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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6098452" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, my approach is to frame scenes and generate complications before the session, relying on the PC's beliefs, traits, and established relationships as providing the requisite guidance and structure.   Since the particular aspects of the BW approach that were under discussion overlap with my approach, I adopted a more comparison versus constrast approach.  If on the other hand you want to emphasis the 'No Myth' and extemperaneous guidelines of the BW approach, then I'll adopt more of a contrast stance.    As you can suppose, two of my problems with the default burning wheel guidelines are precisely the 'No Myth' stance and the advice to rely on improv entirely.  My problems with both are numerous.  'No Myth' is a misnomer, as the whole character burning process proves.  Huge amounts of myth are implied, and to change it would require a whole new character burning process.  It's also either a misnomer or else part of the whole 'the GM isn't also playing the game' stance I sometimes see.  To a certain extent, IMO the GM's character is the setting.  It's the GM's oppurtunity to create and self-express.  And good GMs of any game system always approach their relationship to the setting in the way BW advices players to approach their characters.   And as for the 'all improv' approach, I'm not sure that it ever really works that way in practice, but even if it did there is nothing in an 'all improv' approach that is superior to good prep.  If you prep well, not only can you always improv if you want, but you will likely improv better.  In fact, you can prepare to improv just like you can train for any skillful task.  But once you get to the table, it's too late to prepare and you are on your own.That's probably true, but that's a very different usage of the word 'railroading' than its normal usage.   It's implying - as I said earlier - that either you have a game which is 'No Myth' or else you have a railroad.  That is not a statement that meets any concensus definition of railroad, as there have been lots of players for decades now that play games they wouldn't describe as railroads - including things which are understood to be on the opposite spectrum from a railroad like say a 'sandbox' - that are under his definition railroads.   A game with a firm setting may not be the 'No Myth' game he prefers, but it isn't by any widely used definition a 'railroad'.  Rather, it is simply a 'game I don't like'.   If a DM says, "You find a dark and spooky cave", it's only a railroad if you have to go in.  (Note of course that it can be a railroad without being bad, as many players will willingly ride rails from stop to stop.  In fact, they can even argue for the existance of rails when they aren't provided.)  Interestingly, in BW, not only are you expected to go in, but, if you don't have an Instinct like 'I never go into spooky places', arguably the GM has the systems blessing to begin the scene frame with you having already entered a spooky cave without having recieved player direction beyond what he sees in their goals/beliefs/instincts/etc.  So the relationship between 'railroad' and 'No Myth' and 'improv' is actually complicated.I'm aware of those facts, and fully support people playing what they like.  But, if you are playing a Gygaxian dungeon crawling game using a system that supports and blesses that style of play, you probably aren't playing 'a scene-framed game' regardless of what you preferences may be, and you don't have a right to impose a new social contract on the table just because you are frustrated with the continuous framing.  What you do at your table is your business, and if it works I'm behind it 100%.  But if isn't your table, you abide by the system conventions and game expectations.  And if you'd like to change them, you do not use force in any form to try to achieve that result because well, it's rude.</blockquote>

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