Okay, this I don't understand. You admit that we screwed up...yet somehow Poptart is to blame? Are you seriously going for "the GM should prevent the players from making mistakes"?
@PoptartProdigy is not to blame. However, the reason that the guiderail vs railroad thing came up in the first place was because they had said something about "preventive measures" and not likening this whole mess.
The focus is that
if things were done differently, we wouldn't have had this blow up. The way I would have done it is with some guidrails to get the players in the mindset of "we need to learn more". Therefore, since I believe that mechanics changes will not solve this issue, I brought up the idea of railroad vs guiderail so that it gets considered.
I'm not trying to blame Poptart for our mistakes. I am suggesting that if they hate having their thread blow up like this when something goes horribly wrong, they should take more control and agency over the plot instead of just letting things happen.
There is a huge difference between more traditional roleplaying games and quest's like this. And that is narrowing of focus. Most stuff D&D style, where players and their DM are roleplaying with mechanics to set rules on what can be done. Even the most difficult of DMs need to play using game mechanics. They are usually telling the story of a group of characters and the world they interact with.
Most fourm quests, on the other hand, have a multitude of people sporadically controlling one character, and DM who does everything else, including controlling the way the player character actually does things that the players decide to do. The reason that the guiderail technique is used by many GMs is to prevent exactly the kind of things that Poptart has said they don't like happening.
It's not that a GM should prevent players from making a mistake. The problem is that the entire playerbase is blind to anything the GM doesn't explicitly tell them. The guiderails are to help orientate the player base in sorta kinda the right direction to find clues.
Example: Poptart reinforced the idea that NPCs are competent at what they do. We trusted NPCs to things that there were supposed to be good at. This was fine until it wasn't and we were screwed. In a D&D style game, with several player characters around to do stuff, the compromised NPCs wouldn't have been leading the conspiracy if the PCs both had a choice and cared about the outcome. In a more average quest, some hints about mindcontrol would have been dropped early to be a chekhov's gun later, and the NPCs wouldn't say things that lead players to believe that mindcontroling can be better resisted the stronger you are, without the caveat that power level at the takeover was directly relevant to the resistance. The guiderail method would be used not to prevent mistakes, but instead to prevent misconceptions.
Not everyone will be able to see underneath the underneath. Only the GM can do so consistently, as something fundamentally does not exist in the setting until the GM decides it does, therefore they know everything there is to know.
This actually why forum quest are typically set in a fictional work that exists outside the GM's own head. When it is completely internal, things the players don't know screw them over. And when the players learn about the world and come to the wrong conclusion about important mechanics to the setting, fixing those misconceptions is hard and the only one who can do so is the GM.
Now, this setting based on a fictional work that both GM and Players have a mutual understanding of. But the actual story we are dealing with has huge differences in style, theme, and characters than the original. But while the players learn about how the setting is different than the original work, they will inherently assume that something in the setting is like the original work until proven wrong. Mindcontrol was never a big factor in the Dragonball franchise. It happened, but it was always obvious and could be fought off if you were strong enough. The fact that mindcontrol was ever going to be directly relevant and also in completely subtle sleeper agent form goes against that inherent assumption.
If this was not a Dragonball story, I am completely confident that the idea of allies potentially being under mindcontrol would not have been the surprise. The fact that there were laws against it would have been enough to put the player base on the right trail. But with incorrect assumptions about how it works in the setting, we never acted like it was the threat it turned out to be. And many of those assumptions were not formed from anything that Poptart did, but from the source material that Poptart was using.
In the future, I would hope that when something is completely different or works completely different from how the original material had it, we would have more GM guiderails in place so we don't form misconceptions on things in the setting. But that's only my opinion, and I hope I have adequately explained why I feel that way now.
Edit: Fixed typos.
