The Other Railroading Thread

[MrWaeseL]

Or do your players not choose their campaign at all?

The DM does in our group.

[RandomCasualty]

Well it's certainly ok to ask the PCs beforehand if they have anything they specifically want to do, and low level games can fairly readily be done by winging it. Once you get to mid or high level though, you just can't create reasonable challenges on the fly, or at least I can't. There's just no way to equip NPCs with magic items, feats and spells and prepare a decent battle strategy plus a dungeon map without doing some plotting beforehand.

I could easily do this in 2nd edition becuase there were many fewer variables, but in 3rd it just doesn't work for me. If your PCs min/max and use strategy at all, you as the DM have to as well, and that means preparation. And the higher level the campaign, the more crap you've got to deal with. I've really noticed that my 2nd edition quests were a lot more freeform because I could make crap up on the fly easier. It's another problem with having too many rules and large monster stat blocks.

And while I don't really see problems with PCs sometimes choosing the quests, I think it's good to once in a while have quests that are unexpected spring upon them. Like the PCs recieve a message from a family member requesting help or something. And of course a major world spanning campaign even like the War of the Ring is going to involve the PCs in some way. It's hard to not get involved in something so big if you're heroes.

And I think that's ok, so long as you don't do it to the PCs alot. You can have some mandatory quests and some that the PCs choose to take. Though sometimes the PCs may just be working for a certain organization and take whatever quests or jobs the organization gives them. If you're knights and servants of the king and he tells you to do something, chances are you're going to do it. In which case, most of your campaign will consist of mandatory quests, with the occasional PC inspired quest where he's asking the king to check out some ruins that seemed interesting or whatever.

[Crissa]

1143728757[/unixtime]]

Or do your players not choose their campaign at all?

The DM does in our group.

Then why do you belly up to his table?

Anyhow, apparently Emergent themes are the ones which are the most popular here: Create a setting, and then see where the characters take them.

Unfortunately, you can't have the Mt Doom scenario in this case, because this requires pre-scripting; an artifact which may destroy the players and the world if not destroyed itself. The fact that Sauron can be talked to, but not touched, is not railroading. It's part of the setting. You don't normally have a chance to kill gods unless you're epic characters.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

Well, if its part of the setting for your characters greatest enemy to be invulnerable then go mad.

No wait, that still sucks.

This is why the old threads about how D&D interpretations of dieties suck are so right.

An omnipotent omniscient omnipresent force of the type modern society recognises as a diety has no right to a presence in a good role playing setting as it either inexplicably (and inconsistently) decides to be irrelevant anyway or it just does what it wants with no recourse to stopping it.

Except in this case apparently for the railroad to mount doom.

In my D&D campaigns the gods either do not interact with the world such that they may as well not exist at all (and therefore are not and can not be the big bads). Or they live in their main temple just down the street and you can go have a friendly cup of tea with them or stab them in the back, at pre epic levels.

Making your big bad a vast all powerful force you just can't interact with except via the prepared railroad is not cricket. Its not even good Cthulhu practice, let alone good D&D GMing.

[RandomCasualty]

1143765256[/unixtime]]
This is why the old threads about how D&D interpretations of dieties suck are so right.

Actually if you've got clerics who get all thier class abilities from deities, they better damn well be hard to kill. Nobody wants to suddenly lose all thier powers because their god can't stay alive.

Deities are basically made to be backstory. The fact that they materialize at all is the problem, not that they can't be killed. I actually prefer Sauron like deities. Just some giant eye that tells its followers stuff but can't actually come down and smite you at any given time.

I actually consider Sauron to be the model for a well done fantasy deity. As opposed to some crap like Thor who just comes down and kills anyone he doens't like cause he can and nobody has enough stats to stop him. That actually constantly runs into the problem of why the gods don't just come down and kick ass on a regular basis.

I actually hate the idea of statted gods entirely. If all the gods behaved like Sauron in LotR, we'd be ok.

