The Worst Railroad

[Cheesegear]

Something happened the other night. Time to tell stories about being railroaded!

So, we're playing, we find a Ring.
DM: Who was the first to touch the Ring? Make a WIS save.

Unfortunately, the guy fails his WIS save, and immediately suffers a point of Exhaustion.
For the record, the player tried to throw it away immediately. The DM said 'No.'

Next day. He hears voices inside his head. He is being compelled to put the ring on. Make a WIS save. Failed? Put it on or suffer Exhaustion.
So, miraculously, the guy's failed four saves, four days in a row. He's now at Exhaustion 4.
We figure it's going to go this way until he either puts the ring on (Make a save every morning. If you fail, put the ring on or suffer an extra point of magical Exhaustion), or hits Exhaustion 6, and dies.
Bear in mind, we've also been trying to get rid of the ring since Day 1. The DM just says 'You can't.'

Player: You're just forcing me to put this ring on, right?
DM: No. You can choose not to.
Player: But then I die, right? Neither food, water or sleep fixes the Exhaustion, right? Even if I pass my save today, I'll still be 4 Points of Exhaustion, right?
DM: Yes.
Player: :smallsigh:

He puts the ring on. ...Nothing happens. The voices in the players' head stops. But, every so often - even in combat - the DM takes control of the PC and the character does something detrimental to the party. Our party agrees to sort this out. In the middle of the adventure we stop for the day.

From previous days' magic, we know the ring is Necromantic in origin.

Cleric: Does Remove Curse or Magic Circle do it.
DM: No.
Cleric: Greater Restoration. Breaking his attachment to the Ring.
DM: No.
Cleric: Do I lose my Diamond Dust?
DM: Yes.
Cleric: *headdesk x3*
Cleric: Dispel Evil and Good. The spell that literally breaks Possession.
DM: No.
Cleric: :smallsigh: ...Okay, let's pretend that I had 24 hours and 1000gp, would Hallow do it?
DM: No.

Player (OOC): **** it. Someone cut off my finger.
DM: If you do that, you'll have -2 DEX.

Our resident rules lawyer (every table has one), just, he gets real quiet.

Rules Lawyer: So, you're saying that losing a finger, just one - not even the thumb, let alone a whole hand - gives -2 DEX. That's a number bracket. Not 'Have Disadvantage and/or lose Proficiency in Sleight of Hand'. You're saying that losing a finger, reduces his ability to dodge Fireballs?
DM: Well, yeah. That's how bad the Curse was.
Rules Lawyer: But none of the Cleric's spells could break attunement?
DM: Right.
Player: I'm a DEX-based melee character. Losing 2 DEX pretty much nerfs me into being average-at-best.
...
Player: **** it. I succumb to whatever the Ring is doing and I run off. Next session I'll have a new character. Like I said, this character kind of sucks anyway, even before the Curse-that-definitely-wasn't-a-Curse-honest, I'm happy to ditch him.

DM: No worries! I've got a character right here. I've chosen their name, race, gender, class, alignment, possessions and background for them. You get to roll stats and pick Traits/Abilities.

1. You find a Ring. Put it on, or suck and then die.
2. If you put it on, the DM controls your character every so often - actions are almost always bad.
3. The Ring can't be removed by magical means.
4. Cutting off the finger results in a character-breaking downside.
5. DM chooses your next character for you.

#FunGame

How has your DM railroaded you?

[opaopajr]

Y'all could just ditch his game and play with the rules lawyer as GM. Just sayin'... :smallcool:

[Droodicus]

Not d&d but some form of superhero game. Dm randomly generated our powers by a form of multiple choice quiz, which was pretty cool.
I hadn't passed any of my tests to manifest my powers so was using a pipe wrench as a club and getting negative karma for using a weapon while everyone else is shooting fire at people or melting their brains. Not great dming but not railroady.

Eventually I manifest my powers and we're recruited by not - shield against our will. My power is the ability to absorb/manipulate electricity. I'd pull from the power grid to charge up. We'd decided to ditch the not - shield goons as they kept getting us near killed with their idiocy. They pull tasers on us, hah, I step in the way while the others run for it. I get taken down by tasers, me, lightning man who was expecting to be tased and stated he was readying to draw in the power. Tased into unconsciousness. Fade to black, Rest of the party is cut scene captured and we're sent on our next mission.
I walked from that game

[Urukubarr]

that's some terrible stuff guys, I tend to only play with close friends and family (of that I DM the main game so easy to avoid bad ideas) but I like being able to tell the DM when something is not cool.

[Haydensan]

@OP

Out of interest did you manage to have a chat with the DM out of game (or privately) about how it wasn't fun?

I think a lot of this is caused when DM's don't realise how crappy it is to take player agency away.

[Zanthy1]

Y'all could just ditch his game and play with the rules lawyer as GM. Just sayin'... :smallcool:

*Should*

This goes beyond railroading and seems more like emailing to me.

For those unfamiliar with the difference, Railroading is when a DM essentially puts the players on a track and drags them along with no wiggle room. Emailing is very similar, but instead of there being a track (which can be technically jumped off of or even a little derailed) it is a direct and instant delivery. There is no guiding story and it just does exactly what the DM wants or bust.

Railroading an be tactically used in a campaign, but should never go so far as to be emailing.

[Mr. Crowbar]

I got a kick out of the Rules Lawyer using their abilities for good, but that whole story is yiiiikes. I'm interested to hear about the fallout too.


We had our group's Lawyer try to run a game and it was... bad. I dropped out in the character creation stage but kept in touch and the players told me it was Railroading: The Game. A big problem was that the DM always expected the players do act as he would act and would not consider alternatives or even giving characters choices. The players felt like they were being led around by their noses.

The DM once came to me asking for help:
DM: "I need a combat penalty for deafness. what about [needlessly complicated system involving facing]"
Me: "I wouldn't bother. Keep it simple, tell the players they can't meta-plan in combat because their characters can't hear each other."
DM: "NO. There NEEDS to be a penalty, otherwise they will all choose to put beeswax in their ears."
Me: "Maybe limit the amount of beeswax available? Or don't make it available at all, and they have to scrounge up their own earplugs."
DM: "NO. The beekeeper is GOOD AT HIS JOB. There's no reason he would NOT have PLENTY of beeswax!"
Me: "Someone tipped over his hives??? he got robbed the night before??? There's loads of things out of his control."
DM: "NO THE BEEKEEPER IS WELL RESPECTED AND GOOD AT HIS JOB HE HAS BEESWAX."

I think the players initially tried making earplugs from cotton and other things they had and the DM kept telling them the seals weren't good enough until he finally made one roll Insight, "you think the beekeeper would have wax to seal your ears." The resulting deafness penalty made combat so slow that one player watched an entire 1.5hr documentary and had like 2 or 3 turns.

After 4 session 4/5 players dropped out. The same guy tried to get two other campaigns going with two other groups and they similarly fell completely apart after everyone dropped a few sessions in. Dude never bothered to learn how to change his game.

[PopeLinus1]

Well there was that time in Torre del Bierzo. Now that, that was a railroad disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_del_Bierzo_rail_disaster

[Keravath]

I find it surprising how many DMs can put something so utterly pointless into their game. In this case, it sounds far more like an out of game motivated action to remove the specific character from the game than any plot device .. and if it was supposed to be a plot device then the DM would have been much better off introducing an NPC rather than trying to force a PC into the role.

Having a replacement character ready that the player might have no interest in playing is also just ridiculous.

Anyway, if the OPs story is remotely accurate then its a DM I would never play with again. Just not worth the time.

[BaconAwesome]

OP, did the DM offer any hooks suggesting ways to get rid of the ring?

I was mostly OK with it up until the DM tried to dictate the player's choice of next character, assuming there's *some* way to get out from under the curse.

[Wildarm]

Sounds unfun and unfair for sure. Other than talking to the DM that this is not an enjoyable story and seems very unfair I don't really know what you can do. There are other tables available I'm sure, start looking for a new one if you're truly unhappy with the experience.

You guys did have a lot of magic options. Your best bet might have been to try and make the save until the player dies or saves. If dead, then chop off the ring and revivify. Regeneration to re-grow the finger. Drop that ring in the nearest volcano. Sounds like the player got too frustrated with that process though(and rightly so)

[Sigreid]

Based just on that description I would likely just nope out of that campaign.

[Segev]

There reaches a point where, if you have the entire rest of the table agreeing with you, and you're already considering dropping, you can try just being as big a no-seller as the DM.

"I take off the ring."
"You can't."
"And yet I just did. I throw it away."
"You can't! It's still on your finger!"
"No, it isn't."

(later, during combat) DM: "You suddenly turn and attack your friend."
"No, I don't."
"Yes, you do! You did 10 damage!"
Friend: "Nope, he didn't."

[stoutstien]

Sounds like a case of a DM trying to get you to swallow the plot hook by opening your mouth and shoving it down your throat.

This will only be solved with an actual out of game conversation due to being a conflict of player motivation and expectations.

[The Kool]

There reaches a point where, if you have the entire rest of the table agreeing with you, and you're already considering dropping, you can try just being as big a no-seller as the DM.

"I take off the ring."
"You can't."
"And yet I just did. I throw it away."
"You can't! It's still on your finger!"
"No, it isn't."

(later, during combat) DM: "You suddenly turn and attack your friend."
"No, I don't."
"Yes, you do! You did 10 damage!"
Friend: "Nope, he didn't."

I fully support this.

But I also have a tale to tell of my own. A few months ago, we were starting up a weekend of D&D, and one of our DMs apparently had a story he really wanted to deliver. So after our usual hour or so of making sure everyone has chosen the character they want to play (we run a massive living world, many players have multiple characters), and running everyone through an odd questionnaire, we start. Almost right away we're kicked out of the characters we all wanted to play, and forced to play characters we 'admired'. Note that we had to play half the session with these characters and had no character sheets for half of them. Cue dragging the game down while we sorted this out or made things up. Later, there was a scene where we we forcibly swapped with other characters around the table. More slowness. Then for the second half, we were swapped again, to characters not our own who were 'favorites' of ours. Rinse and repeat, but worse, since some of these characters have been deceased for years in game. And then, for the finale, forced PvP. You heard me right, forced PvP. "Fight each other or you take damage every round" kind of forced. I had the luck of having noped out one scene earlier where he had a player play a genie and grant wishes (my character and his wife wound up deities, an excellent way to retire them and transition to the next phase of their story), but the next hour or two was very frustrating, since for example one person present was a vampire and basically couldn't be killed... I still don't know how it ended, I wandered off.

[Corran]

How has your DM railroaded you?
Sigh...
Players start as imprisoned gladiators at some desert city. City is attacked by some unknown army, we escape during the mayhem (this is not played, but it is described to set up the stage). The first session starts with the pc's wondering the dessert for several days (dessert world) after their escape. The few resources we had stolen during our escape have run out, but we come across a small oasis. The water takes the form of a humanoid head, we speak to it, eventually it opens its mouth and lets us enter promising we will be saved from certain death, and we do so because frankly we are out of options. What we enter is very much like some sort of extra dimensional space. Inside we find an individual trapped in ice (cold stone that melts?!). He awakens, we talk to him, he speaks very vaguely and cryptically, eventually he says that we (the pc's) must stick together for some unknown reason. Then we black out and at the start of next session we wake up at the top of an enormous statue, at a very large underground city of which no pc had any knowledge. We wonder a bit into the city, eventually we realize that no one has any coin, so we must find jobs. We hear talk of a quest. Goblins kidnapped the son of a rich merchant, and the merchant will pay handsomely whomever manages to get his son back safe. We take the quest and we hire a guide that will take us to the place where the merchant's caravan was ambushed. This happened in the surface world, ie in the dessert. At this point I mention that travelling anywhere in this world is practically suicide for the pc's if they don't find and have an npc guide accept to help them with that. Guides are very rare, and the guide guilds are sth like the mafia of this world. They don't sell maps, they don't pass on their trade (at least to us), and to take any jobs from the pc's will either require ridiculous amount of coin (which we wont have) or some favor in return (essentially whatever is the quest the dm planned for us next). So there is almost no freedom to explore the world and go where we want if we cannot find an NPC who wants to help us do it. We don't know how to get in and out of the underground city as well, because the entrance is a secret entrusted to only a few guides. Basically the entrance of the city is much like the entrance of Batman's cave. Later, this changed to being very difficult to enter or exit the city without someone who knows how to do it properly helping us. Anyway, after the guide takes us to the place where the caravan the baby was travelling with was attacked, and after some investigation, we find our way to an underground cave system. It turns out that a goblin magic user kidnapped the baby because he wants to sacrifice it or sth like that. Long story short, we save the baby, we fight the goblin mage and a few of his hundreds goblin goons, and upon the killing blow, we black out again and wake up back where the guide left us, who he then takes us back to the city so that we can return the baby and collect our reward. We cannot do much with our reward (which is not a small amount of coin, 1000 gp each pc). We can buy gear and stuff, but staying in the city costs about 50 gp per night and buying a house requires an astronomical amount. After spending about half a session in the city doing stuff, an NPC magister (who we approached in the hope of revealing anything useful about the fact that we blacked out in the dessert and woke up on the head of the city's statue) tells us that we have to leave the city by morning, probably because he was a bit worried about what we told him regarding what happened to us. The morning when the pc's are about to leave the city, we decide instead to catch onto the only potential hook there is. By talking to one npc, and because of some visions the pc's had, we had a suspicion that there was a dark hidden secret regarding one of the city's long dead rulers. So instead of leaving the city, we enter that ruler's crypt. It's hard to describe what went on in there, but the whole thing smelled of either illusion magic or sth inexplicable and metaphysical. There is one or two more black outs. Eventually, we come face to face with the dead ruler's spirit. Dialogue scene, when it's done we cut to combat. Spirit transforms into a dracolich, uses breath attack, pc's drop unconscious, but the spirit of an NPC we had heard of and who was the mortal enemy of that old ruler somehow takes control of one of the unconscious pc's, uses magic and burns the dracolich. We then wake up back to the cave system where we had fought the goblin mage and after discussing it a bit with the DM, he eventually tells us that this was neither a dream not an illusion. All these things actually happened.

Railroading is when there are no options to choose from and you have to follow whatever the DM wants you to do, otherwise there is nothing to do. It's even more railroaded if the DM creates reasons that compel the players to stop ''wasting time'' and carry on with the adventure.

What's really disappointing for me, is that I have played in the past with this DM. I know he can run good campaigns (or campaigns that I like if you prefer), and one of the qualities of this DM imo, was that he was not afraid to improvise when players went completely off track. The campaign is not all bad. The session when we were trying to rescue the baby from the goblins was enjoyable to say the least, because we had to find a clever way to go about it as we could not just kill 400 goblins. And when we killed the goblin leader, there was certainly this sense of accomplishment that most(?) dnd players get after finishing a hard quest. And the session in the city after succeeding in this mission to return the baby was great as well. We almost got into a bar fight, got drank at a feast that the merchant was throwing, and there were several interactions both between pc's and between pc's and npc's that were enjoyable. And generally the interactions between pc's are enjoyable, as every character brings sth nice to them. But for the most part, the campaign so far feels like a story that is being read to us by npc's, and the players get to actually do nothing other than what is completely necessary between cutting from dialogue scene with npc A to dialogue scene with npc B, etc.

[Alfgar]

Sigh...
Your description of that campaign might be a terrible railroad but on the bright side it would make an awesome sequel to Zardoz.

[jdolch]

Something happened the other night. Time to tell stories about being railroaded!

So, we're playing, we find a Ring.
DM: Who was the first to touch the Ring? Make a WIS save.

