Unpopular Opinion: People Shouldn't Review Adventures They Haven't Run

[Reynard]

Preview? For sure! Unbox? Excellent idea.Give first impressions? If you must.

But for the love of all that's good in the world, please stop reviewing the adventure you picked up yesterday that requires 100 table hours or more to complete. What's more,please DO review that adventure once you did complete it. Or even after you abandoned it mid play because it was terrible.

Every time a new book comes out, especially an adventure, reviews flood the feeds. Blog, vlog or pod, these reviews are hastily constructed and shallow. They reflect the knee jerk reactions of the reviewers rather than any real engagement with the material.

And then, after the initial rush, there's nothing. Try and find a review for an adventure from a year after its release by someone who ran or played through it. Exceedingly rare.

 

[LordEntrails]

I agree, but it's not going to stop. People want things now. They want to know if they should buy the shiny new thing while it's still shiny and new, not weeks or months later.

 

[Campbell]

I think the same thing should apply to roleplaying games and supplements as well. There is a whole mess of opinions, but until you have experience using something in play you really do not know anything meaningful about it.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

To be fair, I ran Chapter 1 before I posted about Descent.

 

[billd91]

I'm OK with people reviewing an adventure after having read it - I just want them to divulge their experience with it. Running it could reveal aspects that reading will not, but reading it can still generate useful and review-worth material.

 

[Arilyn]

I appreciate Seth Skorkowsy's reviews on You Tube. He never reviews a module unless he's run it. And he has great ideas for tweaking or reworking things to make adventures better.

 

[Reynard]

I'm OK with people reviewing an adventure after having read it - I just want them to divulge their experience with it. Running it could reveal aspects that reading will not, but reading it can still generate useful and review-worth material.

Could?

In my experience after 35 years I would say running a prewritten adventure always reveals aspects reading will not. I cannot think of a single adventure that played out 100% as the writer expected it to. And I say this as someone who has also done some adventure writing too.

 

[Celebrim]

First, yes, Seth Skorkowsky is awesome. Not only does he review adventures and products the way that they should be reviewed, and not only does he give really pertinent advice on how to run the adventure and the likely difficulties you'll face when running the adventure, but his production values are amazing.

Second, I feel pretty safe in saying that if you are reviewing a product you haven't used in play, you probably don't have a clue what you are talking about. As Reynard says, nothing ever plays out like it's written. A review of an adventure that you haven't played is about as useful as a review of a video game you've only seen the trailer for.

Heck, a lot of the time I feel it would never be written out the way it is if it had been played before it was written.

 

[John Dallman]

Second, I feel pretty safe in saying that if you are reviewing a product you haven't used in play, you probably don't have a clue what you are talking about.

Sometimes it's clear that an adventure is nonsense on reading it. Modiphius Entertainment's Atchung! Cthulhu! game is pretty good, but they publish an adventure for it, Assault on the Mountains of Madness, which is so blantantly self-contradictory (and so long) that running it would be an utter waste of time.

 

[Xenonnonex]

Related to the OP -> "Reviewers" especially on YouTube "reviewing" a book by just flipping through the book are annoying. No you did not review a book. That is called a First Impression. Stop taking advantage of companies and stop being a little shite.