Lets talk Quantum Ogres

Wherever my PC's go, the plot follows. What the plot entails might change based on where they are and what they do, but the PC's can never make a choice which results in nothing interesting happening, because that'd just make for a dull game. Their choices have meaning in determining what happens and where, but the one thing they can't choose is for things to just not happen- Such is the fate of a player character, shit is always going down.

And imagine that, combat is vastly more rewarding in systems where you have to map it out more. I'm fine with DW, but the satisfaction in that game comes from 1) exploration, 2) looting, and 3) interaction without rolls.

Quantum Ogres only matters if you are making the type of campaign where the players are moving along branches of story, like sly flourish's advice or DW GM advice or many other games' GM advice.

If you run a hex crawl or something like that you don't have quantum ogres because the ogres never leave that location and the party will eventually crawl back that way.

This is DM 101 shit. Anyone who complains 'm-m-muh player a-agency, muh railr-road' has likely never DMd and probably plays in a campaign where their DM is doing this and humoring them so they don't know.

this is where random encounters, reaction rolls, and the overloaded encounter die come into play. the quantum ogre is both quantum in location as well as temperament.

a lot of the Hack and Slash/Courtney Campbell approach, as with a lot of the better OSR stuff, is very JIT (just in time) when it comes to GMing. keeps the game fun and still a game for the GM.

They key to successful DMing is putting your players on a railroad where they get to choose the scenery.

If they never see the tracks, you've done your job right.

It really comes down to if you'd rather have a smaller number of throughly planned out, well executed, encounters, or if you'd prefer to have a larger numver of encounters that are more varied and less structured.

Both have their up and downsides. A randomized encounter will almost never have interesting, planned out mechsnics, but some of the crazy bullshit that randomizers can spit out can make for amazing stories that you'd never have come with up on your own.

Would you rather find an ogre warlord with a speach about the oppression of his peoples intrinsic to the storyline, or an ogre in the woods playing strip poker with his goblin and kobold friends who then attack you out of embarrassment because that's what your randomizer shit out after, having shat out about a hundered somewhat less interesting fights beforehand?

you're forgetting the importance of wandering monsters and random encounters in the hex crawl. the quantum ogre is effectively a "random encounter" as it isn't associated with status quo encounters associated directly with the hex description.

another name for quantum ogre is "rotate the map." when playing a dungeon crawl, only you know the actual layout of the dungeon ahead of time. if you're willing to change the layout, you can make sure your players don't miss something important (e.g. the quantum ogre).

Yes, I use quantum ogres when I want. To be honest, however, I mostly bait out the PCs by giving them an opportunity to choose how to get what they want and make an adventure from there because they bite one of several plot hooks for adventure and loot. I have several ideas that are different, are presented and should play differently, but all equal XP and loot in the long run. I write up any notes I have after the choice is made.
Taking an improv class and getting getting really good at keeping a straight face enhanced my in-person DMing skills a lot.

>And imagine that, combat is vastly more rewarding in systems where you have to map it out more.

Depends on tastes. You could just as well say that combat is more gamey and restrictive the more you map it out, and that'd be just as true -- ie only subjectively so.

I'm surprised by the defence of quantum ogres here honestly. I know I play tabletop RPG's over say video games because my choices really do matter, are essentially limitless and I am not forced into a specific plot path.

If a tabletop RPG is designed as a series of railroaded encounters with the vague illusion of choice I really don't see the point of playing one over a video game RPG which is going to be far more polished in the execution of its railroad.

This is coming from somebody who regularly DM's and can say that it really is not as difficult to design as people make out. You need like a town which you probably have anyway, a map of the surrounding area with like 3 designed points of interest on the map( necromancer fortress, kobold cave, demon enclave) and some hooks from npcs in town to point to them and some random encounter tables if they decide to go exploring instead. If anything it is less prep than designing an intricate a,b,c,d,e railroad.

I mean I think both of your examples are pretty false.

