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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Helldritch" data-source="post: 8593512" data-attributes="member: 6855114">More players automatically means that there are more of all the types. Good and bad ones.Ho but they have. Unless a DM put them artificially back, they no longer work.Gold? Not needed. No magic shop, no kingdom/barony/temple/guild to build.Magic Items? Not needed either. They are optional from the get go.Experience? Miles stones are there my friend. And many players will try to force a mile stone in the throat of a DM. (Hey we have to level up now. It has been a while...)Special Powers? Not needed any more as all power a PC needs are built-in the class and class level advancement.To please a god? Hey gods are no longer needed RAW. Just pray to a philosophy. Healing is overnight anyways and Bards and Druids and Even some Warlock (Not counting paladins and rangers) can heal... Ho and the Artificer can heal too... A good story that I build? Hey! Players' agency is there and this is the very subject we are discussing... And Railroad is so badly viewed that a young DM trying it will get roasted.So what is truly left? Tell me because I fail to see where, as a DM with the non optional stuff in the PHB and DMG I can nudge the PC in the direction I wish them to go without going full railroad. (This is for the sake of argument, I have no problems at all as I have reintroduced most of the above myself). If I were a non experienced DM I would be hard pressed to nudge the players in the direction I would like.And I am familiar with a lot of other system too. Some have their own tools to bring players into the line the DM wants and some don't have any. Survival alone is often the key. At the same time, D&D has a tradition of using the above examples to "encourage" players to act in certain ways or to choose some possibilities over the others. 5ed did removed these to "emulate" other RPG but did not provided other tools that these other games had to incentivize players into certain desired behaviors. Here is an example: The merchant offers you 100 gold to guard him up to Waterdeep. For 3rd level characters, this would have been good in other editions. But in 5ed, why would the characters care? The first orog they'll see will wear a nice plate mail that can be sold for a lot more. And where there's an orog, there's bound to be some more. Unless you give outrageous rewards, the players are not incentivized to act on gold anymore. And even then, at a certain point, when the players have all the gold they need, what will you use to push them toward the story you want if they have their own agenda that goes against what you had in mind? All the tools I mentioned earlier are no longer there or do not have the impact they did in earlier editions. Especially gold, magical items and experience.</blockquote>

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