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Advice for Caves of Chaos/B2
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7287860" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Howdy. You didn't "tick me off", and if you did, the fault would lie with me and not you, so you'd have nothing to apologize for in that regard. That said, what you did do is build an argument that relied not on your comprehension of what I wrote, but on your preconceptions and assumptions, leading you to have a conversation with yourself in which you were speaking not to me, but to some construct you'd erected in your mind. This makes it very hard to discuss anything with you without first kicking down the straw man and forcing you to confront my actual words.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Sure, but there is a big problem with that line of reasoning. If that is what makes B2 a great module, then surely B1: In Search of Adventure is even better, as certainly it does even more to encourage the fledgling DM to stretch their wings and make up their own unique world. Page 2 does not address the fundamental problem that a novice DM has at this point in his career. That problem is that he does not yet know how to make stuff up. Encountering an exhortation to make stuff up is therefore useless, as the novice DM must immediately ask, "How?", and the text does not give a good answer. The only actual tutorial the DM has on what to make up at this point is the text of the module itself, which suggests, "Make up more stuff like this." Therefore, it is very much in the interest of the game and the budding DM's education, that the module present something that is actually really well done, so as to provide a template for all that future imagination. But B2 doesn't do that. It instead presents something fairly unimaginative, incoherent, repetitive, and one dimensional.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>That's just it. No you do not.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Look, you are wrong in every particular. B2 wasn't written in 1975, but in 1979. By the time 1979 rolled around, not only had lots of people done things with grander conception and better execution than B2, but so had Gary Gygax. Gary had already written S1 Tomb of Horrors (1975!!), S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (1976), S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojanth (1976), T1 Village of Homlett, and most critically the entire GDQ adventure path. So yes, adventure paths were already a thing, if in a primitive form, at least out there. But Gygax himself though he'd already produced several real master pieces and better work than B2 (some of it not yet published) had been surpassed as a writer of modules. Paul Jaquays by this point had written under the Judge's Guild title, 'Caverns of Thracia' and was coming out with the equally remarkable 'Dark Tower'. Moreover, Laura Hickman had already written Rahasia, and her husband Tracy had written 'Pharoah'. So by 1979, lots of people - including Gary Gygax - had written much more sophisticated adventures than B2 which also were better templates or 'how to guides' to a novice DM than 'Keep on the Borderlands'. </p><p></p><p>As far as I can tell from here, what's got you confused is that you think you are having an argument over 'sandboxes' versus 'adventure paths' or over 'story' versus 'setting' or some such thing, and I'm at least not having any such sort of conversation. I could care less on the question of sandboxes or adventure paths. I don't hold one higher than the other. I care about quality of conception, execution, and presentation. It's 2017, we ought to be well past such stupid arguments as whether a PnP RPG is properly a story and how one is created. Among the Dungeon Master's many hats is 'story teller', and it's only a question of how to do that while still giving the players the amount of agency that satisfies them and increases their enjoyment. </p><p></p><p>So, to the point, Keep on the Borderlands doesn't actually teach a DM how to do the DM stuff you say it does. There are things, previously mentioned, that are cool that the text does teach (evocative fantasy setting, interactive rooms with secrets to find, etc.) but what it does not in fact teach is the very thing you claim makes it great - how to invent and expand on a setting. That it needs to be expanded on is unquestioned, but in point of fact it only demands that it be expanded on without really giving good guidance on how to do so. In fact, quite often if you take the text seriously it actually gives either no advice or terrible advice on dealing with the sort of problems that will inevitably arise in the play of the adventure, to the extent that it will even quell the very invention you claim it encourages. </p><p></p><p>For example, one problem that will inevitably arise with a novice DM and a novice party running B2 is the party will wander off the edge of the map. You might suppose from your words that the module then encourages the DM to simply continue inventing, drawing new caverns, new villages, new lairs, and towers and populating them with challenges and treasure. But it doesn't. What it mostly encourages the DM to do is "get the players back on track" by employing invisible forcefields, talking animals that tell the players that they are going the wrong way, and devices of that sort. Isn't that the very thing you are claiming is a bad way to teach DM'ing? </p><p></p><p>The problem here is that before we can even talk about this successfully, I have to rudely stomp on the hubris underlying your whole argument, which is that I don't get it and you and I have different ways of DM'ing. How the heck do you know how I DM? Look "Keep on the Borderlands" doesn't just suck from a "logical story progression" perspective, but also from a "how to build a setting to explore" perspective. Certainly you can build a great setting that also happens to have the Caves of Chaos and a the Keep on the Borderlands in it, but the module doesn't in fact tell you how to do this. It just sort of assumes that you can, asks you to do so, but provides little or no internal help as to how to get there and in fact - if you just have the text as a guide - repeatedly leads you down the wrong path.