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Message: <blockquote data-quote="soulcat" data-source="post: 1902347" data-attributes="member: 22304">I completely agree with the strong story.My players are really bad at doing Character histories, so I started the campaign by writing them each a character history, they had input and it ended up being a joint venture for each of them. The reason I did this? Because I know my players and new they'd need pushing in the right direction from the start.From the very begining they have been on a quest to reclaim Thunderholme (a dwarven city in the Thunderpeaks, inhabited by a dracolich). They have this aim in mind, but have spent a year and a half (of real time) getting side tracked a lot.They did actually try once to retake it, but they where woefully underprepared, and the Dracolich basicaly laughed in their faces and sent them away (She wants them to come back with an army, then she can kill them too. The Dracolich is Aurglarossa, from the Cult of the Dragon 2nd ed book, she is a Cleric of the Dragon god of Death/Undeath, and uses undead dwarves as her guards).In the mean time, whilst trying to prepare to kill the Dracolich they have been side tracked by a healthy mixture of preplanned diversions and Character choices.I agree totally that without the back story of the Quest to retake Thunderholme, and the story provided by it being in FR, the open style of my DMing wouldn't be as easy to keep going. With the support of those two however, like I said in my previous posts, the players have really raised there game, and I've seen some of the best roleplaying they've ever done, whole nights where I've basically been a note taker. Nights where They've become so imersed in their characters that I've been worried that the arguments are becoming real (only to have a food or drink request break the tension and demonstrate that the RPing was really THAT good).So, in Summation, Railroading bad. Guiding story good. Tangental story breaks good. Players enjoying themselves? Priceless. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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