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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bloodtide" data-source="post: 9735802" data-attributes="member: 6684958">3.  Raga is incensed by the king and announces his desire to initiate combat. The player rolls his dice accordingly. The GM observes the roll and without consulting anything, announces that the attack failed. The player looks at the result—an excellent result—and is surprised. “That doesn’t hit? Without having to consult anything”. The GM nods, “Right, your attack misses. His bodyguard attacks in response and…[rolls dice]…disarms you.”This is bad, clumsy Railroading here. As a DM you should avoid this. And the easy fix is to set things up before something like the above scene.Hard Dice Truth- A Player Character in a typical RPG is rough around the edges, at best. Often fringe outsiders that live on the edge of civilization. Often outright criminals, killers or worse. Even the typical adventurer is on the edge like bounty hunters and other such people. Players in a typical RPG are very much playing the game to get out of the tedium of normal, boring everyday life. Such a player will act in ways in the game that they could never do in real life. The RPG lets the player live out any of their wild fantasies.So a typical player in a typical RPG will have their PC just near automatically kill anything they can, often for no reason.  And this is on top of how many players just think anything in a game, like NPCs, are just there for them to use, abuse or worse, as they see fit.You can avoid this type of bad railroading by keeping NPCs alive.  Here are some ways to keep NPCs alive:Keep NPCs away from the PCs- This is simple enough, the king or whatever, never meets with the PCs personally: they send a representative. Sure the PC can kill them, but the king can just send another. Any powerful NPC has better things to do then meet with PCs in person.Guards- Again, simple enough. The NPC has guards. They block anyone from getting close to the important NPC. And the guards have body guard abilities so they can intercept incoming attacks.Disarmament this is the basic idea that the PCs must be disarmed before they can even get close to talking to the NPC. The players are a lot less likely to act when this happens.Villainous Voice-keep the NPC little more then a voice. The NPC uses some form of long distance communication. In a typical fantasy game this can be something like a talking skull or an illusion.The Villains Group- the NPC is just a part of a larger group, and they are easily replaceable within the group.The NPC in a Box- For a fun twist, the NPC is not a standard mortal. They are something like a ghost that lives in an item like a coin or a locket. They possess a body. Their borrowed body can be killed easy enough, but unless the PCs also destroy the item, they can come right back.The NPC you Know- warning that this one is only for more advanced groups that do deep role playing. For a lot of reasons it can be better to keep an NPC around, even a villain , that the PCs know. When the PCs know an NPC in a deep role playing game they can do all sorts of role playing with, verse and against the NPC. So they will have a reason to keep them around.The Society Life- Again for more advanced groups that do deep role playing. When the PC(s) are part of the game worlds society, they won’t always be able to act freely. Society has it’s burdens. If the players a deep role players, they will care about such things.For a deeper, more powerful effect, you can add in Game Mechanical Consequences. This will often have to be outside the normal by-the-book rules for many games. When a player has their PC cross a line, they lose the mechanical game benefits of their class, affiliation or such. A good example is when a PC is a member of the Law Guard and they just randomly kill an NPC, so they loose the benefits from that group, both role playing and game mechanics.</blockquote>

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