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: 9856918" data-attributes="member: 4937">I tend to agree.I write about railroading not as an attempt to set some standard that you can't break, because I break it myself.  I write about railroading in order to inform people how to do it well and artfully if they find themselves having a reason to do it, and also to make people more conscious of when they are doing it routinely or less gracefully so that they can consider whether they are respecting player agency enough and whether there might be alternatives ways of doing things.Mostly I want to tell people things like, "No, there are other ways to play that don't depend on high illusionism to entertain yourself and your players." and "Beware too much improvisation, because it's hard to stop yourself from railroading your players when you are exercising fiat that heavily mid-session."But I'm not trying to tell them, "There is this idealized game where you never fudge and everything is prepped ahead of time and the correct way to play is as rigid as fairy chess, and the players can be any character they want or have any goal they want, and that is the one true way to fun and mastery of the game."  For one thing, I no more believe that than I believe the right way to play is heavy illusionism where your players never find out that you fudge everything.I've often said that if you improv everything, even if you are doing it in response to some player choice, you are probably running a railroad. I get a lot of push back about that, but the above post - while perhaps exaggerated a bit - cuts to the heart of why I think that is.  There is just no way in the middle of play to control your own bias.  You can't be fair while under the emotional stress and pressure of play when you know the outcome of your choices and very often you are basically giving thumbs up or thumbs down to plans of the player.  You invariably are influenced by whether you want those plans to work.  If you wrote down something ahead of time or otherwise have established some conventions at a moment of less bias and less pressure and more time to think, then at least you have a check on your feelings to know whether you are being biased by your present emotions.  At least you have something to base your decision on other than what you want to have happen at the moment.</blockquote>

Verification