In my D&D campaigns the gods either do not interact with the world such that they may as well not exist at all (and therefore are not and can not be the big bads). Or they live in their main temple just down the street and you can go have a friendly cup of tea with them or stab them in the back, at pre epic levels.

Hate to be a cleric in your games, considering your'e getting your powers from something that ain't even as powerful as you are.

It becomes kinda odd storywise when the easiest way to defeat a high cleric is to kill his god.

[power_word_wedgie]

If you can find a DM that enjoys playing it by the seat of their pants and makes things up along the way, that's great. Really, being able to go anywhere on a landscape is always nice.

However, not all DMs are like that. If you're able to find a DM like the former that can keep up with the stories without any discontinuities, I suggest that you hold onto them like gold because they are few and far between. However, the problem becomes that people that can do this usually are DM for quite a bit, and then you see them post on message boards saying, "Man, I'm burned out from DMing D&D all of the time to the point that it is boring - I need to leave the game."

Don't get me wrong - I like the flexibility. I've always thought that maybe the next great book series would be, "101 side adventures for level x" where each side adventure would have 3 encounters (monsters or traps). Personally, it would be ideal because it would be something that players could be able to handle during a evening gaming session. Dungeon magazine used to do this, but I haven't seen it for a while. However, you really need to have something like this in order to combat "railroading" by all DMs.

[Crissa]

1143765256[/unixtime]]Well, if its part of the setting for your characters greatest enemy to be invulnerable then go mad.

No wait, that still sucks.

Buh?

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

Hate to be a cleric in your games, considering your'e getting your powers from something that ain't even as powerful as you are.

It becomes kinda odd storywise when the easiest way to defeat a high cleric is to kill his god.

Oh bullshit. Just because you can do it doesn't mean its easier than killing some priest you don't like.

I'm running an all cleric campaign right at the moment. A large chunk of which revolves around having some actual down to earth interactive dieties.

There is no way that it would be functioning half as well if they were a bunch of the usual invisible penis in the sky rip offs.

But then the fact that it isn't a scene by scene remake of LOTR for a start would probably make you hate it anyway.

[RandomCasualty]

1143789582[/unixtime]]
Oh bullshit. Just because you can do it doesn't mean its easier than killing some priest you don't like.

If you can do it, then people pretty much will. So your world is going to be running out of gods pretty quickly when you get into high level play.

Hell if the party of PCs can kill gods, then you're going to get thier foes who would prefer just to knock out the PC's gods instead of fighting them. Not to mention screwing over all their worshippers at the same time.

I'm running an all cleric campaign right at the moment. A large chunk of which revolves around having some actual down to earth interactive dieties.

Personally I don't like down to earth dieties, it pretty much means clerics just become mindless "do what the god tells me to do" machines. I mean when your god is right there, you're pretty much just getting orders from him all the damn time, and those orders are pretty much unquestionable since they came directly from him.

Not to mention you basically have an infinite use commune spell even for low level clerics and whenever you got a problem, you just ask your god what he thinks the answer is.

When you've got your own deity down to earth, all I can imagine is a quest of entirely railroad quests. If your fucking god asks you to do something directly, you as a cleric pretty much can't say no. And you're complaining about the LotR plotline being a railroad fest?

The problem is that active gods bring up the ELminster paradox all the time. If the God is so uber, why doesn't he just solve the problem himself. And if he's not so uber, why the fuck are you serving him? If the PCs can kill the gods, then they might as well kill them and take thier powers. No point being a cleric of someone you can kill.

[PhoneLobster]

You remain stuck in the mindset of dieties being omniscient and omnipotent.

Get over it already. If the diety is a real being who bleeds when you stab them you think they have all the answers?

You think they know everything their clerics get up to?

For the last time, Jehovah is a totally shite NPC.

[RandomCasualty]

1143793014[/unixtime]]You remain stuck in the mindset of dieties being omniscient and omnipotent.

