> However, I am curious to see how they'd respond to a less-railroaded
> plot, which is why I wanted some idea of what I'd be getting into.
>
I think the context of the game bears thinking about. Examples might be:
Obviously the range of different contexts have different requirements. I think it is useful to have a number of techniques to use to help make the game fun. I have certainly used Mark's suggestion of thinking of scenes that might be useful to incorporate in the theme of the game - I guess this isn't so much railroading as railway stationing, or motorway service stationing since the players can choose any road to follow, they just happen to encounter a cool thing/scene.
When I ran occasional but long sessions I found that I could neither railroad for the whole weekend as I either ran out of rail or ran out of time, nor could I improvise as I ran out of brain. I needed a mix, railroad to here, improvise a bit, hit the railroad again, improvise again. I liked to try games within the main game, giving the players other roles to play in a drama happening slightly offstage to the heroes main action. One side-benefit of this was (IMO) that it made it clear that the whole thing required input from the players - it wasn't a world where everything was planned out: the future of the Pure Horse People could be one of many, the legal status of land ownership in the valley was precarious and that newtling tail was a popular dish with urban Pavisites, who worshipped small Kralorelan figurines idols and sold cheap liquor to the Horsemen. It also made it clear that the player characters were not in a world where everything not touched by the PCs was sort of frozen (a sense one often gets from old dungeon adventures) but that things were happening and the world was changing.
Keith
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