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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7373552" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is finality. Success is success: the PC acquires an item useful for confronting his brother. Failure is failure: the item is cursed.The GM is not at liberty to upend or undo these outcomes by manipulating as-yet unrevealed backstory. [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] outlined this in more detail upthread (in discussion of the example of "becoming a king"), and I posted an actual play illustration of the point: when Halika was drugged by the other PCs, the resultant success - Halika can't beat us to the tower - was secured until they affirmatively took an action that put it into jeopardy (by trying to sneak through the catacombs).In [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s example there is a disturbance, and the PC charms a participant in that (a "harlot"), and then it turns out - due to a whole lot of GM authored and manipulated backstory - that the NPC is a spy who, being charmed, fails to carry out her mission, allowing an attack upon the duke, which then leads to the duke arresting the PCs for having facilitated said attack upon him. This is not a case of finality in resolution - the stakes of the check are not remotely clear to the players, and their success has no significance for what actually unfolds in play.I was talking about the opening scene of a campaign, and provided a concrete example from actual play. I thought you were talking about the same thing. if you weren't, then tell me what you were talking about and how it bears upon what I was talking about. First, I don't see how what you describe is significantly different from what I said - "You're in town - what do you do?" All you've done is add a bit of colour - there was colour in my description of the bazaar too, but the colour doesn't change the basic choice structure of the moment of play.As far as agency is concerned, why is being in the bazaar a railroad? Can't your player choose to leave the bazaar to look for a sage?But furthermore, what does "best method" mean? What makes one method better than another? If you're running D&D, there is no "contact" rule system for finding an old merchant buddy. Are you talking about Streetwise checks? What makes those "better" than investigating the feather in the bazaar? It is completely opaque to me how you are framing and running these situations, how you are setting DCs, what information the player has about those DCs, what moves the player is able to make to affect DCs, and when the game actually gets to the crunch point of whether or not the PC finds a useful item.This is consistent with my characterisation in the post to which you replied. But I don't see how it is a source of player agency that the question of whether or not they actually get to engage their player goal - in this case, finding a useful item - is dependent upon the GM making a (presumably secret) die roll.Well, in my game the PC's goal, as established by the player, was to find an item which would be useful in confronting his balrog-possessed brother. My question is, how do you decide what counts as a useful item? When you're making your die roll to determine if a curio shop has a useful item for sale, what item are you rolling for?In my case, the player will declare what sort of property he hopes to detect in the feather. As well as establishing immediate details about the fiction, it also contributes to the table's shared understanding of what is involved in confronting a balrog.I don't understand what contrast you think you're drawing. This is like [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] saying that the players have more agency because the GM tells them about an intersection, or about a slave being beaten. It's not an increase in player agency to have the GM offer a menu of things to ask questions about.If the players expressed goal is finding a useful item, and half an hour of play is spent getting to the pont where that goal is actually in issue, with that half hour essentially the player eliciting information from the GM ("Does anyone know whether there's a curiou shop in town? OK, can someone tell me where it is? Is it open? Does it have anything interesting for sale?"), I am not seeing where the player agency resides.This is contradictory. If, at every interaction, the fiction might change (ie there's never any interaction where the fiction won't change) then what is the railroad?I also don't know what you mean by "the story". And how you are judging relevance to the story.In any event, whether travelling from A to B requires a check depends upon whether or not anything is at stake. If it is not, then I say "yes". When the PCs in my Traveller game travelled to and from their landing ship to the market in Enlil, that was narrated in less than a minute. When the PCs in my Marvel Heroic game flew in the Stark private jet from Washington DC to Tokyo, that was narrated in less than a minute. When those same PCs wanted to sneak into the basement of the Latverian embassy in Washington, they had to establish an asset to unlock that possibility in the fiction (namely, acquire plans from the a department of planning and urban infrastructure).This is some new definition of railroading, though, when it's railroading to say to players who declare "Right, we get into the jet and fly to Tokyo so we can break into the Clan Yashida headquarters" to respond "OK, you arrive and are standing in the streets of Tokyo outside the Yashida skyscraper. How are you going to get inside."!! The PC is purely imaginary. I'm talking about the experience of the player.This same claim has been made by [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]. It's only true under the assumption that the GM is responsible for all content introduction into the fiction. As soon as you drop that assumption, the claim is not true at all.For instance - if the reason the GM is talking about wolves is because one of the PCs has an ability to summon and control wolves, it makes a difference. If the reason the GM is talking about Jabal is because a player has declared a Circles check, it makes a difference. If the reason the GM is talking about the Raven Queen, or Orcus, is because a player has just declared that his Raven Queen devotee prays for guidance, it makes a difference.The basic action of RPGing is conversation. If the conversation takes the form of the players saying to the GM "Tell me stuff", and then the GM replies, it is true that it makes little difference whether the reply is pre-scripted or not. But as soon as the players engage the fiction in some more proactive style - be that "I'm a devotee of the Raven Queen - are the forces of Orcus opposing me here?", or "We go to the market on Enlil to look for alien artefacts - what do we find?", or "While he goes south with the villagers, we're going to make a hard run through the hills to avoid the giants - what happens?" - then the difference between pre-sripted answers and genuine answers is huge.And I say genuine answers deliberately: because in a game with robust resolution mechanics, we don't get answers to the players' questions until those mechanics are applied, and the application of the mechanics could mean that things go either way.</blockquote>

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