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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6984509" data-attributes="member: 42582">What counts as a railroad is prety table-sensitive. I'll respond to your post from my own perspective.I see two main statements in your post, and to me they seem to be in tension.(1) "I try to leave things up to [the players] as much as I can." "My goal is to leave such decisions in the players' hands." (2) "I'd likely see what the players did as the closed on the Death Star and realized their peril. The tractor beam would likely be my way of forcing the issue of it seemed they were going to do something foolish or something like that." "[W]hen I set things up like this, the threat is clear. They're closing in on the Death Star...they've created a hill to see an entire orc army. They've encountered rival adventurers who seem far more powerful than they are." "If they don't seem to realize then I'll add more comments to try and make it clear."(1) suggests that the situation with which the GM has confronted the players gives the players a choice to make.(2) suggests that there is only one right answer (or, at lesat, some limited spectrum of right answers) to that choice - such that other responses would be foolish responses to a clear threat which the players need to realise. The GM knows what would count as a right or wrong answer, and the players are meant to realise this from the GM's description of the situation.The tension that I see is that the presence of (2) makes (1) illusory. For instance, if attacking the Death Star is TPK, then in what sense is that a choice at all?A possible reply: a bad move in chess, that opens me up to being checkmated, is still a choice that I make. But I don't think this is a very apt reply.In chess, the whole situation of the game is a result of the interaction between my choices and those of my opponent, and winning or losing on the basis of those choices is the whole point of chess.But in a D&D-style RPG, the GM doesn't have to play the game well to confront the PCs with the Death Star. S/he can do that by stipulation. So it becomes less a game of chess and more like a chess puzzle in a newspaper: the players encounter a situation that someone else has already configured, and have to work out what to do.But how does this sort of puzzle work, in the context of an RPG? When it comes to the newspaper, I can keep trying unttil I solve it. Or, suppose that I only have my train commute to finish it (then I have to start work), if I don't get it done nothing happens, and I can still enjoy tomorrow morning's puzzle. But, in the RPG, what happens if the players can't solve the puzzle, or make the "foolish" choice? TPK and start over? And how often do we think it's good for the game to run that risk?And the more the GM sets up flags and foreshadowings and makes things clear so that the "sensible" choice becomes obvious, then why bother presenting it as a player choice at all?My own view as to how to handle these things is quite different: if the players want their PCs to attack the Death Star, let them! There must be a slim chance that they get lucky and send a torpedo down the right shaft and blow it up. And if, as seems more likely, they are defeated then they get taken prisoner, or tractor-beamed in anyway, or jettison themselves in pods, or whatever else.In other words, coming at it from a higher level of abstraction, the stakes for picking an unwinnable fight don't have to be death and hence game over. And once the stakes are changed in this way, so that losing a conflict doesn't mean ending the game, what counts as a "foolish" choice can be decided by the players, relative to the priorities that they have set for their PCs, rather than by the GM in framing the encounter.(I should add: none of the above is novel to or invented by me. I'm basically repeating the "indie" theory of RPGing found in games like Over the Edge, Burning Wheel, PbtA games like Dungeon World, etc. Those RPGs also take a different perspective on a 3rd statement in your post - (3) "there is going to be some form of narrative thread that must be followed to at least some extent." If (3) is true in a game, then the GM has to force outcomes somehow, or else how will the thread be followed? Hence (3), which is a statement about scenairo design and resolution, feed back into the minutiae of the framing/management of individual scenes. The "indie" RPGs reject (3), and hence its implications for how scenes are framed and managed. The "narrative thread" is whatever emerges from applying the resolution mechanics to the players declared actions for their PCs - which might include a failed (or even, miraculously, a successful) assault on the Death Star.)</blockquote>

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