Scenes at the Gaming Table

Salutations, my curious congregation! I have been doing a lot of plot study recently in the vein of writing things. I've always held to the idea that you can't really DM like you're writing a novel because you can never be sure what your players are going to do, but I've been thinking about that. You can have some pretty decent guesses.

Structure isn't bad. I think we're all agreed that railroading is. Can you have structure without it being railroading? Well, you bet your sweet bippy you can....