Unfortunately, the guy fails his WIS save, and immediately suffers a point of Exhaustion.
For the record, the player tried to throw it away immediately. The DM said 'No.'

Next day. He hears voices inside his head. He is being compelled to put the ring on. Make a WIS save. Failed? Put it on or suffer Exhaustion.
So, miraculously, the guy's failed four saves, four days in a row. He's now at Exhaustion 4.
We figure it's going to go this way until he either puts the ring on (Make a save every morning. If you fail, put the ring on or suffer an extra point of magical Exhaustion), or hits Exhaustion 6, and dies.
Bear in mind, we've also been trying to get rid of the ring since Day 1. The DM just says 'You can't.'

Player: You're just forcing me to put this ring on, right?
DM: No. You can choose not to.
Player: But then I die, right? Neither food, water or sleep fixes the Exhaustion, right? Even if I pass my save today, I'll still be 4 Points of Exhaustion, right?
DM: Yes.
Player: :smallsigh:

He puts the ring on. ...Nothing happens. The voices in the players' head stops. But, every so often - even in combat - the DM takes control of the PC and the character does something detrimental to the party. Our party agrees to sort this out. In the middle of the adventure we stop for the day.

From previous days' magic, we know the ring is Necromantic in origin.

Cleric: Does Remove Curse or Magic Circle do it.
DM: No.
Cleric: Greater Restoration. Breaking his attachment to the Ring.
DM: No.
Cleric: Do I lose my Diamond Dust?
DM: Yes.
Cleric: *headdesk x3*
Cleric: Dispel Evil and Good. The spell that literally breaks Possession.
DM: No.
Cleric: :smallsigh: ...Okay, let's pretend that I had 24 hours and 1000gp, would Hallow do it?
DM: No.

Player (OOC): **** it. Someone cut off my finger.
DM: If you do that, you'll have -2 DEX.

Our resident rules lawyer (every table has one), just, he gets real quiet.

Rules Lawyer: So, you're saying that losing a finger, just one - not even the thumb, let alone a whole hand - gives -2 DEX. That's a number bracket. Not 'Have Disadvantage and/or lose Proficiency in Sleight of Hand'. You're saying that losing a finger, reduces his ability to dodge Fireballs?
DM: Well, yeah. That's how bad the Curse was.
Rules Lawyer: But none of the Cleric's spells could break attunement?
DM: Right.
Player: I'm a DEX-based melee character. Losing 2 DEX pretty much nerfs me into being average-at-best.
...
Player: **** it. I succumb to whatever the Ring is doing and I run off. Next session I'll have a new character. Like I said, this character kind of sucks anyway, even before the Curse-that-definitely-wasn't-a-Curse-honest, I'm happy to ditch him.

DM: No worries! I've got a character right here. I've chosen their name, race, gender, class, alignment, possessions and background for them. You get to roll stats and pick Traits/Abilities.

1. You find a Ring. Put it on, or suck and then die.
2. If you put it on, the DM controls your character every so often - actions are almost always bad.
3. The Ring can't be removed by magical means.
4. Cutting off the finger results in a character-breaking downside.
5. DM chooses your next character for you.

#FunGame

How has your DM railroaded you?

I feel your pain.

Just get a new DM. It's really no loss.

Problem #1 is that this guy has no Idea what he's doing. This is a fixable Problem and everybody started green at some point. If it weren't for ...

Problem #2 being that this guy has no respect for the other people at the table. Even after it became painfully obvious that the whole thing went sideways and people got really, really upset he still went on with his course of action.

Sadly there are always gonna be DMs like this, who think that this is all a vehicle for them to live their megalomaniac Fantasies. Especially in Online Groups where the other people don't know each other and it's far less likely that they just tell the DM to go and try to breed himself.

[Sigreid]

I feel your pain.

Just get a new DM. It's really no loss.

This guy has no Idea what he's doing AND has no respect for the other people at the table.

Sadly there are always gonna be DMs like this, who think that this is all a vehicle for them to live their megalomaniac Fantasies. Especially in Online Groups where the other people don't know each other and it's far less likely that they just tell the DM to breed himself.

I'm a bit more charitable than that. I tend to see these DMs as wanting to tell what they think will be a great story and forget that it is first and foremost a game.

[jdolch]

I'm a bit more charitable than that. I tend to see these DMs as wanting to tell what they think will be a great story and forget that it is first and foremost a game.

Sorry, edited my post. You are right if it weren't for Problem#2 (see edited post above)

Of course if it's only Problem #1 it's fixable.

I have myself been guilty of that many, many years ago. We were bored and had the Idea that we're just gonna invent an impromptu TTRPG set in an "Alien" style setting. I was to be the GM and immediately ran into problems. Because it was a Giant Spaceship it made no sense for it to only have one way for the players to proceed. (Yeah it's kinda obvious how to fix that, but oh well). Long Story Short, there were lots and lots of doors, none of which could be opened, no matter what anyone tried because (due to the impromptu nature of the game) I myself had no Idea what was behind them. Only one way would lead to the story I came up with on the fly. You can probably guess were this is going ... straight off a cliff.

Hey don't judge me. I was 15. I had a whole 30 Minutes to come up with a game system AND a story. ;)

In Retrospect it was a bit unrealistic.

[Corran]

Your description of that campaign might be a terrible railroad but on the bright side it would make an awesome sequel to Zardoz.
Don't know what that is, and I am afraid to google it cause I don't want to be spoiled in case the DM drew inspiration from it. To be fair, this DM has great ideas for campaigns. I know this both from playing with him and from discussing some of his ideas while he was running them for other people. But on this specific campaign he seems to be too focused on just carrying on with the story. I am sure it's a nice story, but unfortunately it's not the story of the pc's, or a story in which the pc's get to make choices and influence it. Rather, it's the story of what happened between some npc's a long time ago, and the pc's are just trying to put the pieces together by finding and listening to certain npc's. The transition from one dialogue scene to another is not smooth as well, and exploring the world or talking to npc's other than the ones that reveal the puzzle pieces of the story that is slowly being revealed to us seems meaningless. Essentially all pc actions (which are few, as there is a distinct lack thereof) seem meaningless. Personally, I think this is all because the DM forgot or simply didn't have enough time to flesh out the game world and all he has in his mind is the lay out of a story and some ''movie scenes''. The urge to avoid improvisation on the DM's part still surprises me though. I've talked this over a bit with the DM. He says he understands, but there are reasons behind this and in the end it will all be worth it. Personally, I don't see how. I am still having a good time playing in this campaign, I am after all playing a game. But the passion is not there. If we seem unable to schedule a session, I wont try to find a solution so we can have it. And I wont try too hard to fit a session in my schedule either, or insist to find a day and a time that definitely suits me, as I've done in the past when playing campaigns that I really enjoyed. If I can't make it for a session, that's simply fine, no harm done.

Anyway, I dont want to try and monopolize this thread anymore than I did.

[The Kool]

Anyway, I dont want to try and monopolize this thread anymore than I did.


How has your DM railroaded you?

Well we were invited to share stories, so... I'm guessing no harm done :smallsmile:

[Sigreid]

Sorry, edited my post. You are right if it weren't for Problem#2 (see edited post above)

Of course if it's only Problem #1 it's fixable.

I have myself been guilty of that many, many years ago. We were bored and had the Idea that we're just gonna invent an impromptu TTRPG set in an "Alien" style setting. I was to be the GM and immediately ran into problems. Because it was a Giant Spaceship it made no sense for it to only have one way for the players to proceed. (Yeah it's kinda obvious how to fix that, but oh well). Long Story Short, there were lots and lots of doors, none of which could be opened, no matter what anyone tried because (due to the impromptu nature of the game) I myself had no Idea what was behind them. Only one way would lead to the story I came up with on the fly. You can probably guess were this is going ... straight off a cliff.

Hey don't judge me. I was 15. I had a whole 30 Minutes to come up with a game system AND a story. ;)

In Retrospect it was a bit unrealistic.

To me, that is a bit different. Players should be prepared to cut you some slack when you're making up everything on the fly.

[Wuzza]

Get one of the other players to direct your DM to this thread. "Just happened to see this on the net and thought it might be relevant.."

[Grey Watcher]

Something happened the other night. Time to tell stories about being railroaded!

So, we're playing, we find a Ring.
DM: Who was the first to touch the Ring? Make a WIS save.

Unfortunately, the guy fails his WIS save, and immediately suffers a point of Exhaustion.
For the record, the player tried to throw it away immediately. The DM said 'No.'

Next day. He hears voices inside his head. He is being compelled to put the ring on. Make a WIS save. Failed? Put it on or suffer Exhaustion.
So, miraculously, the guy's failed four saves, four days in a row. He's now at Exhaustion 4.
We figure it's going to go this way until he either puts the ring on (Make a save every morning. If you fail, put the ring on or suffer an extra point of magical Exhaustion), or hits Exhaustion 6, and dies.
Bear in mind, we've also been trying to get rid of the ring since Day 1. The DM just says 'You can't.'

Player: You're just forcing me to put this ring on, right?
DM: No. You can choose not to.
Player: But then I die, right? Neither food, water or sleep fixes the Exhaustion, right? Even if I pass my save today, I'll still be 4 Points of Exhaustion, right?
DM: Yes.
Player: :smallsigh:

He puts the ring on. ...Nothing happens. The voices in the players' head stops. But, every so often - even in combat - the DM takes control of the PC and the character does something detrimental to the party. Our party agrees to sort this out. In the middle of the adventure we stop for the day.

From previous days' magic, we know the ring is Necromantic in origin.

Cleric: Does Remove Curse or Magic Circle do it.
DM: No.
Cleric: Greater Restoration. Breaking his attachment to the Ring.
DM: No.
Cleric: Do I lose my Diamond Dust?
DM: Yes.
Cleric: *headdesk x3*
Cleric: Dispel Evil and Good. The spell that literally breaks Possession.
DM: No.
Cleric: :smallsigh: ...Okay, let's pretend that I had 24 hours and 1000gp, would Hallow do it?
DM: No.

Player (OOC): **** it. Someone cut off my finger.
DM: If you do that, you'll have -2 DEX.

Our resident rules lawyer (every table has one), just, he gets real quiet.

Rules Lawyer: So, you're saying that losing a finger, just one - not even the thumb, let alone a whole hand - gives -2 DEX. That's a number bracket. Not 'Have Disadvantage and/or lose Proficiency in Sleight of Hand'. You're saying that losing a finger, reduces his ability to dodge Fireballs?
DM: Well, yeah. That's how bad the Curse was.
Rules Lawyer: But none of the Cleric's spells could break attunement?
DM: Right.
Player: I'm a DEX-based melee character. Losing 2 DEX pretty much nerfs me into being average-at-best.
...
Player: **** it. I succumb to whatever the Ring is doing and I run off. Next session I'll have a new character. Like I said, this character kind of sucks anyway, even before the Curse-that-definitely-wasn't-a-Curse-honest, I'm happy to ditch him.

DM: No worries! I've got a character right here. I've chosen their name, race, gender, class, alignment, possessions and background for them. You get to roll stats and pick Traits/Abilities.

1. You find a Ring. Put it on, or suck and then die.
2. If you put it on, the DM controls your character every so often - actions are almost always bad.
3. The Ring can't be removed by magical means.
4. Cutting off the finger results in a character-breaking downside.
5. DM chooses your next character for you.

#FunGame

How has your DM railroaded you?

That's... above and beyond railroading. I want to walk out of the game and I'm not even in it! Like, I give you props for not just walking out mid-session.

[Corran]

Sounds like a case of a DM trying to get you to swallow the plot hook by opening your mouth and shoving it down your throat.

This will only be solved with an actual out of game conversation due to being a conflict of player motivation and expectations.
This.
The DM must sell the idea of putting the ring, but there is no carrot in the op's case. The DM must find exactly one player (I say exactly, possibly to avoid any interparty conflict, if that's a goal of course) who for some reason would want to put on the ring. Maybe the pc is power hungry, maybe he is overly curious, maybe he is a do-gooder who has to put on the ring so that it wont fall into the wrong hands. Well, at least until that last pc's can find a way to destroy it. Or any other sufficient reason. It's easier and safer for the DM to talk this over with the player(s) than to just guess and take the risk that the guess was correct.

And then he must ensure that the other pc's have no reason to want to object to that one pc who will wear the ring. Because whether one likes conflict between the pc's, having conflict at such an an early stage of the campaign and over something so basic, means you cannot have a campaign. Again, this is done by a discussion between the DM and the players.

The best thing this DM could learn from this campaign, is to have a session 0 where he will give just a glimpse of what's in store to the players. Not enough to spoil the fun of discovering any plot there might be there, but enough to know that the players will create characters who will be motivated by the basic idea (which in this case is that you find the evil McGuffin and you cannot just ignore it).

[Karnitis]

I just don't understand what the DM was expecting. When you play literally any established game, there are rules. Yes, the DM has flexibility, but what is the point to X spells when the DM hand-waves them into uselessness? If I was the cleric, I would never bother prepping any of those spells again, because now I know that if the DM wants us to hurt, there's just no way around it anymore.

As for a bad railroading, I have one but its mostly forgiven because it's literally the opening scene in the DM's first ever campaign.

Cue Skyrim - we all woke up in a cell. Our party wakes up in a pitch-black room. We don't know each other or how we got there. Despite the fact that half of our party had Darkvision, we still couldn't see each other. Even though what he wanted was super obvious, we tried to RP for an awkward 20 minutes where we couldn't do or see anything. Eventually I was bored, so I said "I cast Dancing Lights." Guess what? there was some anti-magic ward that prevented any spells and caused them to explode, so I also hurt 2 other PCs who were nearby me. Cue guard coming to investigate the noise, and plot progressing. I was so annoyed he wanted us to fall for the 'hurr durr if you cant see, I bet you want to make a magic light huh' trick I wanted to just keep casting cantrips. We were all in a cell and couldn't escape my effusions, and cantrips are free, so I would just cause a TPK because of the DM's stupid "surprise!" gimmick.

Fast forward, it turns out we were wrongly convicted for a crime, got arrested yadda yadda, but how did none of us remember being...knocked out and arrested in the middle of the night?

A good bit of the plot was obvious/forced/hidden, and most of the group wouldn't play along, but I felt bad since it was his first time so I would help when the plot dragged a bit. It got better, but man if I didn't want to give up in the first 5 minutes like the game was bloody No Man's Sky.

[jdolch]

I just don't understand what the DM was expecting. When you play literally any established game, there are rules. Yes, the DM has flexibility, but what is the point to X spells when the DM hand-waves them into uselessness? If I was the cleric, I would never bother prepping any of those spells again, because now I know that if the DM wants us to hurt, there's just no way around it anymore.

It should actually be the other way around. A good DM should find ways to make Players feel useful and mighty.

e.g.
The Paladin gets a +4 Aura of Protection ...

Bad DM: "I just Buff every relevant enemy so the Aura doesn't matter"

Mediocre DM: "Aura? No Idea what you mean."

Good DM: "I throw Saving Throws at the Party on Purpose so the Paladin can feel powerful but I find other ways to keep up the tension"

[Kurt Kurageous]

This was awful.

Quit.

Understand that someone else has to DM, because you've broken this DM. The only hope for them is angrydm.com, and face it, they aren't going to find it on their own.

Who chose them to DM to begin with?

[Unoriginal]

The only hope for them is angrydm.com, and face it, they aren't going to find it on their own.


I've never read anything from the Angry DM that'd make it "the only hope" of anyone. Never read anything from him I'd recommend someone else to read, either.