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7287860, member: 4937"] Howdy. You didn't "tick me off", and if you did, the fault would lie with me and not you, so you'd have nothing to apologize for in that regard. That said, what you did do is build an argument that relied not on your comprehension of what I wrote, but on your preconceptions and assumptions, leading you to have a conversation with yourself in which you were speaking not to me, but to some construct you'd erected in your mind. This makes it very hard to discuss anything with you without first kicking down the straw man and forcing you to confront my actual words. Sure, but there is a big problem with that line of reasoning. If that is what makes B2 a great module, then surely B1: In Search of Adventure is even better, as certainly it does even more to encourage the fledgling DM to stretch their wings and make up their own unique world. Page 2 does not address the fundamental problem that a novice DM has at this point in his career. That problem is that he does not yet know how to make stuff up. Encountering an exhortation to make stuff up is therefore useless, as the novice DM must immediately ask, "How?", and the text does not give a good answer. The only actual tutorial the DM has on what to make up at this point is the text of the module itself, which suggests, "Make up more stuff like this." Therefore, it is very much in the interest of the game and the budding DM's education, that the module present something that is actually really well done, so as to provide a template for all that future imagination. But B2 doesn't do that. It instead presents something fairly unimaginative, incoherent, repetitive, and one dimensional. That's just it. No you do not. Look, you are wrong in every particular. B2 wasn't written in 1975, but in 1979. By the time 1979 rolled around, not only had lots of people done things with grander conception and better execution than B2, but so had Gary Gygax. Gary had already written S1 Tomb of Horrors (1975!!), S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (1976), S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojanth (1976), T1 Village of Homlett, and most critically the entire GDQ adventure path. So yes, adventure paths were already a thing, if in a primitive form, at least out there. But Gygax himself though he'd already produced several real master pieces and better work than B2 (some of it not yet published) had been surpassed as a writer of modules. Paul Jaquays by this point had written under the Judge's Guild title, 'Caverns of Thracia' and was coming out with the equally remarkable 'Dark Tower'. Moreover, Laura Hickman had already written Rahasia, and her husband Tracy had written 'Pharoah'. So by 1979, lots of people - including Gary Gygax - had written much more sophisticated adventures than B2 which also were better templates or 'how to guides' to a novice DM than 'Keep on the Borderlands'. As far as I can tell from here, what's got you confused is that you think you are having an argument over 'sandboxes' versus 'adventure paths' or over 'story' versus 'setting' or some such thing, and I'm at least not having any such sort of conversation. I could care less on the question of sandboxes or adventure paths. I don't hold one higher than the other. I care about quality of conception, execution, and presentation. It's 2017, we ought to be well past such stupid arguments as whether a PnP RPG is properly a story and how one is created. Among the Dungeon Master's many hats is 'story teller', and it's only a question of how to do that while still giving the players the amount of agency that satisfies them and increases their enjoyment. So, to the point, Keep on the Borderlands doesn't actually teach a DM how to do the DM stuff you say it does. There are things, previously mentioned, that are cool that the text does teach (evocative fantasy setting, interactive rooms with secrets to find, etc.) but what it does not in fact teach is the very thing you claim makes it great - how to invent and expand on a setting. That it needs to be expanded on is unquestioned, but in point of fact it only demands that it be expanded on without really giving good guidance on how to do so. In fact, quite often if you take the text seriously it actually gives either no advice or terrible advice on dealing with the sort of problems that will inevitably arise in the play of the adventure, to the extent that it will even quell the very invention you claim it encourages. For example, one problem that will inevitably arise with a novice DM and a novice party running B2 is the party will wander off the edge of the map. You might suppose from your words that the module then encourages the DM to simply continue inventing, drawing new caverns, new villages, new lairs, and towers and populating them with challenges and treasure. But it doesn't. What it mostly encourages the DM to do is "get the players back on track" by employing invisible forcefields, talking animals that tell the players that they are going the wrong way, and devices of that sort. Isn't that the very thing you are claiming is a bad way to teach DM'ing? The problem here is that before we can even talk about this successfully, I have to rudely stomp on the hubris underlying your whole argument, which is that I don't get it and you and I have different ways of DM'ing. How the heck do you know how I DM? Look "Keep on the Borderlands" doesn't just suck from a "logical story progression" perspective, but also from a "how to build a setting to explore" perspective. Certainly you can build a great setting that also happens to have the Caves of Chaos and a the Keep on the Borderlands in it, but the module doesn't in fact tell you how to do this. It just sort of assumes that you can, asks you to do so, but provides little or no internal help as to how to get there and in fact - if you just have the text as a guide - repeatedly leads you down the wrong path. [/QUOTE]
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