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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5614253" data-attributes="member: 4937">Could be a cool one.No, I'm not evaluating the rightness or wrongess of the approach.  However, by any reasonable definition, a DM who has a preconceived story/plot or idea which is not mutable by player action and who uses DM fiat to ensure that the story/plot is not mutable is railroading.   And not only railroading in a small way, but railroading like a conductor.   This may or may not be a good thing, and I'm not entirely opposed to lay rails occasionally, but if you see your self on the open sandbox-ish end of the spectrum, then how you see yourself seems to me to be highly at odds with how you are defining yourself.   Moreover, while I don't think that anyone is a bad DM for laying rails, one of the worst crimes you can commit as a DM is laying obvious rails.   (As for how I define railroading, go <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/298368-techniques-railroading.html" target="_blank">here</a>.   Feel free to disagree with my definition.)Well, pretty obviously and by definition you are limiting player choice by a fiat ruling that something, which normally works under the rules, doesn't work here.   Whether that is good or bad, I'm not judging, but it is railroading.So far so good.  Even if there was rails here, you've successfully hid them.Yeah, but now you are wanting to have your cake and eat it too.  You want him to be dead, but you also want him to around to provide an RP oppurtunity.  And you could probably get away with both in some games, except in D&D that PC's aren't ordinary mortals - they have superpowers.  If they find a situation, they usually have the power to alter it.  With some creativity, you probably could have managed both without saying, "No."  You could have set it up so that the baddies left him to be found with some sort of problem that the PC's would have a hard time figuring out/dealing with before he died.  You could have had him dead, but in some defiant/courageous way he'd managed to leave a message for the PC's.Or you could do what I do, which is look at the silence of the rules in certain area and go: "There is no obvious way under the rules for their to be a one legged pirate, or for someone's arm to get cut off by his father.  We must do something about that, because if we don't, it will be a hinderance not only to my story telling, but to the sort of interesting happenstance that leads to stories I could not have foreseen."I'm not questioning the value.  I'm questioning first, the method, and second the claim that you are on the sandboxy end of the spectrum.    I mean, I'm fairly middle of the road I think on this question, and you see clearly more 'adventure path/pro-railroading' than I am.  To me you seem to have pretty clear rails, they just branch a bit.   When Lex Luther puts Superman in a delimma, you want him to actually be in a delimma, and not go, "Wait a minute, I'm Superman.  This isn't really a problem for me."</blockquote>

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