Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5573947" data-attributes="member: 42582">If by making the choice to help the elementals you're deemed to be committing an evil act, it looks somewhat railroady to me (on the reasonable assumption that the players don't want their PCs to do evil).When the point of play was to explore thematic/evaluative material, then yes - it is a railroad, or a prelude to it.Falling and gravity aren't (except in very strange circumstances, perhaps) matters of theme and evaluation. Good, evil, freedom, duty, honour, expedience, etc are. That's the difference.My opinion is more or less the opposite of that. If the players care about the thematic or evaulative issues, then ingame consequences are secondary, because the realworld metagame consequences - "What did you just do!?" - will be where the meaning resides. I run my gameworld to support this metagame - I don't want to try and sublimate the metagame into the gameworld.And so far from producing unclear or uninteresting choices, it has produced results like: a paladin willingly submitting to a beating from a taunting demon, regarding this as just penance for killing a man; a wizard betraying his home city in order to pursue greater unity and power with his order by allying with Vecna as a new leader of the order; that wizard's ally joining in the betrayal in exchange for promises of a magistracy and redemption of the mortgage on his home (which he had had to mortgage in order to finance his indulgence in trance-inducing herbs); two monks allying with a fox spirit exiled from heaven in order to liberate a rebel god who had been trapped by the emperor of heaven, and to bring a dead god back to life, in a complicated plan that involved tricking borh the heavens and the hells and dramatically transforming the karmic destiny of the world.More generally - if the players care about theme, and you as GM want it to matter in the game, in my view the best way to achieve this is to open up the space for the players to develop and express their ideas through play.</blockquote>

Verification