Temporal railroading.

[RangerWickett]

Edit: In hindsight I wish I hadn't been so vitriolic, but I'm leaving the post here as it was so new people to the thread aren't confused. But for the record, I overreacted, and my DM is not the fool some people here claimed. The lesson, it seems, is not to trust one person's opinion when you don't know the full circumstances.



You know how, when you play a video game RPG, and they say, "We've got to hurry before the train is derailed!" you don't actually have to hurry, because there's no real time limit? Like how, whenever you reach the final boss, the train will derail right after you beat him? Or how, no matter how many monster fights you flee from or how quickly you navigate the level, you'll always reach the end just in time to see the villain in a cut scene killing a key character from the game?

Well that's temporal railroading, and that's what happened in the game I played tonight. It is fine for video games, but not cool for person to person RPGs.

The quick version: We needed to steal the Orb of the Undead from a mind flayer city before an army of Drow stole the orb. A high-level dude tasks us with getting the orb, but refuses to come with us, because he has more important things to do. Sure, okay. Even though we've been told this orb will destroy the world, I guess the guy's busy. We're fine with that. We tell him we've got next to no chance of sneaking into a mind flayer city, and that there's not much point in going after the orb without his help, but he's higher level and an NPC, so he can't join our party, and we're fine with that.

He gives us a guide, and tells us it'll take a week for us to navigate the tunnels and get down to the mind flayer city. We find a way to get there in a day. We arrive just in time to sneak in while the dark elves are assailing the mind flayer city. We fight a few illithids and their minions, but the bulk of the forces are fighting drow, so we make it to the elder brain pool, where the orb is. The pool's defense is a Will save (DC 30, and we're 12th level) that affects anything hostile that comes within 1000 ft. My PC is the only one who makes it, and I fly in, hoping to maybe, just maybe steal the orb while the brain's distracted fighting a drow army.

As I fly in, I make spot checks. 880 ft. away. Can't see it. I would teleport in, but the area is dimensionally locked, so I'm stuck with just having to fly.

760 ft. Can't see it.

640 ft. Can't see it.

520 ft. Can't see it, but can make out figures in the center of the pool.

400 ft. Can't see it. Realize there are two illithids and three cloaked figures - sky elves, who are a sort of 'enemy of my enemy' of the drow.

280 ft. Can't see it.

160 ft. Can't see it.

90 ft. Stop outside of mind blast range, and spot the orb as the mind flayers hand it off to the robed figures. Meanwhile, a mass of roiling darkness -- the epic spell of the leader of the drow -- is forcing its way into the elder brain pool. I'm spotted.

Initiative is rolled, I win. I try to telekinesis the orb out of the guy's hand. He makes his Will save. He then planeshifts away with the orb. Which you can apparently do in an area with dimensional lock.

Now, I had an item that granted a wish, that I had earned after saving an Arabia-esque nation from a yuan-ti conspiracy and a dragon who tried to destroy the sultan. This is a very precious item to me, and I've been saving the wish for a while. I wish for the guy and the item to be back where the were, and for the guy to be unconscious. Well, I get the first part of my wish. He reappears. I cast silence on a rock and toss it at him, hoping to keep him there. He runs out of the silence field and plane shifts away.

So then I leave, link up with my stunned allies, and teleport out before the dark elf doomsday darkness spell kills us. We are miffed.

It's fine that the guy got away with the orb. What irritates me is that he waited until right when I was there to do it. It's like the villain just wanted to rub it into my face that I couldn't stop him, because he had plot protection.

Now logically, out of game, I know the GM just wanted a dramatic scene where the villain narrowly escapes so we have to chase him down. But timeline wise, this makes no sense. Would the drow have waited to attack if we had taken longer to get there? What would we have seen if I'd failed my will save? Would we just have gotten there and found nothing at all? We did so well, but the GM won't let us accomplish anything, because he wants the villains to get away.


Four different groups of villains are being manipulated by one villain so they set up the world for destruction. We're trying to stop this, and whenever we attempt to inform them they're being manipulated, they ignore us. They must just not have the same information we have. Yet somehow they are always a step ahead of us, and all the scrying and teleporting in the world won't let us get there before them.

Basically, all I'm saying to my DM is, you win. We cannot defeat your villains until the time you have chosen for us. We will not bother fighting mooks. We will wait until the end of the world is nigh, and then we'll teleport to the main boss and fight him. We're through running around. For the sake of making things different for once, why not let us stop a villain some time other than right before he is victorious. Maybe let us defeat a villain before he screws us.

I know I'm overreacting a bit, because we have defeated villains before. But it seems like it's never before they do their cool thing. I know you want to give us a challenging victory, with some people dying but hopefully us winning in the end. But, y'know, just once, why not let us win something small ahead of schedule?

 

[Acquana]

Dude. That sucks hard. So obviously this is not the first time.