>I'm surprised by the defence of quantum ogres here honestly. I know I play tabletop RPG's over say video games because my choices really do matter, are essentially limitless and I am not forced into a specific plot path.
While they obviously can be used that way, I don't think reasonable use of quantum ogres really covers what most people would consider "railroading". Railroading generally means that the players lack agency over the overall shape of the story - that they're just rolling dice while the DM reads a book at them. This is more like working with legos - the parts are already made for them, but that doesn't strongly limit what kind of story the players can build.

But if every encounter is predetermined in advance and whatever the players do they will encounter them what control and agency do players have over the narrative?

I don't have a satisfying answer here because I am unsure about this topic as it gives me weird feelings but here goes...

It depends on what extent 'predetermined' means here. If it's just used as a sort of benevolent way (which I will assume it is), what you can argue here is reskinning combined with retheming (which is just reskinning said twice). If it's pure railroad "muh epic plot" shit well then the answer is of course "no actual control."

EG say the players intended to go fight goblins in an area but now they've decided to beat up the baron because they realized, in between sessions, his insults were actually quite hurtful. So now in game they go to the baron and get in a fight there, but you've already made some fancy goblin encounter they were going to run into in the forest, with this cool battlefield. Guess what you do?

You make the goblins "guards" changing their description as necessary, and the forests and tree stumps other things - furniture, wagons, stone columns, etc.

Sort of like said with "the players choose the scenery"

This in particular is very system dependent, though. 4e requires strict balance with fancy encounter design because the system is built off a few finely tuned encounters a day. OSR stuff is a lot looser with everything, so you COULD just plop in a few guards and if they're stronger than goblins, what did they expect? More narrative systems could be even looser since everything is just like, adjectives and nouns.

i always like to say that i write locations/encounters and not story. this feels weirdly in tune with this.

My issue with this is that storming a nobleman castle and fighting your way through goblin foxholes should work out and feel very, very different mechanically. Unless you're playing something ridiculously rules-light a reskin just won't make sense.

Yeah, I know. I feel that way too. Goblins and Guards are not the same things and do not operate the same which is partly why I dislike reskinning to begin with unless they're very similar entities. The disconnect there is explained as a sort of necessary cost of playing the game and wanting a non-railroaded experience.

Of course, such things are normally said and 'necessary' because you're playing some strictly balanced tactical combat game, but hey.

agreed. set piece encounters seem in appropriate for a "quantum ogre" type situation. they make sense for important or necessary "random encounters." things that happen on the way but aren't necessarily tied to a single place (e.g. a druid wandering the wastes looking for help, owlbear being chased by poachers). it is making the random encounter table work for the story while also taxing resources.

The thing is, if your players are doing something as elaborate as storming a nobleman's castle, the point at which Quantumn Ogres applies has already passed.

Quantumn Ogres isn't for situations where you actually KNOW what the players are going to do; if the party is gearing up to storm the nobleman's fortress (or is halfway through doing so at the start of the session), then there's no need for "Quantumn Ogres" in the sense that we're discussing.

Quantumn Ogres are for getting things going in the first place; if the players have no expectations of what they'll find down the left-hand path, then there's no reason they'd feel "odd" running into a cultist's den that was originally on the right-hand path.

That absolutely is not a non-railroad experience. I DM'd 4e for several years and I would never do that. I have since DM'd 5e and OSR stuff and I would never do it.

If every experience is transferable there's fuck all point in having any of them. Most 'dungeons' even in the loose sense of the word are chaotic areas where numerous creatures and other factors can be involved in conflict.

Yes, this enters the "it's not a problem if the players never knew" territory or even "quantum ogre isn't a thing because in reality players don't know these things, and to a player you suddenly changing the location is the same as it always have been there."

The guard/goblin example was more of the idea of an encounter WAS going to happen (the goblin fight) at the start of the next session (because the end of the previous one had the players saying they were going to go out into the forest, for example), but then at the actual start of this next session they say they've changed their minds, and you reskin an encounter that was going to happen - you've just changed the dressing and context. Sorry if this wasn't apparent in the write-up, I ran out of characters.

It seems sort of like "the cultist den is on whichever road you choose", isn't it? Just while also making the cultist den a...merrow-man den.

