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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8337412" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sorry, meant to reply to this but got focus on Crimson Longinus. My core problem is mostly that....I just don't believe any DM is good enough to truly evade suspicion forever, and even making people suspicious is Bad News. Because if people suspect they're on an illusionism-based railroad, it's going to cause some damage, even if only a little. DMs are not infinitely clever, players outnumber them, and time and reflection are on the players' side, not the DM's. And even if it is only "observable" in hindsight, it is possible for players to start testing for it once they suspect it. For example, trying to intentionally make curveballs. Throwing more siutations at the DM where they have to think fast and invent stuff on the spot etc. A player can do that while remaining totally in-character (depending on the specific character, of course), and I just don't quite buy that any DM, let alone many DMs, can withstand such scrutiny for long.TL;DR: The DM just has to mess up once for illusionism to be a problem. The players have the whole campaign to figure it out. The more you use it, the more likely the illusion falls, and the more work you must do to keep it secret. Maybe if you always run shortish games, you can dodge that bullet. I don't believe anyone can dodge it for longish ones, let alone full years (like my game has been).As I said, this is for named people only. If someone is named, or gets a name, I develop stuff. Yes, sometimes me fleshing out a character only happens because the players took interest--but again, this is respecting player choice by saying, "hey, if you take the time and effort to find out about this, you will actually find stuff out!" It would be railroading to do the opposite, to insist that there were nothing to see and stonewall any attempt to find out about stuff outside the narrow preplanned scope.Also, and this is really really really important to me, you're rather straying from the original statement. You originally spoke of events happening purely because the PCs show up. Now, you're expanding that out to "absolutely  any detail whatsoever that wasn't perfectly planned out from the instant you conceived of the campaign," which...yes, I agree is a thing. You've made the statement valid by heavily weakening what it is you're saying.Story events do not simply just happen because the PCs showed up somewhere. The world is not exclusively interesting in the location the PCs happen to be, and completely static everywhere else. That is what I was pushing back against. Specifically, you said:That's a far cry from "people that the PCs interact with have their lives more fully fleshed-out than people they don't." What you spoke of is "the world only happens where the PCs are." What I'm talking about is the PCs digging into the world as they go. Big, big difference.I always try to be at least a full month (4 sessions) ahead of where my PCs happen to be. Of course, I often fall behind because I'm human. But my goal is always to have at least a full month of the current events/story/dungeon/etc. ready, and the first two to four sessions of the next one as well. These plans naturally adjust, usually because the PCs take longer to do things than my neat timetables expect, so I often have more leeway than I "allowed" myself. Again, it's really not that hard, and I am not a DM who is rigidly planning out absolutely everything. I force myself to be adaptive and responsive to player choices. On occasion, they throw me a big enough curveball that I have to do a couple days of intensive prep work, but these are all friends of mine, so we know each other well enough to have a reasonable idea of what one another is likely to do.No situation "effectively just 'start(s)'" when the PCs arrive. Their arrival may catalyze a situation already in progress, or it may reveal more details than were already known, or it may draw out previously dormant actors, or (etc.), but it is absolutely NEVER the case that simply by showing up, Plot Happens to that location instead of some other location.Individual characters may get names (since names are now needed--naturalistically, they already had names, I just didn't assign them), some backstory, etc. But those aren't "situations effectively just 'start[ing].'" That's "a situation is already happening, we're just getting introduced to what it is and why it's happening."</blockquote>

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