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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6132535" data-attributes="member: 5143">I disagree.  Railroading is often a good thing.  I disagree that it is necessarily railroading.  To me, railroading is removing all choices but one.  The PCs still have choices in my game, they are just constrained by the plot of the game.  They have their choice how to solve the puzzles in the tower, they are allowed to use all their resources to solve them and interesting solutions I didn't think of will be accepted and allowed.  However, they do not have the choice of simply skipping all of the puzzles.  Because that ruins the game for me.  If the game is ruined for me, I don't want to DM.I disagree this needs to be done.  I don't have time to power game.  I have to come up with ideas for a plot, NPCs, monsters, maps for battles, and a lot more.  I simply don't have the time to also powergame.  Either way, I'm fairly good at power gaming.  But when I sit down at a table to run a game, I don't want to spent that time in prep.  I want to grab a monster out of the monster manual that the book tells me is of an appropriate difficulty and I want that encounter to work with any PCs that the players have made.I have video games to play, TV to watch, time to spend with my gf, work to do.  I don't want to cut into any of that time in order to do prep on a D&D game.  If powergaming becomes a requirement to DMing, then I'm out.However, even given that, I can't powergame as well as my players.  My mind just doesn't allow me to go there.  I have the same problem with making Magic the Gathering Decks.  If I come up with a card combo that will just destroy the other player...I immediately forget it and make up something more "fair" in my mind.  I don't have fun destroying my opponent.  When I make up D&D characters I normally stop at something powerful but "fair".  My players show up at the table with combinations of feats and powers from 3 different classes that when combined together lock enemies down from moving or attacking for any entire combat(making battles against thousands of year old lichs go like this "He takes fire damage, he gets knocked prone, he gets back up again, he's dazed, that's his action...go").  They come up with ideas that do 60 damage to every enemy on the board as a minor action(it's a really stupid combo by the way, and I eventually ruled against that one)That's debatable as well.  More than once I've had a player come up with an idea that I allowed to work that simply destroyed an enemy without really fighting it.  The players felt cheated.  They expected the action to fail and then get into a fight because they wanted to use their cool combat abilities that they'd been itching to use for a while.  Instead, someone came up with an idea to outright win without a battle and the rest of the players WANTED me to say no or find some reason it didn't work because they wanted to fight.Sometimes the easiest or most obvious solution isn't the one the players actually want to do.  Take my example above about the wizard's tower.  Some players may enjoy solving puzzles.  So if one PC says "Here, I've got the ability to destroy the whole tower with one spell...The wizard will die.  I cast it."  When I say "Sorry, the tower resists your magic as it has some sort of ward that protects it", then one player might be a little frustrated that his spell didn't work, but another might be happy because he wasn't cheated out of the experience of exploring the tower.</blockquote>

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