Yes it did, as a matter of fact. Good to have you back!

I would like to say that the GM does a good job of setting it up so that the thing they want is the thing he wants. This is a vital strategy.

Story time today is about using the setting to gently convince the party to follow the rails of your custom pirate campaign.

I did have a GM not so subtly convince my character to get on the rails of his custom Pirate campaign.

I was playing an Elf Computer expert/scientist who was an ex Military Academy Instructor who got assigned to guard duty at my planets Embassy on the Facist-totally-not-Nazi-Ripoff-Planet because some punk cadet hacked his unwinnable combat sim test to give himself an A. After being kidnapped bye the totally not Nazi's and helping the Fellow PC's steal one of their ships during my escape I was now wanted by both my home planet and the We're-not-quite-at-war-with-you-yet-but-we're-working-on-it Planet So It was easy to convince my Character of the Logic of working for this newly formed pirate crew.

I noticed it went down too.

I'd say that Dragon Trainer has terrible luck with this kind of thing but honestly most sites go down occasionally.

In a terrible Vampire the Masquerade game I was playing, I had a boat. A big one. Think Galley.

Because he owned a shipping company.

The whole game was kind of nothing but bickering and inter party conflict. So when we had to head deep into the Nile river and I offered to take them on the ship? Those two declined.

Myself and the player I got along with had a pretty uneventful trip. The other two went by land. With their army. Which took 2/3s casualties making the trek.


And yet we arrived at the same time.

Went down for me as well.

I was a terrible GM so I'll focus on what the "good" ones do; make sure there is player/GM unity on what the campaign is about and not just at the beginning but the whole way through. Unless its all about an excuse for random encounters and the like, most are going to care about "story" or "realism" (because suspension of disbelief usually requires at least a little). Reminding players that the world is happening around them makes sticking to what is important its own reward, and deviating its own punishment. Nothing like finding out that time you insisted your characters were out joy riding or whatever instead of following up on the obvious plot hook... that said plot hook resolved itself and in a way that was not in your favor.

Now if you really are engaging in a fun campaign of "semi-random dungeon crawls 4 lols", you shouldn't really need rails to begin with.

I didn't notice anything.

exactly

I did, in fact, have trouble with ComicFury, but for some reason FiD came back up long before GL3.5. Went down later, too.

Way I see it? The solution is (it always is) fire.

There are some logistics issues here of course, but the general idea is that you toss a couple torches onto the deck. You want to make it really obvious.

The NPCs if they're around will go and put out the fires. If not? Make sure you go ahead and do that before the whole boat burns down.

And even in the situation where the boat is filled with people you can probably get a lot of experience even if you've ruined your chances of getting treasure.

Like the boat itself.