Quote from: rgrove0172;935213Lets say the players just reached a small village. The Improv GM has no plans for it at all. He decided as the players travelled it looked like a good place for a settlement due to a river and some nice looking farmland. He starts describing the place - probably rolling randomly for various features I would guess, mixing in what he finds to be logical given his understanding of the area, culture etc. Ok, that's fine.

The players are looking for an inn. He rolls a couple dice and describes a building, presents an innkeeper NPC in a fun way, basing their personality on a character he recalls from a recent TV show. The players stay the night and nurse some wounds. Good stuff.

Another success for the Improv GM.

Another GM whips up a village and an Inn weeks before the game. He places it on the map - here- near a forest road. He expects the players will head that way and generates some businesses and NPCs for the place. They however decide to head another direction, towards a river. Not having anything planned that way, but seeing no harm in it as the players are relatively ignorant about the region, picks up the village, its inn and keeper, and plops it down next to the river with a few tweaks, turning it into a farming village instead of woodcutting.

He is a dirty railroader?

Wouldn't be guilty of no more than economy of prep work?

That's my main question here. Nobody is going to argue (Well maybe someone, but not me) that moving something around in front of the players, no matter how hard they try to avoid it, if fair or desirable. But if confronted with a Y in the road, and with no knowledge whatsoever of what lies down either path, how is it wrong to let the players choose then provide an adventure down the one they travel - regardless?

You are illustrating a constant inability to not see the forest for the trees. You're not a "dirty railroader" because you decided to use your location prop to fill a spot for the sake of interest. You're a "dirty railroader" when you intend for the players to go to your Inn to have whatever scene you've concocted in your head regardless of what they choose to do.

Do you see the difference? If you can't... then you're staring very close to the tree indeed. There is always an element of "railroad-track" in any campaign. And it depends entirely on your tastes as a GM and that of your players to what degree you use it. It's very common for unskilled GM's to lean heavily on it as a technique - but it does have it's purposes. It's a tool like anything else. But how you use it and to what degree is what distinguishes you between as shitty GM and good GM.

Conversely, I've seen HORRIBLE GM's that think their improvisational skills are the shit and do zero prep - and their campaign run like shit and the players invariably quit.

It's about establishing consistency and maintaining it to the satisfaction of your players.

Quote from: One Horse Town;935150If they don't know the tower was originally meant to be to the north and they travel east and still encounter the tower for your precious story, you're a dick and your players won't know it.

This is an important point: though your players may not know you're an illusionist cocksucker, you're still an illusionist cocksucker if you engage in illusionism.

If you tell a lie and don't get caught, it doesn't mean you're not a liar.

My challenge with this whole debate is tossing out the principal focus I believe GM's should have for some idea that there's a "wrong way" to do it.

The primary goal of the GM is to make a fun game for the players. I imagine everything else is just technique and style.

As I gregariously (and somewhat sarcastically) shared above was my personal love of improv. I have even been fooled a couple times playing in a game with a canned adventure not knowing it was a canned adventure.

Railroads are not about tossing things in front of characters in order to give them something to do. That's just good GMing. Railroads are insisting that certain events or consquences are going to occur in the narrative of the game regardless of the what the characters do.  Some examples;

1) No matter how hard they try, or bribe, or how creative they convince - the NPC will absolutely NOT travel with the PCs (it's not in the module).
2) Regardless of how inventive the strategy, or effective the execution, the evil necromancer ALWAYS gets away.
3) Leveling up requires one week spent in a town of 500+ population. You only find those towns rarely when the module says the PCs are ready to level up. Any attempt to bypass the tracks to escape to a town fails until the GM (module) is ready.

In the end there is no appreciable difference if you take prepared materials (what I prep as snippets from my post above) or invent something whole-cloth and present it to the PCs. If your intent is to keep the game interesting and fun, to keep things moving, to prevent boredom, because it "makes sense for the region", or it "makes sense as a result of PC choices", or it "makes sense for the bad guy's goals", etc. It's all good. You have take the pulse of the people at the table!

When you moved the village from the forest to the river, did the player's seem disappointed? If so, maybe they were purposefully avoiding civilization. Why? Read the table. If the PCs are given a hint that the village is in the forest, and they avoid it, they are telling you something. Roll with it! Let them head to the river and then give them something to do!