I dunno what you were reading or watching, but Sauron is netiher of those. As for omnipotent, the lidless eye can't even pick up a sword, and as for omniscient, he didn't have any idea Frodo had the ring till the end, now did he?

Sauron is everything you want a D&D deity to be. He does all his work through his followers, which is good because most of your time is spent killing evil minions.

And I really have no problem with mortal gods, until they start granting spells. When you start handing out spells to clerics and your very existence maintains their class features, then you better well be really tough to kill.

If you just want really powerful beings with powerful magic calling themselves gods, then that's fine. They just shouldn't be handing out spells to worshippers. Your god shouldn't be the weak link to your religion. That's just stupid.

[PhoneLobster]

He isn't what you want because.

A) He is invulnerable except by railroad.

B) Everyone is constantly talking up how uber he is and how totally doomed everyone else is. There is totally no way anyone can figure out how to beat him and everyone is panicking. If the players want to be heroes its him they have to defy, and him they want to defeat.

C) Everyone always talks up how he is totally the big bad. Its not "Orc King Thog the 1st is going to destroy us all!" Its all about Sauron, Sauron, Sauron. Even the Anti-Gandalf gets less airplay as the DMs dark will on middle earth. Players pick that kind of thing up and take it to heart. "Who do we need to defeat to save the world?" "Sauron!", it sure as hell isn't "Uh, some orc dude!".

Get over it, gods don't need to be INVULNERABLE, because the apex of a the pyramid of NPCs never needs to be invulnerable.

Who cares if they are the lame flavour text behind a class feature. Even if you decide to go with that (which is already a bad idea for SOOOOO many reasons) that makes unattached clerics a much fought over resource.

I can't see why any cleric who just lost a diety shouldn't have a dozen others knocking on his door begging him to let them be his magic big buddy. Even if it wasn't a dead god that lost your powers it doesn't matter what sin lost you your last god for, there is another god in charge of that fricking sin, like he doesn't want you working with him?

And heck you continue to be so narrow in your perception of what is and isn't a diety and how religion functions that you continue to be trapped in the poorer part of D&D priest diety relationships and their interpretation. Its a fricking pantheon, you don't even need (and indeed its a bit wierd) to be tied to ONE god.

[RandomCasualty]

1143838777[/unixtime]]

A) He is invulnerable except by railroad.

So what? He's not something you fight, therefore you don't care that he happens to be invulnerable.

B) Everyone is constantly talking up how uber he is and how totally doomed everyone else is. There is totally no way anyone can figure out how to beat him and everyone is panicking. If the players want to be heroes its him they have to defy, and him they want to defeat.

It's his minions that they're going to want to defeat. Lets face it, the orcs armies and the Nazgul are more of a threat than Sauron himself.

Defeating Sauron is pretty much thwarting his plans. Not necessarily killing him.

C) Everyone always talks up how he is totally the big bad. Its not "Orc King Thog the 1st is going to destroy us all!" Its all about Sauron, Sauron, Sauron. Even the Anti-Gandalf gets less airplay as the DMs dark will on middle earth. Players pick that kind of thing up and take it to heart. "Who do we need to defeat to save the world?" "Sauron!", it sure as hell isn't "Uh, some orc dude!".

This is all how you play up the storyline. Yeah, Sauron is the big bad, but there can also be lesser bads that the PCs are more concerned with Sauruman, the Witch-King, the Nazgul, named orc leaders... you can come up with as many subordinate leaders that you need for the PCs to fight against.

And that's generally how D&D works. You don't usualyl end up fighting Manshoon, you end up fighting Manshoon's Zhentarium agents. You don't fight Bane, you fight his clerics.

Because once you're at the top of the food chain, you can't have a campaign anymore. Once you can take down the master badass, everything else is just clean up.

I can't see why any cleric who just lost a diety shouldn't have a dozen others knocking on his door begging him to let them be his magic big buddy.

