*D&D 4ed*

[Calibron]

And I'm note being polite, I'm not trying to be polite. If your insulted by that, ask someone to ban me, I don't care. I felt insulted by what you're saying as well.

Sounds like you'lll fit right in here.

Also, it's just what two people here said (Sphere and Casualty). Don't judge the entire board on the suggestions of a few.

I agree with them too, I'm sure quite a lot of others do as well. You'd be a moron or a masochist to fully plot out an adventure and then just throw it away because the PCs don't want to swallow your hooks.

And I'm sure Jotoco will fit in just as well as you do, Jerry.

[Username17]

You'd be a moron or a masochist to fully plot out an adventure and then just throw it away because the PCs don't want to swallow your hooks.

Heck no. It's a cooperative storytelling game. If the players genuinely have no interest in the storyline you've conceived of, then the game isn't going to be any fun and you'd be a fool to move forward with it. By far your best bet is to let the players go off into a different direction and recycle whatever characters and monster encounters you need to into the "new" direction.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

I read that as "You'd be a moron or a sadist to fully plot out an adventure and then enforce railroading and blackmail just because the PCs don't want to swallow your hooks."

[Jotoco]

ou'd be a moron or a masochist to fully plot out an adventure and then just throw it away because the PCs don't want to swallow your hooks.

I did that in the past and will that in the future. It's the PCs game in the DM world. NOT the DM game, in the DM world with the DM decisions and DM fun.

Players need to have fun too, you know?

EDIT:

To be fair I did that just yesterday, only it was 3.5

I have plotted and adventure (2 actually, just in case) but the PCs didn't want to go either route. Had to make monster, dungeons and plot on the fly. Ended up very well for everyone involved. Everybody had fun

[Maxus]

Well, I can respect that it's damn hard to cover all your bases when writing adventures. I mean, players can go bang in unexpected directions.

On the other hand, it's a little disappointing to see the BBEG warlord ignore the players and continue giving a speech about the virtues of combat, even after one of the PC's said, "I'd ask you the meaning of life, but you'd say 'war' ", and two other characters are continually cracking (generally pretty good) jokes.

What I do when I DM is have a word with the players beforehand and try to request mindset to help the game flow a bit better. Something like, "Okay, look, you've all been adventuring together for a while. Think tight-knit and try not to be psychos" or "Okay, you're all part of a branch of a thieves' guild, and life's been better for you than if you had not joined. The PCs should have some loyalty to the guild and want to keep it from falling apart, for personal profit if nothing else"

But I have seen graceless, senseless railroading firsthand, and it ain't pretty.

[Jotoco]

But I have seen graceless, senseless railroading firsthand, and it ain't pretty.

That's why we won't allow a particular person in our group to be the DM, despite him wanting to.

He always craft the most beautiful plots and such. But he doesn't accept we change the tinyest bit of it. We look like a ride in the museum, where we really can't touch anything. Everywhere we see signs: "Please don't touch" and "Do not step on the grass". It's boring as hell

[Maxus]

But I have seen graceless, senseless railroading firsthand, and it ain't pretty.

That's why we won't allow a particular person in our group to be the DM, despite him wanting to.

He always craft the most beautiful plots and such. But he doesn't accept we change the tinyest bit of it. We look like a ride in the museum, where we really can't touch anything. Everywhere we see signs: "Please don't touch" and "Do not step on the grass". It's boring as hell

My experience was more...

...Well, the DM would use his knowledge of the characters to craft encounters that would exploit any holes in our defenses. So after a really bad time of it, I quit. A friend tried another game, though, but when his tripping-optimized character threatened to win an encounter by himself, the little sling-wielding humanoids the party was facing suddenly developed 18 Str (when, from trial and error, my friend had figured out they had a +1 Str mod) and then broke out +1 longbows and all focused on the giant guy with the spiked chain.

It wouldn't be as bad if the dude wasn't painfully obvious about it. I mean, I can think of a couple of ways to turn an encounter around without having the NPC's suddenly go Hulk and pull magic weapons out of their asses.

...Actually, it just occurred to me that this DM particularly liked to have scripted fights that the PCs couldn't win, and would still make us play each round of the fight until we lost. That was his intention, anyway.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

...Well, the DM would use his knowledge of the characters to craft encounters that would exploit any holes in our defenses...

I've had similar experiences. Some Gm's try to make encounters challenging by focusing on negating the party's abilities. It is much better to design encounters which require the diverse abilities the party has. I know from personal experience that some Gm's spend years playing and don't figure this out.

