[Trexmaster]

I'm not even sure where to begin with this subject. It's something that I think a lot of people are familiar with. I know not everyone's in total agreement, but, I think it's worth addressing.

Lately, I think GM events have been, overall, handled poorly. I've already gone over this in the past with every active GM, as I personally messaged all of them about how I felt about giving players more control in events after a few glaring examples were brought to my attention. My issue is mainly the lack of control the players have in these situations. It feels like to me that a lot of these events leave very little budge room for deviating from what the planner had in mind. I understand it's difficult to cater to a large group of people alone, but it's distressing to have your actions be rendered null and void when the GM decides whether or not you succeed or fail, despite how impossible or easy it may have been. Thus the issue of railroading.

To explain, railroading is when the events that form a scenario are all predetermined by the planner, and any and all actions by the participants are skewed to ultimately end in the result the planner wanted, no matter what. I'm sure most of you knew that, but, I wanted to make it clear, that this is what is happening. I don't think, or, rather, I'd like to think that the GMs running these events aren't knowingly doing this.

A recent example of the above was the latest Mechanation attack, which took place in an open area some distance from the Arena. After fighting swarms of Mechanations, and as the fight with the PC controlled Mechs was half-way through, all without providing any sort of pause for player reactions, the following happened:

"A solid number of mechanations surround the area, forming a barricade from all sides. Surprisingly, these mechanations are bearing tower shields."

Approximately ten seconds later, once players realized this happened:

"Two mechanations seem to step through the blockade, carrying... some fancy sort of bomb with them. It seems to be on a timer."

Then, finally about another ten seconds passed for this:

"The bomb is left somewhere roughly around the middle of the closed-off areas, as the Mechs dart off to back up their brothers.

Shall anyone dare inspect the bomb?"

To note. This was out in the open. Yeah, sure, you could argue 'oh, they clearly teleported in!'. And to that my response is the same. This was clearly powergaming, people had no chance to react or stop that from happening. My character and another attempted to bypass this, and only after making several comments over LOOC and finally in IC awaiting any sort of response from the GM on my success, I got this:

"The mechanations here are defensively oriented, bearing towers shields. Not to mention their heavy forms.... It would take a while for them to make an opening."

Alright, I was pretty much expecting it not to be immediately effective, but...it took about 5 minutes for me to get that, in a situation where not acting for a lengthy period of time could potentially be lethal (see: time bomb). It didn't make sense to me to keep acting while I was still waiting to see how successful I was, so, I wasn't too happy about being in limbo in such a situation, while nearly everyone else around me continued to act.

While these attempts were being made to leave, inbetween some of the players attempting to solve the bomb-puzzle presented to them, other players had attempted: throwing the bomb at the attackers, and shooting the bomb. This happened:

"One of the mechanations catches the bomb, and tosses it back into the middle.
One of the mechanations catches the bomb, fiddles with it some, and then tosses it back.

It now has even less time than before."
"The bomb takes the fire, and the casing dents some, but it doesn't detonate the bomb."

Both actions that could've had dire consequences ultimately did nothing (the bomb was eventually defused, so, the casing damage and timer reduction were seemingly irrelevant in end).

After roughly 30 minutes, four players managed to leave after being told to make dice rolls following their attempts.

I think a lot of us would appreciate the following:
1. Having multiple GMs managing events that are intended to be host to more than 7-8 people. This will help stop the 'stuck in limbo' issue I stated before.
2. Always give the players the chance to react to what is happening, within reason. A good rule of thumb is just about everything should offer a window for possible reactions. This does not mean you should game this by making the window impossible, while claiming it wasn't.
3. The flow of the event should not be predetermined. At most, plan for what would happen if no one did anything at all, or the most obvious reaction (see: fighting the monsters, because, well, they're monsters).
4. The event should make sense. We're forced to deal with the end result of the event, and if it defies logic, it can create plentiful issues, varying from making PCs look incompetent by no fault of their own, to creating scenarios that could not feasibly happen--thus resulting in jaded/frustrated players/characters.
5. Finally--be receptive to the criticism you receive in the aftermath of an event. Not all of it is going to be valid, not all of it is going to be bad, but people will always have something to say about it. If people aren't happy about it, don't just discard their thoughts and only pay attention to the people who liked it.

I'm aware that once it passes the 'half the server' threshold, as most public events tend to go, it'll become nigh impossible for moderators to keep everything organized if the players aren't 100% cooperating. There's sadly no easy fix for this. All you can do is plan for dealing with a large number of people, either with more GMs, less people, or careful organization. Don't create situations that demand fast reactions in a huge crowd, or ones that trap players when a GM can't respond to their actions in a timely manner.