Yeah, but faith isn't like that. You don't just convert over to someone new like changing from Walmart to McDonalds. A cleric pretty much devotes his whole life to one god. When that god dies, he's going to basically feel like crap. It shouldn't be "oh well, time to send my resume out to a bunch of other gods." Not if your clerics are roleplayed with any actual integrity.

Being a cleric is about faith and devotion. You don't just convert overnight. If you're a 20th level cleric, you probably don't convert at all.

[PhoneLobster]

Yeah, but faith isn't like that. You don't just convert over to someone new like changing from Walmart to McDonalds. A cleric pretty much devotes his whole life to one god. When that god dies, he's going to basically feel like crap. It shouldn't be "oh well, time to send my resume out to a bunch of other gods." Not if your clerics are roleplayed with any actual integrity.

Being a cleric is about faith and devotion. You don't just convert overnight. If you're a 20th level cleric, you probably don't convert at all.

What the hell...?

People convert over night in the real world like all the damn time.

PRIESTS do it.

Why the heck should it be any different in a fantasy world?

How many crazy baseless preconceptions can someone cling to so thoroughly?

I dread how it might effect a game you were running.

[RandomCasualty]

1143882678[/unixtime]]
People convert over night in the real world like all the damn time.

PRIESTS do it.

Not very often, I'll tell you that much.

And having a high level cleric turn would be the equivalent of a cardinal or the Pope turning to Islam.

A high level cleric is a totally devout follower. You don't just lose that overnight.

[Oberoni]

PhoneLobster, I honestly have no idea why you're debating RC anymore.

RC is saying a lot of reasonable things, and you're acting flabbergasted about it.

It seems like your message always boils down to "You don't play D&D exactly the same as I do! Railroader!"

[User3]

When it comes to gods, I always like to split the difference.

Make the god some unkillable abstract force, but make his avatar a statted up character. By doing this, your god is unkillable, but something can actually come down and hand you a quest or a brawl. When the avatar dies, a new one is picked somewhere in the world.

Forgotten Realms would have your gods be chicks you can fvck because we're all 14 and thats awesome, and thats the wrong way to go. Avatars can have love affairs and personal flaws and all that rot and no one feels too weird. Heck, I'd even take a few levels in Consort of Mystra....I don't what the class abilities are, but you get them by banging the living avatar of a god so they must be pretty neat.

Avatars can also be the plot device you need for any "god stories" you might have. Clerics of Lolth not getting their powers? Well, maybe someone has captured her avatar and is siphoning her power off. Priests of Cthulu trying to raise their god? Sure, they are trying to bring the avatar of their god to the Prime, which is an epic level character and bad news for all the peasants.

You can even have rules where the more powerful an avatar is, the less screentime on the prime material plane he is allowed (barring massive magical rituals). In that way, a more powerful avatar can affect the world as much as a weaker god (weaker giods do more, but its more subtle while a powerful avatar stops by for giant acts that take little time).

That way, big gods like Vecna can be "and now we must stop his cultists from calling him" gods, and Sauron or the Catlord can be gods that hang around their respective fortresses and come out once in a while and kick a little ass.

--------------

A note about Elminster:

My first enounter with this character was the novel Spellfire, and I think that the character was fine before it became a self-insertion character that fvcked gods in their god-holes (real insertion).

The original character was a guy who pretended to be the really feeble but wise sage, and adventurers who roll up into his rural farm community and ask him about glyphs and crap, and he'd send them in the right direction. Sure, he was a powerful mage, but he knew that high level wizardry is a game of rocket-launcher tag so his days of active adventuring were over; he was leveling by accomplishing story goals through proxies and occasionally fighting one of his old enemies in secret.

Thats fine. i mean, why blow your cover as a weak-ass sage just to fight a chimera when you can send some other guys who can get full XP for it, and maybe they become high level friends of yours. Why loot a tomb for thousands of GP when you can search for the resting place of an artifact?

