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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732394" data-attributes="member: 42582">So what you describe is one way to run a game - the GM keeps throwing "hooks" at the players until they bite on one.Another way is for the players to generate PCs that have hooks built in (eg the mage with a demon-possessed brother who wants to acquire magic items that will let him confront his brother and end the possession) and the GM bites on those. [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] asserts that the first is RPGing and the second is not. You seem to assert that the second is not possible. I know the second is possible, because I've done it. And I think it has one obvious advantage: instead of waiting until session 3 to get a game going that everyone is invested in, you can start with it in session 1. (And "session zero" becomes redundant.)Another reason I prefer my approach - instead of characters who have only thin, mercenary motivations ("no reward is worth this!") you can have RPGing about characters who have a richer, more verisimilitudinous range of motivations (as is found in both romantic and modernist fantasy stories).If the players want to play the game, and yet the game is "grinding to a complete halt", what has gone wrong? (This doesn't happen eg if everyone has arrived and wants to play bridge.)Another reason I prefer my approach is that you don't get this problem. If the players have arrived, and want to play, then there is a direction for the game and it's game on!Part of this is not reacing neutrally. Eg your players want to sail into the sunset. But your map says there is no coastline. Now what happens? What does a "neutral reaction" look like?This is why I call it a railroad - because in that situation the GM's vision of the fiction, and of the outcomes of choices and desires in the fiction, trumps the players'. And in most real RPGing situations it's situations more intimate to gameplay than sailing into the sunset - eg the players want their PCs to break into the bank using the sewers, and the GM declares there are no sewers; the players want to bribe a guard, but the GM decrees that all the guards are uncorruptable; etc.In my approach, the GM takes the players' action declaration at face value, does not veto it by reference to secret backstory (otherwise describable as the GM's personal preference for the gameworld), and instead either says "yes", or sets the parameters for a check which then resolves the matter.And here, again, we see the reasons why I describe it as railroading. And also an explanation for what the game might grind to a halt.Here's another possibility:The question of how many ships in port only comes up because one of the players cares about it - they want a ship for some purpose (to hijack; to burn to the waterline; to stow away on; whatever). So either you tell them there's a ship, and then they can enacat their plan, and the game goes on (that's saying "yes") or - if that would be too easy and would deflate the high stakes of play - then you set a check (eg "Make a Perception roll to spot a ship suitable for your purposes") and if they succeed on the check their PC sees the ship they need, and if they fail some appropriate uhappy result is narrated ("The only ship that looks like you can get to it for your arsonist plans is also the one that you know has to carry your secret society's message to the next port - so what's it going to be?" - that's "roll the dice" instead of "saying 'yes'"). The game never grinds to a halt.We post in many of the same threads, and Fate is a very popular and widely-praised game. (I've read it but never played it myself.)It's the issue of possibility that frustrates me a bit. I don't mind how other people play their RPGs, but I find it baffling when they deny that other ways are possible even when pointed to actual play accounts of people playing in those other ways!</blockquote>

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