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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Hope" data-source="post: 2222978" data-attributes="member: 27051">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.</blockquote>

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