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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9041374" data-attributes="member: 42582">In REH's Conan story The Scarlet Citadel, Conan is captured by his enemies, who are conquering his kingdom; imprisoned in a dungeon; a person with a reason to hate him (due to Conan's past deeds) comes into the dungeon to taunt him with the keys; Conan kills the man taunting him, and uses the keys to free himself; in the dungeon, he finds a wizard trapped and frees the wizard; the wizard is able to conjure a spirit that flies Conan back to his kingdom in record time; Conan is then able to regain control of his kingdom.This is not a particularly wacky sequence of events to occur in an adventure story. Consider Star Wars: the Princess is captured by her enemies, who are dismantling her resistance to their empire; she is imprisoned in a dungeon, but not before sending a message in a bottle; the message is found by the hidden heir to the magical traditions that can overthrow the empire, who in turn is found by the mentor of those traditions; the heir, the mentor, and a couple of swords-for-hire rescue her, are allowed to escape in a risky gambit; the gambit turns back on the empire, as the heir and the swords-for-hire save the day.JRRT even lampshades the contrivances necessary to make the plot in his stories work: in Appendix A of LotR, he has Gandalf remark to Frodo and Gimli "A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle Earth."In RPGing, who gets to establish that Conan has a kingdom to defend, that the Princess has a rebellion to run, that the Dwarves have a home to retake from a dragon, etc? Who gets to establish all the chance meetings? How is it determined that enemies will take risky gambits - taunting the prisoner with the keys, allowing the prisoners to escape so as to reveal the location of their hidden base, etc?To go back to my conversation with [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] about purist-for-system RPGing, which I think also connects to [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]'s remarks about (E) vs (A): if no one does these things, we get what Baker <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">calls</a> "listless, aimless, dull play with no sustained conflict and no meaning". Classic Traveller is, in my experience, vulnerable to this when approached in the purist-for-system spirit.If the GM decides these things, we get what I call "railroading". There can be variants: the GM provides one option; the GM provides multiple options; the GM decides, here-and-now, that the PCs meet a friendly wizard; the GM rolls a d% at the start of every in-game day to see if the PCs meet a friendly wizard. These are the various techniques that live within the space of what I call railroading.If the players simply decide these things, we get what looks to me like cooperative storytelling.If the players get to establish their PCs' dramatic needs, and hence either expressly or implicitly what is at stake; the GM authors the conflict; and we have rules for resolving how things turn out, which (more-or-less) apportion outcomes between the PCs get what they want and the GM is obliged to step up or to bring home the conflict; then with a bit of luck we get what I call excellent RPGing!</blockquote>

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