Well fictionally/narratively storming a baron's castle and getting into a scrap with goblins in the forest are very different with different effects and consequences, so I figured that qualified it as not being a railroad. Interesting that you say otherwise. What would you have done in the situation?

Really, re-purposing unused encounters when appropriate is only common sense, but with "When appropriate" being the keyword. Quantum ogre tactics works well for things that could happen anywhere and aren't directly related to the players choice.

For example, if the players decide to investigate the mountains instead of the forest, the chance meeting with a mysterious traveler could still happen, but when they arrive they shouldn't face "geomancers" and "earth elementals" suspiciously similar to druids and treants in stats and behavior (and battle them on a plateau filled with stone pillars, suspiciously similar to a forest), but rather something actually fitting for the choice they made.

How to deal with planing and preparation in the face of PC choice uncertainty, that's a different question with many potential answers.

Not that user, but I would just improvise as best as I could to on-the-fly make encounters that fit what the players are actually doing. Even if they'll be a bit rough it would still be better than re-purposing something that doesn't fit the situation.
I usually have plans for more than one possible PC directions though. It would be a lie to say that i'm never caught un-prepared for what they do, but I never rely on the PCs going of in one predictable direction.

(Not the guy you are talking to, but chiming in anyhow)

I think that while there is certainly an element of railroading in using Quantum whatevers, I think the real question of player agency is player intent and choice.

Railroading is typically more, when the players run in to the hermit he sends them on a quest. No matter what the players choose to do, they HAVE to do the quest. They cannot knowingly turn away. They can't say no. Nor can they even attack the hermit.

I think that most people wouldn't say that placing the hermit just outside of town (regardless of what direction the players leave in) would be considered railroading - unless the players knew he was there and were actively avoiding him.

That is how I look at it anyhow.

That's reasonable.

I tend to do reactive/reflexive ogres. I have a few ideas I like that are rough/thematic, and a few different stat blocks that are easy enough to refluff/modify the mechanics of.

Our group does a collaborative map making mini game pretty much when ever there's a new area to map out based on Beyond The Wall and A Quiet Year, so the interesting details players come up with together gets put onto the ogre-frames I have and then linked together.

I'm not going to make them fight an ogre, but I'm interested in having two large monster things with internal conflicts over dietary restrictions and religion. The players are entering a plague stricken plateau and decide there was an ancient elephant graveyard that has been disturbed. I figure this can be part of the cause of the plague and change the ogre-frame into undead intelligent elephants.

Helps to have a game with fairly simple mechanics. We're using an OSR homebrew so most monsters are just HD, AC, Attacks, a special ability and imperatives/desires. Back in the day when I had to keep track of a dozen encounters with dnd3.5 I was wasting a lot of time on shit we didn't use.

Good summary, user.

Player agency is important, sure. You should let their choices dictate the flow of the game.

The most important thing (aside from fun) is that the players feel like they're having a meaningful impact.

As long as the ogre encounter makes sense it's all right. If the players are smart and put themselves in an ogre-safe position then don't throw ogres at them.

Improvisational jazz is actually made of riffs and bars practised by the musician. When he starts playing he combines those segments into something new and hopefully good. What the finished product will sound like depends on his mood, the groove and the crowd. He will likely not use all his segments because not all segment are necessary. He may end up altering some segment on the fly to fit with this new song, thus creating a new tool.
That is DMing.

It's very hard to do with inflexible rotes. A good DM prepares his tools and constantly asks himself: "is this the tool I need? is this a tool I'd like to use? does this tool need changing?" A DM who isn't monitoring himself or the game is an inefficient DM.
Just as the DM set the scene for player action, player action informs the DM of what parameters are needed. That is player agency.

The DM can't have a million unique encounters for every possible scenario but he does have a utility belt of characters and encounters that can be pluged into situations as needed.

Ideally a monster manual should help with this by giving a quick, easy to read reference for various monsters and difficulties for the DM to grab on the fly. In a perfect world the DM would have a bookmark for each "big guy" encounter of a certain challenge level and grab the right one for the right time. In the real world most monster manuals are shit and the guy is better off writing his own monsters.

I used quantum ogres for NPC quirks and village customs because I run a hexcrawl campaign and its easier to just down the list and check things off than to roll all this shit every time.

