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Right. I have an example that shows why the DM simply having a specific end goal in mind isn't a railroad. Decades ago a buddy and I had only LARPED Vampire the Masquerade. We hadn't played the sit down version. One of the three Los Angeles game conventions arrived and we decided to enter...

That's just simply untrue. As the DM, I'm responding to the player's vision, not my own. I have no vision for how things should turn out. I just have the world respond to the things that they do and their vision runs the game.

There's no illusionism going on there. It's clear that the group has no choice and is being forced down a path, so no illusion of choice is happening. The illusion of choice would be something instead of the rioter blocking the path, the DM has the players roll for various things until they...

What if after getting one orb the players decide not to get the other two?

What is or is not a railroad doesn't change with preferred playstyle. @pemerton may feel more constrained by a traditional playstyle than with his preferred style, but more constrained =/= forced down a single path that the DM wants you on with no way to change anything or get off the rail. We...

It's not true.

Adventure paths cannot inherently be railroads, because they do not inherently restrain player action and force them down a very specific path that the DM wants them on. The adventure path might show us that the Duke is behind the current plot and he has the item we are looking for, but we...

I'm cherry picking?! You've reduced dragon power by a huge margin by not doing max hit points when it breathes. The fact is, the group has no idea that dragons breath anything and if it cast sleep nothing happened, then it followed it up t hat nothing with like 6 points of damage from a magic...

Chattanooga?

Have you talked about it with the other players? As I said earlier in the thread, my players are 100% fine with the scout going ahead of the group and getting the lion's share of the time. Whoever plays the scout doesn't have to feel bad at all. Maybe your group is the same way.

Oh, yeah. I'm head and shoulders better than I was back then. However, I still make mistakes. I will probably be making mistakes until I stop DMing, because I'm only human. The key is to no repeat mistakes you've made. Mistakes generally don't ruin the fun or if they do, not for long since...

The alternative is objective morality, which many people believe exists. However, there are also many people who believe morality is subjective which makes it a matter of preference. A strongly believed preference, but still a preference.

Scatter and cover for what? They don't know anything about dragons. And why on Earth would a smart, ancient black dragon act so stupidly and cast sleep and magic missiles instead of breathing? In any case, all they've seen is a dragon cast a useless sleep spell, and a single magic missile...

What are they going to do when she breathes from the air in the plaza of death, jump really high? Yell at it? Also, the individual modules which I had an also ran, are every bit as valid as some errata'd modules put out later on. In that module it says she flies around breathing on the group...

That's true, but alternate timelines and reboots change things all the time. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that we could see him before the end of the series.

It's not a nitpick. Khisanth had 64 hit points. In that module Tanis had 35 hit points. Dead on a failed save and almost dead on a successful one. Tasslehoff had 15 hit points. Dead no matter what he rolled. Caramon had 36 hit points. Dead on failed save and almost dead on a successful...