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: 9760213" data-attributes="member: 4937">GMing is about a lot of things, but I agree with you that a lot of the things that are most important about GMing are the things that are hard to automate and which separate at TTRPG experience from a cRPG experience.Potentially yes.  There are a lot of railroading techniques in your prep.  It's impossible to have a fully naturalistic campaign.  The questions then become then like: What you are doing in your prep to leave open options other than what you prefer?  Are you branching?  Are you trying to adhere to some naturalistic standard you set for yourself and if you aren't then are you at least conscious of what you are doing?  And maybe, am I using these railroading techniques like Obdurium walls, false choices, small world's, Schrodinger's map, and so forth excessively when I could get by without them.  One standard might be if I gave my notes to another GM and he ran it for a different group, could I be reasonably sure they would have a different unexpected experience?  And even that shows the tension that is going on here, in that the whole point of writing up an adventure is to produce some sort of shareable and repeatable experience at some level.  It's worthwhile to look at published modules and look for the various railroading techniques and ask, "Is this justifiable?" Does the adventure get better for it?  Only if you are dead set on having the qualitative definition.  But I realized that was actually the non-functional definition, because it just relied on "I don't railroad but that other guy, he goes too far."Yes, the GM is allowed to influence the course of the game.  Think about the implications of that statement.  How can you possibly influence the course of the game and not think that you are impacting player agency?  The question is, in impacting the course of the game, are you leaving enough agency behind for the players to also meaningfully impact the course of the game.  People start yelling railroad when they think that you are impacting the course of the game too much, but this notion where people say, "Oh, you can't have predefined myth in a game because that would too much impact the course of the game and that would be railroading." or "You can't say "no" in a game because that would too much impact the course of the game and that would be railroading" or "You cant' have a linear dungeon because that's just a disguised railroad" that we have heard in many different variations when people argue the specifics of what is railroading is the thing I consider ludicrous and unprofitable.  Of course, my definition of railroading also makes it harder to insult other people or feel smugly superior, so it does have its limitations.</blockquote>

Verification