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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9543392" data-attributes="member: 4937">LOL.  I trying not to be insulting by this phrasing while still conveying my thought accurately.  The problem is that I'm pretty sure a GM has enough agency that he can still keep players on a railroad while letting them choose to go on a different course.  Indeed, your example of switching to bootlegging is a classic case where the GM could just let the players self-punish themselves in a small world by doing something boring and of no consequence, until they decided that they needed the funds from retrieving the Tome of Nine Claws to jump start their small business.Yes.  You are starting to get the idea.  But I think you have to distinguish between the act of railroading - moving prepped material around so it is always encountered - and running a railroad.  'Railroading' is about controlling the game.  I'd call it 'Directing' except I consider directing one specific example of how to railroad.  A 'railroad' is what you get when you do too much railroading and for the wrong reasons and in particular when the players are trying to get off the rails but you won't let them.  In other words a 'railroad' is a quantity and not a quality and it is the quantity that people are really sensitive to.  Plus people get burned by some bad GM and then they get sensitive to the techniques - "Prep is bad because he's going to use it to take my agency away." or in my case "No prep is bad because he's going to use it to take my agency away."  GMs are always railroading though, it's just a matter of how much they use it, how good they are at maintaining the illusion, and what they use it for.I know it seems like that should be the case, but it's definitely not the case.  I don't have to block the party from the bootlegging endeavor.  I just have to not make it fun for them.  All I have to do to stop it is not validate that choice.  I don't in this case really have to go out of my way to stomp on the idea.  For the vast majority of PCs, it's a terrible idea.  They don't have the craft skills.  They don't have the business skills.  They don't have the contacts.   Putting that together won't necessarily be more entertaining than starting up a flower arranging business.  And really, from a purely neutral referee stance, why should I make bootlegging fun for them?  Is it realistic that working as a bootlegger is a ton of fun?  Honestly, I'd probably have to railroad more than usual just to make the choice of bootlegging fun, regardless of whether I was annoyed by the fact the players didn't signal to me sooner that this is something they wanted.Someone did.I know what they were trying to say and said so when I responded.  But I also think it's very important to speak with precision about this topic because we as GMs need to be able to accurately assess what we are doing in the game if we are to improve our skill at it.  You can't get better at something if you aren't understanding what you are doing.  It's like being a pole vaulter or something.  You need too look at footage of yourself in order to consciously improve your technique.Potentially, yes.  But all that potential is really created by the GM.  It's tailored to be fun.  It's not (and must insist on this) just letting the players go there and see what happens.  That's an utterly false understanding of what is happening.  You as the GM have to fill in that part of the game world artfully and in a way that all that potential comes into being.  If the players then think that they've made all their own fun and take pride in the course the campaign is taking, so much the better, but that's not what actually happened. I don't disagree, but...the story is always emerging as a back and forth between what the players decide to do and how the GM and the system react to it.  And darn it, it's still a story however reluctant you are to use that language.  It's even got a plot.  Just as soon as the GM backstories a setting or an NPC to create some dramatic conflict, you've got a plot.  If I say, "The bootlegging in this region is controlled by J.C. Wilhelm and his gang.  J.C. moved into the area thirty years ago, back when this was just a small prospector's outpost and built a fortune in illegal alcohol.  Now he guards his turf jealously.", then I've made a plot.  I the GM have set the terms of the conflict.  And really, I need to do that because one thing you need to avoid in any functional RPG is the same player who creates the terms of a conflict also creates the terms of resolving it.  It's much more fun and (FUNctional) if the person who creates the conflict isn't the one that decides how the conflict works out.I agree you are describing a functional way to play.   The problem I find is that a lot of GMs that play this way don't understand what they are doing or how it works, and as a consequence I find a lot of GMs in my experience say that they play this way but don't.   You can still railroad the heck out of scenarios which you got out of player propositions and suggestions.  And worse, you can run Rowboat Worlds on the grounds that you don't "railroad" where you have a sandbox but nothing in that sandbox to play with or engage with.I'm not suggesting you aren't trying to let the players have agency.  I'm just saying that it takes more than a sandbox to have agency, and that if the game is linear isn't proof the players don't have agency.  I take it back.  You just convinced me you don't run a sandbox and you don't understand how they work.  Functional sandboxes are the highest level of prep you can run.  It sounds like you actually run what I call "open world" games, and almost all of those are what I would consider full bore railroads that rely heavily on illusionism and often self-deception by the GMs.  I have never seen one that doesn't, no matter what the GM tells me about it ahead of time.  If you don't prep, you run a railroad.  Pretty much full stop.</blockquote>

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