This is a fair point. But I think he still has a point because "back in the day" they were vastly more common. The expectation of a more rich experience is common now, even if pure dungeon crawls are still perfection to some.
Yup. There are far fewer people now who want dungeon crawls with a bit of framing story.
That seems to be quite a broad assessment and hardly universal.
Agreed. If made up on the fly is garbage then the problem exists round the table. On the other hand most of the RPGs I know that really facilitate improv also run to short (half a dozen session) campaigns because remembering more than that is ... challenging.
Nothing has changed between 1st edition and 5th edition in terms of DMs. You didn't hear any of this before because in 1st through 3rd edition Dungeon and Dragon existed to give time-limited and imagination-limited players regular content to play. You're hearing it now because Dungeon and Dragon do not exist, and the Ebook penetration is reportedly at about 20% at the end of 2014, so it's likely 80% of WOTC's market counts digital Dungeon and Dragon as no Dungeon and Dragon.
Yup. I don't think any version of D&D has had this little in the way of published adventures since about 1977 (with five issues of The Strategic Review and a few of Dragon behind it).
(As far as 4th edition content goes, given what I've read about 4th edition adventures, it's likely they'd long since driven out people who wanted pre-written adventures very early on with the quality that I understand was really bad from 4th edition player's posts here)
Definitely! There are a couple of gems in early 4e Dragon, but they are few and far between. HS1: The Slaying Stone has an excellent reputation among 4e fans not because it is good, but because it, unlike most adventures, reaches the level of adequate.
On the other hand, 4e is probably the easiest version of D&D to improv with at the table, and a little preparation goes a long way. Ridiculous PC Plans? Play them through as a skill challenge -
used properly (and yes the guidance is bad) they are an amazing improv tool. If the PCs start a fight you didn't expect? Pull something out of the MM. There won't be any cross-referencing needed (there's none of this "Casts like a third level sorcerer - check another book for the spells" nonsense, let alone them expecting you to remember subtypes or the trample rules and giving the monster six different feats for you to have to know). And the monsters themselves will take about half an hour to put down so the few seconds you spent finding the right pages in the MM are trivial by comparison.
I don't know if modules really save time. IME, a module is just a springboard for a session seeing as how no DM's plan survives contact with the PCs. Not to say that dishing out a module's content strictly by the numbers is badwrongfun but it's hardly an exercise in what remains the unique province of table top roleplaying, i.e., actual player freedom. For me, a module is mostly a setting. It provides me with locations and a sense of what kind of threats and resources characterize them; i.e., campaign- (as opposed to session- or even encounter-) level information. Everything else would surely take as much or little prep time as one needs without a module.
This works until you hit the adventure path - at which point you need to stay roughly in line with the story.
Having said that, I do recognize there is more than a little utility in preping for a published encounter ... if the published encounter is actually characterful. Thinking up a good set-piece fight is not super easy, which is why script writers and even game designers get paid to do it. The problem is, just like there is a lot of schlock in movies I can't say many published encounters are super memorable. Published encounters had far more utility in 4E (for example), where "balance" was a much more precise thing.
Actually balance being more of a thing means that published encounters had
less utility because it was so much easier to get right rather than being a cake walk or crushing the PCs. Where published encounters helped (but nothing like as much as they should have) is that with all the forced movement in (pre-Essentials) 4e terrain was a much bigger thing than it was in other editions. Pushing monsters into their own pit traps or back through their own portals was SOP - and flat featureless rooms were singularly boring areas to fight in. A pit trap wasn't a no go square on the battlefield so much as it was a focus for the combat.
