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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5421958" data-attributes="member: 93119">Please give some page numbers of these rules. I haven't seen them before and I'd love to integrate them into my game! On second thought don't bother, I don't need to include your fantasy rules into the actual game. There's nothing in the rules that match what you describe. Hell, the Dungeon Master's Book from the DM's Kit says specifically on page 171 to make sure you give players choices. On page 172 it gives railroading as an example of bad adventure design. Starting on page 203 it goes into detail about creating combat encounters. Page 224 describes skill challenges as non-combat encounters. These suggestions are such that it's actually pretty easy to build encounters on the fly. They also end up far more balanced and interesting than the 2E random encounter tables.You're juxtaposing your DM's or your inability to prevent railroading. As I've said, the encounter design rules are easy to use on the fly. You can very easily set up an interesting encounter based on the actions of the players. There's absolutely no need to "design" all of the encounters ahead of time. You throw some monsters of the right level (usefully listed by role) into an encounter template or pick the skills needed for a skill challenge and voila, an encounter!If this requires massive amounts of pre-planning there's not a lot to do any rules system can do to help you. All of the above should be easy to do on the fly and as a reaction to player's choices. You'll notice Paizo ported this idea to Pathfinder, I doubt they did so because it's an unworkable railroady mess. You can even ignore these design rules if you want. However as a stock design method these are actually pretty damned useful. Again, they're really helpful for new or infrequent DMs which was one of the design goals of 4E. WotC is correct in their belief that the game lives and dies by the number of DMs playing the game.</blockquote>

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