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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5398171" data-attributes="member: 58197">Putting clues in scenes is not railroading. It's only railroading if you shove the PCs' faces in the clues and force them to follow up. Whoever said this has never played with a railroading GM; when you've seen what real railroading looks like, the difference is like night and day.Now, I'm not familiar with the RPG in question and haven't listened to the podcast. Maybe shoving the PCs' faces in the clues and forcing them to follow up is exactly what the game tells the GM to do. In that case, yes, it's institutionalizing railroading and that's a bad thing. However, if all it's doing is telling the GM to make damn sure every scene contains some solid clues--for an investigative RPG, that's just good sense.Whether this was railroading depends on whether the players made a good effort to come up with a way to circumvent the need for a password and how you reacted. If they made some lame, halfhearted gesture like "Uh, I ask to be let in and make a Diplomacy check. Does he let me in now?"--then you were justified in saying, "Sorry, it's not that easy." And if they came up with a good plan but botched their skill checks, well, so it goes*. On the other hand, if they came up with a creative, workable solution (a clever bluff, say, or arranging a distraction so the rogue could slip past) and you smacked it down without giving it a fair shake, that's railroading.As a DM accustomed to the old-school, autocratic approach to running a game, I'm usually on the "DM is Da Boss, if you don't like it run your own game" side of these arguments. But the statement "the password was simply necessary" raises some red flags for me. The only things that should be "simply necessary" in an adventure are the elements at the core of the story.If the adventure is about saving a princess from a dragon, then keeping the princess alive** is "simply necessary." If she dies, there is no way to bring the adventure to a successful conclusion, and that's fine--there should be a risk of failure. However, if you start thinking that (for example) slaying the dragon is "simply necessary," that's a problem. The players should be allowed to come up with clever solutions that bypass the dragon, and if this results in changes to the plot you had in mind, you just gotta roll with it.[size=-2]*Having said that, it's still a weakness in the adventure if it can be stymied by something as simple as a forgotten password and a couple of botched skill checks. This is where I'd take a few moments to think up a way to get the action going again, bringing the fight to the PCs as it were. The punishment for failure should be additional threats or obstacles, never boredom.**Assuming no access to resurrection magic.[/size]</blockquote>

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