Old School Renaissance?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by DeadParrot

What I do miss is the feeling that the characters have some control over their lives. Many of the modern 1-20 adventure paths seem like poorly disguised movie scripts where most of the action is pre-determined.

You can't really write a 1-20 adventure path that isn't pretty railroady; the complexity just explodes. You can write a sandboxy adventure if you focus on a narrower range of levels and have a way to keep the PCs contained (e.g. Curse of Strahd is basically a 3-10 campaign and you're confined in a modest sized region). Most of the classic adventures were a much smaller level range (though I will say that we tried to play the Dragonlance module series, and it was most certainly a railroad).

[Polydamas]

If the Adventure Paths are really a series of adventures meant to carry a party from 1st to 20th level (I have no idea, Pathfinder was not my thing and neither were published 3e adventures) then I agree that its hard to do that without railroading. It would be easier in a system without such drastic changes in the capabilities of characters over time. But railroady adventures are common regardless of system, like Mary Sues and Marty Stus are common in beginners' novels.