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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8430314" data-attributes="member: 7032025">No, you're right, it was bad form of me, again my apologies.OK, clear. Jsut for contrast, I like at least some of my NPCs to have long term plans, adjustable, of course.I know, and I think it's one of the difficulty in this discussion. Because some players actually like that their PCs are part of an epic story.Just for example, I once ran a campaign of Wheel of Time in the UK, something like 20 years ago. The novels were not that popular at the time and I was lucky to have great players who had not yet read any of the novels. So I decided to run a game completely in parallel to the events of the novel, with the PCs more or less always missing the heroes of the book by inches in their travels, which allowed the PCs to be the heroes of their own story. The players were in on this, and of course, for them, the fun was sort of knowing this and discovering the world through their own characters, even though they understood that they had to make some allowance for railroading them more or less along the path taken by the characters of the book.Overall, it went great, and the players loved it, especially when, after the campaign ended, they read the book and discovered the original perspective on it. There was just one player, however, who was a bit disgruntled once, when an NPC pulled off an escaping trick that he thought was unfair. But the funny thing was that this escape was not even close to railroading, it was a totally minor NPC who, in the series, is actually not important that all until books that were not even published at that point in time, so it was not important for me that she escaped. And the escape was actually totally justified as, exactly as in the book, the adversaries really have some powers that the heroes know nothing about.But still, the player took it for railroading because, after we discussed it, he did not really like that sort of constraint, and he had been looking for an excuse to point it out. We sorted it out, and it went absolutely fine after that, but it needed clearing. And I'm not commenting on his tastes, these are totally personal, but on the fact that perception and expectation are what matters most in these cases, not the actual event.Yes, YCMV but this definitively one of those areas where it's really dependent on players expectations. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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