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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4405882" data-attributes="member: 42582">This was said in the original thread:I've never used MERP adventures but have used a lot of ShadowWorld modules for RM, and they also set up situations (with various NPCs, various intertwining plots etc) and then set the PCs loose among them.I strongly dislike railroading, but "railroading" is an ambiguous term.I don't mind an adventure in which a particular climax has to occur for the adventure to be fun (eg the conclusion to the Freeport trilogy). That's not railroading, in my book - the whole point (for me) of a published adventure is that it gives me well-developed and interesting situations that are better than those I could come up with myself.What I do object to is an adventure that only works if it can be taken for granted whom the players will ally with, whom they will oppose, and so on, or that only works if it can be taken for granted that the players will fall for a particular trick or not uncover some particular piece of information until the right time. This is railroading, because it precludes meaningful choices on the part of the players.When I ran the Freeport trilogy (adjusted for high-level RM rather than low-level D&D), the players worked out straight away who the villain was (it is pretty obvious, after all) and didn't really align with any of the various factions. They approached the situation in their own way, imposed their own order on the town, and the lighthouse climax (suitably amplified with a number of ideas from Malhavoc's Requiem for a God) was one of the highlights of the campaign.When I ran OA7 The Test of the Samurai (converted from 6th-ish level AD&D to 10th-ish level RM), my players killed one PC they were meant to align with, more or less ignored another, cheered when the annoying tag-along NPC met his end, and once again enjoyed a very dramatic climax.I find that the WoTC 3E adventures are not very suited for this sort of playstyle. I think some of the Penumbra adventures really distill it down to a finely-honed point (especially Belly of the Beast, Three Days to Kill, Maiden Voyage and Ebon Mirror) but I haven't yet had a chance to run them - I've got plans to use them as the basis for a HARP campaign.Unlike the MERP/ShadowWorld approach these adventures remove the exploration element entirely - its not about the players first working out the parameters of various situations and then choosing how to respond, but rather immediately hurling the players into a very intense situation and seeing what happens. I'm hoping that 4e will see more adventures like this - unlike 3E, it has the reward and encounter mechanics (skill challenges, quest XP etc) to really support this sort of adventure design. (Heathen, for Dungeon 155(?), has hints of this.)</blockquote>

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