Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6123116" data-attributes="member: 42582">For me, the marker of a railroad is that the complications/encounters/challenges that the PCs will confront are invariant with respect to player choices.The strongest version of this, I think, is a game in which the villain, the places that will be visited, the events that will occur, etc are all mapped out in advance.Within this context, multiple ways to achieve a goal is for me pretty minor - for instance, if the door can be circumvented either by using the right key, or performing the right opening ritual, that won't stop the game being a railroad by my criteria if the players have no practical option in play other than to pass through the door.Conversely, if the players decide to woo Vecna, and the only way to do that is to kill Kas, that is not necessarily a railroad. (It may be. But knowing only what I've said, I don't think we can tell.) For instance, the players may be able to proceed by a path other than wooing Vecna. Perhaps they kill him instead, and thereby woo Kas.What encounter with the besiegers' leadership? Hussar and I have both talked about the players initiating contact by the PCs with the leaders of the siege. But within that context, "skipping" or "ignoring" the encounter is meaningless. There isn't an encounter unless the players intitiate one.You are talking about the PCs. Hussar and I are talking about the players.I mean, the GM could frame a scene in which the PCs face some crisis and the only solution is for them to all toil in the slavepits of Gehenna for the rest of eternity. From the PCs' point of view, the PCs would of course have an interest in the slavepits and in toil. But I suspect many players would classifiy this as a crappy scenario, and have little enthusiasm for playing it out.Hussar and I are applying the same principle, but more forcefully - whether it's worth playing out isn't just a function of how entertaining the GM makes it, but how much it expresses or is related to the players' goals for the campaign and for their PCs.Yes.The tendency to reshape issues of player buy in, investment, interest etc by reference to the PCs' interests is an obstacle to clear communication.Also the tendency to reframe things in terms of GM power rather than player activity - eg the idea of a predetermined encounter with the siege, whereas as you point out the whole difference of the siege from the desert is that the players can choose how to engage it in a way that serves their city-related goal.Likewise, I tend to find out what my players' PCs can do when they show it off in play.This is why I run a system (4e, in my case, but it's not the only example) where the players' ability to have their PCs shine isn't up to the GM tailoring ingame challenges to suit them - partly because competence is broad and driven by players in how they engage particular encounters, and partly because PC competence reflects and expresses the goals and motivations to which I am responding as GM.Only because in all these discussion geographic proximity and story proximity correlate. How might they not? If the PCs Plane Shift into the desert, and see a city official waiting expectantly for their arrival.</blockquote>

Verification