meaning.Conflating the term "illusionism" with "illusion" is also confusing at best and pointless at worst.To sum up: No, I don't believe that the GM's creative input into the game should always be classified as illusionism/railroading.With that being said: I once watched a player walk out of a game because the GM had the bad guys take the PCs prisoner instead of summarily executing them. The player felt that the GM was taking it easy on them and it broke their SOD and interest in the game. Given that I've watched the same GM ruthlessly TPK parties who get in over their heads, I suspect that the GM was telling the truth: It made sense for the bad guy to question them and then, having gotten their answers, to turn them to his own advantage. (Which, tangentially, worked perfectly: The bad guy got everything he wanted; the players go absolutely nothing they wanted. It was more utterly devastating than any TPK I've ever taken part in. Three years later, the other players are still vowing vengeance on that NPC.)Which I offer only as an example of the danger of assuming that a GM being anything less than a ruthless murder machine is somehow "fudging" things.</blockquote>

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