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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6704131" data-attributes="member: 2067">One interesting thing is that a lot of DMs pretty much railroad their parties into some fights, and a lot of players even expect that to some degree. This would seem to challenge the received wisdom that railroads are bad things - at least when it comes to having to get into some fights, a lot of players seem to expect a bit of a railroad on occasion, so there's little reason for a DM to work hard to avoid them. They probably shouldn't ALL be inevitable (but some players certainly expect that, too!), but some fraction of them can be and nobody's getting their expectations thwarted. Sometimes, when you're facing a charging orc berserker that's crossing the rope bridge, "I cut the bridge and send him plummetting" isn't going to be a real option you can take. Lack of choice or agency isn't always a big deal. Also interesting is the MASSIVE discrepancy between large quantity of DMs who are basically cool with players taking any encounter in a noncombat direction, and the low number of players who expect that to be the case. One would think those numbers would be closer - seems like there's a good chance of some players presuming that a given encounter is one of those little railroads they're fine with, when, in fact, the DM's more open to other solutions than they think! And it might be important to note - I'm more interested in what you have the ability to do as a player than what you end up doing. If you had the option not to fight (even if it may be a challenge to talk the charging ogre down), but you end up fighting some stuff anyway, then you still had the very real option to resolve that differently (often more "efficiently," since skill checks don't cost resources). If that charging ogre was going to attack you no matter what you said or did to it, then you never had a choice but to roll initiative - and apparently that's pretty much as expected some times.</blockquote>

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