Ahh heres the problem. Your wrong. Railroading is NEVER a good thing, and its not removing all choices. Its removing all choices but the ones the GM decided were acceptable when he made the challenge. Which is exactly what your doing.
That's your definition of Railroading. I've seen many. Either way, I once again disagree that railroading is never a good thing. I've been involved with Organized Play for years now. I've seen over a thousand people show up to GenCon explicitly to play Living Greyhawk where they KNEW they were sitting down for a D&D game that could only end one or two ways because it was all prewritten by someone other than their DM. They knew that the rules stated the DM wasn't allowed to change the adventure in the slightest....but they paid thousands of dollars to fly out to a convention just to play in those games.
Many of them ONLY played Living Greyhawk and didn't play in any home games because they liked the fact that the games had interesting stories. None of them cared in the slightest that they were being constantly railroaded.
Thats good. Until you change your mind set you probably shouldnt be DM'ing.
Wow. Now you're just becoming insulting. There's no need for that.
The level of powergaming a DM needs to do adds about 10 minutes to game prep. If you dont want to put that in you either need to play with complete newbs who havent read any of the books or railroad the hell out of a game and watch unhappy players get frustrated and drop or sabotage your game out of spite.
Depends on the system how long it takes. In 3.5e, it took me hours. In 4e, the best way to "powergame" was to search through the monster manuals for monsters that work particularly well together. It didn't take that long, but most often I was running prewritten adventures and the only real way to power game them was to increase the level of all the monsters. Which was easy, so I was ok with that.
Though, I "railroad the hell out of the game" as you would say and I have players who get angry every time I cancel my game because something else comes up. I have them begging me to run the game even when I'm sick because they enjoy it so much.
Your experiences aren't everyone's.
To be completely honest the D&D players in your area are better off that way. No one deserves to have their limited free time ruined by a railroading GM who doesnt want to put in the effort to learn the rules well enough to allow the players freedom.
I know the rules better than any player at my table except maybe one. We're both probably equal on the rules. He's one of 2 really big power gamers at my table. It's not a matter of "knowing the rules". I don't have every ability from every paragon path or PrC or feat or spell memorized. But I do know a lot of them. I only look through those things when I make up a character for someone else's game.
I like concept characters, so I'll try to be the best ninja I can be by searching for feats and abilities that make be better at stealth and striking fast while staying hidden. He just tries to make the character that destroys encounters the best. He doesn't have a job or much of a life. So he spends his time during the week between our games scouring the Char Op boards and making 30 different characters. I wish I was exaggerating on the number. Then he picks the best one and shows up to the game with it.
I tend to show up for the game going "Well, I know that they will be powergaming, just not sure how. So I'll make the monsters 2 levels higher than I normally would to account for it." only to have them destroy the monsters without even blinking.
Also, I'll ask you again to stop with the insults.
Its a bit over-used online but you do know there are games other then D&D right? It really sounds like you want a rules light, narrative game. Which is fine, theres lots of them out there and some are really fun. But they arent D&D. Players sitting down to D&D have certain reasonable expectations which seem to be a complete 180 of how you want to play.
I disagree. I know there are other games, however, I have yet to run into someone who had an expectation of a game that wasn't prewritten. It's rather the opposite. When people sit down for a game of D&D, my experience has been that they are expecting that the DM either is running an adventure they've purchased from somewhere or has a book of notes written up about what will happen and we'll be playing through that.
I know when I sit down at a D&D table, my expectation is that the DM will entertain me with an interesting story. The couple of times that DMs have attempted to run "sandbox" games with me in them normally ends up with me frustrated that the DM appears to be making me do their job. When a DM doesn't give me a clear adventure hook with a clear goal, I get frustrated and normally end up leaving the game. It feels like I'm accomplishing nothing:
"What do you do?"
"What do you mean, what do I do? I'm in a bar, I'm talking to the rest of the party. I drink some beer and I play some tavern games then I go to sleep."
"What do you do after that?"
"Umm, I ask people in town if anyone wants to hire some adventurers for a mission."
"No one wants to hire you. What do you do?"
"I go back to the tavern and drink some more, I suppose until something interesting happens so I can go on an adventure."
When I sit down at a table, it's my expectation that the DM will hit us with a plot hook for the adventure he has planned and we'll follow that plotline.
Try something else. D&D isnt the right system for you to run.
I don't know, I'm running games in the same playstyle as almost every 1e, 2e, 3e, and 4e adventure, along with everything put out for Living Greyhawk and Living Forgotten Realms, the two official WOTC campaigns. I'm also following almost every guideline in the DMG from every edition.