[Elric VIII]

The DM certainly didn't handle that well in the end, but the players are kind of being asshats for not even trying to buy into the plot hook.

I had an adventure like this where the player that tried to loot an idol was cursed and the curent quest line was to gather the necessary ingredients to perform a ritual to lift it. As soon as an adverse effect of the curse came up, my players spend half the session arguing that they should just be able to buy a remove curse, and would not accept the explanation that this was too powerful to simply be removed at a magic-mart pharmacy.

What I see here is a possibly inexperienced DM trying to deal with a belligerent player by using a bit too much force. Seriously, the DM is playing a game, too. You need to compromise sometimes.

[Myzzrym]

I... what? Like, the DM just went "let's make every anti-curse spell completely useless without providing any reasons nor alternative"? That's a big bowl of nope, it really sucks :(

Thing is, I fail to see the fun in all that. The players sure didn't enjoy it, and I don't see how as a DM it could be enjoyable to force a character to slowly die with no options, unless you hated the guy's guts and just wanted to take revenge on him pissing on your pillow or something.

[The Kool]

The DM certainly didn't handle that well in the end, but the players are kind of being asshats for not even trying to buy into the plot hook.

Plot hook? What plot hook? I didn't see a plot hook.

Really though, I saw players who tried to deal with this thing in every way they could think of, up to and including waiting for the DM to present them with a plot hook about it, and the DM just went "nope, you're stuck with it". And when he finally gave up and chucked the character, the DM said "finally, here's your new character". There is no plot hook there, just a DM to run away from.

[Grey Watcher]

Plot hook? What plot hook? I didn't see a plot hook.

Really though, I saw players who tried to deal with this thing in every way they could think of, up to and including waiting for the DM to present them with a plot hook about it, and the DM just went "nope, you're stuck with it". And when he finally gave up and chucked the character, the DM said "finally, here's your new character". There is no plot hook there, just a DM to run away from.

Yeah, a (clumsy) plot hook would look like "I gave up fighting the ring's influence and now I feel a compulsion to go to Plot City," not "I gave up fighting the ring's influence and now the DM just makes me randomly shank my friends sometimes."

If a DM wants to run a game with pre-fab characters, then that's fine, as long as that was presented as part of The Deal when they were recruiting players. This whole thing seems to have been an elaborate ploy to force the player to use the pre-fab character in some way that the DM seemed to consider "organic."

I never thought I'd see a situation where a DMPC was the preferable solution.

[Keravath]

Sigh...
Players start as imprisoned gladiators at some desert city. City is attacked by some unknown army, we escape during the mayhem (this is not played, but it is described to set up the stage). The first session starts with the pc's wondering the dessert for several days (dessert world) after their escape. The few resources we had stolen during our escape have run out, but we come across a small oasis. The water takes the form of a humanoid head, we speak to it, eventually it opens its mouth and lets us enter promising we will be saved from certain death, and we do so because frankly we are out of options. What we enter is very much like some sort of extra dimensional space. Inside we find an individual trapped in ice (cold stone that melts?!). He awakens, we talk to him, he speaks very vaguely and cryptically, eventually he says that we (the pc's) must stick together for some unknown reason. Then we black out and at the start of next session we wake up at the top of an enormous statue, at a very large underground city of which no pc had any knowledge. We wonder a bit into the city, eventually we realize that no one has any coin, so we must find jobs. We hear talk of a quest. Goblins kidnapped the son of a rich merchant, and the merchant will pay handsomely whomever manages to get his son back safe. We take the quest and we hire a guide that will take us to the place where the merchant's caravan was ambushed. This happened in the surface world, ie in the dessert. At this point I mention that travelling anywhere in this world is practically suicide for the pc's if they don't find and have an npc guide accept to help them with that. Guides are very rare, and the guide guilds are sth like the mafia of this world. They don't sell maps, they don't pass on their trade (at least to us), and to take any jobs from the pc's will either require ridiculous amount of coin (which we wont have) or some favor in return (essentially whatever is the quest the dm planned for us next). So there is almost no freedom to explore the world and go where we want if we cannot find an NPC who wants to help us do it. We don't know how to get in and out of the underground city as well, because the entrance is a secret entrusted to only a few guides. Basically the entrance of the city is much like the entrance of Batman's cave. Later, this changed to being very difficult to enter or exit the city without someone who knows how to do it properly helping us. Anyway, after the guide takes us to the place where the caravan the baby was travelling with was attacked, and after some investigation, we find our way to an underground cave system. It turns out that a goblin magic user kidnapped the baby because he wants to sacrifice it or sth like that. Long story short, we save the baby, we fight the goblin mage and a few of his hundreds goblin goons, and upon the killing blow, we black out again and wake up back where the guide left us, who he then takes us back to the city so that we can return the baby and collect our reward. We cannot do much with our reward (which is not a small amount of coin, 1000 gp each pc). We can buy gear and stuff, but staying in the city costs about 50 gp per night and buying a house requires an astronomical amount. After spending about half a session in the city doing stuff, an NPC magister (who we approached in the hope of revealing anything useful about the fact that we blacked out in the dessert and woke up on the head of the city's statue) tells us that we have to leave the city by morning, probably because he was a bit worried about what we told him regarding what happened to us. The morning when the pc's are about to leave the city, we decide instead to catch onto the only potential hook there is. By talking to one npc, and because of some visions the pc's had, we had a suspicion that there was a dark hidden secret regarding one of the city's long dead rulers. So instead of leaving the city, we enter that ruler's crypt. It's hard to describe what went on in there, but the whole thing smelled of either illusion magic or sth inexplicable and metaphysical. There is one or two more black outs. Eventually, we come face to face with the dead ruler's spirit. Dialogue scene, when it's done we cut to combat. Spirit transforms into a dracolich, uses breath attack, pc's drop unconscious, but the spirit of an NPC we had heard of and who was the mortal enemy of that old ruler somehow takes control of one of the unconscious pc's, uses magic and burns the dracolich. We then wake up back to the cave system where we had fought the goblin mage and after discussing it a bit with the DM, he eventually tells us that this was neither a dream not an illusion. All these things actually happened.

Railroading is when there are no options to choose from and you have to follow whatever the DM wants you to do, otherwise there is nothing to do. It's even more railroaded if the DM creates reasons that compel the players to stop ''wasting time'' and carry on with the adventure.

What's really disappointing for me, is that I have played in the past with this DM. I know he can run good campaigns (or campaigns that I like if you prefer), and one of the qualities of this DM imo, was that he was not afraid to improvise when players went completely off track. The campaign is not all bad. The session when we were trying to rescue the baby from the goblins was enjoyable to say the least, because we had to find a clever way to go about it as we could not just kill 400 goblins. And when we killed the goblin leader, there was certainly this sense of accomplishment that most(?) dnd players get after finishing a hard quest. And the session in the city after succeeding in this mission to return the baby was great as well. We almost got into a bar fight, got drank at a feast that the merchant was throwing, and there were several interactions both between pc's and between pc's and npc's that were enjoyable. And generally the interactions between pc's are enjoyable, as every character brings sth nice to them. But for the most part, the campaign so far feels like a story that is being read to us by npc's, and the players get to actually do nothing other than what is completely necessary between cutting from dialogue scene with npc A to dialogue scene with npc B, etc.


Interesting read. It is a bit of a railroad since the environment seems to limit the choices your character can make fairly substantially.

However, I get the sense that the bigger issue here may be that the players don't understand what is going on or why and that is confusing, frustrating and much less fun in some cases. There are a bunch of sudden fade to black moments, something strange happens, the characters wake up somewhere else, some other deus ex machina event happens.

This can be a case of a DM not taking into account the player perspective and knowledge when putting together a narrative. From the DM perspective it may in fact all make sense. There may be a plot at work, other NPCs/creatures/items having an impact that the players only perceive through the effects in the game world. The DM might even be pleased with the looks of confusion and lack of understanding on the player's faces since that is what the characters would be feeling if faced with the same situation.

The problem is that too much of this isn't fun to play. It isn't a puzzle or problem that the players/characters have enough information to solve. As you said, it ends up just feeling like a railroad where the choice is limited and events just happen at the whim of the DM. The DM may not even realize it since from their perspective, everything makes sense since they have all the facts.

It is similar to a DM putting loot in a chest in a secret room that requires a perception check/investigation check to notice. The players search a room and don't roll high enough, as far as the players are concerned that room doesn't even exist. It never happened. There was never anything interesting to find. The players never know about it. It becomes a random loot/encounter that the DM is aware of but which never happens. So the question is WHY put this in at all? If it is important to the plot then the PCs MUST find it so why put it behind a skill check? If it isn't important, just decide whether the loot is worth the party finding it or not and narrate it appropriately. However, from the DM perspective, it feels like there is tension "do the players find it or not?" ... which is completely meaningless from the player perspective - there is no tension since the players don't even know there is something to find.

Anyway, when running a campaign it is ok to include elements that the PCs don't understand right away ... but it should be as clear as possible that these are game world events happening and not some DM fiat and the use should be minimized since it just tends to cause frustration and confusion rather than increase tension since the players don't know what is going on anyway.

[Elric VIII]

Plot hook? What plot hook? I didn't see a plot hook.

Really though, I saw players who tried to deal with this thing in every way they could think of, up to and including waiting for the DM to present them with a plot hook about it, and the DM just went "nope, you're stuck with it". And when he finally gave up and chucked the character, the DM said "finally, here's your new character". There is no plot hook there, just a DM to run away from.

This is 90% Gollum. If the player just put on the ring and played his character struggling againt it, it may have resolved better. It's not much different to a player saying "I dont like the questgiver, so I just kill him." At this point you are left with 2 options: the questgiver has plot armor op-ness or he dies and you say "**** it" to the campaign. Part of the social contract is that the players work with the DM. Maybe a really great DM can improv all the backup plans, but if he had equally great players, he wouldn't need to.


I... what? Like, the DM just went "let's make every anti-curse spell completely useless without providing any reasons nor alternative"? That's a big bowl of nope, it really sucks :(

Thing is, I fail to see the fun in all that. The players sure didn't enjoy it, and I don't see how as a DM it could be enjoyable to force a character to slowly die with no options, unless you hated the guy's guts and just wanted to take revenge on him pissing on your pillow or something.

This is 5e, the players' options do not represent a comprehensive list of all lossible magic. Yeah, the DM tried to force things too much, especially with the -2 dex and premade character, but the player did have an option: put on the ring and trust the DM to reveal the quest/goal/etc. The DM was heavy-handed, but that can be corrected.

Just look at the first bit of "railroading." The guy picks up the ring, the DM calls for a save and he immediately wants to avoid it by throwing the ring away. Sometimes actions have consequences, and some players dont like that. The problem here is that both parties contributed to it spiralling out of control.

The players had just as much of a hand in making it not fun. I see this as similar to the pyromancer throwing a hissy fit because the particular dungeon he's running right now has fire immune/resistant enemies. Sure, a good DM would find a way to make him useful, bit not everyone knows everything about running a great game and at the end of the day, the DM is playing, too.

[Kurt Kurageous]

This was awful.

Quit.

Understand that someone else has to DM, because you've broken this DM. The only hope for them is angrydm.com, and face it, they aren't going to find it on their own.

Who chose them to DM to begin with?

[Segev]

The DM certainly didn't handle that well in the end, but the players are kind of being asshats for not even trying to buy into the plot hook.

I had an adventure like this where the player that tried to loot an idol was cursed and the curent quest line was to gather the necessary ingredients to perform a ritual to lift it. As soon as an adverse effect of the curse came up, my players spend half the session arguing that they should just be able to buy a remove curse, and would not accept the explanation that this was too powerful to simply be removed at a magic-mart pharmacy.

What I see here is a possibly inexperienced DM trying to deal with a belligerent player by using a bit too much force. Seriously, the DM is playing a game, too. You need to compromise sometimes.


I... what? Like, the DM just went "let's make every anti-curse spell completely useless without providing any reasons nor alternative"? That's a big bowl of nope, it really sucks :(

Thing is, I fail to see the fun in all that. The players sure didn't enjoy it, and I don't see how as a DM it could be enjoyable to force a character to slowly die with no options, unless you hated the guy's guts and just wanted to take revenge on him pissing on your pillow or something.

Yeah - and admittedly this is just from one side of the perspective - what I see in this story is more a DM who wanted to force a player to play a particular character, and was going to kill off or force the party to drive off the existing one. Plot hooks need actual lines attached to them; all this seemed to have was a hook that kept doing more and more damage to the cheek in which it was caught, with nothing anybody could do about it.

In addition, if you want players to go along with a plot hook, there has to be something to entice them to follow it. Hope to relieve the curse, for example. There was nothing presented, here. And, besides, you shouldn't make following the plot hook the kind of stupid thing you'd yell at characters on TV or in a book for doing. Not without strong characterization that tells you you have the kind of PCs in your game who would do those things.

"Why won't you stick your hand in this fire? Sure, it'll burn you badly, just like you expect, but I need you to be badly burned in order to run the quest to find the magic balm-leaves!"

That's not a good plot hook, and it's not clever DMing when you force the players to get burned and then give them all sorts of penalties for it while waiting for them to figure out that there's a magic balm-leaf they could be questing to find.

[Frozenstep]

This is 5e, the players' options do not represent a comprehensive list of all lossible magic. Yeah, the DM tried to force things too much, especially with the -2 dex and premade character, but the player did have an option: put on the ring and trust the DM to reveal the quest/goal/etc. The DM was heavy-handed, but that can be corrected.

Just look at the first bit of "railroading." The guy picks up the ring, the DM calls for a save and he immediately wants to avoid it by throwing the ring away. Sometimes actions have consequences, and some players dont like that. The problem here is that both parties contributed to it spiralling out of control.

The players had just as much of a hand in making it not fun. I see this as similar to the pyromancer throwing a hissy fit because the particular dungeon he's running right now has fire immune/resistant enemies. Sure, a good DM would find a way to make him useful, bit not everyone knows everything about running a great game and at the end of the day, the DM is playing, too.

Actions have consequences, but if you have crazy consequences like what happened here come as a result of rather simple actions (just picking up a ring, not even putting it on...), then players quickly become overly paranoid, and that makes it a lot easier for players to miss things. If they were paranoid from a previous incident, they'd probably never pick up the ring in the first place, and what would the DM have done then? Start mind-controlling them from a distance?

If you have to put yourself in a bad position because you think that's what will get the DM's story moving, it becomes an eye-roller. Like every dumb character in a game trusting a npc you know will betray you, but you can't do anything to stop it. You also get into weird situations where you think you see what your DM wants, and so you "trust them", but really it was misreading the situation. You think the DM wants you to try negotiating with the dragon, and you reluctantly go in and try even though your character wouldn't do such a thing (which is its own problem), and then get eaten because that wasn't what your DM wanted.

Actions have consequences, so why would you take actions that are against your own interest? Why would you submit to the curse of a ring without trying everything in the world to stop it/get it off? Because it might please the DM?

DM dictates situation. Players respond with what their character would do in the situation. They do not try to figure out what the DM meant for them to do.

You know what DM does when he really wants party to go somewhere? He has multiple ways to get them there, rather then doubling or tripling down. Players try to get the curse removed? The curse-breaker struggles, and eventually groans in defeat, before telling the party to go to X, where a more powerful cursebreaker lives. Or go to Y, where the materials needed for a strong curse break are found.