_____________

I wonder if this might be much less of a problem in 4e. You don't really do anything apart from whittling damage and weak 1 round status effects. Level appropriate rituals cost 10% of your character wealth, and therefore won't be used. The Dm doesn't have the option of taking away your shiniest toys, because you don't have any.

[Talisman]

...Well, the DM would use his knowledge of the characters to craft encounters that would exploit any holes in our defenses.

That sort of thing can be okay once in a great while. Say if there's a team of assassins sent specifically to take out the PCs. It can be interesting to have to come up with new tactics on the fly.

More than once in a great while, though...ugh.

Once game I played in, the GM put us up against an unbeatable team...some warrior-class with full psionics, despite psionics not existing in that world, backed up by some uber-demon and a squad of lesser demons. Being the crazy bastards that we were, we started pulling all sorts of crazed tactics out of our collective ass. Finally, the GM said "Look guys, for the adventure to go the way I had planned, you all have to die."

We said "Okay, we all die." Was it railroading? Hell yes. But the GM was a good enough GM (and a good enough friend) that we ent along with it, and it ended up being a cool adventure (Council of the Gods, where it was decided by 4-to-3 vote to send us back, since the guy who killed us had psionics, which was outlawed by the gods).

[Maxus]

To give some info...

The DM had a total hard-on for druids. He also had strong opinions about Law vs. Chaos, and was definitely on the chaotic side.

The campaign that was the breaking point for me started off with a setting description saying that there was a big conflict between the druids and the alchemists, with the alchemists wanting to ravage every available resource and the druids fighting to protect the environment. We are explicitly told that this conflict has not yet reached the area the game started in.

The game started. The PCs all run into each other in a market square. The group includes a Fire Elemental, a chain-fighter, a ranger, an elf psion who was older than dirt and had a perment drift disk he rode around on, and the old elf's great-granddaughter, who was the DMPC and an "I love everybody!" Druid.

The 'hook' came by in the form of miss Druid's brother, who had stolen a loaf of bread and was on the run from the guards. The Fire Elemental gave chase.

Let's be clear. This character had a movement rate of about 70 feet per round. And could throw in some extra stuff to speed himself up. He could outrun horses in full gallop.

Yet the thief outruns him.

So the rest of us stop the guard, and my character (the chain-fighter) makes up a story about the guy being paid to bring some bread home, and generously tips GPs around for the cost of the bread and the trouble the guards went to. We see hide nor hair of the brother again.

We camp out in the woods at the Druid's request. We learn about each other. The druid princess, for example, has lost most of her family to the alchemists. The fire elemental is unimpressed with her sob story and her sugary-sweet speech about how she still has hope. Shortly, we are brought out of our tents by 7 alchemists, who are going to kick our asses for haboring a criminal and encouraging theft and stuff.
So what they did was:

-Put an antimagic field on us. Our magic gear is crap.

-Use one of those items of elemental controlling to sieze control of the fire elemental with no save allowed and have him attack somebody, then go over to the river to drown himself. When told that that wouldn't work because water acts as a solid, impenetrable surface to Fire Elementals, his response was, "Maybe in DnD 3.5 But we aren't playing 3.5 "

And then, when combat finally starts--the chief Alchemist hit my character before with a spell and took off a round 50 hit points. We roll initiative. My character gets a 19. What with ability bonuses and magic items and everything, that brings his init up to a 24. I'm thinking I can go for that censer of elemental bullshit, or maybe the chief alchemist.

And, without any visible rolls, we're told that all the alchemists will go first.

I challenge him to roll the dice in the chat, where we could see them. He says he rolled fairly, they just all have Improved Initiative and high Dexterity.

So basically, we reached an impasse. I was pretty pissed at the way he was treating the person playing the fire elemental, but I wasn't nearly as unreasonable as he was being, especially after some of the other players said, "Yeah, they spend all day in a lab, they shouldn't be outmoving all of us". He ended up saying he didn't have to justify himself to us. At which point I quit, as did half the other players.

I would have been fine if I was told the newly-formed party was surprised and overwhelmed and then captured (or whatever he had planned). I could go from there. But when he's using it as an excuse to show how evil Lawful people are, and as a chance to punish a character who called his sob-story Druid a 'candle'...Fuck that shit.

Edit: Oh, yeah, and we're told we're in neutral territory in that bullshit conflict, but somehow our act of charity is a violation of laws that, for some weird reason, the alchemists are the ones with the power to enforce.

[Ravengm]

Let's be clear. This character had a movement rate of about 70 feet per round. And could throw in some extra stuff to speed himself up. He could outrun horses in full gallop.

Yet the thief outruns him.