Now, it's quite possible that the game is meant to be run in the exact opposite method of everything published by its creators. Though, I doubt it. I think D&D is the perfect game for running dungeon crawls through prewritten dungeons.
Umm no. If they expected the idea to fail they would have tried something else. Players do understand action economy.
There is no action economy outside of combat. I'm talking about situations like: Player: "Alright, the wizard is in the tower, right? So, we get a barrel of gunpowder and explode it at the base of the tower, that should level the tower and kill the wizard."
Me: Crap. It probably should take down the tower and that will ruin the adventure. He's a wizard though, I know there isn't any spell in the book to give a tower protection from exploding barrels, but I'm sure someone probably developed a spell at some point. Let's assume the tower is protected against that. "It explodes but doesn't damage the tower."
Players: "Ahh, crap, he must have some sort of protection. Wouldn't it have been hilarious if we bypassed the entire adventure by using a barrel of gunpowder? I guess we go inside. I was kind of hoping that wouldn't work so I'd have an opportunity to beat that wizard's face in personally."
So quit being such a slave to your stupid pre-written narrative and give them a fight. The big baddie is dead? So what? His minions werent paid goons, they were fanatically loyal adherents to his philosophy, and so were his ultra dangerous body guards who happen to come in just as he dies....... hard fight ensues.
This requires a bunch of things to happen. One, I now have to invent goons on the fly, which I hate doing because it requires me to pull out a book and search for some appropriate leveled monsters who have the right flavor which takes 10 minutes or so. I hate pausing the game mid session because it ruins the flow.
Second, I absolutely hate when DMs change their plans on the fly unless absolutely necessary. It smacks of railroading to me. The DM wants a battle here, so rather than rewarding us for defeating the wizard easily, he is adding new monsters that didn't exist until after we beat the wizard.
When I found out that a DM was increasing the hitpoints of a monster every round simply because he didn't want the monster to die, I felt extremely cheated. I feel the same way if there is a mystery and I find out the DM didn't even know who the murderer was until the end and was just planning on making it whoever we accused.
I much prefer a game where the DM knows how many enemies are in the dungeon and new ones won't appear just cause.
If you werent more concerned with keeping the game running exactly along the path you planned out in your head nothing you described would kill or even slightly derail a gaming session.
It depends on what you are looking for in a gaming session. If I get to the wizard after a year campaign trying to raise the army to defeat him only to finally face him in combat and the roof falls on his head and kills him because of a stray arrow...well, I'll feel cheated. Even if his minions show up and are nasty powerful. In fact, it's likely we'll spend the rest of the game complaining that the wizards minions were way more powerful than he was and how stupid that is.
In 20 years of running games I've learned a little secret about what players want. Are you ready? it will blow your mind and change everything........
ASK THEM WHAT THEIR CHARACTERS DO.
Crazy right? I guarantee you though that whatever they tell you, is what they wanted to do. 100% sure to work, no mind reading involved.
The last time we did nothing ask what people wanted to do, we ended up in a tavern hitting on the tavern wench for 4 hours. It wasn't fun for me at all(and I wasn't even DMing that game, I was one of the players). I wanted to get on with an adventure of some sort. But the DM didn't want to move on until every player had finished doing what they wanted to do in the tavern. There were 4 players and 2 of them were REALLY interested in hitting on women in the tavern and were concerned with the appearance and personality of the women they were taking up to their rooms. I almost didn't show up next session. Luckily, it eventually because a fairly standard dungeon crawl with a lot of puzzles and battles, so the game got better.
Also the one guy who loves the puzzles? Ask him to leave the game or get him a Soduku book, whatever. He's pissing everyone else off with his puzzles.
They arent fun for the vast majority of gamers. Usually a "puzzle" is time for 3/4 of the group to get up to use the bathroom, smoke a ciggarette, call your girlfriend, order pizza, whatever it takes to kill the time until the one person still paying attention either solves it or gives up and the GM gives in.... or the players leave the stupid rail roady puzzle to go do something else entirely. Assuming you havent railroaded egress from the dungeon the way they came in into non-existence.
Some people don't like puzzles. Some do. But I'd say it's certainly not 3/4 of people who don't like puzzles. Your preferences aren't everyone's.
The above has not been my experience with puzzles. Most of my players get into them and really work at solving them. Nothing but puzzles gets old, so I try not to overuse them. However, I find that most of the game turns into a LOT of combat. Too much, especially in my group of powergamers who built their characters for the express purpose of doing as much damage as possible and defeating enemies as quickly as possible. We need a break from the monotony after a certain point. Or at least I do. There's only so many hour and a half long tactical war games I can run before I need some story.
