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<blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8516166" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Branching Path: Cousin of the railroad (possibly actually what some people are calling a railroad), except that there are a number of key points at which the players do have actual meaningful control to choose which of several set paths they go down.I consider this mainly worth mentioning because it is the structure of a &quot;Choose Your Own Adventure&quot; book, as well as some aspects of computer games (ie: dialogue trees) and because of both those influences and the fact that it lends itself to a diagram, it is a natural approach for a DM who wants to plan out the whole campaign, understands players are supposed to have choices, but doesn't really get what that should mean. While I imagine DMs actually planning out a whole branching path narrative is pretty rare, I think it's the norm to anticipate several options (or dice results) at major decision points and plan possible paths forward from those, and a DM who one way or another forces players to accept one of the menu they prepared when the players (invariably) think of some other thing to do is basically forcing everyone to play the &quot;Choose Your Own Adventure&quot; story they're writing. I don't consider that an intrinsically terrible experience, but if choice is going to be limited like that then a computer game can give you comparable agency, and you've missed out on one of the things that makes all the overhead of tabletop worthwhile, having a game bound by the players' imaginations rather than the designer's.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Benjamin Olson, post: 8516166, member: 6988941"] Branching Path: Cousin of the railroad (possibly actually what some people are calling a railroad), except that there are a number of key points at which the players do have actual meaningful control to choose which of several set paths they go down. I consider this mainly worth mentioning because it is the structure of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, as well as some aspects of computer games (ie: dialogue trees) and because of both those influences and the fact that it lends itself to a diagram, it is a natural approach for a DM who wants to plan out the whole campaign, understands players are supposed to have choices, but doesn't really get what that should mean. While I imagine DMs actually planning out a whole branching path narrative is pretty rare, I think it's the norm to anticipate several options (or dice results) at major decision points and plan possible paths forward from those, and a DM who one way or another forces players to accept one of the menu they prepared when the players (invariably) think of some other thing to do is basically forcing everyone to play the "Choose Your Own Adventure" story they're writing. I don't consider that an intrinsically terrible experience, but if choice is going to be limited like that then a computer game can give you comparable agency, and you've missed out on one of the things that makes all the overhead of tabletop worthwhile, having a game bound by the players' imaginations rather than the designer's. [/QUOTE]

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