[The Kool]

I'm going to offer a way that a cursed ring of this nature could be included:

Player picks up the ring. Hey, neat, a ring. Wonder what it does. Every so often, the player hears a whispering urge to put it on. Every so often, it gets insistent enough that the player needs to make a wisdom save (or charisma save, I am personally fond of those for compulsions/possessions). If the player wants to get rid of it, "Are you sure? Your character doesn't really want to... he's not sure why. But this could be a pretty sweet ring!" but don't force him to keep it. Chances are actually really good that one of your players will pick it up and put it on, and if you've been keeping tabs on the party you can have it whisper to that player too. If he spends a short rest figuring out what it does, well part of that involves enough connection to it that the curse can sink in. Yeah, now you know it's a ring of [some tangible benefit the player will really like], but now you have to keep it on your person. If they want to get rid of it, then you can put your foot down. Maybe it just reappears in their pocket later, maybe they can't set it down. Now when the whispering hits to put it on, refusal is met with a single level of exhaustion that persists until it has been put on. After a bit of struggling with this ring, when the players are running short on options or beginning to give in to it, the whispers change. Now they are encouraging you to follow a certain path. Or if cursebreaking is tried, the one attempting it would fail but know that it is beyond them, but inform that player that they will have to seek out someone stronger than they to do this. Either they will already know who to look for, or they will already know where to look.

Player has the choice to resist without dying. Player has the choice to give in without harming the party. Players have a tangible plot hook to follow whether they keep it, resist it, or try to destroy it. The locking in of the curse waited for a deliberate action on the part of the player (spending a short rest to identify it after they already knew it whispered to them), and up until that point they could ditch it. The most important thing here is that this plot flows from and continues to allow for player choice.

EDIT: It is entirely possible that it will go like this:
Player A: "A ring? neat."
DM: "Okay, who picked up the ring?"
A: "uh, I did"
DM: "You hear a whispering-"
A: "I toss it. I want nothing to do with cursed rings."
DM: "You sure? You have a feeling it could be a really sweet ring, and you're not sure why but you want to keep it."
A: "Am I able to toss it?"
DM: "Yeah, I'm not forcing you to keep it."
A: "Then I toss it."
DM: "Okay" *begins to set up and move onto the next plot, this one having been shut down*
Player B: *in secret, a few moments later* "Hey, that ring? I grab it while no one is looking"
DM: *evil grin*

[Cheesegear]

For the record, I wanted to read other peoples' stories about being railroaded. Probably could have made that more clear.
However, I also failed to realise that apparently what happened isn't normal, and very, very few people will have a story like mine.
Weird. :smallconfused:

As to who let them DM? They were going on and on about how they have a story to tell and that they'd really like to DM an adventure when the current one was over. So, while not our usual DM, we let it slide because they asked to.


but the players are kind of being asshats for not even trying to buy into the plot hook.

What plot hook? We asked every NPC we could think of if they knew anything about the Ring, or the entity inside it. Nothing. Detect Magic gave us 'Necromancy', which, given how hard the DM was pushing how powerful the Ring was; We heard 'Lich'. We assumed a good History check would reveal something, or maybe we could ask around town. Remember 200 years ago, there was a super powerful Wizard who probably definitely made a Ring? We even asked the Elven Druid NPC that we met two sessions ago. Elf and Druid? If anyone knew about Liches in the local area in the last century or two, it'd be her. Maybe she was one of the Adventurers that took him down the first (or second, or third, fourth?...It's hard to tell with Liches) time 'round...Nothing.

Given that a PC was going to die from six failed non-consecutive saves , and he wasn't able to chuck it away (it had a way of railroading teleporting back to us), the only obvious solution is 'Put it on'.

We do that...Except now our party member in the middle of a situation or combat (again, no discernible trigger, it just happens), the DM just says 'Your character says [something offensive to the NPC].', or, the party member attacks us. So combat becomes way more difficult since we have to now deal with an extra Level 10 hostile with PC classes who we don't actually want to hurt, in addition to the other hostiles we're facing in a given encounter. The DM also ruins social checks because our Possessed friend can't apparently do anything of his own free will anymore, except walk.

This becomes untenable, and our Cleric spends an entire day dropping all the Spells he can think of, for a Level 10, to get rid of a Necromancy-based Curse/Possession, with the exception of Hallow, which he couldn't cast at the time for obvious reasons. However, if the DM was asking us to cast Hallow to solve a problem, I have some issues. But, that's moot, because Hallow was even explicitly brought up - the DM said that it wouldn't have worked anyway.

We asked around. Nothing.
We tried doing the thing ourselves. Nothing.


I had an adventure like this where the player that tried to loot an idol was cursed and the curent quest line was to gather the necessary ingredients to perform a ritual to lift it.

What was the Curse? Was it likely to kill a PC in the immediate future? Was it likely to get PCs killed in the near future?

Furthermore, how did you inform them about the necessary ingredients they had to get? How did they learn about the ritual?
You did tell them how to remove the Curse, right?


What I see here is a possibly inexperienced DM trying to deal with a belligerent player by using a bit too much force.

That's the thing. The DM had no idea who would pick up the ring first.
Loot Divider: "Who wants this plain metal ring?"
Player: "What's it worth?"
DM: "It doesn't have any stones in it. It's a ring. It'll get you a few silvers, maybe a gold, at best."
Player: "Whatever, I take it off [the guy we just killed]."
DM: GOTCH'YA. Make a WIS save!
Player: "Wait. Why? What just happened? I'm not attuned to anything, I swear."

The assumption was that it could've happened to anyone. The DM wasn't targeting anyone, specifically.
It's just that when push came to shove, removing the Ring from the PC came with a -2 DEX penalty. I'm sure some of our other players would've been willing to ride that. But, not the DEX-based Melee character who's already not even breaking combats as it is.

Okay, great. We cut off a finger and a PC takes the -2 DEX hit. Does that even work, though? If he was the last one to touch the Ring, and he's still alive, can't the Ring just teleport back to him again? When does this end? Let's say removing the finger breaks the Curse (despite everything we've seen, that's definitely not how the Curse is broken), the Ring is now on the ground. What do we do? We can't leave it here. Most of the party is Good-aligned and the Ring is clearly Bad News, so we'd have to take it with us lest it fall into a random Bandit's hands who becomes a super-powerful Lich in a few months. Does someone else pick up the Ring? Wont the same thing just happen again? Take WIS saves until you die from magical Exhaustion? What's the plan to deal with this?

Are we just supposed to hack it? Does one of us become a DM-controlled Lich? (This is what we're thinking will happen. But after this adventure, this DM doesn't get another shot at making a recurring villain because this DM doesn't get to DM again). This is, ultimately, the plan we went with. The PC kept the ring on. For the sake of the party and for everyone else in the immediate area, he walked into the hills, never to be seen again. Roll new character. Just kidding. The DM has a PC ready to go.

But yeah. I was expecting other posters' stories of railroading.
I did not realise that it was as bad as it appears to be.

[The Kool]

For the record, I wanted to read other peoples' stories about being railroaded. Probably could have made that more clear.
However, I also failed to realise that apparently what happened isn't normal, and very, very few people will have a story like mine.
Weird. :smallconfused:

Yeah, it's bad. Maybe not the worst though. This forum tends to have strong reactions to things like this. I shared mine, and would daresay it's as bad as yours in hindsight. To sum up: "you are all forced without warning or buy-in to play characters that aren't simply not your own but are actively the PCs of other players, and you don't have their character sheets. For the grand finale, you must PvP or you all die."

[Rentirith]

this was a while ago, and I don't remember the exact details, but here we go

Started as a lvl 1 dread necro (playing 3.5). Small group of 5 is sent to go find an inn and deal with a rat problem. One of the group members stays behind to drink ale. The travel time is 4 days. Let that sink in. The absent player stays in the same tavern in start town drinking ale for 4 days. As part of the 'backstory' we were told that in this part of the world, arcane magic is illegal. glad i knew about that before hand. Along the way, we stop by this traveling merchant who takes one look at me in my minor nobleman's robes and runs away. Great start.

We get to the tavern, and have a 'roleplaying' session where the fighter bangs literally every women in the bar (because he's a MAN!) and I am mocked for my cowardly ways just for asking for a drink. The rogue gets up to rogue ****, and accidentally starts a confrontation with a bar patron. I try to be a team player and use my charismatic skills to talk the guy down, but NOPE he is apparently a level 10 barbarian who back hands me to the ground, and I am out for the night. Morning comes and I have no gold. Great. We get around to fighting the rats, take care of it, and head home. We all level up. woo!

Except no. I am immediately caught upon our returning home and arrested for my arcane magics (not even for using necromancy, just arcane, which none of those npcs saw). The session ends there, but not before we are also alerted that the guy who stayed behind also levels up. Thats not to railroady by itself, it just made me upset. I then learn that all of the melee pcs (ale guy included) were irl friends of the dm.

So for the next session i think to myself (remember I was new to the game, i thought this was just how it went) 'great Rentirith, you can have a cool social encounter where you talk yourself out of jail; all of your stats are low except for charisma, you can do this!' Nope. I was released with a headband that prevented me from casting magic. Can't be removed, cant be deactivated; nothing. So that's great.

A couple of others are added to this party (dunno why) and one of them plays some swordmage type. Duskblade probably. I try to warn him about the magic stuff, but i don't get a chance to. So the next mission is to do...something. But during it we have to camp outside of a cave, and we encounter some bears. Well, i don't know anything about animals, but hey my CHARISMA which is the ONLY THING I CAN USE NOW is pretty high, so i say 'Im gonna try to use my charisma to calm the bears so we can pass.' The dm tells me to roll a persuasion check.

I say to him 'shouldn't this be animal handling?'

he says 'nah use persuasion. You are persuading them. right?'

This makes sense to me, and it is the same modifier for both rolls so i roll. With a natural twenty (i remember this because it was burned into my mind) and modfiers i get a 29 or something. I am ecstatic.

DM: "oh yeah, it would be animal handling. It doesn't work, and the bear bites you. It deals 30 some-odd damage. where are you at?"

I say, in the midst of my sputtering for breath, that I would be at -11 hp (in 3.5 if you went to 0 you would only die if you hit -11 hp, or something) if it wasn't for my damage resistance; so technically i am at -9 hp.

DM: "oh, the damage resistance doesn't count. You're dead. why don't you make a martial character next?"

And then i stuck around for another session because I hated myself.

P.S. the duskblade bit it shortly after as well.

[Unoriginal]

For the record, I wanted to read other peoples' stories about being railroaded. Probably could have made that more clear.
However, I also failed to realise that apparently what happened isn't normal, and very, very few people will have a story like mine.
Weird. :smallconfused:



But yeah. I was expecting other posters' stories of railroading.
I did not realise that it was as bad as it appears to be.

I could tell you some railroad stories , but they all have in common to be frustrating situations leaving unsatisfied and angry players, and most of them involves not playing the campaign in question any longer afterward.

In any case, having a jerk DM throwing their **** around is NEVER normal, and should always be treated as the ****ty attitude it is, not tolerated.



As to who let them DM? They were going on and on about how they have a story to tell and that they'd really like to DM an adventure when the current one was over. So, while not our usual DM, we let it slide because they asked to.

Probably a warning sign, in retrospect. When you have a specific story to tell, writing a novel is much better than a RPG scenario, as what happens in RPGs is by nature and purposely not set in stone.



The DM has a PC ready to go.

Out of curiosity, did the player agree to play this ready-to-go PC? How did everyone react?

[Bloodcloud]

I'm gonna do a bit of a Am I the railroader here...

I've been doing the "elder scroll start" to just about all my campaign for a while. In prison for unspecified reason, get out with a quest or some task, first dungeon is pretty mandatory and straightfoward, then the game opens up.

In my current campagin, the players wanted to do an evil campaign, so I set things a bit thighter to avoid too quickly devolving into full murderhobo territory. Basically, they started being shipped off in exile to a remote mountain region. They are magically branded, making escape impractical because the brand can be used to cause them pain and track them easily. The "town" is a mining colony, built on a discarded dwarven site.

Upon arrival, they are informed the local prince, a disgraced prince, decides to put their abilities to use, and rather than conscripting them to mining task them with investigating a kobold incursion in the mine.

They went down the kobold tunnels, and ended up actually negotiating with the final boss, a winged kobold. They discovered a whole big kobold city, under threat by myconid incursion. They hid that discovery, promised the kobolds to deal with the myconid situation, and reported to the prince that the kobold had been dealt with but had a myconid problem. From there they got into various sidequest involving the previous dwarven civilization, a fey temple, a dark wizard attempting to summon and control zuggtymoy, a brewing slave rebellion, and the prince's goal to restore his honor.

Right now they are helping the wizard summon the demon, are the kobolds great heroes, the myconids have been whiped out, and they want to join the forces of the wizard, the kobolds and the rebellion to overthrow the Prince. It could go a few way still, and I'm rather open on how they manage that.

Basically they've got a few faction with competing and something aligning goals and are navigating between that, and they've got quite a bit of freedom with that. But they are confined to the region through admitedly rather arbitrary limits.

So, would you feel bad about that? Do you consider that admitedly heavy-handed early railroading into the campaign premise too much, or is the following "small sandbox" allowing enough agency to compensate? They definitely have a few way to break out of it eventually.

[opaopajr]

Well old skool games had cursed rings aplenty, often with mysterious ill effects that may show up later, or have rumored malice come with its now dubious benefit.

But that's the problem here with thos original post's example. There's no offered challenge; it's merely a looming threat of "guess what I am thinking (or going to do)!" There is no meaningful encounter in this situation because by definition you are not 'encountering' anything: it's a Schroedinger's Cat Curse, forever in the box, taunting you with its potential.

It's suspense devoid of resolution because the GM forever wants to hide its definition. If you cannot define, you cannot resolve, and thus the tension is drawn out into meaningless-ness. :smallcool: The GM killed his own game because he never let you all in on his game in the first place beyond punitive setup.

You were forever trapped in the non-starter with no meaningful choice.

[Unoriginal]

I'm gonna do a bit of a Am I the railroader here...

I've been doing the "elder scroll start" to just about all my campaign for a while. In prison for unspecified reason, get out with a quest or some task, first dungeon is pretty mandatory and straightfoward, then the game opens up.

In my current campagin, the players wanted to do an evil campaign, so I set things a bit thighter to avoid too quickly devolving into full murderhobo territory. Basically, they started being shipped off in exile to a remote mountain region. They are magically branded, making escape impractical because the brand can be used to cause them pain and track them easily. The "town" is a mining colony, built on a discarded dwarven site.

Upon arrival, they are informed the local prince, a disgraced prince, decides to put their abilities to use, and rather than conscripting them to mining task them with investigating a kobold incursion in the mine.

They went down the kobold tunnels, and ended up actually negotiating with the final boss, a winged kobold. They discovered a whole big kobold city, under threat by myconid incursion. They hid that discovery, promised the kobolds to deal with the myconid situation, and reported to the prince that the kobold had been dealt with but had a myconid problem. From there they got into various sidequest involving the previous dwarven civilization, a fey temple, a dark wizard attempting to summon and control zuggtymoy, a brewing slave rebellion, and the prince's goal to restore his honor.

Right now they are helping the wizard summon the demon, are the kobolds great heroes, the myconids have been whiped out, and they want to join the forces of the wizard, the kobolds and the rebellion to overthrow the Prince. It could go a few way still, and I'm rather open on how they manage that.

Basically they've got a few faction with competing and something aligning goals and are navigating between that, and they've got quite a bit of freedom with that. But they are confined to the region through admitedly rather arbitrary limits.

So, would you feel bad about that? Do you consider that admitedly heavy-handed early railroading into the campaign premise too much, or is the following "small sandbox" allowing enough agency to compensate? They definitely have a few way to break out of it eventually.

That's not railroading, though, it's just the beginning of a campaign.

