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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elfdart" data-source="post: 2960701" data-attributes="member: 31475">You don't have to use two or more modules to avoid railroading. It's just that you should avoid herding the PCs around. For example, the first time I played The Village of Hommlet, our group didn't go straight to the Moathouse. We found out that merchants and travellers were disappearing and decided to pass ourselves off as travelling peddlers in order to lure out another attack. Sure enough, Lareth's brigands attacked and found themselves being ambushed. We wrung information out of the surviving bandits, sought out their lair in the Moathouse, and attacked by way of the secret escape tunnel (essentially we went through the Moathouse "backwards"). When I DMed The Temple of Elemental Evil, the players (for some strange reason) decided to ignore the Moathouse and went straight for the Temple, even though (unknown to them) the Temple was over the heads of 1st level PCs.Now in far too many cases, many DMs would have railroaded the PCs into playing through in order. They are like hack directors who clutch their scripts like security blankets. Luckily, in both cases I mentioned above the DM (blowing my own horn, I know) improvised and adjusted to what the players were doing with their PCs. Original thinking should be rewarded instead of answered with "You can't do that."The big advantage is that players think (rightly) that the actions of their PCs have some effect on the game and aren't just painting by numbers. The other advantage is that if one of the players has already read or been through the module, you can adjust and make him pay!  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /></blockquote>

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