What is your "Fight Me" thread?

[Roxxy]

Mine is when people take umbrage at a GM who bans options for flavor reasons. I do this harshly. I see Pathfinder as a giant, super cool red toolbox with, like, a bajillion drawers like my grandpa used to have, and I don't see why I would ever come anywhere close to wanting to use all those tools on the same project. This is especially true of spellcasters. If I'm running the Occult Adventures classes, I don't really need Arcane casters outside of the Witch, and I don't need Clerics or Oracles or spellcasting Rangers. I like my spellcasting flavor within a campaign restricted to a particular focus or two. As to particular spells, I will never not ban teleportation and resurrection. I'm always up front about what is and isn't allowed, of course.

My other one is when people rail about railroading, without contextualizing it. What would be railroading in one game isn't necessarily so in another. For example, I love the idea of 20th Century Pathfinder, but the traditional adventuring style doesn't really fit with a country like 1960s America. You'd think the government would have figured out a way to handle monsters a long time ago, and that they'd be all over keeping dangerous mages under control (in fact, I assume that the people who can send kids to mage schools are usually people with wealth [and if you don't learn the underlying principles of spellcasting by puberty, you will never be a competent mage, so your childhood background is vital], and people with wealth are also the politician class, which means even in a democracy, the government itself is full of mages). Certainly wouldn't want a bunch of uber-powerful vigilantes running around doing whatever they want for money and fame, and enforcing their own moral code.

So, this campaign setting has player characters working for the government. They are the people dispatched to handle monsters and spellcasters that are too powerful for the local authorities to handle. With such a setup, the PCs logically cannot decide where and when to serve. Something happens, the PCs commanding officer tells them something happened and to go down there and handle it. This would be horrifically railroading in most games, but here, it makes logical sense. Can't really have the cops/special agents deciding for themselves when and where to deal with threats, which by extension means the players kind of can't choose whether or not to bite on a story hook. Now, if the players want to go to a specific place or do a specific type of adventure, they could ask me out of character between sessions, and I could maybe have that be the next thing the commanding officer sends them, but in character, I kind of have to railroad them.