If the PCs had decided, on the first session, that rather than handle the whole kobolds situation, they should immediately try to collect weapons from the first group of slain kobolds and to give them to the miners so that they can revolt, would you have stopped them and told them they Had To go in the dungeon to the end?

[The Kool]

That's not railroading, though, it's just the beginning of a campaign.

If the PCs had decided, on the first session, that rather than handle the whole kobolds situation, they should immediately try to collect weapons from the first group of slain kobolds and to give them to the miners so that they can revolt, would you have stopped them and told them they Had To go in the dungeon to the end?

Exactly this. As long as your players were on board with the whole shipped-to-an-island-and-branded thing before you began, then that's fine because they agreed to it. The real question of railroading is whether you're letting them make choices, or leading them down a path of "Okay, now that you've done that, here's what's next". As long as they have the freedom to decide where to go in this sandbox, I get the distinct feeling that they could eventually break free from the box when they become powerful enough. Remove the brands, hijack a ship, sail an army to the mainland... It might be a completely new direction that could be classified as a new campaign with the old characters, but it feels like they could. They needn't be able to leave the island to be free from rails, though. If they agree that this island is a big enough sandbox and they won't try to leave, then again that part isn't an issue. Sounds like there's plenty to do.

[JNAProductions]

I'm gonna do a bit of a Am I the railroader here...

I've been doing the "elder scroll start" to just about all my campaign for a while. In prison for unspecified reason, get out with a quest or some task, first dungeon is pretty mandatory and straightfoward, then the game opens up.

In my current campagin, the players wanted to do an evil campaign, so I set things a bit thighter to avoid too quickly devolving into full murderhobo territory. Basically, they started being shipped off in exile to a remote mountain region. They are magically branded, making escape impractical because the brand can be used to cause them pain and track them easily. The "town" is a mining colony, built on a discarded dwarven site.

Upon arrival, they are informed the local prince, a disgraced prince, decides to put their abilities to use, and rather than conscripting them to mining task them with investigating a kobold incursion in the mine.

They went down the kobold tunnels, and ended up actually negotiating with the final boss, a winged kobold. They discovered a whole big kobold city, under threat by myconid incursion. They hid that discovery, promised the kobolds to deal with the myconid situation, and reported to the prince that the kobold had been dealt with but had a myconid problem. From there they got into various sidequest involving the previous dwarven civilization, a fey temple, a dark wizard attempting to summon and control zuggtymoy, a brewing slave rebellion, and the prince's goal to restore his honor.

Right now they are helping the wizard summon the demon, are the kobolds great heroes, the myconids have been whiped out, and they want to join the forces of the wizard, the kobolds and the rebellion to overthrow the Prince. It could go a few way still, and I'm rather open on how they manage that.

Basically they've got a few faction with competing and something aligning goals and are navigating between that, and they've got quite a bit of freedom with that. But they are confined to the region through admitedly rather arbitrary limits.

So, would you feel bad about that? Do you consider that admitedly heavy-handed early railroading into the campaign premise too much, or is the following "small sandbox" allowing enough agency to compensate? They definitely have a few way to break out of it eventually.

That's fine. Most notably, it sounds like your players are having fun, which is what ultimately matters.



To Cheesegear, and some of the others who posted... Good lordie loo, those stories SUCK! I feel for y'all.

[Keravath]

I'm gonna do a bit of a Am I the railroader here...

I've been doing the "elder scroll start" to just about all my campaign for a while. In prison for unspecified reason, get out with a quest or some task, first dungeon is pretty mandatory and straightfoward, then the game opens up.

In my current campagin, the players wanted to do an evil campaign, so I set things a bit thighter to avoid too quickly devolving into full murderhobo territory. Basically, they started being shipped off in exile to a remote mountain region. They are magically branded, making escape impractical because the brand can be used to cause them pain and track them easily. The "town" is a mining colony, built on a discarded dwarven site.

Upon arrival, they are informed the local prince, a disgraced prince, decides to put their abilities to use, and rather than conscripting them to mining task them with investigating a kobold incursion in the mine.

They went down the kobold tunnels, and ended up actually negotiating with the final boss, a winged kobold. They discovered a whole big kobold city, under threat by myconid incursion. They hid that discovery, promised the kobolds to deal with the myconid situation, and reported to the prince that the kobold had been dealt with but had a myconid problem. From there they got into various sidequest involving the previous dwarven civilization, a fey temple, a dark wizard attempting to summon and control zuggtymoy, a brewing slave rebellion, and the prince's goal to restore his honor.

Right now they are helping the wizard summon the demon, are the kobolds great heroes, the myconids have been whiped out, and they want to join the forces of the wizard, the kobolds and the rebellion to overthrow the Prince. It could go a few way still, and I'm rather open on how they manage that.

Basically they've got a few faction with competing and something aligning goals and are navigating between that, and they've got quite a bit of freedom with that. But they are confined to the region through admitedly rather arbitrary limits.

So, would you feel bad about that? Do you consider that admitedly heavy-handed early railroading into the campaign premise too much, or is the following "small sandbox" allowing enough agency to compensate? They definitely have a few way to break out of it eventually.

Presumably there is a way to remove the brand and when they do they can wander off however they wish.

From your comments, the players know that they can probably find a solution ... at the least they have a wizard and possible demon that might be able to help ... and are choosing to remain and deal with the local situation.

So although it might have been an initial hindrance, countering the brand is actually the first step of the quest and the characters have had free choice about how to go about that so I'd say it isn't the same type of railroading at all.

[Unoriginal]

I mean, Out of the Abyss has the "Elder Scroll opening" with the PCs having been enslaved by the drow. It's not railroading, not any more than any campaign's premise.

[jh12]

I mean, Out of the Abyss has the "Elder Scroll opening" with the PCs having been enslaved by the drow.

Does no one remember Daggerfall? The Elder Scrolls don't always start off with your character in prison.

[GlenSmash!]

I've been lucky enough to never have a bad railroad experience. Which the commonality I see from examples is that no approach the players think of will work unless it's exactly the approach the DM had in mind, rather than reacting to the players approach and determining success, failure, or uncertainly as normal.

Oh I've played in and run a few campaigns that were linear, on-rails even, but you could still let the player's choices have meaning.

[Karnitis]

Yeah, the Elder Scrolls beginning isn't bad because it never hurts to have a teambuilding event. That's usually my only problem with campaign beginnings where we aren't part of a guild/group - why exactly would I want to work with these strangers?

But when you are all hired to kill kobolds, or perhaps you all work together because none of you plan on being branded for life, it makes sense.

It only gets dumb when you are all in a bar coincidentally, and a NobleTM bursts in the door and points at you five specific people and says "You're all tough! Help save my half-elf daughter from the local crime boss/lich!"

Bunch of commoners dealing with common problem (kobold infestation) = normal
Bunch of commoners chosen by an ancient Wizard to fight 7 deadly daemons recently unleashed upon the world = not normal

[ATHATH]

I've never read anything from the Angry DM that'd make it "the only hope" of anyone. Never read anything from him I'd recommend someone else to read, either.
I liked his Two Orcs Method trio of articles and his Megadungeon series, and do actively recommend the former to other people.

[Yunru]

I liked his Two Orcs Method trio of articles and his Megadungeon series, and do actively recommend the former to other people.

His paragon template is also very useful, and probably the one I use the most.

[ATHATH]

His paragon template is also very useful, and probably the one I use the most.
Wasn't that a part of the Two Orcs trio (or was it a series?) of articles?

[Elric VIII]

Actions have consequences, but if you have crazy consequences like what happened here come as a result of rather simple actions (just picking up a ring, not even putting it on...), then players quickly become overly paranoid, and that makes it a lot easier for players to miss things. If they were paranoid from a previous incident, they'd probably never pick up the ring in the first place, and what would the DM have done then? Start mind-controlling them from a distance?

If you have to put yourself in a bad position because you think that's what will get the DM's story moving, it becomes an eye-roller. Like every dumb character in a game trusting a npc you know will betray you, but you can't do anything to stop it. You also get into weird situations where you think you see what your DM wants, and so you "trust them", but really it was misreading the situation. You think the DM wants you to try negotiating with the dragon, and you reluctantly go in and try even though your character wouldn't do such a thing (which is its own problem), and then get eaten because that wasn't what your DM wanted.

Actions have consequences, so why would you take actions that are against your own interest? Why would you submit to the curse of a ring without trying everything in the world to stop it/get it off? Because it might please the DM?

DM dictates situation. Players respond with what their character would do in the situation. They do not try to figure out what the DM meant for them to do.

You know what DM does when he really wants party to go somewhere? He has multiple ways to get them there, rather then doubling or tripling down. Players try to get the curse removed? The curse-breaker struggles, and eventually groans in defeat, before telling the party to go to X, where a more powerful cursebreaker lives. Or go to Y, where the materials needed for a strong curse break are found.

If you take that stance why be an adventurer at all? Run 1 adventure path then live like a king off the excess gold and terribly balanced economy. D&D is predicated on making an overall risky or stupid choice for suspension of disbelief. It's a game. Also, not all of us are award-winning authors that can come up with groundbreaking plot arcs that change the genre. Tropes will happen.

Yeah, your DM shouldn't "gotcha" the players at every opportunity, but it happens sometimes. If your players are going to metagame that everything could be a trap, you're going to have a ****ty game regardless. If your players "nope" out when they see the golden idol on a pedestal in the middle of the room, they're just being ****ty players.

The whole point of this game is that it's collaborative, not adversarial. This situation devolved into the adversarial as a result of both the players and the DM here. The players should trust the DM that if they take the hook, even if it is sloppy or obvious, the game will be good. I don't know about this specific DM's plans, but my players just started leafing through the PHB and complaining when the obvious things didn't work. If, instead, they just took the hint that this was special(TM) and went with it, it was going to evolve into an adventure where the player that triggered it would eventually be given the opportunity to embrace the evil or fight it. But because they immediately made it adversarial, everything fell apart.

Maybe the DM was power-tripping here, but I think it's more likely that he's just inexperienced and his players were unwilling to compromise. So he tries to be more and more heavy handed, because instead of the player that was affected by mind control playing along, the guy acts with 100% clarity and knows he needs to get rid of the ring. This is on both of them.



What plot hook? We asked every NPC we could think of if they knew anything about the Ring, or the entity inside it. Nothing. Detect Magic gave us 'Necromancy', which, given how hard the DM was pushing how powerful the Ring was; We heard 'Lich'. We assumed a good History check would reveal something, or maybe we could ask around town. Remember 200 years ago, there was a super powerful Wizard who probably definitely made a Ring? We even asked the Elven Druid NPC that we met two sessions ago. Elf and Druid? If anyone knew about Liches in the local area in the last century or two, it'd be her. Maybe she was one of the Adventurers that took him down the first (or second, or third, fourth?...It's hard to tell with Liches) time 'round...Nothing.

Given that a PC was going to die from six failed non-consecutive saves , and he wasn't able to chuck it away (it had a way of railroading teleporting back to us), the only obvious solution is 'Put it on'.

We do that...Except now our party member in the middle of a situation or combat (again, no discernible trigger, it just happens), the DM just says 'Your character says [something offensive to the NPC].', or, the party member attacks us. So combat becomes way more difficult since we have to now deal with an extra Level 10 hostile with PC classes who we don't actually want to hurt, in addition to the other hostiles we're facing in a given encounter. The DM also ruins social checks because our Possessed friend can't apparently do anything of his own free will anymore, except walk.

This becomes untenable, and our Cleric spends an entire day dropping all the Spells he can think of, for a Level 10, to get rid of a Necromancy-based Curse/Possession, with the exception of Hallow, which he couldn't cast at the time for obvious reasons. However, if the DM was asking us to cast Hallow to solve a problem, I have some issues. But, that's moot, because Hallow was even explicitly brought up - the DM said that it wouldn't have worked anyway.

We asked around. Nothing.
We tried doing the thing ourselves. Nothing.


A cursed ring that makes you hear voices doesn't strike you as a plot hook? I'm just not buying it that you were all innocently playing along and the DM just decides to **** with you. I'm still inclined to believe that he just wasn't good at moving the plot along.

For example, it would have been just as easy for the DM to say you're compelled to not throw the ring away, rather than have it teleport back. I've seen this scenario where the players are being belligerent enough that the DM just lets them get rid of it and makes it come back.

[Keravath]

If you take that stance why be an adventurer at all? Run 1 adventure path then live like a king off the excess gold and terribly balanced economy. D&D is predicated on making an overall risky or stupid choice for suspension of disbelief. It's a game. Also, not all of us are award-winning authors that can come up with groundbreaking plot arcs that change the genre. Tropes will happen.

Yeah, your DM shouldn't "gotcha" the players at every opportunity, but it happens sometimes. If your players are going to metagame that everything could be a trap, you're going to have a ****ty game regardless. If your players "nope" out when they see the golden idol on a pedestal in the middle of the room, they're just being ****ty players.

The whole point of this game is that it's collaborative, not adversarial. This situation devolved into the adversarial as a result of both the players and the DM here. The players should trust the DM that if they take the hook, even if it is sloppy or obvious, the game will be good. I don't know about this specific DM's plans, but my players just started leafing through the PHB and complaining when the obvious things didn't work. If, instead, they just took the hint that this was special(TM) and went with it, it was going to evolve into an adventure where the player that triggered it would eventually be given the opportunity to embrace the evil or fight it. But because they immediately made it adversarial, everything fell apart.

Maybe the DM was power-tripping here, but I think it's more likely that he's just inexperienced and his players were unwilling to compromise. So he tries to be more and more heavy handed, because instead of the player that was affected by mind control playing along, the guy acts with 100% clarity and knows he needs to get rid of the ring. This is on both of them.




A cursed ring that makes you hear voices doesn't strike you as a plot hook? I'm just not buying it that you were all innocently playing along and the DM just decides to **** with you. I'm still inclined to believe that he just wasn't good at moving the plot along.

For example, it would have been just as easy for the DM to say you're compelled to not throw the ring away, rather than have it teleport back. I've seen this scenario where the players are being belligerent enough that the DM just lets them get rid of it and makes it come back.


Think of it this way. If a cursed ring is a plot hook that the characters can't get rid of and have absolutely no choice about what to do with it or how to react then the DM might as well narrate whatever they have in mind and advance the plot to the point where the player decisions actually have some meaning again rather than trying to force the players to do the one thing that the DMs script allows for and making the characters die or otherwise suffer extreme penalties if they try to vary from the plotline.

Think about it a bit. What would your characters do in the following situation:
- character picks up a ring that is cursed, causes them to hear voices, takes over their volition causing chaos socially by being insulting and inappropriate and in combat by attacking allies.
- the party has no way to remove the ring and can find no information about it
- chopping off the finger with the ring is going to cause disproportionate harm to the character.

Options:
- find a good jail or sanitorium and lock the character up, leaving them behind until you can find some solution to the ring
- kill the character and bury both them and the ring at the bottom of a 100' shaft in solid rock

Adventuring with this character is NOT an option from the character's perspective. The character may be a friend but they have become a massive liability. If they are good friends then the confinement option is probably the best choice. (Though the character with the ring might well choose to die rather than be possessed).

Basically, the DM has created a situation which is, by its very nature, adversarial. There is no cooperative story telling when the characters decisions (except the exact one scripted by the DM) can contribute to the story line. The ring as described by the OP is a no-win situation in which the characters have to get rid of the character with the ring. They haven't been given any other reasonable choice. Keeping the character in the party and trying to put up with unexpected negative outbursts scripted by the DM isn't really a reasonable option from the character perspective.

