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Message: <blockquote data-quote="haakon1" data-source="post: 5712308" data-attributes="member: 25619">Good point.I'm not sure I agree with your implication that even the slightest hint of railroading is bad.If that were true, then any Adventure Path -- or any campaign that's not a seat-of-the-pants improv sandbox -- would be at least a partially bad campaign, because it's not completely free player choice every second.Generally, I think DM's need to plan encounters and need to get the PC's to the site of X adventure.  That's not railroading, it's getting on with game, as I've always seen it run, as least.What annoys me when the two following scenarios are both decried here as bad DM railroading:a) "Railroading" as the DM drags the players around by the nose and micromanages them.  E.g., they must befriend the Spirit of the Land, 'cause it's cool or because it's the only way to beat the BBEG, and he "must" be defeated.b) "Railroading" by the evil-bad DM buying/building a scenario and wanting the players to play it.If I as DM say: "So your mentor's wife is waiting for you at the tavern when you come back from your shopping, and she looks very upset.  She takes you aside, away from other guests at the tavern, and says your mentor may have been kidnapped, as he's been missing for two days.  She asks you to investigate."Then I expect you as a player to say (OOC: oh, here's the adventure hook, goody, let's play) and in character something like:  "Does she know where he was last seen?  Did he have any enemies?"As in, do improv right and go with building a story together, rather than shutting it down and killing the story.  If you are there to play D&D, by all means go ahead and play some D&D.If the player chooses to react to that lead-in by saying, "No, ignore the wife, let's go wandering around some more for no reason" or "Let's shove around the Commoners in the bar to prove we're tougher than them", or some other not-getting-on-with-the-adventure approach, I'm going to be annoyed because the player is wasting everyone's time.So if you say my (b) scenario is railroading and wrongbadfun, I have to disagree.  If you don't say that, then nevermind.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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