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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7056788" data-attributes="member: 42582">Obviously I'm not [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], and he can speak for himself.But I think I can see at least a little bit of what prompted his post.When, in a reply to a poster, I provide an example of how a surprise occurred at one particular point in a campaign, and explain the method whereby that surprise was generated, it is odd to have that same poster then assert that surprises are impossible when using my method.More generally, when it is claimed that a GM making stuff up ahead of time is necessary to having a depth to the fiction, that claim is odd when (i) not based on trying other ways of doing things, and (ii) made in the face of others posting actual examples of fiction having depth that didn't depend upon the GM making stuff up ahead of time.Even more generally, what is sometimes surprising is reading an ultra-confident assertion that such-and-such is impossible in a RPG, when hundreds and thousands of RPGers are reliablty doing just that in their games, every day, and have been for 20+ years.Just to elaborate upon one example: upthread [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] conjectured a campaign in which the PCs have a mentor, and do work for him, and eventually it turns out that the mentor is a vampire, and the PCs have really been helping his evil schemes all along.Lanefan took for granted that this campaign would take place by the GM deciding, from the start, that the mentor is a vampire; dropping hints and rumours that won't tip off the players, but will enable them - after the big reveal - to recognise the signficance of those hints and clues.I said that, in my approach, this sort of revelation would not be something built in by the GM, but might be narrated as a consequence of failure. And I gave an example of something a little bit similar happening in one of my campaigns. That was the discovery - narrated as the consequence of a failed check searching for a mace in the ruined tower that was formerly the home of the PC and his older brother - of cursed arrows in what had been the brother's private workroom. The significance of this was that the revelation that the brother was a manufacturer of cursed arrows strongly suggests that he was evil before the brothers fled the tower under orc attack and the older one became possessed by a balrog; ie it strongly suggested that being evil led him to be possesed, rather than vice versa; which completely pulled the rug out from under the PC's goal of redeeming his brother and freeing him from possession.Yet even in responding to my reposting of this example, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] replies "So no one but you knew the brother was evil up to that point" - which seems to completely miss my point that no one at the table knew the brother was evil before the narration of that failure result.Which was the whole point of the example: you can have twists, hearbreaking surprises, conspiracies, etc, without having to plan it in advance - it can be managed as part of the narration of consequences of failure. (As the OP illustrates, you can also have searching or perception checks, and frame and resolve them in a meaningful way, without it having to be the case that the GM has noted in advance the contents of the area being searched or looked at.)Surprise and other twists can also be introduced as part of the framing of ingame situations and conflicts. When introduced this way, it is introduced by GM fiat, but is immediately presented as something that is up for grabs for the players to engage with, or push against, via their PCs.As I've posted a few times upthread, judging what sort of stuff should be introduced in which sort of way - as consequence for faiure, or as framing - is an important GM skill for the approach I'm talking about. If the GM treats something as up for grabs in framing, which the players regard as something that they're entitled to rely on unless they lose it via failure (such as, eg, the implict open-ness of their brother to redemption), then the players will feel de-protagonised and the game will not deliver the experience that it is meant to.Now obviously no one expects everyone to be interested in this sort of GMing - as I posted in my OP, I expect my conception of railroading is broader than some other posters'. What is weird, though, is repeated assertions that it can't be done.</blockquote>

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