From: Elizabeth.Mccoy@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Elizabeth Mccoy)
Subject: Re: Improvisation!
Organization: Extended Bulletin Board Service
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 17:48:18 GMT

In article <1992Aug18.023221.58228@cc.usu.edu> sl9b4@cc.usu.edu (Deep Six) writes:
>In article <AeY51IG00Vox1FS1Zo@andrew.cmu.edu>, 
> William Henry Timmins <wt0b+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:


>Player: Let's check the floorboards, there might be something hidden
> there. This guy is a merchant, he GOT to have SOMETHING.
>Improv GM: (Thinks - Hmm. He's right, I did say this was a merchant's
> house, and a merchant is likely to have something). Okay, you notice
> loose board.
>Prep GM: (Looks at notes) A complete search yeilds nothing (there was
> nothing there to find, the room was created last night).

On the other hand, the Prep GM may look at his notes, think, "Why isn't
there something there? Geeze, gotta stop staying up to 3am on these.
Yeah, there ought to be something hidden here." <shrug> If the GM's
thought of why there isn't a hidden safe (or whatever) ahead of time, 
there won't be anything, of course. But that applies equally.

>> .. specifics are either wrong, or you end up railroading
>> your players.
>
>How about a definition of ``railroading?''

<grin> How about an example. Setting: GURPS Space game. Participants:
Moonfur (cat-centaur), her DNPC Embereyes, asst. baddies, the rest of
the crew of the Hell (ship Moonfur works on).

DNPC gets kidnapped in a crowded "mall" area, loaded into a van.
Moonfur, sprint of Very Fast, gets to van, leaps atop it. Calls for help
(local police's brilliant advice, "Hold Your Position."), calls the
Hell, describes where she's heading <another ship parking lot>, squawks
for the Hell to *sit* on the baddie's ship. For some unfathomable
reason, the pilot does this. One unusable ship. Moonfur takes damage,
stuns most of the nearby kidnappers, falls unconscious. Before anyone
can get to the van, the baddies have woken up, tied Moonfur up, and are
driving the van away. Sensor expert rigs the sensors to fry the van
("Door is ... open, door is ... open"). Baddies get out, hauling DNPC
towards ship next door. Weapons are fired at them (we take out a wall
and wing a patrol ship with the ship's lasers), and they keep going. It
becomes obvious that "gee, the baddies had *two* ships!" We tell the
other ship that our antimatter containment fields are fluctuating (to
make them take off before the DNPC was loaded in), but no. People chase
after the baddies, but are warned away by guards. Ship takes off.
(Later, we waltz through the prepared "dungeon" like nobody's
business...) 

That's railroading. The *really* annoying part was the other ship. It
was irritating that the local police couldn't do anything, like stop the
other ship from taking off, too.

Same GM, same crew... We get drafted (sort of) to get "captured" by an
enemy base and fight our way out. Uh-huh. With only 2 combat effective
characters, one of whom is preggers and isn't doing anything dangerous
right now. When these techno-toys will be found and confiscated if the
enemies are being played at all sanely. Right. Sure. Oh, yeah, he wanted
to blow up our ship and give us another one that was smaller but had
more firepower. We ended up devising some rather nasty biological
warfare and infecting the base, since we obviously weren't going to get
rid of all these obnoxious "friendly" NPCs until we blew up the base.

> I for one have never heard 
>players say ``Oohh! I don't want to play in this scenario! You're rail-
>roading me!'' 

Well, we never *said* it, at least not to the GM in so many words, but
when half the game is spent fighting the railroad, a quarter of it is
spent solving the problem in something resembling a sane way, and about
a 1/100 is spent on a few dice rolls to implement the solution... And
the rest is spent on non-game stuff....  Though eventually I *did* hear
about one of his future plots (in the form of a "news story") and poke
about 60 holes in it. Which *ought* to say, "This is not a scenario I
want to play in."

>Additionally, if you are improvising a lot because the players are doing
>things so fast that you can't prepare, then aren't they railroading you
>into doing things their way? So what is the harm in doing things your
>way?

The trick is doing it within the constraints of reasonable behavior of
NPCs and the outside world. If a computer expert has a skill of 30
(don't ask), then someone with a skill of 23 is *not* going to be
breaking her encryptions.  A low-tech group looking for aliens for a zoo
should *barely* have *one* ship, not two. The best mercs in the sector
shouldn't come up with hair-brained schemes for us to get captured and
have to fight our way out of a base when we're outnumbered about 50+ to
one. And offering to blow up our ship was just a tad obnoxious, too. 

I've been in one game (same group, different GM) where it *was* a
*total* railroad! But it didn't *feel* like one because everything
seemed to fit some version of reality. (It was also an "inside-job" by
afore mentioned computer expert...) And there was no-one pressuring us
to do [X] or else.  

Now (same group, me GMing!), I'm trying to figure out how much of my
internal prep is just prep, or if I'm going to be trying to railroad, or
what... This weekend I get to be a Real Live GM for the first time.
And this is a good thread for me to figure out where I'm just making
background in my head, and where I'm assuming that I can get the PCs to
do what I want.... :-)

--EM
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