A lot of OSR material follows the philosophy you lay out. If you haven't you might want to check out some of it. Because the focus is usually very much about utility over reading.
Yeah. I agree here. And, I'd point out, it follows my point rather well. OSR material draws very heavily on how the game was presented (largely pre-2e) before the world builders took things over. Material to be used, rather than read.
Yes, it’s a conpromise. A specific issue may lean one way more than another, but I’m reasonably sure they’ve been giving an entire adventure for free with any issie, right? Maybe not with this last one...I haven’t checked it out.
At this point, all I can say is that it’s pretty much impossible not to include at least some fluff material with any bit of crunch because without it, the mechanics lack context. So even in a best case scenario from your point of view, you’re going to be looking at a 50/50 split. I think that’s just a given.
Even in the releases where there is a free module, you still have about 90% of the material related to world building. There has not been a 50/50 split in material between stuff to read and stuff to use in decades.
So, no, it's not a given.
Are there a metric ton of modules out there for 5e? Yuppers, it's great. Fantastic stuff. Mostly DM's Guild stuff true, but, there's a buttload of stuff.
Trick is, so much of it is there to be read. As in, the DM will read it, most likely forget about 90% of it and then get on with building his or her own adventures, largely without any help from the publishers.
I said this earlier. To me, a perfect Monster Manual would have about 1/4 the monsters, but, every monster would come with 1-4 very short adventures/encounters, complete with maps, treasure, all the stuff you need to run that adventure. String together a bunch of those and you've got a complete adventure.
My absolute favorite 3e supplement was the Foul Locales series from Mystic Eye Games. Fantastic stuff. Each one focused on a certain type of location (urban, wilderness, whatever) and gave about 20 adventure locations you can plug and play. Great stuff. Used the heck out of those books. Heck, I STILL use them. Or, as another example, I used to callect the Dragonlance modules. The ones I got the most use out of were the last two (DL 15 and 16? is that the right number?). They were collections of 10 or 15 short adventures in Krynn that you could plug and play. FANTASTIC. I used the crap out of those.
THAT'S what I want. All this "10000 years ago, the ____ were a proud ___" stuff can go jump in the lake.
