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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ingolf" data-source="post: 4167883" data-attributes="member: 1783">In general I mean something overarching going on, with NPC actors that have their own agendas, secrets and so forth. Plenty of those sorts of "plots" can be subverted by things like scry, etc, and as a DM I get tired of constantly having to account for that sort of thing at all times, but I can deal with it.But the second type is not automatically a bad thing. No one likes to be railroaded, of course, and if a DM is going to restrict what the PCs can do, it has to be done rarely and with considerable care, or the players will (rightly) object.For example, my last 3.5 campaign started with all of the PCs in prison together after being captured by slavers. When play started, the rogue had just managed to lift a key off the hobgoblin jailer and the escape was on. Later in that same campaign, I framed one of the PCs for the murder of his Lord in a fairly complicated story involving plenty of behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, a bastard son and (eventually) a trial by combat.Both of those were situations where the PCs were forced into a specific course of action, but I don't think either of them were "bad" plots or stories, and based on the reaction of my players they didn't think so either. And in the case of the PC framed for murder, something as trivial as "Detect Thoughts" could have made the entire thing a hell of a lot less interesting - I could only run that particular game because I have fairly oddball players and there was no one in the group capable of casting it. Oh, sure, the actual murderer could have been wearing a lead-lined hat all the time or something silly like that I suppose. But the best solution (for me at least) is to just dispense with things like "Detect Thoughts" and the various other plot-twisting effects entirely.</blockquote>

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