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[Cthulhu]

It's not railroading, trust me.  I have never Railshroded, either.

[Sean Mirrsen]

It's either one or the other, or there's no plot. You either enforce the storyline, or pretend that whatever the players do is what you planned all along.

[Cthulhu]

Maybe what you do is what I planned all along?

I am Cthulhu, after all.  I know things.

[Neruz]

You have to railroad to a degree. Even in my 3.5 game i've railroaded a bit if only to try and get these dipsticks to stop running around in circles making me make up rooms to explore.

Mind you, it only worked about half the time. Get ready to make stuff up on the fly.

[Cthulhu]

I'll get ready.

I've gotten stat blocks for everyone but RAM and Jervous.  I'm going to leave Jervous' alone until we deal with the issues with his, and since Neruz's is already pretty compact and I think he knows what he's doing, I'll leave it alone.

[RAM]

Must... resist... urge... to kill NPCs... and walk into random buildings...

[Sean Mirrsen]

In my RTD, I'm mostly railshroding. It's usually pretty clear where to go and what to do, but the RTD play style lends itself well to ludicrous amounts of Schroedinger's guns. Chekhov's guns come up too, but they're rarer. For example, I bet the players in the current world will be pretty surprised when/if they reach their objective and try to leave the world. Speaking of which, I should probably be paying more attention to my games. Let's see if I can write them turns today...

[Neruz]

I tried to make it fairly clear where to go in the DnD game too.

That only slowed them down for like one session. Bay12evers are driven, by what i'm not sure, but they are single-mindedly driven to tear apart any preconcieved story and charge off into the wilderness looking for trolls.

[Cthulhu]

That's good, kind of.  It means I'll have to do more work beforehand, but huge overarching storylines aren't my forte.  The more you guys spend doing open-ended stuff, the less I'll have to worry about that.

Don't worry, there will be plots and such, but don't expect the whole campaign to be a huge epic journey from level 1 to 30.  Until the epic tier I'll try to resolve most storylines within 3 to 5 sessions, depending on how long you guys take on stuff.

Oh, and RAM.  This Wizard's Curtain thing you've got in your rituals.  Apparently that's from a supplement I don't have.  Could you replace it with something in one of the PHBs?

[Neruz]

At least you're using 4e, the edition where it's easy to make things up on the fly

[Cthulhu]

Yeah.

Although I think some of the things the new books say are a little strange and offputting.  I posted a thread on /tg/ regarding a tip where the book tells you to steal ideas, and it's not your job to be original (It wasn't what he said as much as the way he said it.) and that lasted 20 or so posts before it spiralled into an argument about copyright, so whatever to that.

Also, putting magic items in the player's handbook.  That's not where they go.  The player's aren't supposed to know what stuff does.  And then it says maybe I could let the players make a wishlist of items they want.  I'm a Dungeon Master, not Santa Claus.

[Jervous]

Actually guys, I think I might not play..I have no idea how 4e works, and I thought it'd be similar to 3.5 and that's why I signed up. I don't have the player handbooks for it or anything, nor can I get them anywhere, so I think I'll just sit out. Thanks anyway.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I don't think I remember much of the 3.5 rules, but here everything's mostly just simplified, in what seems to be a good way. It does look similar to Diablo in some regards, but I think it's a good thing - a simple comprehensive system is always preferable, in all games except wargames.

[Jervous]

I hate how there's no Hypertext SRD though =(

[Cthulhu]

Anyway, should we put someone from the waiting list in the group or just leave it at 5?  I'll have to tone down some of the encounters, but 5 is apparently the lucky number for 4e.