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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7056794" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think I've ever used the Caves of Chaos (except to borrow the cultist section for setting up cutists temples in all sort of places, most recently the catacombs of Hardby). But I've used the Keep multiple times.I've never used Hommlet, but not because of any railroad-y element - more because I didn't have a copy back in the days when it would have been most useful (eg low-level Greyhawk games).But the presence of a "self-moving" plot would make it less appealing to me.It's like a version of the "freeze-frame" room in a dungeon: you don't need it to change because (i) when the players first encounter it, it doesn't matter that the fiction was authored by the GM some time ago and hasn't been touched since, and (ii) onece the players encounter it, they will generate changes.These things are all matters of opinion. I would regard all the things you say are not railroading - having a plot prepared in advance, automatic failure in a context of genre-appropriate action declaration, secret backstory including NPCs with there own "character arcs" - as railroading. I wouldn't do them, and I wouldn't enjoy a game that featured them. (Outside the context of something like a CoC one-shot.)And - somewhat contrary to   [MENTION=6846794]Gardens & Goblins[/MENTION] defence of Gygax's modules as having been authored 30+ years ago - I think it's a strength, and a deliberate strength, of those modules that they don't include the things you refer to: no NPC characer arcs, very little secret backstory that will mandate failure for player action declarations, no pre-scripted plot; instead, an expectation that the players will impose their will on the fiction, and that the GM's job is to respond to this and manage the unfolding events of play, not dictate them.Yet oddly, it's as if the most recent 25 years of RPG design and play (I'm choosing Over the Edge as my marker - I could easily set it 9 years earlier, at James Bond; or 5 years later, at Maelstrom Storytelling) never happened.No one posting in this thread is confused about the existence of your preferred style. But some people posting in this thread seem confused that other approaches exist, or that others might think your preferred GM-driven style is too railroad-y for their taste.(And before someone says - but we're talking about D&D! - where do you think skill challenges came from, including the example of the narration of failure in the 4e Rules Compendium, which is exactly like the sort of "fail forward" I've described in this thread, with the GM drawing on estabished elements of the backstory to introduce a new and adversarial element to the fiction; or where do you think 5e's Inspiration rules came from, with the idea that by playing so as to engage self-chosen character descriptors a player can acquire resources which make it easier to impose his/her will upon the fiction?)</blockquote>

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