>"Hexcrawls are all about muh player freedom!"
>"Eh, no matter which way the players walk in, they'll encounter the same stuff."

It's like pottery

I think justification for this behavior really depends on the circumstances. If your players know Ogres are never in the Forest, I either need a reason for the Ogre to be in the Forest, or I don't use the Ogre and do something else.

I think using what material you have in what ways you can is absolutely fine (and sometimes squeezing a concept into unusual circumstances can be really cool), but I never contradict player expectation unless I have a reason. I want the players to shape the game through decisions; just about everything they know is true, everything they don't is mutable.

I reskin sometimes, but I give a reskin a unique trait or two. Red Stone Ogre probably climbs mountains and cliffsides without penalty. Green Wood Ogre probably resists Sleep Magic. Otherwise, identical.

>It's like pottery
how is pottery

ITC: procgen/sandbox vs themepark MMO players debate, and pretend it's Veeky Forums related.

>Do you use Quantum Ogres in your games?
Yes.

>If so how did it work out?
Fine?

>Do players even care?
They never find out.

>Is it ever okay to force an encounter on players?
What they don't know won't hurt them.

>How about reskinning an encounter?
Yep. Do it. Make it happen.

>How about Quantum Dungeons?
Yes.

OP, the thing you don't understand is that players don't see behind the screen. If you make two unique dungeons and the players will only ever visit one of them, you have, definitively, wasted your time, unless you plan to re-use the dungeon later, which is a valid way to do things but it also pretty much falls under the situation you describe. The players will never know that there was another unique dungeon unless you tell them, which is just going to come off as you being a neurotic attention seeker.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with mechanical railroading. Narrative railroading is one thing, and that should almost definitely be avoided, but if you are merely attempting to lessen your workload with no actual impact on the players by re-using assets, or building those assets to be flexible, then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's the optimal way of doing things, in fact.

I concur.

>The counter argument is that using Quantum Ogres destroys player agency as their choices end up being meaningless as the GM is just railroading them to his encounters.
They will never know about it tho.

>Do you use Quantum Ogres in your games?
Yes
>If so how did it work out?
Pretty fine
>Do players even care?
They don't know about it
>Is it ever okay to force an encounter on players?
They can try to avoid the ogres still
>How about reskinning an encounter?
It's fine too.

Player agency is a myth.

Tee-hee everything is fake 'cause it's a game of pretend!

This.

If the players never know then there is no problem

Sometimes I tell them after the game and we have a good laugh.

>Likewise it's fairly trivial to design An Ogre Fortress and an Ogre Encounter for the mountains and a Troll Cave and a Troll Encounter for the forest

Sure - if there's ONE branching choice with TWO options the players make. But unless you're railroading heavily, there can easily be half a dozen such choices within the space of a single session and each with multiple possible choices. And that's not even accounting for anything truly unexpected the players might do. Do you really expect GM's to throw away 9 encounters out of every 10 they make?

Not every encounter should be decided in advance(if the players don't raid the lich's fortress, then they're obviously not going to encounter the lich's guards followed by the lich himself - some encounters of that fortress might be recycled, but if they stumble upon the lich elsewhere, it'll be a very different kind of fight) regardless of the player choices, but at the same time I don't see anything wrong with having some generic encounters that happen on the road regardless of what route the players take as long as the illusion of choice is preserved - obviously an ogre encounter would be out of place if the players go by a boat instead.

>Is it ever okay to force an encounter on players?

>Is it ever okay to put content in your game that the players have to pick a specific set of choices to not miss?

>Is it ever okay to force an encounter on players?
How is using prefabricated parts for an encounter "forcing" it on the players? And if it is, how is designing the encounters on the fly any less "forcing" them? Either way, the encounter is happening despite what the player wanted. Player agency is letting the players made decision about how to deal with an encounter and where to go after it, not getting a say in the process the DM uses to design encounters.

I don't see what's the difference between making up a random encounter on the fly and reskinning your prepared material, but claiming that the first is entirely acceptable while the latter is taking away player agency is ludicrous.

