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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6594526" data-attributes="member: 27160">I can't think of any variety of RPG (apart from a most extreme type of "railroad" in which the players have literally no freedom of action) in which the encounter could be ensured. A more serious objection, however, is that the "entire plot can only hinge on that encounter" only if the outcome of the encounter is fixed. That would be the very definition of "railroading" that  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is using, and I doubt anyone here would disagree with the label for an encounter with only one possible outcome, regardless what the PCs do.There's another decision point with no "real world" (by which I mean "game world as if real", not - neccessarily - the real real world...) analogue. By deciding who are the "important NPCs" you are arbitrarily selecting subsets of what could happen to form what will happen. By doing this, the GM is quite literally "contriving the world".It has to be two-way, I think. Players can't protagonise their PCs unless the GM lets them; the GM can't create protagonist PCs unless the players play them as protagonists. That applies to all styles and agendas, IME.OKBut this latter part is not unique to any style or agenda; it applies to all, surely? What happens feeling plausible and "making sense" (which I find is often a BS descriptor regardless, but nevertheless...) is just a given. Of course, what "makes sense" to different people differs - which can lead to some issues - and the range of what might be plausible is almost infinite (even though it excludes a great deal - and, yes, this is (mathematically) possible).The problem is that this is (a) stochastic and (b) immeasurably wide in its possible expressions. There is vast scope, within what might happen in such a world, for both interesting and uninteresting possibilities. Picking only to play out the interesting possibilities seems to me to be (a) only sensible, (b) almost inevitable, if the game is to become or remain engaging at all, with at the least something of interest potentially engaging the characters, and (c) inevitably contrived, since even picking a relatively boring possibility is a selection from an infinite number of possibilities.Ah, this is interesting. So the aim appears to be to use the players' availability heuristic to make it appear that everything here is "normal"? But one good reason that the real world feels as if "unlikely stuff happens" - apart from that it really does - is that the availability heuristic is an illusion. For example, far, far fewer radical students become political activists or charity CEOs than become office workers.Which comes back to picking which unlikely events will happen, again. "Most likely" is seldom something we have any data on, so heuristics kick in. And we end up with a contrived world that is based on our own set of heuristics. This can work OK (even though it is strictly an illusion) if all at the table share pretty much the same heuristic parameters. I, for one, however, would find many or most worlds modelled purely on heuristic "likelihood" both obvious and irritating. You might, of course, manage to stick purely to those heuristics that I both use and am unaware of using, but that would be either insanely lucky or infeasibly skilful <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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