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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9854727" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, but perhaps potentially very minor.  A lot of railroading for me depends on the why of what you are doing. To me the real issue is whether the justification for planar lock is based on the internal logic of the setting or whether it is based on the desires of the GM for how he wants the scenario to play out.  In this case, a good question is why the Winter Court would want to seal everyone in the first place (as opposed to say sealing everyone out) and whether they believably would have the tools to do so.  In particular, if they can devise a spell that steals all the tuning forks in the domain without a saving throw or other check, then they could conceivably by the same powers do a whole lot of things that would make them basically omnipotent relative to PCs.  Does the logic of everything that is happening match the actual goals of the NPCs and the listable powers on their stat block, or are the powers being invented on the spot solely so the GM can get the scenario he wants?So in the case of Undermountain, did the creator have a good reason for wanting to planar lock all of his stronghold?  Did he have the sort of resources that would have made this possible and available?  How did he do it?The reason those questions are important is that they determine whether you are railroading.  If a wizard's tower is planar locked that to me makes a ton of sense, because as a PC if I had the wherewithal I'd do the same thing.  But obviously, planar locking a huge area takes a ton of resources.  If the cost of planar locking a huge area amounted to 100's of thousands of XP, would any wizard do it?  Or wouldn't they instead spend more efficiently on just locking the important parts?   Perhaps if the goal was to create a prison to contain evil spirits, then it would make sense to do that if the containment made sense in the first place.  But then you'd almost certainly not make it sprawling, and in my game the backstory would almost certainly be the place was crafted over centuries by many wizards working diligently and not one wizard trying to pay for the whole thing all at once.One reason this is important is that if you are working on the basis of "what should this be like according to the rules and logic of the setting" these things are discoverable, analyzable, and often will have rumors or other means of learning them ahead of time.  If they are just because the meta requires them, then there is probably nothing the PCs can do about it because the whole point was "stop the PCs".  So for example, in the case of a planar lock, it would show up the first time you cast detect magic - "So you notice that the whole area is radiating this blinding abjuration magic on an epic scale."  And potentially, depending on what your rules said, the whole thing might be subject to Break Enchantment or some other recourse.  The more you as a GM are wiggling around a making special exceptions to make the normal rules not apply in this situation and the more you are inventing special powers that couldn't be on a PCs stat block to justify it, the more in my opinion you are railroading.Which again, I'm passing no judgment on just saying you as a GM should be aware of that.</blockquote>

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