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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7392773" data-attributes="member: 42582">Looking up something else, I found <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=29332.0" target="_blank">this old forum post</a> which seemed relevant to the GM narrating that the PCs arrive at the cavern of the fire giants:The fact is that if at least one character is not fictionally present in a fictional location, with the location's immediate features described to everyone, then play can't happen. . . . Your question is knotted up in the idea that if anyone ever says, "You wake up in a locked box," or "All right, skipping ahead to next Tuesday," or even, "When you open a door, a hydra strikes at you," then it's railroading. That is, that any kind of scene-situation or even description would be railroading. That's absurd. Without such material being established as the fiction in action, play cannot proceed. The only alternative would be to have every character's actions be laboriously described minute to minute, every damn day of his or her life, in the hopes that somehow, through no actual human agency, their situation would evolve into something fun to play. . . . In many ways, framing a scene sometimes requires presumptions about the characters' actions. If I am the GM and I say, "All right, skipping ahead to next Tuesday," or, "Later, while you're taking a shower," then I obviously tacitly played the characters between the last moments played and the moments I'm describing. You did not, after all, laboriously describe your character going into the bathroom, taking off his clothes, turning on the shower, and getting in. You may well not even have said, "I'm going to take a shower" at all. So is that railroading? It's a matter of three things. First, did you genuinely have something in mind that you wanted your character to do instead, or related, did you genuinely want your character not to take a shower for some reason? (And the GM didn't even ask.) Second, does the GM typically extend this kind of 'takeover' later in the scenes over consequential decisions for your character, in which case this is sort of the thin end of the wedge? And third, if you object, does your voice at the table matter, or does the GM shut you down and say, "My way, you're in the shower, I said so." If some combination of those three things is going on, then yeah, it's probably railroading. But that doesn't mean it had to be. If the GM's statement, "Later, when you're taking a shower" is understood by everyone at the table to be a provisional opening statement of what can become a dialogue about the next scene, then by definition, it cannot be railroading. The GM is perfectly politely saying he's ready to cut to a new situation, the old one's done. The players are perfectly capable of modifying the suggested situation ("I'm in the shower with him," or "I'd rather have gone to the neighborhood bar first," or "No way I'm taking a shower! I like the smell of the nasty slime," et cetera) without it being considered a challenge, because the original statement wasn't a decree in the first place. That kind of provisionality is very useful, especially when my #2 above (the thin end of the wedge) is not ever present. In practice, I've found that it turns into a negotiated dialogue only very rarely because no one is uptight about that mild transfer of who says what the character did. . . . You probably know the problem with not having that understanding . . . the players become paranoid and argumentative because they are tired of having their characters played for them, and they "turtle up," insisting that their characters do nothing and react to nothing all the time.This is a more elaborate articulation of what I had in mind when I said that players at my table don't need permission to speak.</blockquote>

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