[Frozenstep]

If you take that stance why be an adventurer at all? Run 1 adventure path then live like a king off the excess gold and terribly balanced economy. D&D is predicated on making an overall risky or stupid choice for suspension of disbelief. It's a game.

Adventurers have all sorts of reasons to do what they do, just the same as heroes and characters from any other media. But just because they're the ones who head towards danger rather then away doesn't make them stupid or reckless. They can easily be careful people who try to gather information, make sure they're supplied if they're aware of what they'll fight, and retreat when they see a battle is not winnable. They're willing to risk their lives because they do a lot to reduce that risk, and see it as an acceptable risk for whatever reward is on the other side. They might just fight that big scary lich to save the villagers from his rule. That doesn't mean they have to walk in the front door and announce their presence.

Dnd is about making choices in general. Not just stupid ones.


Also, not all of us are award-winning authors that can come up with groundbreaking plot arcs that change the genre. Tropes will happen.

We all use tropes, but even the most trope-heavy campaign has something on the other end of that risk. A princess to save, a treasure to find, a personal grudge to settle. Jumping into a pit of spikes is risky, and you're not going to do that because you're an adventurer and you take the risky choice, you avoid it because there's nothing apparent to be gained from it. It doesn't matter if there was actually a treasure below the spikes that were actually an illusion.


Yeah, your DM shouldn't "gotcha" the players at every opportunity, but it happens sometimes. If your players are going to metagame that everything could be a trap, you're going to have a ****ty game regardless. If your players "nope" out when they see the golden idol on a pedestal in the middle of the room, they're just being ****ty players.

See, if my players saw a golden idol in the middle of the room, they'd start looking for signs of traps, ambushes, the like. They'd follow up with detect magic and identify. This is what I imagine a real adventurer would do, and it's something I encourage. How does that make them ****ty? What if I just made a trapped idol, no story hook behind it? Should a player go up and get cursed just in case my campaign hinges on the fact that someone needs to be cursed by it?

See, I don't design my stories around players intentionally making a choice their character would see as a bad idea.


The whole point of this game is that it's collaborative, not adversarial. This situation devolved into the adversarial as a result of both the players and the DM here. The players should trust the DM that if they take the hook, even if it is sloppy or obvious, the game will be good. I don't know about this specific DM's plans, but my players just started leafing through the PHB and complaining when the obvious things didn't work. If, instead, they just took the hint that this was special(TM) and went with it, it was going to evolve into an adventure where the player that triggered it would eventually be given the opportunity to embrace the evil or fight it. But because they immediately made it adversarial, everything fell apart.

Don't offer hooks that look like traps and curses, then. If you want a curse to be part of your story, the curse itself shouldn't be the hook. I'd just have a ghost curse them, they go to get it cured, and the priest says they can't do it but someone at x place where I wanted them to go can. Boom, players will follow that no problem.

If you're gonna have a hook...use some damned bait. A fish isn't going to bite a hook that has a shark on it, they're going to rapidly swim away as fast as possible.


Maybe the DM was power-tripping here, but I think it's more likely that he's just inexperienced and his players were unwilling to compromise. So he tries to be more and more heavy handed, because instead of the player that was affected by mind control playing along, the guy acts with 100% clarity and knows he needs to get rid of the ring. This is on both of them.

Inexperienced DM, yes. Heavy mind control on a player is bad stuff, the DM controls the entire world and the player controls 1 character. The DM controls the entire universe outside of the actions of these characters, if he can't guide those players towards where he needs them to be and has to seize control of the characters too or his story will be ruined, he's already failed. Of course the player will fight back against mind control and his party will do anything to get rid of it.


A cursed ring that makes you hear voices doesn't strike you as a plot hook? I'm just not buying it that you were all innocently playing along and the DM just decides to **** with you. I'm still inclined to believe that he just wasn't good at moving the plot along.

For example, it would have been just as easy for the DM to say you're compelled to not throw the ring away, rather than have it teleport back. I've seen this scenario where the players are being belligerent enough that the DM just lets them get rid of it and makes it come back.

See, now you're the one encouraging metagaming. If my character is a sane, rational person, they wouldn't put on a random ring that can try compelling me to do anything, it's probably cursed. So they should do it because...out of character, I know this is probably a plot hook. That's ridiculous.

And see, they picked it up, get cursed, sure. The plot hook should not then be "keep doing insane things with a ring you know is cursed" or "suffer continuously with no way to respond", the plot hook should be "holy crap, get this ring away from me". The plot hook should lead somewhere right away.

You have to remember that whatever story you're trying to tell, you need to play to the strength of your medium. Taking control away from the characters, forcing them to be the ones making dumb choices for the sake of the story, that stuff is a lot more noticeable and a lot less appreciated in this medium compared to a book or something, because there's a person attached to that character and you're taking away from that so called collaborative story/game by taking away their ability to make choices.

[Elric VIII]

Think of it this way. If a cursed ring is a plot hook that the characters can't get rid of and have absolutely no choice about what to do with it or how to react then the DM might as well narrate whatever they have in mind and advance the plot to the point where the player decisions actually have some meaning again rather than trying to force the players to do the one thing that the DMs script allows for and making the characters die or otherwise suffer extreme penalties if they try to vary from the plotline.

Think about it a bit. What would your characters do in the following situation:
- character picks up a ring that is cursed, causes them to hear voices, takes over their volition causing chaos socially by being insulting and inappropriate and in combat by attacking allies.
- the party has no way to remove the ring and can find no information about it
- chopping off the finger with the ring is going to cause disproportionate harm to the character.

Options:
- find a good jail or sanitorium and lock the character up, leaving them behind until you can find some solution to the ring
- kill the character and bury both them and the ring at the bottom of a 100' shaft in solid rock

Adventuring with this character is NOT an option from the character's perspective. The character may be a friend but they have become a massive liability. If they are good friends then the confinement option is probably the best choice. (Though the character with the ring might well choose to die rather than be possessed).

Basically, the DM has created a situation which is, by its very nature, adversarial. There is no cooperative story telling when the characters decisions (except the exact one scripted by the DM) can contribute to the story line. The ring as described by the OP is a no-win situation in which the characters have to get rid of the character with the ring. They haven't been given any other reasonable choice. Keeping the character in the party and trying to put up with unexpected negative outbursts scripted by the DM isn't really a reasonable option from the character perspective.

This is like saying because the DM won't let the PCs just murder the king and take over the kingdom that he should narrate things. Just because you don't have every option available, doesn't mean you have no options available.

You're focusing too much on how this exact scenario turned out. If I flip a coin once and it comes up tails, I can't just conclude that all coins land tails when flipped. Maybe if the players did play along it would have gone smoothly, maybe it wouldn't have. But the takeaway is that both parties are at fault.



Adventurers have all sorts of reasons to do what they do, just the same as heroes and characters from any other media. But just because they're the ones who head towards danger rather then away doesn't make them stupid or reckless. They can easily be careful people who try to gather information, make sure they're supplied if they're aware of what they'll fight, and retreat when they see a battle is not winnable. They're willing to risk their lives because they do a lot to reduce that risk, and see it as an acceptable risk for whatever reward is on the other side. They might just fight that big scary lich to save the villagers from his rule. That doesn't mean they have to walk in the front door and announce their presence.

Dnd is about making choices in general. Not just stupid ones.

And the point is that players should work with the DM to adjust their motivations to the world. If you want to go all the way down this rabbit hole, then the rest of the world can react with that same caution and preparation and you end up with a whole lot of "rocks fall, you die" scenarios. There's a difference between stupid and just playing along. The DM caters the world to the players by not having the ancient dragon god BBEG decide to curbstomp them at level 1, the players should tailor their motivations to the world in the same way.




We all use tropes, but even the most trope-heavy campaign has something on the other end of that risk. A princess to save, a treasure to find, a personal grudge to settle. Jumping into a pit of spikes is risky, and you're not going to do that because you're an adventurer and you take the risky choice, you avoid it because there's nothing apparent to be gained from it. It doesn't matter if there was actually a treasure below the spikes that were actually an illusion.

Sure, in this case maybe there wasn't. The point is you need to work with your DM.

Also, we don't know anything else that was going on in this campaign. Maybe there was another plot arc that provided motivation and this was a side part? Last week I had a session where my players were trying to infiltrate a temple where the BBEG was assembling a planar bridge to bring his army to this world. That's a huge doom clock. I had set up the encounter through the temple as a series of skill challenges to overcome its magical defenses, but first the players fought some lesser demon guards. Those lesser demon guards gave some of the players a poison that worked like mummy rot that increased exhaustion every hour, rather that eating hit points every day. I told them it was a poison, and even after hinting that lesser restoration alone wouldn't work, our cleric and bard used 9 spell slots casting it on everyone, repeatedly.

I had to let them take a long rest after that or basically let them walk into a TPK because they used the rules of "how the system should work," rather than trusting me to balance things out. Seriously, this would have been a moderate increase to the difficulty of the subsequent encounters, but not enough to deplete all of your resources. This DM didn't have the foresight to do that, but that doesn't change things.



See, if my players saw a golden idol in the middle of the room, they'd start looking for signs of traps, ambushes, the like. They'd follow up with detect magic and identify. This is what I imagine a real adventurer would do, and it's something I encourage. How does that make them ****ty? What if I just made a trapped idol, no story hook behind it? Should a player go up and get cursed just in case my campaign hinges on the fact that someone needs to be cursed by it?

See, I don't design my stories around players intentionally making a choice their character would see as a bad idea.

This (http://agc.deskslave.org/comics/AGC5-10.GIF) is the logical conclusion to that. If your players stop short of this, they are intentionally being stupid because they know it's a game and they know that the universe works with a very clear set of rules.




Don't offer hooks that look like traps and curses, then. If you want a curse to be part of your story, the curse itself shouldn't be the hook. I'd just have a ghost curse them, they go to get it cured, and the priest says they can't do it but someone at x place where I wanted them to go can. Boom, players will follow that no problem.

If you're gonna have a hook...use some damned bait. A fish isn't going to bite a hook that has a shark on it, they're going to rapidly swim away as fast as possible.

That is literally the same type of railroading, but this one has a quest giver NPC. You are being very disingenuous if you don't think people wouldn't complain about "magic ghost curses" that they couldn't prevent.




Inexperienced DM, yes. Heavy mind control on a player is bad stuff, the DM controls the entire world and the player controls 1 character. The DM controls the entire universe outside of the actions of these characters, if he can't guide those players towards where he needs them to be and has to seize control of the characters too or his story will be ruined, he's already failed. Of course the player will fight back against mind control and his party will do anything to get rid of it.


See, now you're the one encouraging metagaming. If my character is a sane, rational person, they wouldn't put on a random ring that can try compelling me to do anything, it's probably cursed. So they should do it because...out of character, I know this is probably a plot hook. That's ridiculous.

And see, they picked it up, get cursed, sure. The plot hook should not then be "keep doing insane things with a ring you know is cursed" or "suffer continuously with no way to respond", the plot hook should be "holy crap, get this ring away from me". The plot hook should lead somewhere right away.

You have to remember that whatever story you're trying to tell, you need to play to the strength of your medium. Taking control away from the characters, forcing them to be the ones making dumb choices for the sake of the story, that stuff is a lot more noticeable and a lot less appreciated in this medium compared to a book or something.

At that point, is the character a sane, rational person? The player may be, but the character that is hallucinating voices sure isn't. Once again, though the direct control is a bad DM thing, it is a smaller issue than the overall dynamic here. You could just as easily say to the players "character X is overcome with rage/madness/whatever and you must take an action that is detrimental to the party."

Understand, I am not defending this particular DM, he's clearly not very good, I am bringing up the point that the players are just as responsible for making the world work as the DM is. By necessity, there must be some degree of railroading, because no human is capable of creating a fully functioning universe on the fly. So while there are degrees of railroading that can make the game unplayable or unfun, the calibration of that comes from both sides.

[Osrogue]

This is my 1 and only experience playing Dread, so admittedly, I don’t know how it’s supposed to go. The DM ran dungeon world and liked to make things up as he went. Anyway, it went a little something like this:

The 5 PCs were on a school trip out to a summer camp or something and got lost. I played the bully who was good at physical things. We end up at a cabin with a creepy Doctor guy. We need firewood to not freeze to death, so another player and I went. Little did I know, I was basically signing my death warrant.

Pull for the cold.
Pull for the stress.

Then I picked a number between 1 and 10 and my partner had to pull that many blocks. He succeeded so a tree fell on me.

Pull for getting a tree dropped on me.

The tree was too heavy to move so the guy had to get help.

Pull for the stress of being alone.
Pull for the cold/pain.
Pull because a wild animal showed up and I had to punch it... somehow.

The tree gets pulled off me, but now I’m injured and bent over in pain.

Which is a pull for stress.

We get back to the creepy cabin.

Everyone pull for the stress of seeing an injured friend.

The creepy doctor insists on checking me out and the way the dm plays him makes it incredibly obvious that this is not a good idea. He gets up in my face.

Pull for stress.

So I punch him.

Pull to punch him.
And an extra pull because I’m injured.
Also punching is stressful.

“I thought I was good at punching,” I said.

“You are,” he replied. “That’s why you are pulling 3 blocks and not 4.”

but the doctor is rebuffed and the tower now looks like Swiss cheese.

Then the cabin floods and we all go up to the roof.

Everyone pull not to drown in a spontaneous flash flood.

At this point I was done. I knocked the tower over so it could be reset and other people who are better at Jenga could play since it takes me about 5 minutes to pull a block.

The storm instantly cleared up and he kind of just went into the next area. Basically he had it in his head to kill one person before moving onto the next section, and threw everything but the kitchen sink at us to make it happen.

When someone accidentally knocked over the tower immediately only a few pulls after it was set up again, he skipped all the way to the end of the section they were in and moved onto a different area.

The whole thing was an utter mess. The bad guys aside from freak natural disasters and the creepy doctor above included the military, ghosts, a curse, and a random knife murderer.

[dragoeniex]

Ouch, OP... That sounds frustrating, as do several of these stories. The pre-made replacement character would have stung especially.

A DM pushing for certain plots or meetings, etc doesn't bother me; I like to buy into the game being run as much as possible. If that means helping figure out why PCs would chase the plot, I'm game. But it's different when you feel like you've lost control of your own character.

The worst encounter I've had with this was a sidequest "pilgrimage" to remove a curse that had left my character unable to move without an attunement item serving as life support. He was given the task of climbing to the top of a mountain alone to prove his worth, and the item slowly failed as he got higher and higher. This meaning he was dropping closer to his natural 1 strength every night he didn't freeze to death, things were dicey.

To this point, I was enjoying it! Creative applications of spells for survival were fun. And I was still on-board when my bard found another pilgrim half-dead on a ledge, one leg broken and no hope of carrying a heavy idol to the top by himself. This idol was meant to be in exchange for the NPC's village being spared from drought.

And my bard essentially looks at this guy, looks at the idol, sucks in a breath... "Did anyone tell you that you had to make the trip alone? ... No? Oh, ah, no reason. Let's just... Let's go together. It'll be easier."

So he gives up hope of having his own curse lifted and helps drag Mr. Heroic NPC to the peak, where the guy proceeds to go unconscious. Nothing could be done to bring him to, and no matter what I did, the two of them would gain a level of exhaustion each night due to cold and exposure.

This is where the railroading really started, and I started dreading the conclusion the DM wanted.

See, my character had worked as a jaded assassin for decades, and after giving up on life, he was rescued and cared for by the party. He found himself wanting to repay them and maybe actually help make some lives better instead of worse all the time. He'd had a kind of redemption arc involving him putting his skills in deception and intrigue to the party's use so they could thwart corrupt governers and the like. He also came to value his own life again.

