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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8337421" data-attributes="member: 16814">Okay, [USER=7019027]@Asisreo[/USER], and [USER=93631]@Greg Benage[/USER], I have a question for you.  You've essentially staked the position that the GM restricting players to one course of action is railroading.  Using that, how it establishing that a mcguffin is in Fort A not also this?  I mean, if the players decide to search in Town X for the mcguffin, it won't be there, no matter what they do, because it's decided it's in Fort A.  The players are required to go to Fort A if they wish to be successful in recovering the mcguffin, right?The point of this isn't to mock your play, but to point out that the arguments being used fail if you don't except your own play.  If the issue is player agency, no matter what, then the ability to search for the mcguffin, and have a chance of success, anywhere is maximizing agency.  And, before you claim this is ridiculous, there are popular games that actually work this way.  The difference is that those games aren't about finding out what the GM thinks about the fiction, but instead finding out what happens together, GM included.  Until a mcguffin is establish as in Fort A in the shared fiction (and GMs may be restricted from just doing this, depending on the stakes), it could be anywhere.  Usually, bad locations or additional challenges are due not to GM pre-planning such, but do to failures of the players.To give a play example, in the Blades game I play in, we were prompted to do a score for a powerful ally and were gathering information on the target.  At this point, the only things established was that the target was likely on a large boat, and that the target was suspected of being a nasty paranormal thing.  The goal was to expose it's existence or end it for our ally.  So, we investigated.  We rolled a number of failures, though, which prompted the GM to establish that the ship did not hire from the docks -- if they replaced crew no one knew how -- and that the ship was very tightly guarded and located in a private yard.  Also, we learned that the ship actually did most of it's business out of the city (in Blades, this is a very bad thing) and only returned to berth for a few months between trips.  This was all terrible news for us, because we were left with no good way to deal with the ship -- our crew is capable in a fight, but we're not great, and the only viable option for us was an assault.What ended up happening is that we had to expend/risk additional resources and got a break - a check with consequence yielded that there was one former crewperson that had left the ship, but she was holed up with a cult in the Deadlands (outside the city, very bad).  Still, best we had, so that's where we went, because we are actually decent at moving through dangerous places (the crew is Smugglers).NONE of this was established or planned for.  I couldn't be, because we might have succeeded at our gather info checks early on and then the ship wouldn't have been closed, and we could have snuck aboard or gotten hired aboard.  These games change with the checks, with nothing established outside of play, so prep is meaningless in this case.  And yet, we ended up with a seriously complicated plotline here.  So, claiming that you cannot just search whereever is not required to be true, but is a choice that the GM is making and that restricts agency of the players.Which, again, is just fine.  Restricting agency is a requirement of a game -- you can't just do whatever you want, there has to be some structure.  The thing is, though, that these structures are arbitrary not objective.</blockquote>

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