If the players don't have any information about what can be found in the forest and the mountains it doesn't even matter if you are using ogres in both places or an ogre in the mountains and goblins in the forest, the players still don't have any agency and are just picking a path randomly.

Now if the players are going somewhere, and can choose a quick route through a mountain pass or a long route through a forest, AND someone tells them "there be man eating monsters in them mountains", then you have a genuine interesting choice.

>Do you use Quantum Ogres in your games?
Well, yeah.
>If so how did it work out?
Fine. Why would it not?
>Do players even care?
Why would they? How would the player find out?

>Is it ever okay to force an encounter on players?
Define "force an encounter". If it's "I made up a sweet cave encounter full of neat monsters, a creepy bossfight, and a good plothook, so the next cave the party finds is gonna have this shit", then yes. If it's "the party can't get away from my DMPC and he'll beat them all and then heal them back and tell them how great and cool he is" then no.

>How about reskinning an encounter?
You gotta do a little more than just re-skin. Refluff the loot, change the architecture and the treasure, change how different creatures behave. Set-up and broad idea can be the same, though.
>The Ogre in the forest is a Green Wood Ogre. The mountain Ogre is a Red Stone Ogre. They both have identical stats.
That's dumb. The Wood Ogre should have some plant abilities and be vulnerable to fire, and wield a knotted, living branch as a weapon. The Stone Ogre should have a rock throw/fire/magma theme, maybe a fun arena with a magma pool or two. If it's just a 50x50 room with a different colored ogre in the middle who full attacks every round, you're a bad DM.

>How about Quantum Dungeons? Both the forest and the mountain also contain the Ogre Fortress based on whatever the players choose.
The Ogre Chieftain will be the same, probably with the same subplot of a hobgoblin embassy seeking an alliance with the ogres, but the fortress itself would be very different depending on where it is.

Cancer DMing.

I'm simulationist. I don't bullshit my players. I treat them with respect and they appeciate it, because they know I don't fudge dice, conjure up extra enemies by fiat, railroad the party (including soft railroading, which is what 'Quantum Ogres' is) or do anything else that's dishonest.

There is a school of thought that goes "WHAT PLAYERS DON'T KNOW WON'T HURT THEM" but I think it's disrespectful and even misanthropic. More than that it's cheap, lazy and a sign of GM rot. I certainly have no respect for a GM who does this, either as a player or a GM myself.

How much of your prep work goes to waste? Or are you just a rules adjudicator, and let random tables do all the creative work?

Damn.
Nailed it, user, so hard.
There's no escaping it - it's either one or the other.

I think there's some misunderstanding on how to run freeform games without Quantum Ogres.

You don't intricately prep and detail 10 dungeons and hope your players find one.

You prep a town, which you have to prep already anyway, a map with a handful of different terrain based locations. A swamp, forest and mountain. Which you probably have to prep anyway. (Railroad GM's seem to love prepping maps they will never use properly) 3 hooks from NPC's in the town that lead to different dungeons within each of those locations. (You probably already prepped one of these.) You then have some random encounter tables for when the players go exploring. Then leave the players to decide what they want to do.

You then design as much of each of those dungeons as you expect to be completed in a session, and any further design is based on whatever the players decided to do you just designed along with them and use your toolkit to support it.

How do you not railroad without being flexible with where the players want to go? Do you just randomly generate appropriate encounters on the fly?

All creativity is inherently dishonest.

Reality is honest. Anythign else is you pulling the wool over their eyes.

I hate to tell you this, but those are Quantum Ogres too. It's only a group of them, rather than one. Because you don't know what they will chose, so you're setting up a bunch of possibilities that they may choose. And you can STILL be wrong, so you have to move things around anyways.

Just like is honest about being on the rails and overt about his choices, and using random number generators instead of 'quantum ogres', which is still just a quantum ogre that didn't exist a moment ago.

Half the fun of GMing is seeing what the PCs will do, what's the point if you don't react to it?

No they're not they're specific locations in the game world that the players can choose to explore if they wish. A quantum ogre presents the players with say three choices that all lead to the same encounter/dungeon/area, this actually presents them with three choices that lead them to three different encounters/dungeons/areas and allows flexibility if they choose none of them.