Here, on the mountain, one level of exhaustion away from death, the DM kept hinting that "you'll be able to get far enough down to stay warm tonight if you leave him, but he probably won't make it. If you stay, you'll have to roll again."

Mr. Hero has been unconscious for 4 days now, we've been making con saves at disadvantage each night no matter what I do, and both characters are all but guaranteed to die if mine stays. So we're heading toward a moral about self-sacrifice and unconditional love for strangers being the purest power their is, and just... No, DM, we've talked, and this isn't what my character would do. I don't want to write him into something he's not. Pragmatism can do more good than blind idealism and dying without a cause.

I wasn't afraid of perma-death. It had the trappings of a secret test of character, and this was the real challenge. Fine; still don't want to make my guy a super boyscout.

So he bundles Mr. Hero up best he can, goes down for a night of rest, then climbs back up to find... a frozen body. Alright, well... He didn't take Raise Dead for nothing.

A half hour's worth of play, Sending spells, and team coordination to get me a rescue team and diamond in time later, and I roll a nat 20 on the check to bring Mr. Hero back. He doesn't remember my character or the trip at all, walks off without so much as a "thanks," and disappears. I'm all ready to accept this, since it can at least still be ambiguous what the "right choice" would have been, when the DMPC paladin strolls up and tells my character he made the selfish choice. But don't be sad; most people would, and that doesn't make them evil.

And I'm like... "Most people would give up their health and nearly die carrying a stranger up and down a mountain for one and a half weeks? Are you sUrE?!"

Through the group wizard's creative use of divination spells, we found out next session Mr. Hero wasn't even real, and there had never been a village to save.

Having gone along with the two hour-ish cutscene, I felt awful for wasting the other players' time. And it stung having thrown valuable and emotionally significant resources away (lighten carrying load on the cliffs, buy the diamond) for nothing but a "not as bad as you could've been" award.



Sorry. That got a bit long-winded. But that's the only time I've felt a DM was trying to write my character for me, and that hurt.

[Cheesegear]

A cursed ring that makes you hear voices doesn't strike you as a plot hook?

Of course it is! Party has to consecrate and/or destroy a cursed item. Seems legit.
...Okay. How?
*4 days later*
No. Seriously. How?

[Frozenstep]

This is like saying because the DM won't let the PCs just murder the king and take over the kingdom that he should narrate things. Just because you don't have every option available, doesn't mean you have no options available.

You're focusing too much on how this exact scenario turned out. If I flip a coin once and it comes up tails, I can't just conclude that all coins land tails when flipped. Maybe if the players did play along it would have gone smoothly, maybe it wouldn't have. But the takeaway is that both parties are at fault.

Part of the point is that the players were forced into one option, that option wasn't fun for the player or the other party members, none of the choices they did try to make (which were reasonable things that characters would do) had any effect nor brought the hook anywhere forward.

I don't know where you're going with your coin flip. As a DM, you can't prepare for everything, but if the players making one choice that is reasonable from their perspective throws off your campaign and causes it to be as unfun for your players as it was for these guys, you've got a problem, and it isn't the players.


And the point is that players should work with the DM to adjust their motivations to the world. If you want to go all the way down this rabbit hole, then the rest of the world can react with that same caution and preparation and you end up with a whole lot of "rocks fall, you die" scenarios. There's a difference between stupid and just playing along. The DM caters the world to the players by not having the ancient dragon god BBEG decide to curbstomp them at level 1, the players should tailor their motivations to the world in the same way.

How far does playing along go? Should adventurers just blindly wander into lich castles front gates, confident that if they try anything else the DM will strike it down? Is it not playing along if players try to come up with clever solutions to get around encounters? How far should the players tailor their motivation? Because players already tailor their motivations so they have a reason to go adventure. They shouldn't have to further tailor them to be recklessly stupid.

And you know what? I think it's fair for the rest of the world to be somewhat cautious and prepared. I balance that out by having rocks fall, you die scenarios not be something you can walk into blindly. Going in the front gate of the lich's castle is suicide, and the party can see it from so far away and it's unmistakable ("hey, remember that elite zombie that downed 4 of you in the last encounter? There's 40 of them in front of the gate").

See, I already catered to the party by making the lich and several encounters in the castle all be manageable, and having several alternate routes into it already planned and letting them find hints about them fairly easily if they just look for them, and being open to unique ideas they come up with. They already tailored their motivation to my world by wanting to take out this lich.



Sure, in this case maybe there wasn't. The point is you need to work with your DM.

Also, we don't know anything else that was going on in this campaign. Maybe there was another plot arc that provided motivation and this was a side part? Last week I had a session where my players were trying to infiltrate a temple where the BBEG was assembling a planar bridge to bring his army to this world. That's a huge doom clock. I had set up the encounter through the temple as a series of skill challenges to overcome its magical defenses, but first the players fought some lesser demon guards. Those lesser demon guards gave some of the players a poison that worked like mummy rot that increased exhaustion every hour, rather that eating hit points every day. I told them it was a poison, and even after hinting that lesser restoration alone wouldn't work, our cleric and bard used 9 spell slots casting it on everyone, repeatedly.

I had to let them take a long rest after that or basically let them walk into a TPK because they used the rules of "how the system should work," rather than trusting me to balance things out. Seriously, this would have been a moderate increase to the difficulty of the subsequent encounters, but not enough to deplete all of your resources. This DM didn't have the foresight to do that, but that doesn't change things.

First off, you have to ask them why they continued to cast lesser restoration. If you had put your foot down after the first expended spell slot saying "It has absolutely no effect" and they continued to try, maybe they're just silly. But if you aren't careful, it's really, really easy to say something that isn't clear enough. Even calling it poison was a mistake, because things interact with poison and are meant to treat it. Give it a different term and you'd have less trouble.

And see, how does the party know you balanced for them to continue ahead while taking one stack of exhaustion per hour? What if you had balanced for them to spend resources to get rid of the poison? How are they supposed to know that? Because seriously, one stack of exhaustion per hour is a huge deal, it's literally a death sentence (how do you long rest when you die of exhaustion in 6 hours?). It makes sense to try and deal with that first, rather then press ahead and in 2 hours find your speed halved and be at such a disadvantage in the next combat that they all die.



This (http://agc.deskslave.org/comics/AGC5-10.GIF) is the logical conclusion to that. If your players stop short of this, they are intentionally being stupid because they know it's a game and they know that the universe works with a very clear set of rules.

And because players being cautious and smart totally leads to that example, they should instead instantly pick up any idol and accept the trap that hits them is balanced and won't kill them? Look, the point is players aren't being ****ty when they're presented a suspicious scenario, and decide to play it cautious.



That is literally the same type of railroading, but this one has a quest giver NPC. You are being very disingenuous if you don't think people wouldn't complain about "magic ghost curses" that they couldn't prevent.

It literally is the same type of railroading, I agree, and yet I still managed to have to go somewhere faster. It just shows how unnecessary the whole ring sequence was.




At that point, is the character a sane, rational person? The player may be, but the character that is hallucinating voices sure isn't. Once again, though the direct control is a bad DM thing, it is a smaller issue than the overall dynamic here. You could just as easily say to the players "character X is overcome with rage/madness/whatever and you must take an action that is detrimental to the party."

Understand, I am not defending this particular DM, he's clearly not very good, I am bringing up the point that the players are just as responsible for making the world work as the DM is. By necessity, there must be some degree of railroading, because no human is capable of creating a fully functioning universe on the fly. So while there are degrees of railroading that can make the game unplayable or unfun, the calibration of that comes from both sides.

At least we can agree direct control is a bad DM thing. The worse problem was that it didn't lead anywhere, it just stuck around as a torture device rather then actually lead anywhere. It was a hook without a string to pull you anywhere.

[Unoriginal]

If you take that stance why be an adventurer at all? Run 1 adventure path then live like a king off the excess gold and terribly balanced economy. D&D is predicated on making an overall risky or stupid choice for suspension of disbelief. It's a game. Also, not all of us are award-winning authors that can come up with groundbreaking plot arcs that change the genre. Tropes will happen.

Yeah, your DM shouldn't "gotcha" the players at every opportunity, but it happens sometimes. If your players are going to metagame that everything could be a trap, you're going to have a ****ty game regardless. If your players "nope" out when they see the golden idol on a pedestal in the middle of the room, they're just being ****ty players.

The whole point of this game is that it's collaborative, not adversarial. This situation devolved into the adversarial as a result of both the players and the DM here. The players should trust the DM that if they take the hook, even if it is sloppy or obvious, the game will be good. I don't know about this specific DM's plans, but my players just started leafing through the PHB and complaining when the obvious things didn't work. If, instead, they just took the hint that this was special(TM) and went with it, it was going to evolve into an adventure where the player that triggered it would eventually be given the opportunity to embrace the evil or fight it. But because they immediately made it adversarial, everything fell apart.

Maybe the DM was power-tripping here, but I think it's more likely that he's just inexperienced and his players were unwilling to compromise. So he tries to be more and more heavy handed, because instead of the player that was affected by mind control playing along, the guy acts with 100% clarity and knows he needs to get rid of the ring. This is on both of them.




A cursed ring that makes you hear voices doesn't strike you as a plot hook? I'm just not buying it that you were all innocently playing along and the DM just decides to **** with you. I'm still inclined to believe that he just wasn't good at moving the plot along.

For example, it would have been just as easy for the DM to say you're compelled to not throw the ring away, rather than have it teleport back. I've seen this scenario where the players are being belligerent enough that the DM just lets them get rid of it and makes it come back.

So you're outright accusing OP of lying when they say their group tried to ask everyone about that ring?

When there is a "you are cursed" plot hook, the natural step is to try to get rid of it. That's engaging with the plot hook, if there is one. So is trying to learn more about it.

You're saying the players are at fault for being adverserial, but the ring was an antagonistic force, being adverserial is the whole point. If an item causes you problems, it's part of the challenges to overcome. Except the DM made so it couldn't be overcome by anything they tried, and that they were unable to learn anything about it.

[Brookshw]

How has your DM railroaded you?

I actually just got reverse railroaded into running Dungeon of the Mad Mage, despite never having played 5e.


An old buddy/player of mine just finished in the service and moved back into the area with his family. We ran across each other, got to catching up, and started talking about getting a game going. My time's pretty limited so I offered to run a one shot for him and his kids if they were interested, system unspecified though I later found out the kids know 5e only (not a big deal I suspect, I've run games for 30 years since 1e). We got to sorting out details and he casually mentions he's got the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, as well as most of the figures for it. I see where this is going....

Not committing at first to DotMM, I ask who's going to run? He's fine with either and mentions again he has DotMM. I'm thinking to myself, that's not a one-shot, I remember running Ruins of Undermountain I & II. Megadungeons aren't one shots.

Thinking he wants this to be a consistent campaign for his kids I ask what his kids would get a bigger kick out of, dad as DM, or dad as player? He figures player. Uh huh, so he's really asking me to run DotMM for him and his kids. .....fine.

This is the same player who years ago picked up the Worlds Largest Dungeon, ran 25% of it, then left it to me to finish running it. Thankfully, he's also a good friend and one of my favorite players so I don't really mind, just found it a comical railroad reversal.



All that said, aside from D&D Beyond, anyone know of any cheatsheets or quick primers to get me up to speed on 5e?

[Unoriginal]

I actually just got reverse railroaded into running Dungeon of the Mad Mage, despite never having played 5e.


An old buddy/player of mine just finished in the service and moved back into the area with his family. We ran across each other, got to catching up, and started talking about getting a game going. My time's pretty limited so I offered to run a one shot for him and his kids if they were interested, system unspecified though I later found out the kids know 5e only (not a big deal I suspect, I've run games for 30 years since 1e). We got to sorting out details and he casually mentions he's got the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, as well as most of the figures for it. I see where this is going....

Not committing at first to DotMM, I ask who's going to run? He's fine with either and mentions again he has DotMM. I'm thinking to myself, that's not a one-shot, I remember running Ruins of Undermountain I & II. Megadungeons aren't one shots.

Thinking he wants this to be a consistent campaign for his kids I ask what his kids would get a bigger kick out of, dad as DM, or dad as player? He figures player. Uh huh, so he's really asking me to run DotMM for him and his kids. .....fine.

This is the same player who years ago picked up the Worlds Largest Dungeon, ran 25% of it, then left it to me to finish running it. Thankfully, he's also a good friend and one of my favorite players so I don't really mind, just found it a comical railroad reversal.



All that said, aside from D&D Beyond, anyone know of any cheatsheets or quick primers to get me up to speed on 5e?

Honestly, I'd advise you to run Lost Mines of Phandelver first. It's short, written as an introduction to the system, and on top of that meant to start at lvl 1 when Dungeon of the Mad Mages is meant to start with lvl 5 PCs.

[Keravath]

Also, we don't know anything else that was going on in this campaign. Maybe there was another plot arc that provided motivation and this was a side part? Last week I had a session where my players were trying to infiltrate a temple where the BBEG was assembling a planar bridge to bring his army to this world. That's a huge doom clock. I had set up the encounter through the temple as a series of skill challenges to overcome its magical defenses, but first the players fought some lesser demon guards. Those lesser demon guards gave some of the players a poison that worked like mummy rot that increased exhaustion every hour, rather that eating hit points every day. I told them it was a poison, and even after hinting that lesser restoration alone wouldn't work, our cleric and bard used 9 spell slots casting it on everyone, repeatedly.

I had to let them take a long rest after that or basically let them walk into a TPK because they used the rules of "how the system should work," rather than trusting me to balance things out. Seriously, this would have been a moderate increase to the difficulty of the subsequent encounters, but not enough to deplete all of your resources. This DM didn't have the foresight to do that, but that doesn't change things.



You seem to expect the characters to take unreasonable and unknowable risks on the expectation that the DM will make sure things turn out ok. You do realize that there are a LOT of DMs who do not play that way, right? DMs create a world, the characters interact with that world, DMs may fudge occasional die rolls but if the characters decide to walk into the lich's castle at level 3 because they expect the "DM to make it turn out ok" then there are a lot of parties that would be turned into zombies.

I've played in games where the players eventually realize that there are no consequences for stupidity, that the DM will always "make things right", unless the games were being run just for giggles this usually means that the game goes off the rails with characters just choosing to do stupid, hilarious things because they know they will get away with it, because there will be no significant or long term consequences.

In almost all of the games I have played in, the players can NOT assume that the DM has made the entire world friendly and accessible to a party of their current level. In many campaigns, challenges don't scale like in video games where the mob levels are adjusted to match the player levels.

Can the current challenge placed before the party be reasonably accomplished? Usually yes. However, this might often require strategy, tactics or subterfuge on the part of the characters to increase the odds in their favor.

Getting hit with a poison that causes exhaustion every hour means you will be dead in 6 hours if you don't fix it. Trusting the DM that the module is balanced around the characters all having disadvantage on attacks, saves, skill checks and reduced movement is usually just a good way for the characters to die. So, honestly, most players will try to find a way to cure that poison. In addition, the only reason a "reasonable" player casts lesser restoration NINE times over to try to cure something is because the DM did NOT say "It does nothing". The DM said something like "It is hard to tell. It might have done nothing." which leaves the players wondering if additional castings are required to fix the problem. If the DM says the spell does nothing (NOT "nothing noticeable") then no player in their right mind will continue to uselessly cast a spell. The only reason they cast it so many times is because the DM was NOT clear that it did NOTHING.

