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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7054747" data-attributes="member: 42582">When I talk about railroading I've got in mind mostly what I think you would call "the main plot" - ie the bulk of the action that the PCs were engaged in over the course of the timeframe in question.I don't really get the "interfered with".PCs and NPCs do things in the fiction - but in the fiction there is no "plot", only life (the imagined life of those various imaginary people).The plot is something that is created by the actions of real people - the players and the GM - and when I talk about railroading I'm focusing on who creates that plot, and how.If the GM is presenting something to the players, then - unless it is a sheer narrated vignette (a viable technique, but not a very traditional one) - presumably the PCs are somehow connected to it, if only to the extent that they learn of it.I'm opening with the above paragraph not to be pedantic, but to link that point to a more general one - every RPG world will involve some stuff that is connected to the PCs only in that rather trivial sense, that they learn of it, or that it forms some background in a circumstance where the real focus of the action is something else.But that sort of stuff - by dint of being background, or only trivially connected to the PCs - is not the plot of the game.If the GM starts using that sort of stuff to actually determine outcomes of action resolution then its connection to the PCs becomes more than trivial - within the fiction, it is exercising some significant causal power in respect of them. In those circumstances, I do regard it as railroading.But preparing events isn't the same as using stuff to determine outcomes. A GM might have a list of "Stuff that would be fun/interesting to happen", and then when some action declaration or some new framing context makes it appropriate, s/he takes something from the list. That's not railroading - because the GM isn't shaping outcomes towards something predetermined. That said, you didn't use the word "preparing" - which is about the GM's "homework". You used the word "planning", which is a bit ambiguous as between preparing material so its ready to use, and sketching out a causal path within the gameworld. The latter needn't be railroading - the GM plans to narrate some event as occurring under such-and-such conditions, but the question of whether the conditions come about is ultimately subject to the outcomes of player action declarations for their PCs. But in practice I think it easily bleeds into railroading, because there can be a strong "pull" on the GM to use the background causal considerations that s/he envisages will bring this planned event to pass as factors in adjudicating player action declarations. And, as I said, that's something that I regard as railroading.My own preferred approach, therefore, is that when these events, being causally driven by ingame forces, are planned by me, they become known to the players also. Eg in my main 4e game the players (and PCs) know the Dusk War is on the horizon; in my Burning Wheel game, the players (and PCs) know that the mage Jabal is engaged to marry the Gynarch of Hardby. That way these pending events become part of the shared context of action declaration, framing of checks, etc. And it becomes clear to the players how they might declare actions to delay or prevent them (as has happened in both cases, deliberately in respect of the Dusk War and a bit more inadvertently in respect of the wedding).The multiple plots in a single work are, nevertheless, sequences of events that are interrelated, and presented as such, and in some sense "main" or otherwise salient.But some bit of backstory known only to the GM is not salient in the same way, in my view. if the audience (ie the players) don't even know of it, I don't see how it counts as plot.The breadcrumbs, "flexible plots" etc are also not plots. They're not sequences of fictional events. The GM planning, or preparing, to make a certain event part of the shared fiction under certain circumstances, does not actually make it part of the shared fiction. And if it's not part of the shared fiction, then it's certainly not part of the plot of the game.</blockquote>

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