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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Noumenon" data-source="post: 4786781" data-attributes="member: 70102">Well, I just got done with another player-directed session.  They told me which dungeon they were going to head to before the session.  But first, the dwarf had had all his gear stripped last session (not bad DMing!  I asked him first and it was supposed to punish the people who left him alone and helpless with all his Wisdom drained).  So I had a quick encounter where the guy who stole them brought them to town and tried to sell them, and the deal went bad and the party found out.Railroad version: they kill the smugglers, open the crates and find all the dwarf's stuff.  The room is otherwise empty and they have to leave.  Off to the dungeon.Nonrailroad version: The room has two locked doors, the PCs got the impression the smugglers were dragging some bodies toward one of them (just to hide them in the dark hallway actually).  So the party wants to pick the lock, and I flexibly have it open into the basement of the pirate-affiliated shipbuilder Blackjack's Hulls.  It started out fun because the rogue came upstairs behind the counter and stole the entire till.  Then the sheriff PC came up without hiding at all, asked them why they all looked so guilty (they're pirates, but the PCs didn't know that), and left.  Then the pirates checked the downstairs and the rogue decided to kill them.  Very chaotic, and probably evil, but I didn't think of any reason or way to stop him.  Then the store owner ran out the door for help and the sheriff PC chased him down and marched him down the street to jail.  This led to more scenes explaining things to the magistrate, the sheriff PC discovering the murder, and down the road the sheriff being stripped of his title and official armor.So now we have all these massive consequences on the horizon with murder investigation, pirate retaliations, interparty alignment conflict, but since I was flailing so badly trying to react to all this that I had my players running the NPCs for me, we kind of ignored them and finally set off across the bay to the planned adventure.  About three hours later than the railroad version would have taken.  You can blame my players for taking such consequential actions in town, but I blame the freedom too.OK, I wanted one or two scenes on the way to the dungeon.  Railroad version: stormy sea requiring sailor checks or turning back for a new boat.  One random encounter with a water elemental or something.  Nonrailroad version:  I randomly pick a random encounter with a shark (I don't have a table) and realize I'm not sure how it could get in the boat, so I have it circle the boat.  Then I try the profession:sailor check and it's a 4, so a wave swamps the boat enough that the shark can attack people in it.  All created on the fly, and there's a kind of fun encounter where the shark capsizes the boat, there's underwater combat, one character remembers he has shark repellent in his pack, another gets trapped under the sinking boat and uses a gaseous form potion to bubble to the surface and promptly be whipped away by the storm winds to the other side of the harbor.  A wild chaotic and kind of fun encounter, but it ends up with the party having no boat, having to swim back to shore and one hitching a ride home with a fishing boat.Then they gave up and just went to a different dungeon.  And split up besides with one character just sitting outside guarding the entrance.  I think being in what Chatty DM calls the <a href="http://chattydm.net/2007/09/21/the-4-stages-of-a-rpg-teams-development-storming/" target="_blank">"storming"</a> phase is half my group's problem.  But they didn't storm before I gave them their head and allowed the consequences of their actions to start determining what happened next in the session.It's almost, kind of still fun, but I come out of it feeling half-consternated, not charged-up.The worst part is one of my players said part of the reason he started causing so much chaos in town was he really wanted to leave the town and felt stuck.  The one kind of freedom he really wanted, I still wasn't giving him.  (I could start a whole 'nother thread about that, as the modules I was using originally were all different towns, but I moved them all to the same town because I like recurring NPCs.  Other than that the experience is exactly the same.)</blockquote>

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