D&D 5E Rejecting the Premise in a Module

[Helldritch]

In a sandbox environment, I might be more sympathetic, but when playing a module, the DM is in control of the story - not the players. It DM responsibility to achieve thematic and cinematic greatness.



Depends what you mean by "play along."



No one deserves respect for work alone. I could draw the letter "a" on a piece of paper one million times. It would be a lot of work, but I'd be a moron for doing it.

It is the DM's job to earn respect by virtue of DMing well. If the DM chooses an adventure boring enough or runs it in a way that makes the players bored enough to go off the rails, then the DM failed and deserves no respect (as a DM, not as a human being). The DM may have failed 1) to run the adventure properly, 2) choose a good adventure, 3) find the right players for that adventure. In the end, however, the result is the same: the DM failed.



Choosing good players is an important DM skill.

You immediately assume the worst in DM. Most DM will do good honest work for their players. Don't take the morrons and the exceptions into account. A DM trying his best is entitled to a basic amount of respect. If you read my earlier post, it did happen to me once, through no fault of my own, to have such a player at my table and it was not a habit of his either.

Yes, mistakes and bad calls can sometimes be made. Again, this is the exception, not the norm. If a DM is so bad to do such thing regularly, then the DM should simply stop being the DM. Good players should always give the benefit of the doubt to their DM.

 

[Scott Christian]

Bad organisation, straight-up bad dialogue/description, TMI on totally meaningless stuff whilst barely describing core events, not understand their own timelines (often having impossible timelines), inconsistencies and contradictions, missing obvious approaches, and as I said actual massive logic-holes. Bad organisation and logic holes are pretty bad, because the former is very hard to fix, and the latter can ruin a part of the adventure to the point where it has to be re-written entirely (though more often requires minor re-writes). Missing obvious approaches goes to the heart the problem this thread is about too.

I respect your opinion. I know you have a lot of experience, and if you see these things, it is true for you and your group. I run these, and have not encountered those problems. But, groups differ.

 

[FrozenNorth]

When a DM prepares adventures, bought or otherwise, that DM puts a lot of work into it. This is something that many players forget. All this work should bring a small dose of lattitude to the DM and players should get along at least for a while. Players should indulge in the adventure for a few sessions to get an idea of what the adventure is about. If after a few sessions, it is evident that it is not their cup of tea, then a discussion should occur. A good DM will listen and adjust to the complains and adjust. A better DM will adjust way before such a discussion has to happen. But the players should at least give it a try. It is a question of mutual respect.

Also, it can take a single player to knife a game regardless of what the other players think.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The DM chose to run that adventure. The DM is still responsible.

I don't think that's really reasonable, because DMing is a skill, and identifying the flaws in an adventure from reading it takes skill and experience. It's a bit like a partner giving some tricky contract to a trainee lawyer to handle, then being shocked and upset when he fails to spot various flaws, and even then the trainee has been through a lot more training than most DMs before they start running stuff.

And this goes to what I'm saying. Most "professional" module/AP design is utterly amateur-ish. There's no consistency, no standards, no real thought about what might be easy/hard for a DM to deal with, and in many cases it seems like there's been little or no playtesting. There are often professional standards of art and visual design, but that's typically about it.

Am I saying this should change? Probably that's not practical. It's been like this for decades and it's not a big money business.

But we have people claiming there are these brilliant "professional" APs and my experience is that it's actually a complete crapshoot as they say. Some APs are of a very high standard, and what they do wrong is relatively minor. But most are riddled with issues that, were this a big-money business, or one with a history of specific standards and professionalism, and expectations from readers, be unacceptable.

We see too how far people will go - people are claiming no AP is so bad it couldn't be "fun" (whatever that means - and even true it is a meaningless claim by its very definition!), yet engaging in hours, sometimes dozens of hours, of hard work fixing, improving, and adding to these APs, often doing stuff that really shouldn't be necessary. It does seem that no module is "so bad" that someone won't apologise for it, won't claim it's "fun for them", won't spend countless hours fixing it up. But at that point, we're just seeing how the standards for what people want out of a module are incredibly low in many cases.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Yeah, and this is why I question why run them at all, a question no-one has answered yet. Or even like, hinted at an answer. Why do something that's both harder work and, it seems less rewarding?

I guess we will never know!

Maybe if you came off less like an arrogant jerk you’d get more responses...

Here’s mine (though for me, I tend to put about the same work for homebrew than for an AP).

1. The AP is about a topic that the author knows better than I do. This allows me to change up what I normally present to my players and can spur me to learn more about the topic.
2. It is easier to improve an existing structure than to build it from scratch. This applies to mechanics (iI have rewritten the PHB’s wild surge table) and to story elements (giving the BBEG a personal motivation, changing some monsters).
3. A strong skeleton to the AP means that instead of spending time creating the basic encounters and maps, I can spend that time on material that is custom to the characters.
4. AP + custom content creates a better experience for my players and me than either AP alone or homebrew alone.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I respect your opinion. I know you have a lot of experience, and if you see these things, it is true for you and your group. I run these, and have not encountered those problems. But, groups differ.

