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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1869579" data-attributes="member: 812">Well, see, that doesn't sound like a very fun game to me. Frankly, that's a kind of railroading."We're going to hang around in the tavern and see what happens.""Um, okay, nothing does.""Oh. I guess we're done playing for tonight, huh?""Yeah. Guess we are."There's a DM who refuses to allow the party to have fun doing anything other than what he has planned for them to do: that, my friends, is railroading. Again, it works just fine if the party follows the lead the DM provides, but it sure sucks for everybody if they don't.Great stories are almost invariably about bad things happening to people. Happy stories end with people overcoming the bad things that happen and triumphing, sad stories end otherwise, but fundamentally, from Homer to Neal Stephenson, great stories are about people overcoming adversity.Nobody's saying your campaign has to involve great stories. Killing things and taking their stuff is a time-honoured style of play and it's great fun, no question. But to me, killing things and taking their stuff is even MORE fun if it's part of a great story that my friends and I are making up as we go along.And in order to try and make my campaign's story as great as I can, I try to make sure that the PCs have bad things happen to them. Constantly. I recommend it as a technique.</blockquote>