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Hoard of the Dragon Queen - a solid D effort.
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6370792" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Ouch.</p><p></p><p>Very good review though. You've been very specific in your criticisms. </p><p></p><p>I think I see where they are going. They are going for, "Everyone loves Keep on the Borderlands, because its this introductory module that is basically a big pile of parts - most of which are actually missing - and it speaks in some broad grand ways how you might make the parts into an interesting adventure, and even if you can't, well at least there are large numbers of generic fights you can have to fill up the time. It's classic and its a safe model to emulate because people that have been playing for 30 years expect that sort of thing."</p><p></p><p>But that has all sorts of problems. "Everyone loves Keep of the Borderlands" isn't in fact true, and it is not a good introductory adventure for a DM. I personally detest the module, even though I've run it twice, first because it's such a crappy adventure precisely because Gygax vastly overestimates the abilities of a novice DM, and second because Gygax fills up the text with lots of random tidbits but not necessarily the tools a DM needs to be inspired and see Gygax's overall vision. But it took me literally a decade of playing before I really got what it could have been like, and then when I realized what was required I was like, "WTH? I could go ahead and write my own stuff. The module literally gives me the least interesting and easiest creation portion of the information needed to run the game. Yes, it's great that I can make it my own, but I don't need permission to make stuff. I need empowerment to make stuff, and this in fact isn't empowering."</p><p></p><p></p><p>Worse, this sort of style does little I think to bring new DMs to the game. Existing DMs, at least the ones with gray hairs in their beards, can run with this sort of thing and maybe have fun with it. I don't think that's necessarily the case of a group of 12 year olds, and 12 year old nerds are a harder market to reach now than in 1980. </p><p></p><p>What you repeatedly describe is text of the sort I used to create as a novice writer. And I discovered it didn't work by trying to play my own games based on the text I wrote and realizing that those empowering details didn't just create themselves on their own when needed, and if I didn't want to get struck and did want the encounters to work I had to write something slightly different - the sort of stuff you exhort them to write. I mean I literally had the bullying problem you mention the last time I ran a game, where I had written, "X NPC bullies Y NPC", but had to figure out what that meant before I could actually run the game. Fifteen years ago I probably would have thought I'd done my job by outlining a sequence of events rather than concretely imagining them. You know how I would summarize your whole review: "This adventure reads like an adventure written by someone that does a lot of writing, but rarely run games." That's the exact impression I get. When you run your own stuff, you learn to produce a different sort of text. And I had to some up my impression of your review, it is, "This reads like a review by someone who spends at least as much time running games as he does reading about them, whereas so many reviews look like book reviews rather than game reviews. Thank you for that."</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6370792, member: 4937"] Ouch. Very good review though. You've been very specific in your criticisms. I think I see where they are going. They are going for, "Everyone loves Keep on the Borderlands, because its this introductory module that is basically a big pile of parts - most of which are actually missing - and it speaks in some broad grand ways how you might make the parts into an interesting adventure, and even if you can't, well at least there are large numbers of generic fights you can have to fill up the time. It's classic and its a safe model to emulate because people that have been playing for 30 years expect that sort of thing." But that has all sorts of problems. "Everyone loves Keep of the Borderlands" isn't in fact true, and it is not a good introductory adventure for a DM. I personally detest the module, even though I've run it twice, first because it's such a crappy adventure precisely because Gygax vastly overestimates the abilities of a novice DM, and second because Gygax fills up the text with lots of random tidbits but not necessarily the tools a DM needs to be inspired and see Gygax's overall vision. But it took me literally a decade of playing before I really got what it could have been like, and then when I realized what was required I was like, "WTH? I could go ahead and write my own stuff. The module literally gives me the least interesting and easiest creation portion of the information needed to run the game. Yes, it's great that I can make it my own, but I don't need permission to make stuff. I need empowerment to make stuff, and this in fact isn't empowering." Worse, this sort of style does little I think to bring new DMs to the game. Existing DMs, at least the ones with gray hairs in their beards, can run with this sort of thing and maybe have fun with it. I don't think that's necessarily the case of a group of 12 year olds, and 12 year old nerds are a harder market to reach now than in 1980. What you repeatedly describe is text of the sort I used to create as a novice writer. And I discovered it didn't work by trying to play my own games based on the text I wrote and realizing that those empowering details didn't just create themselves on their own when needed, and if I didn't want to get struck and did want the encounters to work I had to write something slightly different - the sort of stuff you exhort them to write. I mean I literally had the bullying problem you mention the last time I ran a game, where I had written, "X NPC bullies Y NPC", but had to figure out what that meant before I could actually run the game. Fifteen years ago I probably would have thought I'd done my job by outlining a sequence of events rather than concretely imagining them. You know how I would summarize your whole review: "This adventure reads like an adventure written by someone that does a lot of writing, but rarely run games." That's the exact impression I get. When you run your own stuff, you learn to produce a different sort of text. And I had to some up my impression of your review, it is, "This reads like a review by someone who spends at least as much time running games as he does reading about them, whereas so many reviews look like book reviews rather than game reviews. Thank you for that." [/QUOTE]
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