Railroading has less to do with how you create situations as a GM and much more to do with how you're limiting choices or worse FORCING conditions, results or consequences on the PCs.

Quote from: rgrove0172;935208So by your assessment if they players go north and I arbitrarily plop down a tower I avoid dickness but if I instead take a tower from the world elsewhere and move it there (them not knowing of it) I will embrace dickness even though the experience would be exactly the same for the players?

You really have trouble with reading. I'm not going round the houses with you, you're not worth it.

Quote from: CRKrueger;935007But if confronted with a Y in the road, and with no knowledge whatsoever of what lies down either path, how is it wrong to let the players choose then provide an adventure down the one they travel - regardless?

Now you're starting to edge into the problem area that Tenbones is talking about.  If the players have no real intent or foreknowledge and they're just picking a road randomly, then of course that one particular decision of deciding to have this cool Inn with the lively Innkeeper you've prepped be down this road and not that one.  The important thing though isn't that you did it, but WHY you did it.  

If you did it because according to you "By god this is the best Inn ever and they WILL visit it." - well then, that's a big problem.   It indicates that the concept of players choosing their own fun is about as alien to you as the sun is to an angler fish.

If you did it because you got caught with your pants down and you feel you will run a prepped/moved area better than a improv'ed area, then not really a problem...But, if you actually do a deent amount of advance prep, picking up and moving a village, or even just an Inn, might have consequences you're going to have to design around later.

Quote from: rgrove0172;935212Some of you are forgetting the original question. Player choice is very important of course...but what difference does it make if that choice presents a brand new, conjured up on the fly, situation or one the GM planned for later and maybe elsewhere but moves it?

I answered this on page 2:

Quote from: CRKrueger;935007If the players have no knowledge of the Tower one way or the other, and thus no plan whether to find it or ignore it, and you decide to move it from South Road to North Road because you think they'd enjoy it more - then that's really no different then just deciding out of the blue that there is a Tower on the North Road.  It's Fiat.  You decide they see a Tower on the North Road.  But, it's Fiat that does not nullify player action or choice for the sake of your narrative.  Whether the Tower was created 2 minutes in advance or 2 months in advance, it's still just in your bag of tricks, ready to be used until you actually use it.

If the players have heard there is a Tower, but want to avoid it, and correctly choose the North path, but they reach it anyway, then you're imposing your will and using your powers as GM to override their choice for your own reasons, even if you think it's for their own good.

Quote from: CRKrueger;935229If you did it because according to you "By god this is the best Inn ever and they WILL visit it." - well then, that's a big problem.   It indicates that the concept of players choosing their own fun is about as alien to you as the sun is to an angler fish.

I also don't understand what the mental state of the GM has to do with anything when the objective result is the same as if he'd been improvising the Inn. In neither case do the players really  have a choice; it's all fiat.

Quote from: tenbones;935211As others are saying in various ways - it's about internal consistency. You can do Zero-Prep with ease, if you as a GM know what your world is about, what the NPC's that inhabit it are all about, and why it all works the way it does. When you start changing the consistency of those dynamics to suit your desires despite whatever the PC's do, well you're now creating a railroad (and as I've said in all your other threads - if that's what your players LIKE - who cares what we think? Play on.)

You don't have to tell the players what/why/when you're doing things - their characters should, imo, discover all that in game. But the onus of creating that consistency is on you as the GM - by whatever means it takes you to get there, be it railroad, improvisation, PC exploration or RP or a big glorious mix of all of the above.

I generally find it a bad move to create some kind of orthodoxy of thought when it comes to using a toolset. But I also stipulate that if you really wanna use a claw-hammer to put in a screw... then have at it. heh

Edit: With this seeming concern you show over whether "railroading" is legit or not vs. improvisation within/without a sandbox - and often these idea get very muddled for you (at least it seems that way by dint of your response), I find a lot of your questions seem to revolve around the idea of how much "prep" is too much prep and hairsplitting. Have you ever tried setting up your campaigns a different way than what you normally do?

I think a nice method for you, if you haven't looked might be the Plotpoint Campaign idea from Savage Worlds. It might let you let go of some of your preconceptions and let you answer your own questions without even trying.

