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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8055928" data-attributes="member: 18">You're making a lot of assumptions here, ones which seem ill-founded.First off, you're assuming the players know perfectly well, that they're "ruining" the module. The better the DM is, the less likely they know that. A terrible DM, it's going to be immediately obvious, as he goes "Errrrr I dunno what to do", and you've probably seem him struggle a bunch of times with even minor deviations from what is expected. But a good to great DM will have handled any previous deviations so well, that the players likely don't even know that they were deviations. I'm not that great, but I've managed this a lot of times back when I still used modules. The players were like "Oh that bit in the temple was awesome this module rocks" and I'm like "I improvised that entire bit, you weren't even supposed to go there..." except obviously I kept that to myself.The better the DM, the less you need to explain the entire premise and forward-looking plot of the module, too, especially if the module isn't exceptionally weird.Don't think I have no sympathy. I am a DM, and very experienced one. I share your pain when things go off the rails, and I'm not always super-keen to continue such a campaign. But unless you have clear agreement to being basically railroaded, to a specific, singular campaign goal, which I think is going to be rare in most groups, the players are not at fault here. Even you might not be at fault, if the module is sufficiently bad and you somehow legitimately didn't realize how bad it was (it does happen).Second-off, there's a lack of responsibility from a lot of the DMs here. My experience as a DM and player for 30+ years is that, by and large, most groups want to stick to the module plot, unless it's dire. Yes, sometimes you get "that guy". You, Oofta, seem to want this to all be about "that guy". We all hate "that guy". But that's why I said your example was irrelevant, because it was about "that guy" - and further examples had the same problem - about "opening a seat". This isn't about "that guy". This is about the entire group deciding on a different direction. You're not opening a seat, you'd be firing the entire group.And the reality is, a lot of DMs screw up. They pick a bad module. They fail to think about how their actual players will actually respond to the actual module. Sometimes they don't even read it properly. Or they don't understand it. Or they see problems, but they can't be bothered to fix them, or don't know how to fix them, but run it anyway. Or they take a great module, and by dint of bad DMing, manage to make it dull. I've seen it done.When you've got to the point that ALL the players are saying "Okay let's go do this instead!", either you've run it so brilliantly that they think that's totally legit, or more likely, something has gone profoundly wrong. What that is can vary wildly. I've seen some modules where, the plot doesn't fail forwards, it basically just dead-ends unless the PCs do something incredibly specific and non-obvious. Often at the same time, there's an obvious course, but the module author didn't realize that. I've seen other modules where they're designed to horrifically railroad the PCs at some moment, but do so in a way such that the railroad can be avoided, and make no allowances for what happens if it is. I've seen yet others which put the PCs in a potentially cool situation, then expect them to do something boring, and if they don't do the boring thing (which is often doesn't even make sense), then the module can't cope. This isn't even rare, this is like a dead minimum of 30% of modules longer than a single adventure. And sometimes it's on the DM, as discussed, but the point is, entire groups of players don't go rogue for no reason.Third-off, you say the DM puts in more work than any given player, but when he's running a pre-gen module (not one he wrote himself), especially running it stock, with few/no modifications, is he really putting in more effort than the entire rest of the table? I doubt it. I've never felt like I was, when running a largely-stock pre-gen module/AP/campaign. When I'm writing adventures from scratch, heavily modifying a campaign, running in my own gameworld and so on, yeah, then absolutely, I am putting in more work than the entire other 4-6 people, but that's not the case here.EDIT - The classic example of it being the module's fault when the PCs go rogue isn't actually a D&D one, it's a Shadowrun one. A number of adventures (esp. in 1E/2E) for Shadowrun feature ridiculous betrayals, or plot twists, which the PCs are clearly supposed to roll with, but where no real justification exists for doing so. People like to deny this, but it really is the case in a number of official adventures for earlier SR - this is part of why the legend of "just steal the cars" exists. Part of it is that official adventures, and generic suggested rewards in SR was just ridiculous lowballs for people full of expensive cyberware massively breaking the law and murdering a bunch of people and committing massive theft/industrial espionage, whilst risking not only their freedom, but their lives. But the other part was that so many adventures and so on had situations where it just made no sense to continue with the adventure - your employer backstabbed you, or wanted you to do some ridiculous thing not previous agreed to, with no extra reward (indeed, often the reward would somehow have decreased by then), and sensible, kind players who would go along with a lot of railroading woul be like "To hell with this, steal the cars!". I feel like when an entire group goes rogue like that in D&D ("to hell with this, let's become pirates!") then something similar has to be going wrong.</blockquote>

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