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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7067054" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is true, but again on its own it doesn't differentiate very much. Framing by the GM might fit this description, but that's very different from (say) massaging or nudging at action declaration or resolution so as to produce a pre-planned outcome.In my personal experience, the GM doesn't need to shape events - beyond framing - in order to form a narrative of some sort.Speaking roughly, and trying to generalise from my own experience (always risky!), I see three broad approaches, with the difference between them speaking to the concerns of the passages I have quoted:(1) The player authors a PC who is the heir to a dangerous ring. That would be similar to how, in the game mentioned in the OP, the player authored a PC whose brother is possessed by a balrog.In this game, the revelation of the backstory about the ring would be a result of action resolution (a bit like the cursed black arrows in the OP game). The decision to take the ring to Mount Doom would itself arise in play - and one could envisage it being a result of failure ("I make a check to persuade Elrond to tell us how it can be destroyed" <rolls dice, fails> "Elrond looks at you gravely - 'It cannot be destroyed unless thrown into the fires in which it was forged"), or being the result of success ("It must have been forged by Sauron in his evil volcano forge, and so I bet we could destroy it by dropping it back into the lava!" <rolls dice for a ring lore/obscure history/whatever check, succeeds> "Yep, Elrond and Gandalf agree that that's the only reliable way to be rid of it"). If another character has built some sort of backstory into his/her PC that relates to redeeming a failure of an ancestor to destroy the ring, the GM might even make the ring's immunity to destruction other than in Mt Doom a part of the framing - as part of setting up a situation where the concerns, backstories and goals of multiple PCs will intersect.Notice that, on this approach, there is no reason why Gandalf couldn't be a PC, whose exposition of lore is a mixture of successful and failed checks. I have a Gandalf-style loremaster as a PC in my main 4e game.That is largely how I tend to run my games. It is, more or less, what [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] has called "scene framing". Another label give to more-or-less this sort of style is "<a href="http://inky.org/rpg/no-myth.html" target="_blank">no myth</a>".I hope you can see, from this, why I had the reaction I did upthread to the presentation of LotR as being - if a transcript of a RPG - an account of a certain sort of approach to GMing. Because I look at LotR and see how it could result from all sorts of different approaches, including the one I've just outlined.(2) Another way to produce LotR as a RPG experience would be the following. I think this is probably a pretty widespread approach to play, and is implicit in many modules, APs, etc.The GM decides that the game will be about the PCs taking a cursed ring to Mt Doom. The GM reveals this to the players partly in campaign set-up, and partly (perhaps mostly if very metagame averse) via in-character exposition and "recruitment" by a "significant" NPC (eg Gandalf, and later Elrond; in this approach, those characters are almost certainly NPCs). The players, in order to participate in the game, have to agree (perhaps up front, but more importantly in the play of their PCs) to take the quest.The GM has a series of events, locations etc written up in advance. The players will go through these more-or-less in the prepared sequence, with some variations depending on the details of play (eg maybe they skip Saruman, although in some systems - eg orthodox D&D - this might then cause issues around having earned enough XP to be the right level to tackle the rest of the adventure). The players generally won't know what is the GM feeding in the pre-written material, and what is the GM responding to the actual events of play. If one of the PCs dies - especially if it's the one prophesied to deliver the ring to Mt Doom - or there is a TPK, it is a problem for the campaign. The story might grind to a halt, or go on some sort of hiatus, or need emergency plugging. Sometimes the GM will fudge or otherwise manipulate outcomes to avoid this problem.I think this would count as an instance of what [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] have called "storytelling". It would also count as an instance of what I, in the OP, characterised as "railroading" (while noting that my usage was probably broader than typical). I would certainly regard it as a very GM-driven game.(3) Similar to (2), but the whole quest situation is agreed to, at the table, up front. The players might even play a role in sorting out the details: PCs are created with the right sorts of hooks and interrelationships to the GM's idea for a quest, geography and history, etc. As the game unfolds, everyone is more-or-less overt and on the same page about where things are going and where they're ultimately going to end up. It's a collective "playing out" of the agreed story.I don't know what label [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] would give this. I think Fate and Trail of Cthulhu, at least as Campbell is presenting them (I've read but not played them, but Campbell's account of them makes sense to me), fit this picture. I think CoC can easily fit this picture too, although the nature of the agreement is rather high level (the GM keeps the details secret, because part of the fun is being surprised by the precise nature of the mad stuff you discover and the insanity you have to play out for your PC).I would not count this as "playing to find out": the important stuff is already pre-determined. I wouldn't call it "illusionism", either, because there's no illusion. It's overt. [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has used the word "participationism" to describe (roughly) a consensual railroad, but I'm not sure that's quite right for this approach either - that seems more like a useful label for (2) when the table is happy with it.I don't mind (3) for one-offs - I think it especially suits CoC one-offs, because CoC doesn't have action resolution mechanics that lure the players into making action declarations that can then lead to results that destabilise the agreed scenario. I wouldn't like it for an ongoing game, though.I think (2) and (3) are not separated by a hard boundary. I think both are fairly different from (1), though.I hope my (1) to (3) above, in the context of LotR as an RPG, go some way to explaining how I think about the things you mention here.I don't find the notion of "sidetrack" at all helpful. The action is what it is. There's just one track.As far as a sense of where things will go - well, given the PCs' beliefs, which include stuff about the dead mage, the naga, and the mage whose tower the action happened in, I'm fairly confident that those elements will continue to figure. There is also, now, the nightwatch, into whose custody two of the PCs have fallen. So they're going to figure too - that will almost certainly be the starting point for our next session.But what the events will be in which those elements figure - no, I don't have much of a sense of what those will be.A few sessions ago, the session commenced where the last one had ended - with a PC locked in an iron maiden, having been captured by death cultists in the catacombs beneath the city of Hardby. That session ended with the PC having reached a truce with the chief death priest, and then practically befriending him. The two reached an agreement, which both honoured. The death priest explained the cult's rationale, and the PC ceased trying to kill them all. In the future, it's not beyond question that the PC might even call upon the death cultists as allies!That's an instance of what I think of under the rubric "playing to find out". And it's not something that I anticipate in advance. It's the result of framing, plus the application of the mechanics to resolve action declarations, and then feeding those outcomes of resolution back into the framing. It means that things unfold in ways that weren't known, or even knowable, at the start of the session. (This is what I take to be meant by the idea of the story being "feral" - though if I've got that wrong [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] can correct me.)Absolutely, but what?If they all want to play to find out, then they both have to be ready to engage techniques - eg the ones I've talked about - to do that. So no one can pre-author the story.If they all want to play through a story of destroying a ring in Mt Doom (ie my (3) above) then the situation is completely different. To be honest, I'm not even 100% sure how mechanics figure into that - what are they for? if everyone at the table wants to tell the same story, why are we rolling dice to find out whether or not the story we all want to tell is the one we're "allowed" (by the rules of the game) to actually tell? That's another reason I think CoC is fairly well suited to aproach (3) - the dice don't really get checked except as a device for parcelling out insanity, and that helps contribute to the feeling on the player side that one's sanity is not under one's own control.But if everyone at the table wants to tell the LotR story, why are we rolling dice? What are they contributing to the experience? I'm sure there's an answer, but I personally don't know what it is.</blockquote>

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