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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haffrung" data-source="post: 6376492" data-attributes="member: 6776259">When we talk of railroads and scripts, it's worth considering the different forms they come in. There's the railroad of the linear series of adventures, where you complete one chapter and then move on the next. Clear out the steading of the hill giant chiefs, and it's on to the glacial rift of the frost giant jarl. That model is hard to get away from if you want to publish a mega-adventure that spans many levels. You can't have the PCs discover the shrine of the kuo-toa before they infiltrate the steading of the hill giant chief. So self-contained locations or chapters have linear connections.The other kind of scripting is, in my opinion, more egregious. It's where the outcomes to particular encounters are scripted. A dragon attacks and scares the beejesus out of the PCs but it doesn't kill them, and it always escapes. A villain steals an artifact that the PCs have recovered, and they can't stop him. An evil priest they encounter in chapter 1 must be kept alive for the climax of chapter 5. In these cases, agencies is denied the PCs on a basic level. And furthermore, rather than the script aiding a novice GM by spelling things out for him, this sort of scripting contains potential landmines that could blow up if the PCs go off-script and kill the wrong PC, and the novice DM has to substantially rewrite the subsequent chapters to account for the change.We can recognize the necessity of the former while objecting to the denial of agency and potential for train-wrecks in the latter. Seconded. By releasing adventures intended to be used in Encounters play, while emulating the Pathfinder model of Paizo, WotC are not playing to the strengths of the game system they just published. Ironically, they did the same thing with 4E by kicking it off with adventures better suited to AD&D (or 5E). There's a weird misalignment between the systems they design and adventures they publish to support them.</blockquote>

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