Some of this isn't even opinion. It's demonstrable fact. So all this stuff about "groups differ" is irrelevant with that. "Groups differ" doesn't explain bad organisation. "Groups differ" doesn't explain missing material or massive plot holes. "Groups differ" doesn't explain inconsistencies, lore errors or impossible timelines. "Groups differ" doesn't explain AP writers just straight-up getting rules wrong or ignoring rules (I have no issue with an AP overriding rules if it acknowledges that is what it is doing, of course).

Groups differ does explain a few things, of course - for example the FR AP we started which involved actual World of Warcraft-style sidequests (of the most hilariously dumb kind), which were completely bizarre the in scenario (an emergency evacuation). Maybe some people want World of Warcraft-style sidequests in their D&D? But this is in one of these "professional" APs you're comparing to Shakespeare, and it read like it had been written by a twelve-year-old (speaking as someone who was once twelve and a DM).

The dungeon crawl parts are described fully

No, actually that's exactly part of the problem. There are plenty of APs with forced/expected encounters which don't actually have them "fully described", or even dungeons/quasi-dungeons which have most of the flaws I've described. For example, the early WotC APs for 4E were basically all dungeon crawls (with some linking elements). The non-dungeon-crawl bits weren't actually that bad, but the dungeon crawls were terrible and bizarre, and full of inexplicable, lazy-seeming stuff, nonsensical scenarios, self-contradictory lore and plot points, confused writing, misunderstandings of 4E mechanics, and so on (I'm talking about the series that starts with Keep on the Shadowfell). And don't even get me started on railroading, that's so prevalent I've barely mentioned it.

And what's sad is it's not always the case. Sometimes stuff is really well put-together and makes a lot of sense. Or it has a lot of flaws, but they're not the kind I've listed above, i.e. not ones that are objectively or close-to-objectively bad, but rather ones that are a matter of taste (2E Dragon Mountain for example, has a lot of taste flaws, far fewer in the way of the other kind of flaws).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The Dalish Curse for Dragon Age.
Anything I have read or played from Numenera.
The one adventure (I didn't run it) from the Conan TTRPG. I looked at it after playing. I love the setting, but the adventure was...
I ran The Inn at Five Points for Dungeon Crawl Classics.
All of these I found much more difficult to run than anything published in 5e or PF. Some of the rulesets I really enjoy. But the written adventures need a lot of work to compare to D&D 5e.

Thanks, this is interesting! I shall avoid all of the above.

Re: 5E/PF have none as difficult to run as these, do you think that's due to 5E/PF having better writers or being easier to write for or what? It seems like the people involved in writing the adventures above were mostly professionals with a lot of experience. Numenera's mega-adventure the Devil's Spine (which I presume may be the offender) is written by Monte Cook. The Dalish Curse is by Steve Kenson.

 

[Helldritch]

We see too how far people will go - people are claiming no AP is so bad it couldn't be "fun" (whatever that means - and even true it is a meaningless claim by its very definition!), yet engaging in hours, sometimes dozens of hours, of hard work fixing, improving, and adding to these APs, often doing stuff that really shouldn't be necessary. It does seem that no module is "so bad" that someone won't apologise for it, won't claim it's "fun for them", won't spend countless hours fixing it up. But at that point, we're just seeing how the standards for what people want out of a module are incredibly low in many cases.

Dozens of hours to put an AP to your tastes?????? Either you are way too perfectionist or you do it wrong, very wrong. STK took me about half an hour to fix for my players. Not counting the actual read through (about an hour to read it four times, while taking notes, speed reading is a pet peeve of mine.) Dragon Heist took a bit more, about 45 minutes and that was the longest time I had to put in an AP to adapt it.

Just a few notes on post-It put where your troubled areas are should be more than enough. And I do this for two different groups. It is simply a matter of being organised enough and being very concise.

Even if I liked all AP, it does not mean that they are all for my players. Just like every "module" made in 1ed were not for my players. It is also part of the DM's job to know if such and such adventure is suitable for his/her players' play style.

Edit: mussing words...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Of course it is a waste of 60 pages... if you do mot take into account that these villains will be there for Dungeon of the Mad Mage. They will be there for a long time and should harass the PC when they are out of Under Mountain. Recurring vilains are great for story telling! This is exactly what I was hinting at. DH has been written as part of DotMM but some links are missing. Either due to space constraints or editing cuts. You are assumed to buy the second book to play the first. Is it a bad assumption? Yes and no. Those 60 pages are wasted if DH is only a one shot for you and your group moves on to an other part of FR. But if you go on with DotMM, it opens up so many opportunities...

That's objectively bad writing/design. Objectively. Over 25% of the material provided is essentially irrelevant to the adventure, and apparently suited to a different adventure. Imagine buying a book about the FR and finding 25% of it was entirely about Krynn or something, with no indication on the back or in the marketing that this was the case.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Dozens of hours to put an AP to your tastes?????? Either you are way too perfectionist or you do it wrong, very wrong.

Buddy, your pal Scott has just explained how he takes dozens of hours to "improve" or "do justice to" APs. You clicked like on all the posts where he talked about it.