Things like that are bullshit.

And sound like a campaign I was part of. The DM seemed to have a panache for creating impossible situations for our characters to get out of (each time half of the characters died, and the other half, which were the pet DM players, were more or less none the worse for wear).

As a party of level 4 or so characters, we walk into a dungeon. Since just about every other floor tile was trapped, it was slow going, since we had to make search checks every three steps we took (who the hell spends that much money to trap a ruin?!). So to get us to go faster through the dungeon, there were traps that sprung whenever you got close enough (read: too far away to search for, disarm, or God forbid avoid in any way) that created a wooden barrier that pushed you into the next room so we couldn't peek through the doors, since there was almost always a powerful monster waiting.

So, we were flung into a large room. Which seemed fine, because there were no monsters there. That we could see. Apparently our DM felt the need to create the ultimate TPK monster, because it was an assassin which had to be decently high level, so no one could flank it. To top it off, it was invisible, used its death attack liberally, and could teleport anywhere within sight as a free action.

As was standard, half the party died, and the pet players lived through yet another adventure to level up and put everyone else just that much further behind.

I haven't played a game with him as a DM ever since, and I probably should have gotten it through my head to stop before then too.

Edit: I should mention that the reason the assassin died was because the party's barbarian prayed to Timora and gave a blood offering from the party's dwarf (which killed the dwarf, who was unconscious). This was all to further some "grand plot" that never actually took place.

[name_here]

i feel sorry for people who endure that kind of railroading.

the kind i endure amounts to, you go on this adventure because you are members of the military who follow orders, and because i can't be bothered making up the 10^9 things you could potentally do instead (free roaming settled galaxy D20 future seems like it would be hard on the DM)

[Jerry]

I agree with them too, I'm sure quite a lot of others do as well. You'd be a moron or a masochist to fully plot out an adventure and then just throw it away because the PCs don't want to swallow your hooks.

And I'm sure Jotoco will fit in just as well as you do, Jerry.

I'm did not say that I disagreed with anyone, just not to assume that everyone here is a power-gamer for caring about rules, calculations, math, and stuff.

And I thought that Jotoco was just talking about two people, and he assumed that they were giving D&D a bad name for their suggestions or some such.

Sorry if I came across as accusatory.

[RandomCasualty2]

Heck no. It's a cooperative storytelling game. If the players genuinely have no interest in the storyline you've conceived of, then the game isn't going to be any fun and you'd be a fool to move forward with it. By far your best bet is to let the players go off into a different direction and recycle whatever characters and monster encounters you need to into the "new" direction.

Well it depends. If the plot honestly has no reason for the PCs to go on it, then pretty much maybe you can give it up. If the PC is just being a douche trying to be unhookable to make your life hell, then I recommend hitting him with something hard, like a hammer.

I mean, I'm no fan of railraoding, but the PC who is mr. AntiQuest pisses me off just as much.

I consider it good form to give the DM some warning of what you plan on doing and where you plan on going prior to the session, so he can prepare. I mean, it's cool if the pCs have their own goals and ideas, but fuck man, the DM has to prepare a quest. If the PCs don't give any notice about the shit they'd like to do, then yes, I'm going to railroad them a bit.

[Koumei]

...I have never encountered Mr. AntiQuest. Seriously. We go and do the quests, we get the XP. If we don't have a reason to do it, we create one, seeing as we control our characters, not the other way round.

The only exception would perhaps be that someone was toying with the idea of "After you level up, you have to get training in town to gain your abilities." I explained that I'd totally abandon whatever I was doing to go back and level up, end-of-the-world-be-damned. He decided to drop that idea.

One DM did the "really powerful monsters attack" trick, except he didn't do it to railroad us. Instead, it was to see how we'd react - with a contingency for what to do if we died. Thanks to tactics and the abuse of action points, we won. We gained two levels from that encounter. It was pretty sweet.

Another did try railroading with the good old "Air suddenly vanishes! You suffocate and pass out. When you wake up..." until we pointed out that we could totally carve our way through the walls, which we then did. The god who wanted to talk with us ended up having to go and visit us instead of having us wake up in his domain.

[Talisman]

This is why, if you intend to capture the PCs for any reason, there are only two real options:

1) Use overwhelming force and be prepared for Plan B, where the PCs somehow defeat/escape said overwhelming force.

2) Use GM Narrative Bullshit Powers. "Suddenly, you're waking up. A 20'-tall man wreathed in blue flames smiles down at you from a throne carved of a single huge diammond..."

