Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6336605" data-attributes="member: 4937">No.  That's just me.  Any perceived emotion on my part should be taken with a grain of salt.You say they were trying to complete a ritual.  Ok, when would that ritual have ended?  A ritual like 'Make Whole' takes 10 minutes.  If the ritual was began before the fight broke out, why wasn't it complete by the time the party completed the short rest if not before?  If they'd gone to the vault, then maybe returned to town for a long rest, then come back, would the ritual have been done by then?I think it's great that you thought up some rationale for keeping the combats separate but the sort of rationale you provide imply to me that, for example, the ritual had an indefinite duration and regardless of when they opened the door they would have encountered the ritual being performed.  The inhabitants of that room have no real animation unless the door is opened, triggering the scripted event.  I don't think you had in your notes, "The ritual will be complete by 3:30 PM.", and you kept careful track of time to see if the party arrived before, during, or after the ritual.  My fundamental point going forward from here is that you need to decide what sort of game you really want to have and use the tools appropriate to making that game.   Your using what appears to be a loosely simulations tool set, which reflects my tastes and preferences, but it's not at all clear to me from your choice of rules and statements about what you are trying to accomplish and past admission that you've railroaded a lot that this is really what you want.So I'm basically doing what I usually do and being provocative here, not because I'm angry, but because I'm forceful.  If you really want to do simulation, then your doing it wrong.   If you really want to railroad, then your unreflected upon adherence to things like concrete spatiality (when as I think, you have abstract temporality as evidenced by the suspended animation ritual occurring 'when they open the door') and rules as physics are getting in the way of your real goals as a GM.   If you want to learn to railroad well, I can tell you how.  It's not that railroading is bad, it's just that it's often not artfully done.For example, if you really didn't want the outcome, why didn't it occur to you to redraw the map on the fly so that the vault was not immediately present on the other side of the door, but for example, down a stairway leading to a second similar (locked) door.   Or you could have put a corridor on the fly between the room and office.  After all, the players have no way of knowing what the map of the world looks like until you tell them.  You don't have to stick to any fact you haven't disclosed unless you have a commitment to 'fairness' that is greater than your commitment to a particular story.  I think you are trying a little bit to be both director and referee at the same time, but not being consistent in how you apply those stances.  The result can only be frustration on your part.So any way, I agree with several others, that in your case, having the PC's be captured and providing for their eventual escape is probably the best way to color their defeat and get the story back on track.I completely disagree with the idea of addressing this problem in the metagame.  In your case, since it seems like you'd probably be better off embracing your inner conductor and becoming a good one, and one prerequisite of that is becoming a skilled illusionist.  One of the goals of a skilled conductor is to get the players to believe that they aren't on a railroad, that the story isn't in a certain sense linear, that events are preceding in a logical manner rather than according to whim or metagame considerations, and that they aren't able to rely on your protection.  If that illusion is broken in some way, the results can get ugly.  This is not about not admitting your mistakes.  This is about on one hand not making it seem like the characters are puppets and you the puppet master, and not making it seem on the other hand like the players will only get what the want and expect.   Even on a railroad, the players can give input to the story.  It's more about how much of a safety net your preferred plot has than whether or not the players have choices.  But you don't want to give the impression that either the PC's or the narrative has so much of a safety net that there is no way you'll let either fail.  If you let the players see the magic, it ruins the entertainment.</blockquote>

Verification