[Totem]

I'm not sure if I've asked questions like this before, but I should have if I haven't. Let me start with a story:

The guy who introduced me to the idea of GURPS (though not to the game itself sadly; I discovered that several years later) mentioned one situation that he had been in during a game where he was trying to take out someone in a car. For whatever reason, the proposed method of doing this was: a bomb (Demolitions/ Explosives/ Armoury) wired up to an infra-red detonator which was then detonated by his character riding a motorbike (Drive) using the infra-red doohicky on a mobile phone (Computer Operation to program a suitable signal, plus a penalty on Drive for trying to manipulate the phone and the motorbike at the same time). I think it worked...

Anyway, the point here is that I got the impression that the whole thing was somewhat open ended. Now, obviously it's tricky to be that open ended when you're on PbP because it's harder to just chat and exchange ideas with the other players (well, it isn't, but it's harder to keep track of the whole thing when it starts to run into multiple pages and people start loosing track of what the actual idea is).

Basically, my question is what would people prefer on PbP? I'm mostly aiming this question at my current players, but I'm open for anyone who wants to put their bit in to do so. I can railroad things and just make it a series of directed encounters where you have little or no choice about where to go (basically a more extreme version of what is happening here, where the team leader is an NPC) or more open ended (where you would be given a situation with a clear goal defined and would need to sort out how to deal with it based on what you took the initiative to find out). That last one I sort of tried with the first part of Worlds of Fire (dealing with Chu'dam), and I've tried to keep it to a less severe kind of railroading since then...

Basically, I'm trying to streamline the style a bit here; I've been left waiting for players to respond with thoughts on how to proceed when they're just sitting around not planning on moving at all, and I've had thoughts about whether to keep Worlds of Fire going or to give it up and start up something else instead. So whether I'm using these thoughts for Worlds of Fire or a different game... I could do with some hints or actual thoughts and suggestions so that I can work out what to do next.

(I'm not intending to be nasty here, but it's kind of come to a head recently where I'm expecting players to take the opportunity to role play and do something creative with the skills that they spent points on, when they seem to be expecting me to provide the ideas for them. This is genuinely a question of style, rather than getting at people.)