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Worse than Railroading

2/5

I GM'ed this on high-tier, and our group generally enjoyed it. However, that enjoyment was in spite of the many flaws in this poorly designed scenario.

TLDR – The combats have cool mechanics and can be great fun if you take the time to prepare tactics. Ustalav is also a flavorful location. The rest of the scenario is...the darkest abduction of four hours of your life.

If you have to run this, tell your players not to investigate or think about the plot. Tell them to just pretend that each encounter along the railroad is an isolated event.

Here’s why…

1. Every player action is meaningless

The scenario presents itself as an investigation/mystery, yet nothing the players do will have any consequence. There are clues, but the clues do not lead to any answers. There are people to question, but their responses are all untrue. It may seem like I’m exaggerating, but there is actually not a single thing the PCs can do to “solve” anything. They simply must go where an NPC direct them, fight a combat, and then get pointed to the next location. Once they have done this three times, they will end up at the final location and fight a final combat.

I don’t consider railroading to be bad in a PFS scenario, simply because the scope is limited. However, even when the PCs only have one path, that path should include meaningful actions and challenges. The proper way to do railroading is to for Step 2 to require for Step 1 to be done first. Step 1 is overcoming some barrier or acquiring some knowledge that allows the party to do Step 2.

In this scenario, however, none of the steps rely on each other. They could be done in any order, because they don’t create any results. At the end of the three encounters (all except for the final one), the players know exactly as much as they did at the beginning of the scenario and no progress has been made in stopping the villains.

All knowledge and all progress are acquired in that final encounter.

In fact, since the preliminary encounters don’t accomplish anything, logically they could all be skipped. The PCs could complete the mission briefing, go to sleep for the night, and then walk to the location of the final event, and everything would still make sense.

About three hours into the scenario, players realized that everything they had done up until that point was irrelevant, and they were disappointed. We were also rushed during the final encounter because they had spent a long time trying to solve an unsolvable mystery.

2. The scenario document doesn't even tell the GM what is happening

My table was incredibly creative in using divination spells and out of the box thinking. Given the above point that player actions were meaningless, I want to add some meaning to reward players for investigating. However, I was mostly unable to do so because the scenario doesn’t even tell the GM what the villains are doing prior to them appearing out of thin air for the final encounter.

The scenario document is 39 pages long. I think maybe two paragraphs are devoted to the actual plot of the scenario: the actions of the villains and their abductee. The rest is incredibly lengthy descriptions of every room in every location. I don’t need to know what every rug, chair, desk, and bottle looks like, where they're from, and what condition they're in. I do need to know what the NPCs are doing along with when, where, why, and how they’re doing it, even if they’re off screen.

I ended up having to invent a great deal of detail for why things were occurring, simply because the document says "it happens because it's the next step".

3. Players must take evil actions or lose significant rewards

Spoiler:
In the second encounter, the players have the option to either attack peaceful, innocent NPCs or negotiate with them. Negotiating costs them a large amount of gold or prestige.

In the third encounter, the players have the option to destroy hundreds of thousands of gold pieces of a legitimate businessman’s property, who they have not seen commit any crime (and who is not involved with the villains), and then steal even more of his stuff. If they don’t, they lose a large amount of gold.

In both of these cases, the NPCs were completely peaceful, and there is no benefit to being good. I honestly think the writer didn’t even consider that these actions were evil. However, some Pathfinders are not murder hobos, and the scenario writing shouldn’t force players to act that way.


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