discussion on railroading characters
The live journal of eyebeams has an excellent post about story structure and in the comments is a brillant comment on railroading a plot and how it all comes down to Player/GM trust.
In summary, if the players trust the GM to give them the sort of story they expect then being railroaded isn't a bad thing. An example of this is Paranoia. The players have very specific expectations around what is going to happen to their characters and how heavy handed the GM is going to be in regards to their characters.
As our Saturday night geek-fever rages on I ponder over the balance between micro/macro railroading of my story. We have had cut scenes (as Eric likes to call them) where I described the passage of time for the characters and what had happened around them. In these cut scenes the players were welcome to throw in long action input, but I'm not sure they knew it or saw a place for it. In fact, I don't think I knew I would be accepting of it until just recently. But I think it might be an important part of having the players co-story. Make room for them to throw in their $.02. After all, if it's not important enough to apply mechanics to (dice rolling, RP'ing out) then it's not important enough to begrudge any changes they want to introduce.
posted by geekmojo @ 10:55 AM
2 Comments:
One social effect I notice during "cut scenes" is that you don't take as many pauses as you do during more interactive play, so I feel more rude jumping in and interrupting :). The other thing that characterizes these sequences for me is a feeling that there is a bunch of action going on that my character may feel powerless over for personal reasons (eg, the King is speaking, and I'm a mere servant, or whatever).
That makes sense then. I knew that there were non-verbals flying all over the place, but wasn't aware of what they were. I suppose it comes down to pondering out loud and being open about what I'm looking for or what expectations I might be carrying around.
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