When the character became a self-insertion character, it ended. People started asking "if he can kill anything with one spell, why doesn't he just do that all the time?" Like God, he had the question attached to him "if he can stop evil in the world, then why does he let it exist?"

And thats not useful. The self-insertion version of the character has to be ignored. Like any kind of masterbation, we have to acknowledge thats its essentially a sterile pursuit.

[PhoneLobster]

I don't know why I'm debating him either, but suggesting religious conversion is totally impossible and priests in a pantheistic world are all dedicated monotheists for life is NOT reasonable Oberoni.

Indeed its rather loopy.

It seems like your message always boils down to "You don't play D&D exactly the same as I do! Railroader!"

My message boils down to, unstatted super beings that can't be interactive but dick the characters around anyway, piss players off.

I'd use the term railroading because if as RC represented it you use a big lack of stats/rules to bludgeon the players over the head and declare large swathes of options, stories and actions impossible or automatic failures that seems to me to be excessively controlling behaviour on the part of the GM.

When it comes to gods, I always like to split the difference.

Interactive avatars is all very well. For them to function what they essentially are doing is taking the role of the big bad (or some other NPC) that would have been filled by an uninteractive diety.

Thats probably good.

But if you like that then outside of trying to maintain forgotten realms continuity (which doesn't really benefit players) I don't see why the interactive avatar can't just be the god.

Now if for some reason there can't be a statted interactive character I don't see how allowing that critter to be a key NPC like the big bad guy is in anyway good.

At least with an interactive avatar of bane the PCs have a big bad they can defeat by some means other than the GM fiat railroad of the rings.

[Hey_I_Can_Chan]

Or do your players not choose their campaign at all?

The DM does in our group.

Then why do you belly up to his table?

Crissa, the best advice I ever got as a DM is to DM the campaign I want to DM. That means if I want to be in it, my enthusiasm will carry over to the players, my plots will be better because I want to be there, and the characters will be better because I want them to be happy there.

I'll belly up to anybody's table who absolutely loves his campaign... and who isn't just using his campaign as an excuse to show how cool his NPCs are.

RPGs aren't democracies but a benevolent dictatorships.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Phonelobster, RC never said that preists cannot convert to another god's worship. He just suggested that suggesting that it shouldn't happen lightly.

And frankly, I think the idea of a god as something that just anyone with enough levels on them can kill is pretty retarded in 90% of campaigns, almost as retarded as having a god itself as the BBEG in a campagn. I thought it was established that not EVERY idea in LotR is any good in a D&D game.

-Desdan

[power_word_wedgie]

1143936346[/unixtime]]My message boils down to, unstatted super beings that can't be interactive but dick the characters around anyway, piss players off.

Hey, all a DM has to do to piss off players is what I emphasized. If a DM is doing that as his ultimate goal, everybody might as well start either finding another DM in the group or find another group altogether. The rest is just details.

[dbb]

1143953172[/unixtime]]almost as retarded as having a god itself as the BBEG in a campagn.

Desdan, you are so, so right.

In fact, I'd like to suggest a general rule derived from this statement: if your BBEG is someone who the players can't eventually get hardcore enough to deal a permanent defeat to, you should probably go back and rethink who you want the BBEG to be.

--d.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I gotta say one thing, any thread where Phonelobster posts is guaranteed to deliver.

[RandomCasualty]

1143936346[/unixtime]]
My message boils down to, unstatted super beings that can't be interactive but dick the characters around anyway, piss players off.

Only they don't dick around anybody.

You shouldn't look at a god as a being, but rather as a coalition personification. In many ways I view D&D gods much like corporeations in Shadowrun. The corporation itself doesn't actual do anything, the people that work for the corp are the ones you've got to worry about. Similarly you can't "kill" the corporation because there is nothing tangible to kill beyond followers.

[Neeek]

Um, in that case, "Killing off the orc hordes" is a viable strategy. Easily as effective as "tossing the ring into a volcano", since the ring thing doesn't actually kill off the orc hordes.