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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7376104" data-attributes="member: 42582">Why would the GM pre-author the feather being cursed? The existence of the feather in the fiction was established after the player's build their PCs, as part of the opening scene of the campaign. The feather was only introduced into that scene, by me as GM, because I was following the lead of the player who decided that one of his PC's Beliefs was that he would acquire an item useful for confronting a balrog. And how would I know that the player is going to decide to have his PC read the aura (as opposed to, say, just buy it? or try and steal it? or ask the peddler more about it?). Pre-authorship of outcomes is not consistent with the idea that the players have genuine choice in action declaration, with that action declaration yielding genuine answers to the questions it poses about the fiction.By treating this as a "clue hammer" or "the best course of action" you are building in assumptions that the GM is authoring all the fiction!There's no clue. There's no best. There are choices that tell us something about the PC - This is what I'm willing to do - and that, as they are resolved, will tell us something about the situation - This feather is useful for confronting balrogs or this feather is cursed or this peddler knows very little about the wares he is selling or any of a hundred other possibilities depending on what actions are declared.Whether novel or film is a better model for RPGing is an open question. But even focusing on a novel, in fact LotR does not describe every detail. How many flagstones are in the hallway of Bag End?I would suggest that in  [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s game, if the GM mentions an uneven flagstone then it is de rigeur to search for traps or secret doors. Does that mean that, by not mentioning every flagstone in the tavern, Lanefan is railroading the players?Or to put it in the form of direct assertion rather than rhetorical question: there is a finite amount of time available in which the GM tells the players stuff. To spend most of that time telling them stuff that speaks to PCs' dramatic needs, rather than stuff that invites them simply to get the GM to tell them more stuff ("You're at an intersection - which way do you go?" "You notice an uneven flagstone on the floor between your table and the bar - what do you do?") doesn't lessen the players' contributions to the content of the shared fiction. It increases it.This all rests on an illusion, namely, that the gameworld is real. But it's not. In the approach you are advocating, it's authored by the GM.When you narrate that the PC is in a "neutral place", you have determined where the PC is. If the PC says "I look for a sage - is there a library nearby" you, as GM, tell the player what the PCs sees, and establish the parameters within which the player can make choices. The whole fiction here is GM-authored, and the player choices are all confined within GM-established parameters. As soon as the GM has one of the NPCs s/he is narrating do stuff (eg decides that someone at the library lies about where a sage might be found), the GM is also starting to drive events on some GM-desired course.The idea that it is more railroad-y to say to the player "OK, you said you wanted to find items - here's a prospective item, now tell us what you think about it!" is bizarre!</blockquote>

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