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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8343337" data-attributes="member: 42582">Which games are you talking about?The scene-framed games that I have GMed are 4e D&D, Prince Valiant, Burning Wheel, and MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. Probably the most influential scene-framed game is Dogs in the Vineyard.None of these played in accordance with the instructions is a railroad except some possible approaches to Cortex+ Heroic.A minimum requirement for something to be a railroad is that someone knows, in advance, what is coming up next. Given that none of these games (with the possible exception noted just above) has that property, they can't be railroads!Telling the players You see a knight in a clearing, mounted on a horse- he looks like he's ready to joust isn't railroading any more than telling the players The sun is shining and a breeze is blowing. It is more interesting, but I don't think being interesting is a marker of being a railroad.Why, then, assume that people are imagining a choice of direction to matter, or to seem to matter, if they're telling you that it doesn't?See, to me this sounds like a game that I wouldn't enjoy, because from this description it sounds like everything in the shared fiction that matters is decided by the GM, and the role of the players is to declare various sorts of actions that will bring to light what exactly the GM has decided. If I was in this game I think I would describe it as a railroad, because the choices the players get to make - which bit of the GM's fiction to bring to light and foreground in play - aren't that meaningful to me as a RPGer. My interest is more in pursuing the goals/themes I've established for my PC and finding out (via the action resolution rules) how the world pushes back against that.Presumably, though, the sorts of choices your game provides for are ones that your players do regard as meaningful.Again, this seems to be describing a game I wouldn't enjoy. The notion of "breadcrumbs" to me seems very railroad-y (as metaphors they are hard for me to really distinguish). And I don't find the idea that play might be boring very appealing either.I can think of three water voyages that have figured in my games in the past dozen years. One was the river voyage in Night's Dark Terror: as per the module, the PCs had to defend against an attack from the Iron Ring. There were boats, and a sand-bar, and NPC ranged attacks from the safety of the shore. It wasn't boring.One was a voyage on the Woolly Bay in a Burning Wheel campaign. I used <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/maiden-voyage-penumbra-d20-module.393493/" target="_blank">an adaptation of the Penumbra module Maiden Voyage for this</a>. When the PCs failed to save the ship from its haunting, they ended up in the drink. One of the players - playing an Elven Princess - made a successful Circles check, and by good fortune the Elven vessel that was searching for the missing Princess was able to find them (it had spotted the sorcerer PC flying above the ocean in falcon form, which mechanically had augmented the Circles check). Subsequent failed Duels of Wits between a couple of the PCs and the Elven captain resulted in him depositing them on the shore of the Bright Desert.The third was the PCs trip from Britain to Cyprus in Prince Valiant. The trip across the Channel was narrated in a minute or so until they foundered on the French coast (my framing of the Bilgewater Brigands episode from the Episode Book). After overland travel to Marseilles, they then sailed to Sicily - the players were keen for a naval encounter and so I had them attacked by pirates sailing from islands off the North African coast, and the PCs' victory in this clash led into the The Feast of Sir Ainsel episode (as written, Sir Ainsel's motivations are pretty weak; I had him allied with pirates). After establishing a small outpost of their military order in Sicily the PCs then sailed east again, landing on the Dalmatian coast as I mentioned upthread - again that was probably a minute of narration. I've already mentioned the "dragon" encounter on the Black Sea. And after crossing Anatolia overland, they sailed to Cyprus which again would have been a few sentences of narration.I've sketched these episodes of play because - while all involving the special case of a water voyage - they all illustrate my general thoughts on GMing: if in doubt, frame the PCs into conflict. As I see it, the meaningful decisions aren't about "finding the plot" or avoiding challenges - they're about what happens when conflict occurs. In 4e D&D this is a bit more 4-colour gonzo than in BW, where it can be pretty thematically laden (Prince Valiant sits somewhere in between in terms of tone). But the notion that I would hold back from framing into conflict because I have to do something else first in order to make it permissible is quite foreign - doubly so if that something else is laying "breadcrumbs" or dangling "hooks" for the players to follow. I prefer the players to hook the GM and lay the trails, rather than vice versa.</blockquote>

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