[Jotoco]

This is why, if you intend to capture the PCs for any reason, there are only two real options:

1) Use overwhelming force and be prepared for Plan B, where the PCs somehow defeat/escape said overwhelming force.

2) Use GM Narrative Bullshit Powers. "Suddenly, you're waking up. A 20'-tall man wreathed in blue flames smiles down at you from a throne carved of a single huge diammond..."

I usually use a variation of 1.

"If you know thyself and thine players you do not need to fear the result of a hundred plot hooks"

Please don't hurt me because of this badly written medieval english.

I usually offer what the players want. Women and fame to the bard (me), power to the barbarian, money to the sorcerer, influence to the cleric and so on and so forth.

And when I want to railroad I usually use the quote above

[JonSetanta]

One DM did the "really powerful monsters attack" trick, except he didn't do it to railroad us. Instead, it was to see how we'd react - with a contingency for what to do if we died. Thanks to tactics and the abuse of action points, we won. We gained two levels from that encounter. It was pretty sweet.

That's the best.

2) Use GM Narrative Bullshit Powers. "Suddenly, you're waking up. A 20'-tall man wreathed in blue flames smiles down at you from a throne carved of a single huge diammond..."

"I kick the bastard in his giant, bloated, divine scrotum."
*attack roll*



And Maxus: seems like you've been gaming with teenagers. It's an opinion I hold because it's almost exactly like (with characters altered, situation of a bullshit DM BAWWWfest similar) a few sessions I've had in the last 10 years.
Leaving is really the only solution for such problems, as they stem from the players and not the game itself.

[Judging__Eagle]

I do neither.

I invite the PCs to work for my NPC.

Seriously, it works every time.

As long as they're asked to do a job and get paid, players will do nearly anything for a more powerful character/NPC. Heck, even one that pretends to be more powerful.

[Koumei]

Alternatively, you could use reverse psychology if you know your players just like to screw with you.

[Username17]

I usually throw out a few plot points and have the PCs hash it out amongst themselves which one they want to follow up on. Since it's a player choice to go to the Black Temple (or whatever), they usually don't balk.

-Username17

[Amra]

Amen to that. Nine times out of ten, the PC's in my game are merely under the illusion of choice, which is good enough. You don't spend a week writing up a bunch of interesting NPC's, balanced encounters and a metric assload of plot _just in case_, but at the same time you don't want - and I mean, ever - to let your players think they don't have a choice about what to do.

As such, I'll always have a bunch of interesting stuff going on, much of which is interrelated (and thus kicking off the same adventure whatever they choose, although the players don't know that until later) and some of which can easily segue into the plot I always wanted to run. This approach has the sterling advantage of players remembering something a dozen sessions later on and saying "So *that's* what [X] was all about! Wow!"

Not only that, but they'll actually start doing your work for you once they've started seeing relationships between events, and draw completely unwarranted conclusions about the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things (TM), thereby making you look godlike in your planning abilities and incidentally coming up with cooler stuff than you'd thought of originally

I haven't railroaded a party since I was teenager, not even in an innocuous fashion like the deployment of Narrative Bullshit Powers; it's not necessary.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Really, you've never played with Mr. Antiquest? He's fun... for one session.

*bread gets stolen* "happens every day, meh"
*powerful forces are on the rise, do you join them or put them out?* "meh, not my problem"
*evil clerics capture your character, your compatriots may or may not come to your rescue* "I make a new character"

Seriously though, some combination of interesting plot hooks that the players choose (Franks method) and giving players what they want (reward) (Jotoco's method) is best, IMHO.

[Amra]

Of course I've played with Mr. Antiquest. He has been part of my regular gaming group for the last six years or so, and I'd encountered him in other heinous incarnations many times before that. I just tend to set things up so that the adventure plays out no matter what the players choose. It's not that the players' actions don't affect the course of events - of course they do - but all the stuff they're given to interact with leads (without them realising it) to the adventure I've written, pretty much.

I was agreeing with Frank; a series of interesting plot hooks is absolutely the thing to do. I just generally see to it that all roads lead to Rome... and of course, it's generally not obvious at the start exactly what it is the players are getting involved in. Rewarding the players is a no-brainer, otherwise they, y'know, stop playing; and rightly so.

[RandomCasualty2]

Seriously though, some combination of interesting plot hooks that the players choose (Franks method) and giving players what they want (reward) (Jotoco's method) is best, IMHO.

It tends to depend on the player. Generally your best roleplayers are happy being the stars of the show, and thus if you let them pick their quests, they're pretty happy about that. The more immature gamers who make bland characters solely based on accumulating treasure tend to get hooked in best by a reward system.