When you as DM cry foul in the players' favor

[Rabelais]

And if I ruin a session I want to at least be there

QFT

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Oh gods, the Year of the Reckoning series by White Wolf - there is one where the PCs are dragged from scene to scene, and never allowed to even get off the railroad - all so that they can see Baba Yaga get killed by an NPC that they are powerless against. The worst written piece of drivel that I have ever seen published for a major RPG. I cried 'Foul! Begone from my sight vile spawn of bad game design! Get thee hence!' and I swear the book evaporated into a foul cloud of sulfurous smoke, leaving only the outline of a clove cigarette on the table.*

The Auld Grump
*Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a bit here.... The adventure really was tripe though.

 

[an_idol_mind]

Every Eberron module I played through (the first trilogy + Voyage of the Golden Dragon) had huge swaths of material that I ripped out because it was either stupid, redundant, or both. Example: Whispers of the Vampire's Blade has a scene where the PCs have to fight through guards and leap onto an airship as it's leaving its dock. Later in the same module, they have to fight through guards and leap onto a moving train as it's leaving the station. I dropped the latter scene entirely.

I don't know if that's what the original poster was looking for, but it did mean one less fight in the module, which made things a bit easier for the PCs. More importantly, it meant having more fun at the table, since the players and I would have been bored out of our skulls replaying what is essentially the same scene again.

 

[el-remmen]

I guess I am just a mean DM.

 

[billd91]

On another gaming website a few years ago, I read a post by a DM who told how he had read the combined Slavers modules (all four modules included in one booklet), and how the plot required the players to be captured, wtihout giving them any chance at all to escape capture. He noted how the Slavers would go out of their way to destroy the PCs' most cherished heirlooms and their most precious possessions. It's supposed to motivate the PCs and get them mad at the Slavers, but the DM concluded that it would only make them mad at him. It's important to note that these aren't just their most powerful magical goodies; role-playing trinkets that might be worthless in-game but are still very important to the PCs, such as pictures of loved ones, family crests, and other things like that would be destroyed just to distress the PCs.

He panned the module and IIRC decided not to run it as written, since he thought the players should at least have a chance to evade capture and be able to keep their precious treasures, especially the ones that mean a lot to them.

To be fair, the A supermodule treatment was expected to follow the Temple of Elemental Evil in a super campaign arc and I would expect the PCs to be pretty magic heavy at the end of ToEE. And the best of their magical treasure, the stuff potentially useful to the Slavelords, was intended to be kept on board.
The intent of the encounter was to really give the PCs a rage against the Slavelords and drive to take them down compared to the rather weak adventure hook of the originals.
But, interestingly enough, I didn't use the encounter as written either and the PCs ended up defeating the slaver ship.

Note, however, that the A supermodule has a second encounter that is expected to defeat the PCs and put them into the Slavelord's clutches, but it is presented as a straight-up fight. There's no real way an appropriately leveled and equipped group of PCs should win (and I crushed mine handily when I ran it without even revealing all 9 Slavelords) so it's really a railroad... but it's a railroad that most players aren't going to begrudge very much because it's presented in a totally different way.

 

[Jhaelen]

Why is this so common? As far as I can tell about 98% of published adventures with plots suck due to railroading.

Unfortunately, that fits my experiences, too. It doesn't matter much, though, since I mostly don't use much of the plots as written. Instead I create my own story and just use the (adapted) settings/locations/encounters.

However, some adventures dissolve completely if you try to take them apart. A good example for this very bad kind of adventure is the first trilogy of adventures for Eberron. I've been very disappointed by these. This was one of the reasons which kept me from using the setting for my campaign.

 

[John Morrow]

On another gaming website a few years ago, I read a post by a DM who told how he had read the combined Slavers modules (all four modules included in one booklet), and how the plot required the players to be captured, wtihout giving them any chance at all to escape capture. He noted how the Slavers would go out of their way to destroy the PCs' most cherished heirlooms and their most precious possessions. It's supposed to motivate the PCs and get them mad at the Slavers, but the DM concluded that it would only make them mad at him. It's important to note that these aren't just their most powerful magical goodies; role-playing trinkets that might be worthless in-game but are still very important to the PCs, such as pictures of loved ones, family crests, and other things like that would be destroyed just to distress the PCs.

To be fair to the Slavers modules, they were written as convention tournament modules for use with pre-generated characters, not long-term PCs that the players are attached to. I also think the GM advice in the Hackmaster version of those modules about how to deal with player complaints is pretty funny.

That said, when I ran my own variant of that part of the module, I felt it was important to craft a trap that could actually capture the PCs by the rules and didn't destroy their items (though they were taken away and they played part of the adventure without anything, like in the original module). I also telescoped the capture because the players were using divinations fairly regularly and one of the divinations told them to expect to be captured but to not despair over it. It was pretty funny that when the characters got stripped of their goods and locked up, the players started saying, "I'm despairing!" but they took it well -- better than they would have if I had just captured them by fiat, like the original module does.

 

[S'mon]

I did this recently with the Stormbringer adventure 'Rogue Mistress' - a horrible railroad that begins with the PCs involuntarily implanted with demonic hearts that then slowly consume them for the next 100 pages or so.

 

[Lorthanoth]

I really would like to run Rogue Mistress but I think it might be a good idea with fresh characters that the players aren't attached to, and warn them... "You won't like the first part"

Or... maybe the implantation is a really good spur to adventure? After all, aren't all hooks 'railroads'? I'm undecided.

 

[S'mon]

e

I really would like to run Rogue Mistress but I think it might be a good idea with fresh characters that the players aren't attached to, and warn them... "You won't like the first part"

Or... maybe the implantation is a really good spur to adventure? After all, aren't all hooks 'railroads'? I'm undecided.

Yes, I think that, as with the Slavers modules, as the start to a campaign it might be acceptable. That said, it didn't make sense to me that Pollidemia the sorceress would deliberately piss off the heroes she summoned to retrieve the Tenatir - even an insane sorceress catches more flies with honey! Promise the average PC a bit of cash and a magic item and you have a loyal agent; mess with them like that and you have a bunch of foes who'll stop at nothing to bring you down. Of course the adventure ensures that the PCs *must* stay on the rails the whole time. It also suffers from way too many Mary Sue NPCs. Eventually I just ran it as a brief free-the-Tenatir vignette, I may use some of the alternate planes for inspiration later.