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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8657945" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are so many unexpressed premises in here, it's hard to unpack them all!The most obvious ones pertain to authorship: you assume that players should have some sort of authority over situation (so "quantum ogres" are bad) but that they should have no authority over setting. Given the obvious tension between those two premises - how does someone exercise authority over situation if setting is being controlled by someone else? - there must be other premises assumed to, that dissolve the tension: eg that the players can take low-stakes actions, like collecting rumours, that will enable them to learn the content of the setting and hence make choices about which part of the setting to go to and hence which situations to trigger.Talk about jargon!The last few times I've played Cthulhu it has been using Cthulhu Dark rather than CoC. One game we set in between-the-wars Boston, the other in late nineteenth century London.Cthulhu Dark is not a complete RPG, in that it doesn't fully set out the rules for either framing or for resolution. (The author is aware of this: I'm not criticising him.) I used Apocalypse World-techniques of asking questions and building on answers, and Burning Wheel intent-and-task resolution. There were no "nodes", no "key witnesses", no "necessary clues". It worked fine.I bristle at "coded as an antagonist". Unless you just mean that the GM describes them doing something that the players (as their PCs) would rather the NPC not be doing.If a player says "I say 'Hello'", and the GM responds "roll initiative" then I guess I want to know a few things: is this something that, within the system being used, is a legitimate hard move? For instance, is the attack by the NPC a consequence for a previous failed action?Or is the player declaring an action - an attempt to talk in a peaceful fashion with the NPC - and the GM is deciding that action fails without calling for a dice roll? In that case, what are the resolution rules for the system? 5e D&D, for instance, says the GM decides if an action has a chance of success or not. Maybe the GM has decided that this NPC is very angry, or is mind-controlled to attack, or whatever. There are other systems, though - eg DitV, BW - that tell the GM to "say 'yes' or roll the dice". In that case, saying "no" would be breaking the rules.If you are suggesting that a GM who has decided that the NPC is angry, or mind-controlled, or whatever - and hence will attack - should change that decision because the players want a different scene, now we're in the territory of the GM rewriting the setting details based on player desires/suggestions. But above I've quoted [USER=86653]@overgeeked[/USER] saying that it's not railroading for the GM to author a setting or NPC responses.So now we have two different uses of railroading - twice the jargon!In the Cthulhu Dark episodes I mentioned above, there was no "road" already there. I asked the players what they (as their PCs) were doing, they told me, I (as GM) riffed on that, things happened. In the London game, at various points characters travelled north or south of the Thames. When I asked a player where he (as his PC) was rooming, and he answered "The Forlorn Trap", we had no trouble running with that. When one of the players in the Boston game decided his PC was a longshoreman, I started the action at the harbour. When the other PCs went home, we didn't worry about what suburbs their houses were in. I can't remember if it was me or the player of the journalist PC who suggested his house would have a darkroom for developing photos, but that didn't cause any puzzlement. We just did it.When, at a certain point, I narrated that the home of the legal secretary was on fire, the player (as PC) made sure she escaped from the flames! There seemed no need to work out how long it might have taken cultists (or a shoggoth, or whatever it was that set the fire) to travel from the harbour to the home and back again.</blockquote>

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