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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7377871" data-attributes="member: 42582">Actually, the player can choose what to search for, which affects the DC. The player can also spend resources or use augments to affect the chance of success.I don't understand how play works at your table. Do the players need permission to speak?At my table, if the players want their PCs to be stealthy, or take precautions, they can say so. In some systems - eg Traveller, or AD&D - there are also generic surprise rules that apply, but in 4e (which is the system I was envisaging in the example - as evidenced by the reference to residuum) the players would have to actively declare Stealth checks or something similar.So it's not railroading to expect the players to ask about uneven flagstones; but it is railroading to expect them to declare Stealth checks if they want to be sneak up on the giants?As far as I can see, those things are exactly parallel.Raised, chipped etc flagstone also exist in any rational world. But you don't tell your players about all of those. You wait for them to ask. Why is that not railroading, but it is railroading to expect them to ask if there are any intersections?As far as I can see, those things are exactly parallel.Again, this is bizarre. Why is narrating an encounter with potential allies, or with potentinal items, less railroading than narrating an encounter with the giants?And how do you know the giants that have seen them aren't potential allites?You seem to be locked into a GM-driven mindset - eg where something being a potential ally is a GM decision rather than a player decision.And you also seem to think it's important to insert GM-authored filler. Why?Upthread you were very insistent that not everything is pre-authored. If it's preauthored, then you are telling the players something you already wrote. You are giving effect to a past decision.If you did not pre-author it because you're making it up on the spot, you are deciding to mention it at that time.This is the point I've been making for most of the thread. Authorship is authorship - it's the making of a decision to introduce some element intto the shared fiction. What's at issue is the techniques and principles one uses in deciding when and what to author.And here we can see those principles at work.For some reason you think it's not railroading for the GM to either decide, or to determine by die roll, that there's nothing useful in the bazaar - thus blocking the player's goal for his/her PC without the player even getting to make a meaningful action delcaration. But you think it is railroading for the GM to frame the player into a situation where that meaningful action can be delcared and the outcome turns on that.That sttrikes me as completely backwards.</blockquote>

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