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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Hope" data-source="post: 3267101" data-attributes="member: 27051">Well, it's also a good illustration of the point that you made about the influence of the DM over whether a game is railroaded or not.  Our DM at the time stuck very closely to the plot as written and smacked us about the place something rotten when we tried to forge our own path through the story.To start with we didn't really trust the NPC patron (Elladrin d'Cannith or something), but when we tried to question her further, she ran away and nothing we could do allowed us to catch up with her - because the adventure says that she leaves, there was no way we could alter that.  So, without really having any real in-character reasons to embark on the adventure, we did so anyway because, well, the DM was taking the effort to run it and it's the decent thing to do.We came up with what we thought was a really cool way to deal with the Rose Quarry segment.  We planned to negotiate a settlement with the Karnathi dudes there and do a mutually beneficial deal.  Apparently not catered for in the adventure, so the DM had the NPCs attack us relentlessly without provocation until we were one hit point away from a TPK and either down or captured.  Apparently we were "supposed" to immediately figure out where the mucguffin was and sneak about until we found it.  Failure to do so resulted in punishment.  Bad PCs!  Bad!!We also came up with an alternate approach to the ending (you know - the bit where you are "supposed" to hand over loot to the bad guys - the same bad guys who had beaten and tortured us the session before, I might add).  We rested, spelled up, set up a very cool fortified position in the Whitehearth entrance cave and prepared to lay the smack down.  Again, apparently not catered for in the adventure.  So the DM had some glass zombies suddenly rise out of the cave floor, shatter our ranks and then TPKed us to a man.  Campaign over.It's clearly primarily an issue of the DM not being willing to budge when we tried to actually play our characters and influence the world around us.  However, having since read the adventure, it is also clear that Keith Baker's design makes no allowance (or even any real mention) of alternate paths through these bottlenecks.  The PCs are simply assumed to do things the way he writes them, and hard luck if they want to take an alternate approach.I fully agree that the DM makes or breaks the game (and any associated railroads) and, at the end of the day, I come down firmly in the "It's The DM's Responsibility" camp.  But the adventure design plays a part as well, and a larger part if the DM (for whatever reason) can't recognise problems of this kind...(crazy_cat, if you are reading this, you may mock my continued obsession with our DM's approach to the adventure - I am clearly in need of remedial free-form gaming, preferrably involving pirates, exploding monkeys and Neal Schlessinger... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />)</blockquote>

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