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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4250819" data-attributes="member: 5143">I hate to say it...but, why?  I have had a lot of fun killing things and taking their stuff for years and years.  Why would I suddenly need more?  I mean, I like to have the chance to play a cool character, I like to have an interesting plot and reason why I'm killing monsters.  I like to feel heroic so I like thinking that the killing of monsters is helping people.It's the game I've loved playing for 15 years now.  I've destroyed evil cultists, rescued people from drow, traveled through time and space, explored new worlds....and killed the stuff there.  But still, it's fun.No, I'm just used to dealing with players who will take ANY advantage they can get.  Print it in a book and they will find a way to interpret it in such a way that they can use it to WAY more advantage than it should have.Sure, it's fairly funny to use an illusion to humiliate an NPC you don't like.  And that's a fairly harmless use of that power...and worth being a 1st level power.  However, the question becomes what happens when people take that power and use it in a combat situation?  What happens when one of my players sees a spell that says "Make an illusionary object any size up to huge" and thinks "What if I made it look like a dragon?  That should scare away the orcs, right?"?Then, I have an adventure with a big climax where the players fight the Orc chieftan and his elite guard.  And it has to be decided by my interpretation of whether or not the monsters fall for the illusionary dragon.  Not very fair for the players.  And if I decide that they run away from the dragon...it is rather anticlimactic.  You run into the room filled with the most powerful Orcs in the tribe after fighting your way past their vast hordes, you finally stand before their leader.  Then you make him run away with an illusion of a dragon.  The end.From a balance point of view, the question becomes: Why is it that I should give a power that can defeat all the monsters in an encounter to one person but not to the fighter?  The player of the fighter shouldn't feel like he picked a weak class.These are the sort of adventures WOTC SELLS to people all the time.  They not only like them, they pay money for them.  I know, since I volunteer to help edit and write adventures for the RPGA(for both 3rd and 4th Ed).  I mean, this is about average for Living Greyhawk adventures and I've heard numbers as high as 200,000 as to the number of people who play in the campaign.I've mentioned this in another thread...but most people like to have an interesting plot in a game.  I know, if left entirely to my own devices I can wander around in a game world and amuse myself for about 2 hours before I get bored.  I've come pretty close to timing it.  After that, I want a plot of some sort to reveal itself.  I want a villager to be attacked and I have to defend him or I want a mysterious cloaked man to offer me a job.  And I want those things to be part of a larger story that I have to discover.And as soon as you put a plot into your game, you need to railroad, at least a bit.  After all, by having a plot you need to make sure the players stay on it.  You need to give clues in order to lead people to further parts of the adventure.  If they follow those clues, there is now a rail of sorts.  Heck, the best adventures ARE railroaded.</blockquote>

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