 

[Ze]

I think it's something you and your DM should agree beforehand.
The point seems to be that your DM did not sense correctly your mood and he was not able to give you what would have made your adventure a good one. He stayed on his plot, without perceiving that the right thing to do would have been give up his villain and subsequently rewrite the plot.
BUT, do the other players agree with you? Or is this just something with you?
Your DM could have felt what you wanted but he may have decided that keeping the plot as planned would have been better for the others, you know, for the sake of fun...

 

[the Jester]

Is this general despair shared by your fellow players? Have you guys already talked about this out of game, or even in game? Have you brought it up to your dm face to face? That might be more, um, politic than airing your grievances in front of tens of thousands of your dm's peers.

I hope everything works out; good gaming to your entire group, whatever happens!

 

[Vigilance]

Between this and the magic thread I can only say, want some whine with that cheese?

Chuck

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

Ouch. That sounds more a classic case of players vs DM and one side always is going to win with such superior resources.

To be honest, I played like that for a while, both as a DM and player and while there was glimpses of fun it always came round to sucking badly.

The only solutions that spring to mind are: to take over as DM because you can see how it should be done; roleplay the character despairing.

 

[arwink]

I've done this kind of thing when it's appropriate to genre (go Feng Shui/Buffy RPG), but I'll always tell players that they can't actually stop the bad guy from leaving (so they don't focus on it) and that there is something they can do that will stuff his plans down the line (so they aren't feeling entirely helpless).

And I've never done it in a DnD game.

 

[Mark Hope]

More than just players vs DM, it also sounds like your DM is keen on having his plot and story play out according to his vision of things, rather than your vision, or a combination of yours and his. It's a classic belief of many DMs that they decide or direct the story and the players participate in it as protagonists. My feeling on this is that the story is something that jointly gorws out of the ideas and actions of DM and players both. You guys definitely need to be in agreement out-of-game over this, otherwise it is not so much fun for anyone. The players don't enjoy being treated this way and the DM doesn't enjoy having his game fall flat as a result.

I used to play (intermittently) in a campaign that was like this. The DM would get these ideas for sweeping plots and thrilling scenes and then fudge the game like crazy in order to ensure that they played out accordingly, irrespective of what we did. He had a great flair for drama and description, which kept me coming back longer than I might have in another game (plus he was a really good friend and there was the whole social gaming thing going on) but eventually the campaign died a particularly grisly death after one session like this too many. I am trying to think of one succinct example, but the more I think of it, the more I realise that every session had this kind of thing going one, to one degree or another. The "NPCs who get away every time at the last minute until I want you to finally kill them" became a running campaign joke, for example.

Is your DM particularly inexperienced or something? I ask because I remember running games when I was starting out where I had these sorts of ideas as well. It was changed for me during one session when my PCs were being talked at by a massively powerful red dragon. Instead of listening to its pre-prepared speech and then watching it fly off into the sunset, accompanied by stirring music, they instead attacked it. Somewhat surprised by this, I couldn't bring myself to railroad them and, feeling very lost and panicky, I rolled with it and found that the end results were far more satisfying all round than my original ideas. The plot ramifications that came out of that combat literally changed the gameworld forever, as well as changing my DMing style. Never looked back since.

I also think that this "temporal railroading" approach is quite common. I am about a half-dozen sessions into a new Dark Sun campaign with a totally new group of players and couple of them seem to expect this kind of thing to be going on. I have to mention at least once every other session that it isn't - it seems to be almost assumed that the DM is gonna mess with you in some way or other.

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

I used to be a DM like that. My desire for everyone to be as excited by the plot and situation as I was was everything.

I don't do that anymore. Interestingly, the players both find themselves harder pressed. If bad guys aren't scripted, they tend to make decisions that directly inhibit the party.

Party: Finds an ancient complex filled controlled by The Great Mind, a computer (Not that the characters could know that) hoping to find the final red gem that binds Set to this dimension. The bad guy wrote a letter that the PC's picked up from some dead liutenant mentioning a temple with this fabled gem in it, and he would be moving in a week. They moved in a day.

They make it to the most strongly guarded room...

To find he'd laid an ambush, the temple didn't have any evil artifact and the BBEG was no-where within a hundred miles, busily assassinating the general they'd left in charge of a country. Teaches characters not to trust blindly that the nemesis isn't as intelligent as they.



Between sessions I actively think of his power level as I've described it and where he could be at any given time and what he would want to do. If they catch him off guard, they catch him off guard - and good for them! It lets low level parties fall under the radar, and high level parties have to outthink rather than just outfight any bad guys.


Every DM is tempted to make their bad guys omnipotent. Don't do that. Make them a credible threat, and the less made to die a dramatic death the better.


IMHO, you aren't a hero unless you win against insurmountable odds. If a villain is designed to eventually be defeated after trial and tribulation, he is surmountable, eventually.

 

[Wayside]

Between this and the magic thread I can only say, want some whine with that cheese?

You know, I had the same thought, although to be fair I certainly wouldn't want to play in this game either. Mostly because whoever invented Illithids and Drow should be shot, but that whole railroading thing is a little sketchy too.