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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elfdart" data-source="post: 3189469" data-attributes="member: 31475">If the shoe fits...I love the way you left off the rest:Nice going.Last time I checked, D&D was a game. Not a novel and certainly not dinner theatre.   That's exactly how it happened and we had a blast. Serendipity is what games are all about. A combination of skill and chance. You can do everything right and still lose; you can do everything wrong and still win. We've had a number of adventures turn out very differently from what the DM/module designer had in mind. Railroading requires more effort than playing it by ear and adjusting on the fly. When I'm ready to tell a story, I read to the kids. When I play D&D, I'm playing a game. The two are completely different things. Even if I were inclined to do the D&D-as-amateur-theatrics/storyteller thing, I'd avoid clinging to a script like a lifejacket and adhering to cliches. Great storytellers know when to change or chuck a script when it's not working whereas sticking to the script no matter what (railroading, in game terms) is the sign of the hack. There's a reason the late Robert Altman is considered a great filmmaker and it's not his devotion to the script. Chucking cliches and/ or turning them around is another sign of creativity. For my money, the best action/adventure movie of all time (I'm not alone considering how many filmmakers crib from this movie.) is The Seven Samurai. There's no BBEG in the movie. Just a gang of brigands. The "leader" is nothing special and is only noteworthy because (a) he kills the Toshiro Mifune character and (b) he has a patch over one eye. The bandits are plenty menacing enough without a Moriarty-like mastermind behind it all. The cliches about the noble samurai get demolished in the movie as well. They are exposed as being little different from the bandits. I have a good idea of what The Seven Samurai would have been like had "storytellers" got hold of it and it's not pretty.Speaking of outlaws, some people have the mistaken impression that the "leaders" of such groups are the stuff BBEGs are made of. Hogwash. To the extent pirates, brigands and others like them have leaders at all, they are almost always one or two unprofitable raids away from being replaced. Not BBEG material at all.</blockquote>

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