GMing a plotline, Structure, or railroading? Options

[Talia Invierno]

[Crusher Bob]

Part of the problem is that when a runs goes bad, there can be a high chance of a total party kill. Needing five things to happen win your favor, all having only a 90% chance of success gives you a roughly 40% chance of failure. What if your hacker fails at a critical moment, or your fake IDs don’t scan properly, or your B&E guy can't crack the lock, or whatever.

Most players only have 'heist' type movies to go by, and things basically always happen right in those... But when it's your character on the sharp end, you see how unlikely the heist move actually is. The other problem is that some plans can place you in an essentially unrecoverable situation if something goes wrong. GMs might complain about the PCs packing enough ordinance to kill a tank, but how else are 4 people going to get out of a heavily secured compound, when the alarm goes off?

So the 'assault' plan may start off as the backup to the 'finesse' plan, but if the 'finesse' plans fails too often, it will simply be junked and planning will start with the 'assault' plan (after all its never failed before, if it had failed, we wouldn't be here to talk about it :rotfl: )

This is part of why I got into the Infiltration Challenge, I'd gotten into the rut of going 'assault first' when doing the planning. Of course, it didn't help that the group I ran with was a bunch of combat mages and cybered up killers.

[Talia Invierno]

Heh, look what I found.

I do understand the pattern, Crusher Bob. I've seen it play out, again and again and again -- and indeed my own first group ever, the one through which I finally discovered from within the world of roleplaying (via DnD, of course!) was of the same nature.

Yet when the roleplaying game has effectively turned into a tactical first-person shooter, what's the point of having an absolutely beautiful and multilayered world construct to play within? It's not like you're ever going to be able to slow down enough again even to see it, let alone appreciate it.

[Shadow_Prophet]

I know I'm getting into this late, and no I haven't read everything in here but heres what plots are to me.

Plots are fluid entities. Plots are not places and events. Plots cause events at places.

Plots are ideas, and ideas alone. And they shouldn't be specific idea's. In shadowrun something like the idea of the runners being betrayed by someone close to them getting them in trouble with a corp. That even may be too specific. A better idea would be The runners get betrayed by someone close to them.

Plots evolve. Players, I've found through experiance, do everything you don't expect them to do. Players through sometimes their own stupidity or dumb luck stumble onto something or occasionaly completely miss something critical with your plot. Who knows they may find out before hand that their fixer sold them out. But by who? The plot has evolved. Or they may completely miss the fact they're being sold out, some players are afterall rather dense, but that shouldn't kill your plot. So the fixer got away with it but they survived. Wait what happened to their fixer? He suddently isn't around? What happened? Why? The plot has evolved again.

Plots should never be set in stone. They are meerly the idea's that bind the events together. Players will miss clues. Players will figure things out that you didn't expect them to. Don't force them into things. Theres no need for that, unless thats what your players want.

I've found its best if you think of it this way. The players are the colabrative writers of the story. They dictate how the story goes, not the GM. The GM is meerly the guide, the editor if you will. Giving the players bounds to write in giving them ideas to expound on (plots) shaping what the players write into a story.

[Kyoto Kid]

[Wounded Ronin]

Well, I used to think that railroading = bad, and free reign = good.

I have to reluctantly admit that I've had some GMs railroad things, but I still had a good time. Like, they would railroad things, but they would railroad them to create funny, interesting, or challenging situations.

I guess it's sort of like hiring a dominatrix. A good dominatrix can do something to you that is normally bad (like railroading) but still make it good.

Like, I could see how railroading would work well with a tactically minded GM. I.e. everyone gets captured, so for the next fight against the prison guards you have to use krotty, or something. But only one team member is good at krotty, so you have to manueuver so that the person who is good at krotty engages first, and the others join in later when they're pumped up by increasing Friends in Melee bonuses, or something like that.

Yeah, it would kind of suck to railroad the team getting captured. But, if it's used to set up a unique and challenging situation, or something like that, it could still "work" at the end of the day.

[Wounded Ronin]

[Ed Simons]

[Wounded Ronin]

[Kagetenshi]

[Dog]

Ed's comments have piqued my interest, because he brings up an issue of playing style. Some players are in it entirely for their characters. To them, I think, railroading would be a real pisser. Maybe this is just another expression of the autonomy thing. To them, if the character does well, the player does well. I'm guessing that Ed is one of these folks.

Another player style is playing the character with the intent of contributing overall to the story. These folks would be more likely to accept railroading, and would be more likely to sacrifice something of their character (or the character itself) if it made good drama.

I'm not saying one's good and one's bad, (although my players and I are probably in the latter camp.) I suggest though that a GM would have to know which style his players like. In fact, looking back through some other posts, like the one about fudging dice rolls, it seems that acknowledging this difference in players would explain a lot of the polarization that occurs over RP issues.