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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7054703" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I don't know if you made a strong distinction between judgment calls and railroading. You gave an example of a judgment call involving setting a DC, and then you explained why this example was not a railroad because you were not basing your decisions with the intention of maintaining your predetermined course of action.You then kind of implied that leaving the presence or not of a receptacle for the mage's blood up to the GM's judgment was a railroad. Which it could be...a GM could make his decision based on maintaining what he expected to happen. But that need not be the case. The GM could simply answer yes or no about the presence of a receptacle based on the prevailing conditions established by the fiction without knowing the player's intent....his desire to seethe railroad maintained need not enter into it. Hence why I would say that in this instance, the DM's judgment to decide yes or no is about the same as it would be to set a DC for the player.I suppose that we could say that one approach opens up the possibility of railroading more than the other. But then we need to get into value statements about railroading and what the term means and so forth. Okay, thanks for clarifying. I misunderstood and I thought that the skill check was being used to determine some of the elements of the world rather than simply the PC's ability to interact with the world. So do you think that one cannot achieve the same results with simply relying on DM judgment? Or is it only less likely? Does a failed check really open so many alternative paths that a DM saying "there is no chamber pot" does not? I think it would vary depending on many factors...but I'm not sure if I would say that it would tend to do so more often. Do you feel that from the player's point of view there is a significant difference between a failed check compared to the DM simply saying no?</blockquote>

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