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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 5391460" data-attributes="member: 99817">I'm just going to write a few things about the railroading aspect, mainly because its a subject I've always been interested in as a GM.It might seem sage advice to a DM not to 'railroad', but then you have to ask yourself - what exactly is a published module? What does it mean to write a scenario? It's actually very superficial and unhelpful advice.Within the game railroading means presenting the illusion of choice when there is none. For example, you've prepared a village of undead. You say to the players "You reach a fork in the road - do you go left or right?" and whichever way they go you say "Okay you reach this ruined village..."The choice of going left or right wasn't a choice at all. Players resent this kind of phoney choice and, in my experience, if they start to suspect it they say "Okay, we go back to the fork and go the other way..." Oops. That only has to happen once or twice (and we've all been there) before you cut the crap and just say: "You reach this creepy, silent village just as the sun is setting..."But at a meta-game level, railroading is often implicitly expected - the players are looking to the GM for cues about plot, where to go and what to do. Damsels in distress, villages under threat from ancient evils, cultists summoning unspeakable horrors, final confrontations.Many classic games (from D&D to Call of Cthulhu) have a premise that the PCs want to explore the GM's plot. That the players do not ignore your carefully scripted kidnapping in favour of sending their PCs off for a day's fishing. Railroading at that level is in-built into a lot of RPGs and players are willing to forgive quite a lot of it if the resulting story is interesting.Not railroading at any level requires a certain approach to a game. It needs starting PCs with goals and motivations of their own, NPCs with goals, motivations and resources, relationship maps between the characters, and players open to the idea that the outcome of any given conflict is not going to result in ultimate failure (or success) - just a new, more complex situation.If you're interested in that style, you should probably try and find a copy of Sorceror by Adept Press. It pretty much wrote the book on in-game, player-driven plot.Anyway, looks to me like you have a good group of players and a strong setting, so I'd say go for it. What you've written is not railroading them in any bad sense. And if you give them meaningful choices (do we escape the games or help run more?) you won't be railroading them at all.</blockquote>

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