The Crimson Binome
Hero
Not all railroading requires player choice to be negated. If I recall, that was part of our definition of Illusionism, which is related but not identical to railroading.How is it a railroad? What player choice has been blocked/negated?
You could say that it is a matter of degree, of how much force the GM needs to exert over the game world - how much strain to place upon the suspension of disbelief - in order to contrive that these events happen. Common events are more likely to happen, so it's less of a railroad when the GM say that they do happen.In that case, why is a GM preference for pedestrian events, which biases the occurrence of such events in the game, not equally a form of railroading? They are both instances of GM decisions about content introduction.
1. At 6pm, the Big Bad grows weary of interrogating the victim, and has him killed.How? Can you describe how such a scene might occur in your game?
2. At 6:30pm, the body is disposed of in an abandoned building.
3. At midnight, when the barrier between worlds is weakest, a hungry demon crosses over to this plane.
4. At 1:00am, the demon finds the corpse, and begins consuming it.
5. At 2:00am, the demon finishes eating, and leaves.
If the players are searching through the abandoned buildings between midnight and 2am, they are likely to hear it. If not, then they don't.
Which is why I suggested the second thing, about rolling for likely disruptions to likely events. The goal is to honestly emulate the reality of the game world, while mitigating the effects of GM bias.Once again we return to the Spartan world. For me, a Spartan world is not remotely realistic or verisimilitudinous. Every day things occur to me that are not more than 5% likely to occur on a given day!
And given the other conceits required for the game to be playable, such as the non-complication of serious injuries, modeling only the most-likely and first-most-unlikely events should be sufficient in terms of "realism".
In a role-playing game where a player takes the role of a character, the player has the same agency within the game world as the character does.You seem to be talking about the imaginary agency of some imaginary people (the PCs). When I talk about player agency I am talking about the actual agency of some really existing people - the players of an RPG.
Unless you're doing something funky, and trying to exert player agency beyond what the characters wield. That's nothing to do with any game I would ever want to play, though. That's Dungeon World type stuff.