Anyway, the role of the DM is to adjudicate the interactions of the PCs with the game world, from the sounds of it, in your world, the DM is on the side of the players protecting them from harm ... in other worlds the DM gets more attached to the monsters and has an us vs them attitude ... and, probably in most cases, the DM lets the players make their own choices while balancing for the extremes of the probability curve but not for careless or unreasonable decisions of the players.

Character death may be rare but in most games it is still a possible consequence of making unreasonable choices. (It is up to the DM to provide the information on the game world so that the players/characters can make informed decisions).

[Keravath]

I actually just got reverse railroaded into running Dungeon of the Mad Mage, despite never having played 5e.


An old buddy/player of mine just finished in the service and moved back into the area with his family. We ran across each other, got to catching up, and started talking about getting a game going. My time's pretty limited so I offered to run a one shot for him and his kids if they were interested, system unspecified though I later found out the kids know 5e only (not a big deal I suspect, I've run games for 30 years since 1e). We got to sorting out details and he casually mentions he's got the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, as well as most of the figures for it. I see where this is going....

Not committing at first to DotMM, I ask who's going to run? He's fine with either and mentions again he has DotMM. I'm thinking to myself, that's not a one-shot, I remember running Ruins of Undermountain I & II. Megadungeons aren't one shots.

Thinking he wants this to be a consistent campaign for his kids I ask what his kids would get a bigger kick out of, dad as DM, or dad as player? He figures player. Uh huh, so he's really asking me to run DotMM for him and his kids. .....fine.

This is the same player who years ago picked up the Worlds Largest Dungeon, ran 25% of it, then left it to me to finish running it. Thankfully, he's also a good friend and one of my favorite players so I don't really mind, just found it a comical railroad reversal.



All that said, aside from D&D Beyond, anyone know of any cheatsheets or quick primers to get me up to speed on 5e?


Nice story :)

Do you have the 5e Players handbook? That is the starting point. I'd also recommend Xanathar's Guide to Everything since it has supplemental character options and additional spells.

You will likely also need the Monster Manual and probably the DMG, at the least to reference magic items.

Dungeon of the Mad Mage is designed to start at around 5th level (the easiest dungeon levels are designed for tier 2 characters (levels 5-10). The content is supposed to be sufficient to take the characters to level 20. Each dungeon level can be played as a separate module as far as I know which at least limits the scope a bit. Each level is probably 2-5 play sessions of 4 hours each. This would depend on how they are played and how much social vs combat encounters occur. A group I play with is likely starting DotMM soon, playing once every 2 weeks, with the expectation that if we play all of the levels, it will take two to three years to complete all the levels.

However, since DotMM starts at level 5, I would agree with the other poster than you play either Lost Mines of Phandelver from the starter kit or Waterdeep: Dragon Heist first. Both of these are smaller in scope and should take the characters to level 5/6 when complete which is a good point to segue into DotMM.

I started playing D&D with 1e and have played some of each of the versions in between. I find 5e does a reasonable job of balancing mechanics vs role play. It removed a lot of the complexity of 3.0/3.5 in favor of a more accessible system and overall, I think it is a good idea.

How quickly you can pick it up depends on what you have been playing for the last few years. I'd also mention that there are some elements that can feel unbalanced or overpowered when you first run into them coming from earlier versions (these are popular topics for discussion), however, I would tend to advise playing the game as is for a long time and over a wide range of levels before being tempted to make adjustments since overall, even the features that are considered the least balanced by some on the forums, just aren't that bad (in my opinion and experience :) ). Finally, higher level play, at least to level 16 is pretty reasonable. 5e has the concept of bounded accuracy so a large enough pack of level 1s is still a threat in many situations to high level characters. This feature also reduces the range of capability between an "optimized" character and an average one so that most characters will be able to contribute effectively.

P.S. Your question might have been worth a thread on its own ... tucking it into this one won't get as many responses :)

[Boci]

This (http://agc.deskslave.org/comics/AGC5-10.GIF) is the logical conclusion to that. If your players stop short of this, they are intentionally being stupid because they know it's a game and they know that the universe works with a very clear set of rules.

No, its not all or nothing. Everyone takes safety precautions, even in their daily life, no one takes every safety precaution available to them. Safety is good, but it costs resources. Time and energy at the minimum, possible money, and everyone will have their own balance between no safety which will end them up in the hospital or worse, and a theoretical near 100% safety that would be too draining on resources.

The same is true for adventurers.

[Segev]

Yeah, the trouble with the OP's scenario is that the DM didn't provide any string attached to the hook, if this was a hook. They tried everything they could think of to get rid of it, and nothing gave them a hint where to go next with this potential plot arc.

Meanwhile, evidence that this was a DM trying to shove a character into the party by forcing a player to play him: as soon as the afflicted character "got the hint" and removed his PC from the game, the DM told him he had his replacement all made up.

[Boci]

Yeah, the trouble with the OP's scenario is that the DM didn't provide any string attached to the hook, if this was a hook. They tried everything they could think of to get rid of it, and nothing gave them a hint where to go next with this potential plot arc.

No string, and as mentioned no bait either. If you're going to shackle the players with a magical item that has a negative effect like wisdom save or a level of exhaustion at the end of the day, make sure its also does something positive to give players a reason to treat it as something other than a thing to be gotten rid of.

[Segev]

No string, and as mentioned no bait either. If you're going to shackle the players with a magical item that has a negative effect like wisdom save or a level of exhaustion at the end of the day, make sure its also does something positive to give players a reason to treat it as something other than a thing to be gotten rid of.

That's how I usually try to handle it, yes. The goal is to tempt the players with rewards maybe worth the risk, so that there's a sense of agency and corruption, rather than a sense of inevitability and sickness.

But even a clumsy plot hook with a force-fed trap/curse that is all stick can still be a plot hook if the DM has a story planned. It might be on rails, but it qualifies.

This lacks the essential point of that: there was nothing the DM provided to progress that presumed plot. Just inevitable character death or the character being mechanically crippled or being a liability to the party. i.e. punishment until the character is removed.

That's why I reject the opinions of those saying the players, here, should have followed the plot hook: they couldn't. They were given nothing to follow. They tried to play along, and all they got was, "Nope, that fails, too. Sucks to be him."

Add in that the DM had a character ready to go, and he wanted to force somebody to play this character for some reason. If THAT was supposed to be the way forward on the plot, he's failed because he's now essentially replacing a PC with a GMPC and forcing a player to pretend to play it for him.

[Brookshw]

Good suggestion Unoriginal, thank you for your reply. I gather from his repeated mentions of it that he's pretty hopeful for DotMM (I get it, he has toys sitting on the shelf he wants to play with).




P.S. Your question might have been worth a thread on its own ... tucking it into this one won't get as many responses :)

Probably, but it's more a passing question if people can point me to any quick primers. Ultimately, I was just sharing the story of reverse railroading. If all goes well and I get roped into this as an ongoing thing (see: when) I'll probably post a separate thread asking about transitioning to this edition, materials, etc. In the meantime it's more a game "for old times sake" and for his kids to have some fun (which in turn is good practice for me for when mine are old enough to roll dice).

Also, thank you for your thorough reply!

[Unoriginal]

You seem to expect the characters to take unreasonable and unknowable risks on the expectation that the DM will make sure things turn out ok. You do realize that there are a LOT of DMs who do not play that way, right? DMs create a world, the characters interact with that world, DMs may fudge occasional die rolls but if the characters decide to walk into the lich's castle at level 3 because they expect the "DM to make it turn out ok" then there are a lot of parties that would be turned into zombies.


Yeah, if my players expected me to "make things turn out ok" no matter what, I would tell them they are mistaken, and if they continued not believing they would probably die.

[The Kool]

Yeah, if my players expected me to "make things turn out ok" no matter what, I would tell them they are mistaken, and if they continued not believing they would probably die.

I need to learn to loosen up, throw some challenges at my players. They seem to have a knack for coming out on top, even when they take on something much stronger than they, that they should have run away from.

[Keravath]

I need to learn to loosen up, throw some challenges at my players. They seem to have a knack for coming out on top, even when they take on something much stronger than they, that they should have run away from.

:)

This depends on whether they are succeeding because they come up with excellent ideas to leverage their abilities making their success possible OR because the DM adjusts the encounters so that there is no risk to the players.

It is fun to succeed. If the players are lucky and barely survive then they end up with a feeling of accomplishment. If they succeed but know in advance that failure isn't a possible outcome then sometimes they start making riskier choices because they can get away with it (this is particularly true if the role playing aspects of the character involved are aligned with taking greater risks). So there is a balance between making the players believe that there is risk involved in the decisions they make while keeping that risk at a level that is perhaps less likely to be fatal to the characters while keeping that knowledge from the players :)

[Bloodcloud]

That's how I usually try to handle it, yes. The goal is to tempt the players with rewards maybe worth the risk, so that there's a sense of agency and corruption, rather than a sense of inevitability and sickness.

But even a clumsy plot hook with a force-fed trap/curse that is all stick can still be a plot hook if the DM has a story planned. It might be on rails, but it qualifies.

This lacks the essential point of that: there was nothing the DM provided to progress that presumed plot. Just inevitable character death or the character being mechanically crippled or being a liability to the party. i.e. punishment until the character is removed.

That's why I reject the opinions of those saying the players, here, should have followed the plot hook: they couldn't. They were given nothing to follow. They tried to play along, and all they got was, "Nope, that fails, too. Sucks to be him."

Add in that the DM had a character ready to go, and he wanted to force somebody to play this character for some reason. If THAT was supposed to be the way forward on the plot, he's failed because he's now essentially replacing a PC with a GMPC and forcing a player to pretend to play it for him.

Yeah, I see a couple ways this could have been a good (or maybe simply acceptable) plot hook, with decent way to deal with it. Pickup the cursed ring that slowly take over the character can be done, but man, give some hint that there is a way out. And the whole premade character thing... that's just rude.

[Finback]

DM: "NO THE BEEKEEPER IS WELL RESPECTED AND GOOD AT HIS JOB HE HAS BEESWAX."


Sounds like someone is in the pocket of Big Apiary.

[Aussiehams]

I usually play with friends, or friends of friends which might make it different, but a lot of this seems like it might be fixed by communication.
If you have a cursed item that is unbeatable, talk yo the group about using homebrew, and that things may mot work the way they are meant to. If all of a sudden things from the PHB don't work the way the should, the players can legitimately get upset.
If they know homebrew is coming, and that you have a plan to let them succeed anyway they are more likely to play along.
And a DM giving me a character that they built like that would be a big hope for me unless they explained why.

[Finback]

I will admit to a semi-railroad, in that our Halloween game last year involved the PCs stumbling into a graveyard, whereupon wave upon wave of 1hp skeletons (who only did a d4 damage, IF they hit) slowly approached the PCs. The intent was to make them retreat into the one defensible location, an old crypt, wherein the real dungeon lay. (They fought a Blob, a Werewolf, a Frankenstein, a Dracula, a Fishman, a Giant Shark, and a Mummy - to a soundtrack of "Spooky Scary Skeletons", "The Monster Mash", and "Thriller", amongst others)

[The Kool]

I will admit to a semi-railroad, in that our Halloween game last year involved the PCs stumbling into a graveyard, whereupon wave upon wave of 1hp skeletons (who only did a d4 damage, IF they hit) slowly approached the PCs. The intent was to make them retreat into the one defensible location, an old crypt, wherein the real dungeon lay. (They fought a Blob, a Werewolf, a Frankenstein, a Dracula, a Fishman, a Giant Shark, and a Mummy - to a soundtrack of "Spooky Scary Skeletons", "The Monster Mash", and "Thriller", amongst others)

That scene was likely better handled with narration. If it's obvious that the session lies in there, it's not a stretch to say "you valiantly fight off wave after wave, but they press in too thick! You're slowly forced back, step by step, until you take cover in an old crypt and manage to bar the door, keeping them at bay... for now. When you catch your breath and look around..."

[mephiztopheleze]

That's a brutal railroad.
I would have a chat with the DM. They screwed that up but good.
The Cleric was talking some pretty high powered remove-curse magick there that should easily have removed the curse.
Taking away player agency is something that should only be done in a very, very few very, very rare circumstances, and the one described doesn't fit my definition of same.

[DarknessEternal]

The OP asked for stories of railroading.

The OP did not ask for how you would have solved his railroading story.

[Sigreid]

I will admit to a semi-railroad, in that our Halloween game last year involved the PCs stumbling into a graveyard, whereupon wave upon wave of 1hp skeletons (who only did a d4 damage, IF they hit) slowly approached the PCs. The intent was to make them retreat into the one defensible location, an old crypt, wherein the real dungeon lay. (They fought a Blob, a Werewolf, a Frankenstein, a Dracula, a Fishman, a Giant Shark, and a Mummy - to a soundtrack of "Spooky Scary Skeletons", "The Monster Mash", and "Thriller", amongst others)

I'm usually sandbox guy but I have hooked up a train on occasion. When I do that it starts with asking players "if I run x kind of thing, are you game for going along or should we do something else instead of me putting a bunch of time into this?".

[erok0809]

I'll admit to some railroading in some of the games I DM, though I at least try to do it by making the option I want the PCs to take be the obviously correct one that they would want to do. I wouldn't refuse it if they decided to just randomly go off somewhere else, but it usually wouldn't make sense for them to do that in character. It is a railroad, but it's one that the PCs usually get on of their own volition and it's going where they want to go anyway. They could walk a different route and still get there, but it'll be harder and longer that way; why not take the nice train to the destination?

Only once that I can recall did I pretty much force a plot point; I had a 3.5 game leading up to the Elder Evil Atropus. The evil people need the Book of Vile Darkness to do the thing, and I had it in a dungeon; the party ended up retrieving it out from under the evil guys, and I couldn't think of a good way to get it back without this evil organization just straight up murdering them all. What I ended up doing is having another friend join the game for one week, having spoken to him prior, and having his character steal the book from the party. I did at least admit to being backed into a corner to the party later and they understood, which was nice of them.

[Segev]

I think the biggest railroading I did in a campaign was when I had a dungeon I wanted to run (I even forget why; possibly it was just what I had prepped at the time) and the party was trying to avoid it. It did some space-warping shenanigans (which did make sense with the dungeon's setup) so it kept winding up back in front of them. It was transparent as all get-out and I don't think the players minded (in fact, I only remember the dungeon now because somebody who played in it brought up some of the events that happened in it as an amusing story a few weeks ago).

Still, not my finest hour. Fortunately, like I said, the players were good sports about it, and I think they enjoyed it.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I used poison as a railroading motivator precisely once, in my very first ongoing campaign. An erinyes struck a party member with a poison that would send his soul to hell in a week. If the party disobeyed, he wouldn't be given the extremely rare antidote. The erinyes claimed they were actually on the same side and had them perform tasks that appeared to lead them towards defeating the BBEG, only for them to learn that their target was actually completely uninvolved with the main plot and just someone the erinyes hated. After the players learned this, I finally let them off the tracks, leading to the immediate murder and looting of the erinyes. It was easier than helping it kill a completely unrelated demigod, regardless of the dubious promise of 'power'.

Probably should have seen that coming.

[Jamesps]

I don't railroad in the traditional sense, but sometimes when the players end up skipping an encounter I'll end up reusing it somewhere else if it fits the situation. This is more out of laziness than any dedication to a particular plot. In fact I usually set up my games so I won't know how they end to avoid getting bored with a story I already know the outcome for.

[Yunru]

I don't railroad. I have railroads. It's up to the players to board the train.

Un-metaphor'd: Certain plot hooks might trigger chains of events that keep players locked to a plot, but by the actions of the world, not the inability to act on the behalf of the players.