Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4627371" data-attributes="member: 58197">True, but just because you can come up with an in-game excuse for your railroading doesn't make it less of a railroad. The limitations should be reasonable ones; the players should be able to figure them out ahead of time; and if the players come up with a clever way to circumvent those limitiations, they should be allowed some degree of success.I'll present my argument for why each of my scenarios is a railroad:1) This scenario has the best case for not being a railroad situation; it's entirely possible that the Wild Wood and the Caves contain no clues. The problem here is that the DM is dismissing each player idea out of hand, without even a pretense at giving it a fair shot. He doesn't ask what sort of clues they're looking for, or how they're going about looking for them. He just says, "You don't find anything."It's especially unreasonable in the case of the Caves of Unspeakable Dread. It's quite possible there might not be any clues in the Wild Wood, but it's pretty hard to credit that all the unspeakably dreadful monsters just up and left the Caves.  It smells strongly of DM-not-wanting-to-deal-with-this. If there really is a legitimate reason for it, then visiting the Caves should be an investigation in itself, and the PCs should be able to rule out a few possibilities if nothing else.2) Sure, you can dream up a reason for the road to be protected from the dire weasels. That isn't the point. The problem is that the players are being rudely shoved back onto the road when they try to go off it.Yes, fairy-tale logic is weird, and if you're running a campaign with a fairy-tale theme, you might create a "don't-go-off-the-path" scenario. I've done it. But in that case, the prohibition should be clearly established for the players ahead of time, not sprung on them the moment they try to deviate from the plan; and the consequences should be more interesting and engaging than just "monsters attack you until you go back on the path." (Remember that ninety percent of the time in fairy-tales, these prohibitions are broken. Often the broken prohibition is all that prevents the story from ending three paragraphs in.)3) This case is the most egregious form of railroading, but not because it's not possible within the logic of the game world. Bahamut might be perfectly capable of taking control of the body of one of his paladins and using it to smite a dragon. It's still a railroad, because the DM is arbitrarily denying the player a choice that he should reasonably be able to make.</blockquote>

Verification