NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7055877" data-attributes="member: 42582">So are you arguing that it's not railroading? Or thatit's railroading that is justified in virtue of the GM's investment and time commitment? Or that it's railroading that the players enjoy? Or, like [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], that - because the player's enjoy it - it's the same sort of GM force as railroading but not apt for the pejorative label? Or, like [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION], that it's a railroad that the players will enjoy because so long as they don't notice it's a railroad?Because to me, you don't seem to offering any reason why I'm wrong in describing it as railroading. You just seem to be explaining how and why it might come about, and why it might be a good thing. (I'm not even sure if - as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] did - you're contesting the pejorative labelling or, like [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION], you're accepting that it's a railroad but arguing that a good GM can hide this.)Again, this doesn't seem to be explaining how it's not a railroad. It seems to be explaining why the railroad might be a good thing.This basically antithetical to the way I GM RPGs. To me, it seems more like the mindset for writing a story than GMing a RPG. The bit about NPC arcs particularly stands out - because, once you allow that the GM can introduce material into the shared fiction unilaterally and secretly, and then can draw upon that backstory known only to him/her in the course of resolving action resolution, the stage seems to be set for the GM to let those NPC arcs really spring forth.If the players aren't watching, then whose sense of reality is being engendered? The GM's?As I posted upthread, my campaigns tend to be distinguished by an emphasis on history and/or cosmology as elements of the framing. This creates the sense, in play, of "depth". But it does not exert force on resolution of declared actions. Rather, it either provides framing context for them, or is established as a result of action resolution. To give a cosmological example of the latter process: in my main 4e game, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?490454-Session-report-reposted-PCs-stave-of-the-Dusk-War-by-negotiating-with-Yan-C-Bin-and-defeating-the-tarrasque" target="_blank">the PCs' success in defeating the tarrasque before it could rampage across the world may well be a sign of the fact that Dusk War is not imminent after all</a>. To give a more prosaic example: the nervous collapse of a baron with whom the PCs were friendly, following the revelations (i) that his adviser was a treacherous necromancer, and (ii) that his niece, betrothed to the advisor, was not an innocent victim but herself a willing participant in the necromantic arts, were not narrated simply as consequences of these revelations (which were framing elements presented by me as GM); it only took place after the PCs killed the niece in order to stop her necromantic predations. And hence was a consequence flowing from their actions, not just an outgrowth of behind-the-scenes backstory.I don't think anyone who has ever read my actual campaign reports would describe my 4e campaign world as static! Gods pass on; cosmolgical forces muster and clash; civilsations fall (I don't think any have yet risen during the course of the campaign). This is not just stuff that the GM reads about (like, say, the backstory of many modules). It is at the heart of the play of the game.In the game reference in the OP, the stakes are (on the whole) more grounded in local matSlters. But in that game, a feather purchased by a PC at a bazaar, ostensibly an angel feather but also (as the PC found out) cursed, turned out to be stolen from the Bright Desert pyramid of the Suel wizard Slerotin. Slerotin's mummy, it turned out, had at some time in the past been reinterred in the catacombs of the city of Hardby - whch the PC learned some years later (both ingame and in real time) when Slerotin's mummy assaulted a dinner party in a mage's tower (the same mage in whose tower the decapitation occurred).In my experience, the use of history and backstory to give depth and interconnection to the framing of events, and the narration of their consequences, is how you convey a living breathing world. This seems very significant to me - because I would not use that sentence to describe any sort of campaign I've run since the first half of the 1980s. Even the 3E Castle Amber game involved PCs who weren't just "murderhoboes".Or, to flip it around - I don't use the threat of GM-imposed consequences to keep my players "on task" or not murder-hoboing. (It sounds like a version of Gygax's much-scorned ethereal mummies or blue bolts from the heavens.) As I've mentioned more than once already upthread, the basic trajectory of play comes from the players, and the goals and aspirations they set for their PCs. The consequences in the game arise in response to those goals and aspirations - not from some sort of GM-adjudicated karmic retribution.</blockquote>

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