Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9760103" data-attributes="member: 4937">Not by you.  You've repeatedly failed to address any of the substance of the post you are supposedly responding to.  Ok let's jump back and I'll repeat myself.Mostly agreed.  "Blocking" is a very general term here and I don't want it understood as only "saying "no"".  A GM can railroad for example by making all the choices he prefers easy and all the choices he doesn't prefer hard or boring.  For example, "Yes, but nothing happens" is a great way to railroad.  If the GM says "Yes" to everything, but only those things he thinks are good for the game have meaningful consequences and in particular "open doors" or "find breadcrumbs" or "reveal hooks" to further play, then the GM has railroaded just as effective as if they said "no" to everything that they didn't want to have happen.   Reward what you like and don't reward what you don't like.  We agree that is railroading - "blocking" in the most general sense of the term.I didn't say everything is railroading.  I said all hand waves (of which time skips are the one most under discussion) are railroading techniques.To understand why I would say a counter-intuitive thing like that about a common RPG technique you have to dig into the weeds a bit.  Hand waves or time skips are processes of play where you don't play out the scene according to the normal procedures of play, you just use GM fiat to declare that something has happened and we are now in the state in the fiction, usually one significantly removed from the current state in time or space.  Time skips in particular are hand waves of this sort by definition moving the fictional state forward in time by a considerable degree with "nothing happening" that is meaningful in the meantime.Now everything here depends on having a traditional GM with traditional GM authority.  That is to say that "railroading" can only happen when there is tension between the secret keepers agency and the player's agency.  And my assumption is that all participants have conscious and subconscious desires for how things play out, if only because they want to enjoy the session (or ideally want the other participants to enjoy the session).So GMs are always biased regarding player decisions.  Being secret keepers they have some notions about how well some course of action is likely to work out, some bias about how much fun it will be (for themselves and the group), and some stake in an a proposed action because of how much stress or effort it is on their part to respond to it (by inventing things, making judgment calls, etc.)Now the players purpose that they want to go from A -> B (a desirable location that will advance the fun) or from A -> C (a location I feel poorly about because I don't think it will be fun), and now the GM has two choices about how to play this out.  They can time skip it or they can play it out according to the usual rules that would govern travel, describing the events in greater detail and granularity and maybe having meaningful encounters on the way.If the desirability of the location determines whether you choose to time skip or not even subconsciously, then we have a situation that is in fact we both agree was railroading: "blocking player action declarations or their desired effects because they would take the game off the GM's preferred path".  "I don't want to play this out" or "I do want to play this out" is a very powerful tool.  You can railroad either by "Ok, fine, you make it to Canterbury in three days.  There is nothing to do here.  It's an empty room." (minimizing the time the players waste on this "wrong" action).   Or you can railroad by, "You go another mile down the road and you are attacked by another patrol of the draconian army.  This one looks even stronger than before.  Roll for initiative."  Of course, in practice the force used here is going to be less obvious but it's there none the less even when not exaggerated for subtly.  Likewise, time skips are often GM initiated.  The GM proposes to the players, "Hey, do you want to skip over this?" like a pusher offering a free sample.  Don't try to tell me that when a GM proposes a time skip isn't influenced by his feelings about the course of action.  IF the process of play is influenced by GM desires to get what he wants, then we have railroading behavior - by your own definition.And can occur when you don't intend it.  For example, my players know to a certain extent that they are on "the right path" when they can tell I'm reading from my notes and not merely extemporizing.  They can't always tell that, because I often paraphrase notes, and I can improvise pretty well, but they can tell fairly often.  Am I subconsciously (and sometimes consciously!) more eager to offer time skips when I think the result gets the story and the action back on track?  Probably or certainly so.</blockquote>

Verification