I've brought this up mainly because of local discussion. As stated I've played both ways without issue but had a player lose his god when he discovered I had more or less 0 prepped an adventure. I had another more tactfully question possible railroading during a single session adventure. I didn't see the real difference between the two practices. You guys are great with your opinions.

Quote from: trechriron;935224My challenge with this whole debate is tossing out the principal focus I believe GM's should have for some idea that there's a "wrong way" to do it.

The primary goal of the GM is to make a fun game for the players. I imagine everything else is just technique and style.

As I gregariously (and somewhat sarcastically) shared above was my personal love of improv. I have even been fooled a couple times playing in a game with a canned adventure not knowing it was a canned adventure.

Railroads are not about tossing things in front of characters in order to give them something to do. That's just good GMing. Railroads are insisting that certain events or consquences are going to occur in the narrative of the game regardless of the what the characters do.  Some examples;

1) No matter how hard they try, or bribe, or how creative they convince - the NPC will absolutely NOT travel with the PCs (it's not in the module).
2) Regardless of how inventive the strategy, or effective the execution, the evil necromancer ALWAYS gets away.
3) Leveling up requires one week spent in a town of 500+ population. You only find those towns rarely when the module says the PCs are ready to level up. Any attempt to bypass the tracks to escape to a town fails until the GM (module) is ready.

In the end there is no appreciable difference if you take prepared materials (what I prep as snippets from my post above) or invent something whole-cloth and present it to the PCs. If your intent is to keep the game interesting and fun, to keep things moving, to prevent boredom, because it "makes sense for the region", or it "makes sense as a result of PC choices", or it "makes sense for the bad guy's goals", etc. It's all good. You have take the pulse of the people at the table!

When you moved the village from the forest to the river, did the player's seem disappointed? If so, maybe they were purposefully avoiding civilization. Why? Read the table. If the PCs are given a hint that the village is in the forest, and they avoid it, they are telling you something. Roll with it! Let them head to the river and then give them something to do!

Railroading has less to do with how you create situations as a GM and much more to do with how you're limiting choices or worse FORCING conditions, results or consequences on the PCs.

Thanks for that, really. If your opinion is common then those that have called me a railroaded are without argument as I have never gamed that way. What I do by occasionally shifting the reality of my setting to better present the game is absolutely no different than throwing down arbitrary and new content. I feel liberated! Laugh

I openly brag about winging everything with like no prep so my players know all about it already. I think they're just impressed.

As for what you described, no it's not railroading, unless you're doing it with the intent of them going some place no matter what.

If it's just, "I need some content here, and oh look, I had some made earlier, so I'll just use that," then no, no problem.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;935232I also don't understand what the mental state of the GM has to do with anything when the objective result is the same as if he'd been improvising the Inn. In neither case do the players really  have a choice; it's all fiat.

For any one isolated choice...no difference, but like Old One Eye said, if the idea comes from the concept of the GM choosing the Fun for the players, and being more of a Master of Ceremonies than simply Playing the World, then overall, you're going to get a very different campaign.

That's a big assumption. There could be a big range of styles that can express a mindset differently. That he would move the tower when they don't even know it exists doesn't imply that he'd move it when they already confirmed for a fact it exists at X location.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;935256That he would move the tower when they don't even know it exists doesn't imply that he'd move it when they already confirmed for a fact it exists at X location.

True, which is why that's not what I said.  But if he moved the Tower because he wants them to experience "Tower Fun", therefore they will experience "Tower Fun", then whether or not he ever outright railroads them, the campaign in the end is going to be "We're always doing what the GM thinks is fun, dramatic, whatever."

It'd be more accurate if you changed that to "Sometimes we run into set pieces that the GM just moved." Even if you changed that to "always", it doesn't mean you're always doing what he thinks is fun because he doesn't control how you interact with said set pieces.

Quote from: rgrove0172;935208So by your assessment if they players go north and I arbitrarily plop down a tower I avoid dickness but if I instead take a tower from the world elsewhere and move it there (them not knowing of it) I will embrace dickness even though the experience would be exactly the same for the players?

If the players don't mind exploring the tower, regardless of how it got there, then I think you're dickery-free. If the campaign cannot move one inch forward unless you make them explore the tower, then you're dickery-infused. Regardless, if the group goes along with what you have in mind, then it doesn't really matter how anything gets anywhere. Players & GMs must meet somewhere in the middle at some point, or there's no game to be played.