[ SECRET POST #4488 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4488 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #643.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Question thread

[11thmirror]

Okay, I seem to have a different definition of railroading to other people? I assume that railroading is when you wall off other options than the ones you want players to take, or you punish them for going off the beaten path. Last session:
- Players could go to the house or not (I *did* tell them I'd cry if they didn't). They went to the house.
- Players could go where they liked in and around the house. All they were told was that it'd be nice if they didn't get in the way of the staff. They sat in the living room.
- Players could talk to a number of characters, and a couple went straight in and spoke to them. They shuffled through the conversations I started, and then went back to doing nothing much.
- Players were shown to their rooms for the night. One player investigated his room, found the laundry chute, and got another player to magically lock it. None of the other players thought to look for any other secret doors.
- Dinner was served. Players were invited to dinner, but they had the option to skip, ask for dinner to be brought to their rooms, go bother the staff - I didn't give them a dot pointed list of options, but I think I made them reasonably clear.
- Players went to dinner. Some of them spoke to the other people at dinner, some of them didn't.
- The guy who was made to get murdered, got murdered. The players were perfectly free to go "Wow, WTF" and go sit in their rooms for the rest of the night, eyes on the doors and weapons in hand. They decided to round up and threaten the dead man's family.
- After Zone of Truth didn't give them any answers, they went looking for a secret tunnel. They found a secret tunnel. Yaaaaaaaay.
I'm just... how the fuck am I supposed to provide a story without being accused of railroading? At this point I legitimately do not know!

Oh, and since I was obviously unclear - no, they did not roleplay amongst themselves. They "roleplayed" sitting in a room in complete silence, for two hours. A servant brought in snacks. They ate the snacks. They continued to sit in silence. Not much I can do with that.

Re: Question thread

[(Anonymous)]

You don't have a different definition of railroading, you said "I forced the story along since none of the players were doing shit", and we took that at face value.

As for how to deal with that sort of situation in the future, if your players aren't biting at the NPC interactions and aren't riffing off each other for a social scene and aren't looking for clues, either put the murder* earlier than you'd intended, or if the murder has to occur at a specific time, give your players one last chance to engage ("okay, anywhere else you want to explore/anyone else you want to talk to" can cover a lot of ground) and skip ahead to the action. Don't marry yourself to a specific sequence or approach - that is a form of railroading, if a much softer one than "you have no choice but to storm the castle", and will just frustrate you and your players both. Flexibility is probably the most important trait for a GM, and sometimes that means throwing half your planned encounters out the window because no one's biting and you don't want them to sit around with their thumbs up their butts for the whole session.

If you want them to have some piece of information - there are secret doors, the stars are wrong, the butler isn't breathing, whatever - contrive of a way to give it to them if they don't happen to look for the right thing. Passive perception scores are an absolute godsend, in my experience, because it means you can nudge your players into realizing something's up, which might prompt them to speak with those NPCs in more depth or explore their surroundings more thoroughly after all. Or it might not, and you'll have to skip ahead anyway. Players are weird.

(Players are also weird in the opposite direction. I've wound up inventing a new villain wholecloth before because my players have fixated on Random Flavor NPC A for reasons I could not fathom and would not be budged.)

*substitute "murder" for any other "next step in the plot" as necessary