It's also an illustrative example of how to very quickly prep a more open scenario. There's no reason you can't have 10+ points of interest and hooks for the players to explore if they wish.

It doesn't matter. It isn't vidya, they can't replay the campaign. Just let their choices affect the story, and they won't care about quantum ogres.

Let's talk about the difference between mechanical railroading and narrative railroading (which some other user handily brought up earlier). Quantum ogres is definitely mechanical railroading (all players choices lead to the same result) but is not necessarily narrative railroading.

Example:

If the players go to the woods, they encounter the Ogres. If they go to the mountains, they encounter the Trolls, which are just reskinned Ogres (and the players will never know, etc.) Either way, the party is expected to beat the enemy and continue on their way. But wait--! Although as a GM, you technically only statted out ONE encounter, TWO possible storyline results arise.

If the players killed the Ogres, the Ogres take to raiding caravans through the area, because a number of their fighting males in the tribe were slain and they need a way to get some easy food. This causes merchants to have to spend money on mercenary guards (which are often unreliable and prone to looting themselves) which results in less caravans getting through, higher merchant expenses, and cascading economic effects.

If the players killed the Trolls, the trolls are angry and want revenge on the humans. They start raiding various mountain towns. The town lords call to the king for help, and soldiers have to be moved from the border to the mountain towns to respond to troll raids. Moving troops away from the border makes the kingdom appear weaker to the neighboring, expansionist empire, which begins to cause a host of international issues.

This is being used as an example, but basically, although you only need to stat one encounter, you can draw wildly different storyline results from it (it could work even if both were ogres, they just reacted differently). This lessens GM burden and still lets the players have a meaningful impact in the world, as well as generating a number of different possible tangential quests.

Wow, so many people in this thread are defending rank illusionism on the grounds that "the players will never know".

Perhaps true. But you'll know, user.

You'll know that you're supposed to be refereeing a game for the players, but instead you've decided to cheat at it.

You monster.

Great post. Could have used some argument, but we can't have it all.

I'm not against it at all.
Sure, if you want, I'll stop, and instead of encounters and areas I've planned ahead of time in detail, you can have random encounter tables and pencil sketch maps I draw in front of your eyes.

>You'll know that you're supposed to be refereeing a game for the players, but instead you've decided to cheat at it.

You're either a shitty GM or an entitled player.

Honestly I'd take the variety and choice of random encounters over being forced to play through my GM's precious encounters.

I'm the referee.
The only way I can cheat is fucking them on the actual rules, the game mechanics.
Doesn't matter how they get to the encounter, if I run the encounter to the rules, I'm not cheating anybody.

Okay. Have fun fighting 2d4 owlbears instead of anything actually interesting.
Also the fact that I'm rolling on the tables means they're prewritten anyway so it's not like they're inherently more creative or player-driven.

>variety and choice
Do you have a GM who always throws the same enemies at you or something? Because otherwise, I don't see how prepared encounters would have less variety than encounters taken straight from the monster manual with little to no alteration.

I wasn't aware that "not quantum ogering", which is so much the default mode of gameplay that there isn't even a catchy memetic name for it, needed backing up.

If you insist… I would argue that anyone who actually does it and unironically thinks that it's just efficient prep is probably missing the very point of role-playing games to begin with.

At its heart, an RPG is about interacting with a setting—an environment filled with locations, objects, and characters, all of which in principle (even without the referee fleshing them out in detail) have their own timeline or trajectory of events describing (at least in a general sense) what would happen without a protagonist there to shake things up. Then you drop the player characters into this setting to find out what happens as a result of their interactions.

Illusionism destroys this process utterly. Ergo, it destroys RPGs.

Spoken like a true storygamer. Enjoy conducting your railroad, I guess.

Just a technicality but because they choose where they go they're conducting.

The GM isn't a referee.

Because unless my GM is preparing a variety of encounters at least with a random table I have a choice based on where I choose to go and can prepare for that. If I go to the forest I'm likely to encounter forest monsters ( wolves, trolls, green dragons) If I go to the mountains I'm likely to encounter mountain monsters ( goblins, ogres, red dragons) etc.

