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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6246575" data-attributes="member: 17106">What agency, though? If the character is fated to do something, or to have something happen to him, the player never had any agency to remove. I think that even if you give the player no control whatsoever over the outcomes their character experience, there's still a lot of interesting gaming, and that's the extreme.That's why I gave the examples I did. Even if I decree that a PC has a terminal illness (horror) or a destiny to live amongst the fairies (fantasy), how the player deals with that immutable circumstance is still in itself quite dynamic and dramatic. I wouldn't call that railroading, but if you want to, go ahead. I'm certainly not advocating fate as the only way to go, simply a handy DM tool.Well, no, he's not allowing the players control over this series events. To me, this is not railroading, because the PCs are not being deprived of the ability to make an in-character choice.However, I think this also illustrates an unnecessarily limited view of what the outcome is. What if one of the PCs has some giant blood in him, and the session is really about him exploring his heritage and deciding what these events mean to him? Or what if some third party is watching which side the PCs take in this conflict and will then do something to or with the PCs according to their choices? The complexity of an open world makes it so that even if certain important outcomes are outside of the players' control, there is almost always something worthwhile that is.In fact, since one of the many roles of the DM is narrator, I think it's potentially very important to devote more time to narrating parts of the fiction that do directly affect the characters and are affected by them. In that context, said giants vs village battle may be little more than a backdrop. Often, listening to the players and letting them drive the narration towards things that they care about, rather than focusing on a set scenario like the adventure above, can be very informative and satisfying. But (and this is the beauty of it) still does not take the players out of their roles.I've tried doing preplanned adventures, and I despise the idea. But I've also tried pure undirected sandbox play and found it fairly frustrating. I prefer what I refer to as "thematic improvisation", where I pick a few big important facets of the campaign and determine them myself and enforce them with a very heavy hand, and then go pretty laissez faire with everything else. But to each his own.My point is that DMing and railroading are not the same thing. Even in a sandbox game, the players are still their characters, and the DM controls everything else. He's simply exercising his control in a different way, less focused, but also less restricted.</blockquote>

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