How's this for plot progression?

[Duboris]

http://imageshack.us/a/img23/4533/plotline.png (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/23/plotline.png/)

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Long story short, I need people's opinions on how this plot-line looks, and I'm wondering if it gives enough freedom to not be an "Absolute Train-Rail"

Have at it.

P.S Mother of god do I hate paint.

[gr8artist]

What's the timeline? is this for one game, or for a month's worth of games, or the plot for an entire campaign?

[Duboris]

This is potentially 2 sessions worth of events.

[Laserlight]

I'm wondering if it gives enough freedom to not be an "Absolute Train-Rail"

I'm not clear what the "take the case and get ambushed" part is about, but really it looks like the only thing you need to railroad them into is getting onto the ship. After that, their options are naturally limited.

As a player, I don't mind railroading as long as it's either logical or explicit.
By "logical", I mean something like "your options are: stay on the ship and get to the port, or jump off the ship mid-voyage and die."

By "explicit", I mean the GM says "that was a clever plan, I hadn't expected it, and it would ordinarily have worked, but this particular black knight has a temporary Enchantment of Major Plot Device, and so he evades your attack and rides away, with the captured princess over his saddlebow, and she's cursing fit to make a sailor blush. And your scroll is still unused."

What I hate, despise and loath is stupid railroading. I recall a module years ago where you had to hit the evil dragon with a dwarf-slaying weapon, nothing else would work. You see, there was this evil dwarf, and the Council of Good Mages--you'd expect them to have high INT scores, wouldn't you?-- had decided to punish him, and they'd decided that a really smart way to do that was to permanently transform this perfectly normal dwarf into a powerful red dragon.



P.S Mother of god do I hate paint.

For flowcharts, you might want to try PowerPoint or equivalent.

I can't believe I just said that. The grinding noise you just heard was my alignment, shifting one notch towards Evil...

[Duboris]

Well, I like "General" railroading. What I mean by that, is have multiple ways of approaching a specific area on the plot line, but having multiple ways to reach that plot point.

In this case you can do 3 things.

Go along with the body guard duty, and end up fighting the renegades.

Resist the job, and become imprisoned on the ship, and end up fighting the renegades, however fighting the start very differently.

Take the Case (A box with a dormant sphere of annihilation inside it, intentionally meant to be captured anyway as, of course, you're totally expendable, and therefore no one's going to care if, when that thing opens, it completely destroys any renegade slum it ends up in.) and get caught, ending up on the Renegades ship in that fight, and having the option to destroy it from the inside, and jump back onto the ship full of knights.

Either way, your ending up at a mining area, potentially dangerous.

That sound fine?

[danzibr]

Well... I like it. I don't have any advice to give as I don't have any background information, like what 8 people they killed or anything. More planned out than most of my stuff.