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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6496406" data-attributes="member: 42582">The GM had a map with a locale on the coast. As s/he indicated in the post I quoted, that's all s/he knew about that locale. So s/he decided that it was a trading port with a ship available - "sure, that sounds fine."I will repeat myself for a third time: I reject your claim that the game would have been better if the GM had not made this decision, and instead had decided not to give the PCs easy access to the ship that the players wanted for their plan. (Your use of "spontaneous" is another red herring - any description of the town was going to be "spontaneous", given that the GM had to make something up about a locale concerning which s/he had no information except its location on the map.)A game in which the players have to spend valuable time at the table faffing around for a boat, when the real action is with the delivery in Waterdeep, doesn't sound like a "spicy" game to me. It sounds like a boring one.I don't think so. Derren asserted that the GM's decision to have the coastal town marked on the map be a trading town in which a vessel was easily available was bad GMing, making for a boring and spiceless campaign. I disagree - I think it was good GMing and seems to have kept the game focused on the action the players care about - making their delivery to Waterdeep, whatever that was - rather than forcing the action onto something the players apparently didn't care about, namely, spending play time acquiring the necessary means of travel.At this point, unless I've badly misunderstood you, you are disagreeing with Derren, and hence (it seems) agreeing with me that the GM did not make a bad decision. No one is talking past anyone, as best I can tell.I think that forcing the action onto something the players have no prior interest in, and thereby stopping them from pursing the action that they actually are interested in, are pretty much the paradigm of railroading and roadblocking respectively.If it was already established for the campaign that Candlekeep was a library rather than a port town, that is a different matter - consistency of backstory is a fairly important part of mainstream RPGing - but the poster whose GMing Derren criticised already made clear that there was no prior backstory. All s/he and his/her players knew was that it was a coastal locale marked on a map.I should add - even if, for whatever reason, the GM did decide that Candlekeep was a library rather than a trading port, the idea that no boats were available there would still make no sense. If the economy of Candlekeep bears any resemblance whatsoever to real world examples, then the librarians acquire their food either from local producers - who, living by the coast, would have boats and/or ships - or from distant producers, who would use ships to deliver their produce to a coastal location.I learned everything I know about the canonical Candlekeep by Googling it, and then skimming the entry on Forgotten Realms wiki, before writing this post.If there were details on Candlekeep's economy I missed them in my skim, but absent some pretty exceptional circumstances, a library on a coastal bluff is going to have some boats or ships available pretty close by. So even following canon, the GM has no reason not to make some sort of vessel available to the PCs. (If it's a fishing boat rather than a sea-going ship, that can add to the colour but needn't be crucial to the play of the game.)</blockquote>

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