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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tyrlaan" data-source="post: 6654766" data-attributes="member: 20998">I was responding to your own phraseology, which you address here...Which tells me we are indeed on the same page, it just was not clear to me that you didn't also mean the above when you talked about "final say in imagination".Okay, sure, but really that's just an illusion. It's still your brain sorting out the actions of those characters. You can say that they are deciding what they will do, but it's still your brain doing the deciding. Unless you literally consult other people to play the roles of your characters for you when you write a book (which would be basically playing an RPG at that point), no matter how you slice it, what happens is up to you. Now that's not to say things may go unexpectedly for you if you're doing a good job of thinking about how a character would react to things, but...and... ...you still have complete control over the final product. It doesn't matter how long it takes to write your book. It doesn't matter how many twists and turns it took because characters "surprised" you. No matter how arduous the process, by the time the book is on the shelves, it's complete and it's what you wanted it to be. Maybe it's not what you thought it was going to be when you started, but it's complete and you are satisfied with it. And when a reader picks up that book, they are looking at a finished work.When running a game, you do not have the luxury of revising and so on. You can retool as much as you want until contact with the PCs. Then you must adapt adjust, etc. While this is similar to adjusting for characters in your own mind when writing a novel, there is a significant difference. You do not have the luxury of ensuring the work is finished to perfection. What you present to the players is often raw, draft-like. The finished product is a work of collaborative fiction, as you alluded to. It's not the same as a writer writing a novel because the players at your table will never be as limited as the characters in your own mind. AND you don't have the luxury of revising and revising when they throw you off track.(Obviously you get a good chance between sessions to do some revising and whatnot. I'm not suggesting you can't alter things to accommodate the unexpected. My point here is that there is a significant gulf between that and the type of revising one does for a work of writing).Another significant difference I hadn't mentioned earlier is audience. For work of fiction, my audience is the reader. For a RPG session, my audience is the players. The needs and expectations for both have some overlap surely, but also some incredible differences. I call plotting plotting and railroading railroading. As you reply to me more, it's clear that we're not all that different, and not really disagreeing on much except perhaps some terminology and maybe some mild philosophical differences. Railroading to me is something like the GM wanting the players to stop a robbery and they are not interested, so he/she forces them into the situation anyway through heavy-handed tactics that stretch or break the fiction of the game. That's not plotting anymore (to me at least) because the GM has not compelled the players to take the desired action. Like you I also am no fan of the sandbox. I find it just leads to a lot of uninteresting mulling about that can quickly lead to boredom. Like you I prescribe to plotting, but if despite my best efforts the party doesn't take my bait, I roll with it. It sounds like you do too and we were just talking past each other with terminology.</blockquote>

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