Obviously a good gm will use a variety of prepared encounter situations and linked hooks and random tables to add further variety.

>'quantum ogre' means that it literally has to be an ogre placed in front of the party no matter the environment

But how the players know that you have truly prepared three different things instead of just saying so?

>newfag detected

I'll bet you started playing in the 90s.

But even if the players are encountering a Quantum Ogre they're still interacting with the setting. There is no reason why beating (or failing to beat) that encounter wouldn't send repercussions through the world, leading the GM making up new Quantum Ogre encounters. It is an indistinguishable process from what you're suggesting.

Now I want an actual Quantum Ogre...

Can someone stat that?

When they try to visit more than one of them in the space of a session or more. The Quantum Ogre loving GM would have to either railroad them by stopping them doing so which is awful or improvise something and if he can just improvise something there's no reason to have the Quantum Ogre in the first place.

Honestly as a GM myself it's incredibly transparent when another GM is obviously railroading an encounter. Illusionist GM's think they're like genius masterminds conducting the players like the stupid puppets they think they are while they in reality give away a million tells that reveal their hollow railroading bullshit.

Sure, why not.

Quantum Ogre
No. Enc.: −(ħ/2m)∇^2 + V (double this in lairs and wilderness, of course)
Alignment: Chaos-Theoretic
Movement: σ(x)σ(p) ≥ ħ/2 (thanks, Hisenberg)
Armor Class: 5 (chainmail)
Hit Dice: 4d8+1
Attacks: 1 (on our every empirical intuition)
Damage: 1d10
Save: E_n = −me^4 / 8[(ε_0)hn]^2 = 13.61 eV/n^2
Morale: basically 0 if you're as much of a determinist as Einstein
Treasure Type: ∫|Ψ(x)|^2 dx

This implies the railroad/illusionist GM has for some reason decided to include a quantum ogre but actually prep a sandbox scenario around it which is never the case.

In reality all his encounters are scripted in this way so defeating or beating the Ogre encounter will both lead to the exact same next encounter he has planned and so on. ' You beat the Ogre further on in the woods you 'stumble' upon the goblins that worship him' 'The Ogre defeats you and drags you to the Goblins who worship him.' Or even worse you can never lose to the Ogre or will always lose to the Ogre as the illusionist GM fudges the rolls to go either way he decides he wants the encounter to go.

How anybody can want to play in a game like this or defend this type of play boggles me.

I just don't see why anyone want to play through a random encounter made up on the spot instead of a reskinned prepared encounter which has cool stuff planned for it.

Well, as it turns out, Veeky Forums is apparently full of storygamers and frustrated novelists.

Kind of boggles the mind when you look at the catalog. According this thread, I would expect 80% of posts to be about Vampire and Fate.

>simulationist
No user, you are the cancer

Well, I trust the GM's judgement what makes for an interesting story more than just dumb luck of the dice. The GM should fudge to keep the challenge exciting and tense. That means not too easy nor not too hard, but just right. How would you feel if you came up with cool stunt in the game but failed just because you rolled poorly? It would be insane not to reward player creativity.

They wouldn't, but that's the point of random encounters. A random encounter is a drain on resources that remits practically no reward for defeating it: wandering monsters carry no treasure and are therefore worth only a pittance of monster XP rather than the XP you would normally earn for robbing the monster's lair of gold in a dungeon.

So you want to avoid random encounters at all costs. They're in the game to keep tension high, and to prevent players from dawdling when they should be moving along (in a dungeon) or planning a tight travel route (in the wilds).

>How would you feel if you came up with cool stunt in the game but failed just because you rolled poorly?
Uh, normal? If it wasn't possible for me to fail because I was so cool and creative, then why did I roll?

This should be in the next book

Well you shouldn't have to roll. In my opinion the GM should guarantee that when a player comes up with an awesome idea it succeeds, otherwise you end up the players only taking boring, the most statistically likely actions to succeed i.e. it basically kills the sense of adventure in the game and turns it into a bookkeeping exercise.

I couldn't disagree more. The chance of failure is what makes victory so sweet.