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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8693104" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Then I would think you have rather a high opinion of your ability to consistently and faultlessly outwit 4-5 other people for a sustained period. I find most players are highly intelligent, and can pretty quickly figure out that they're being deceived. A clever and chary DM can keep up the charade for a while, but it never lasts forever.It is a bad thing if it is presented deceptively. It's not the rails that are the problem--it is their (alleged) invisibility. Putting someone in a cage when they think they're completely free is questionable at best.Yeah...this is exactly the problem I have. If their joy depends on never, ever realizing that they've been deceived, then the game is eternally on the edge of collapse when it doesn't need to be. It's really not that hard to actually let players have agency either--nor to recycle old ideas into new things if you didn't have the time or opportunity to use them when you originally intended. Recycling doesn't have to take the form of "it's literally exactly what I was originally planning to do, but I've just quantum-superposition'd it from being south of the Dark Marsh to being west of the Fire Cliffs."This isn't even agency in the first place, so we're not exactly off to a good start.At one point, I actually did something like this....sort of. It's from the Gardens of Ynn supplement, which (other than this one small flaw) is actually quite excellent. When I solicited feedback from players after the journey to Ynn, one of them spoke up about how when he realized that I would roll to find out what the next area was after they chose which way to go, it bled away all tension and impact. He knew that, whatever would happen, it was random, so there was no strategy or preparation involved. Just some new thing the party hadn't seen before. (Technically that was me very slightly tweaking it because I didn't want to have to keep completely re-drawing my map every time they hit a new room.)Should I do something like this again in the future, I will try to generate a set of labyrinths in advance, and then select between them when the adventure starts, so that it's still random and I'm still surprised by what specifically happens, but there is an actual set of rooms and choosing to go in direction A actually truly is different from choosing to go in direction B (unless, contextually, it isn't because of magic BS or whatever.)So while this has some potential, I have actually gotten direct player feedback about how this is not great, and if I were actually hiding it from the players, that would have gone over like a lead balloon.Frankly this is so much worse than the three doors. At least there, you're making it clear that they're picking even if the "choice" is really not a choice at all, just a random selection. With this method, you're literally just straight up lying to them about whether or not they're making choices. There is no direction except "forward," you're just letting them believe there is.....why not just talk to them? This isn't even doing anything that just saying, "Alright guys, time for final preparations before you head out. Is there any remaining business you'd like to cover, anything you might have forgotten?" wouldn't. Like...at least with the others you're trying to be efficient with resources. This is literally just "they'll pick up on the hints! There's no need to communicate with them!" What possible advantage does this provide?Here I must outright disagree with you. Yes, it is one possible option that this is done in a railroading fashion. It is ABSOLUTELY NOT going to ALWAYS be railroading. The problem is, you have presumed a linear sequence of clues...meaning, you have presumed the rails. You can have clues that are just...present. They don't specifically point to subsequent clues. They're just single pieces of information. I know this because that's how I did a murder mystery. There were clues in the kitchens, clues on the body (some real, some faked), clues in the victim's bedroom, clues that could be gleaned from talking to the servants. No clue directly led to any other clue; it was on the players to choose where to look and who to talk to. There were intentionally-placed false leads, and there were dead ends. (The players tried to resurrect the victim, for example; it only partially worked, however, so the victim wasn't going to revive fast enough to prevent the diplomatic incident the players wanted to prevent.) The players had to reason, had to use IRL information I knew they had (e.g. that livor mortis takes at least 2 hours to be noticeable, so the victim couldn't possibly have been killed by the person who found his body), contradictions between statements made by the suspects, and weird differences in the reports between different people who had no reason to lie. I had prepared for as many possible results of this mystery as I could: failure to identify any culprit at all, positively identifying the wrong person, having two or more plausible suspects without a clear identification, identifying the right culprit but not the reason for the murder, or truly finding everything. The players were persistent and clever and worked out almost everything, including the secret motive. There was no railroad here, because I was willing to accept essentially every possible result from the investigation. The one mystery they didn't solve was who was keeping one of the tertiary suspects under control via addictive drugs. (I think it just got lost in the shuffle, to be honest, but it is the one component of the mystery that never got solved.)There was no "track" to get back onto, because the players were fully in control of whether the mystery was actually solved, or not. And they very, very much appreciated that their success was theirs, not something I ensured would happen.Because it is. Blatantly so. There is no "seem" about it.I strongly disagree with this sentiment. Tricking people is rarely wise, and never necessary.This order is impossible to obey while implementing the other things you have described here. Either you actually do respect player agency, and thus do not force the story to end up in the shape or location you want it to be, or you do ensure that things end up going where you wanted them to go anyway, and thus do not respect player agency. (Note that, if you have a frank conversation with your players, that's rather a different story; you are still respecting their agency, by giving them the opportunity as players to choose whether or not to participate. It's not ideal to say "please just do X thing, even if you might not normally, because it's important for this to happen." But at least you're respecting them and their agency.)Again, your instructions are directly contradictory. You advocate knowingly making it so whatever direction the players choose to go in the wilderness, it will always lead to the haunted house (or whatever other location you have in mind.) That is directly and specifically restricting the choices and negating the agency of the players. They do not actually have a choice of where to go. They can have any color they want, as long as the color they want is black.I don't. Ever. Full stop. I have never needed to, and I see no reason to start. I have always been honest with my players. The characters I play are not always honest with them. But I, as DM, have never lied to my players. And doing so has enriched my game in ways too numerous to count.</blockquote>

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