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="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9722569" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Which was also the case with the runes. Again, I'm not talking about someone who controls every decision. I don't care about the caricature GM who's railroading everything every moment of play. I'm more concerned with instances of railroading during play. I'm more concerned with play that revolves around passively following the plot. Games that are mostly fine, but could be improved if the GM just stuck to processes more or who was honest about what play would involve and so on. Otherwise perfectly competent and capable GMs.  Meh, they're close enough for me and the distinctions matter so little to me, that I consider them the same. If it helps, you can treat my use of either as interchangeable with the other. So you didn't answer. What are some examples of each? What DM decisions introducing a new element of play are changing game reality and which ones aren't? How do you make the distinction? In this example, yes. But that does not mean it is always so. I find that what many trad GMs describe when they describe their play... the content of what their play includes... sounds very much like a path. References to things like "BBEG" and "hooks" and so on. These are elements of a story, and one that's been largely sketched, if not detailed exactly. I find that the need for prep largely reinforces this. To maintain a brisk pace of play, the GM of a trad game needs to have material ready to go. To have material ready to go, he has to have done it before play. For that material to be relevant and useful, it has to come up in play. I mean... this is pretty much self-evident. Can things be done to mitigate this to some extent? Yes. Can procedural elements be implemented that help alleviate this kind of thing? Yes. Is every trad GM running a game doing all those things? No, of course not. Does that make them "bad" or their style "bad"? I don't think so... I don't think it's very enlightening to discuss an extreme example like a GM who gives their player no say whatsoever. I think it's far more interesting and useful to discuss the practices that we're all likely doing or familiar with that maybe are contributing to play being less fun or effective than it is.</blockquote>

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