Okay, since I put spoilers in the subject, I'm not putting anything here in spoilers. Also, [rant]...
I'm miffed. I successfully got into the House of Hope, made all the rolls to get the invitation to the boudoir, beat up the Cambion and his imps, used the rejuvenation pool, and then maneuvered, swiftly and mostly intact, through all Raphael's servants to make it down to Hope's prison. I won that hard fought battle, and freed her. Then, because I knew I'd left a floor full of flaming baddies back upstairs, I purposefully entered turn-based mode outside of combat and upcast invisibility on everyone, including Hope. That is a tactic I've used to wonderful effect on a few different occasions. I have, because it is a tactic that often works well at the actual tabletop. It likewise worked perfectly well here. I was able to safely and swiftly (using Dash action every round for everyone) get the entire group to the edge of the portal back to Baldur's Gate. I'm sure you can imagine my disappointment when the game railroaded me into fighting Raphael and his fricken horde of minions anyway. Speaking as a long-running D&D DM, "Hoot Hoot! All aboard the railroad!" I can't tell you the number of times that I've planned an epic boss battle, only to have my players come up with some wonderfully creative way to bypass it. When that happens, I always reward the players for genius game/roleplay. I don't punish them because I planned to have that fight, so, darn it all, we're having it!!!
The fact that as soon as I clicked on the portal back to the material plane, with everyone standing, invisible, around the lip of it, it disappeared and Raphael showed up, just reeked of, "you have to win this fight because 'that's what's supposed to happen.'" We all made it to the portal, it was open, and nobody was around at that point. If you want to railroad everybody into fighting Raphael in his house, then that portal needs to disappear long before everybody gets safely to it and you click on it. Like, LONG before. If a party is capable of getting Hope out of her prison and to the portal, they should be rewarded for that, not punished.[/rant]
