Part of this whole conundrum is that because use pre-printed adventures in all kinds of different ways... everyone will have different tolerances on things that could be considered good or bad. So for example... I never run adventure path books as-is. They always end up being just a spine around which the adventure ends up flowing. So for me, the most important part is the story that the book is giving me... if the story is compelling, if the villains have interesting motivations, if the actions the PCs are meant to undertake are easily grasped and the players have something meaningful to hold onto and accomplish... then to me the adventure is great! And questions like "How does this monster eat while in the closed room?" never even occur to me because chances are extremely good that the question will never come up, will never need to be addressed, and on the off-chance it does... improvising a quick answer that satisfies the players will take 3 seconds. So I'm never going to look for those issues in an adventure path, let alone dock the writers for not answering it themselves.
By the same token... adventures that other people may think are fantastic are ones that do little for me. Most of 4E's adventures from DDI Dungeon magazines are useless to me, because they consisted of nothing more than "Here's a location, and three combat encounters the players will go through to reach the end." Without having any through line or narrative as to what the monsters are doing there, what it the point of the location, and what are the various narrative hurdles (rather than monster encounters) that make the adventure compelling? So to me, those 4E adventures are completely pointless-- I can toss a handful of monsters in the path of the players on my own-- I want story!
I found a similar issue with the one Arcane Library module I downloaded from their site, after so many people said they had the best adventures they had ever read. And the adventure seemed fine... it was the Skyhorn Lighthouse one... but I wasn't blown away by it like other players seemed to have been. And I suspect it's because the stuff those players thought were so important and which the adventure did (that a lot of other adventures, including WotC ones don't) was that it wrote out reactions for the DM to take in response to three or more different ways the players might engage with the encounter (as most adventures usually only write one-- the most likely one-- probably to save word count.) Which again, for some players might be a godsend and a great revelation to adventure design... but for me, I know how to improvise reactions to whatever choices my players might make so having them written out for me does not do me much good. And since the narrative of the adventure was good, but nothing too original... I gave it a thumbs-up, but was not nearly as raving about it as other players here have been.
So at the end of the day when it comes to reviews, whether or not we find them useful or meaningful will ultimately come down to whether the reviewer cares about the same things we do. If we know that X reviewer is really concerned with "combat balance" for example and they crap on an adventure and give it a scathing review, we can go in and take their results with a massive grain of salt. And not really care that they crap on it, because they are crapping on something we ourselves feel to be pointless. So they are in 'Old man yells at clouds' territory, and why waste our time getting defensive about something like that?
By the same token... adventures that other people may think are fantastic are ones that do little for me. Most of 4E's adventures from DDI Dungeon magazines are useless to me, because they consisted of nothing more than "Here's a location, and three combat encounters the players will go through to reach the end." Without having any through line or narrative as to what the monsters are doing there, what it the point of the location, and what are the various narrative hurdles (rather than monster encounters) that make the adventure compelling? So to me, those 4E adventures are completely pointless-- I can toss a handful of monsters in the path of the players on my own-- I want story!
I found a similar issue with the one Arcane Library module I downloaded from their site, after so many people said they had the best adventures they had ever read. And the adventure seemed fine... it was the Skyhorn Lighthouse one... but I wasn't blown away by it like other players seemed to have been. And I suspect it's because the stuff those players thought were so important and which the adventure did (that a lot of other adventures, including WotC ones don't) was that it wrote out reactions for the DM to take in response to three or more different ways the players might engage with the encounter (as most adventures usually only write one-- the most likely one-- probably to save word count.) Which again, for some players might be a godsend and a great revelation to adventure design... but for me, I know how to improvise reactions to whatever choices my players might make so having them written out for me does not do me much good. And since the narrative of the adventure was good, but nothing too original... I gave it a thumbs-up, but was not nearly as raving about it as other players here have been.
So at the end of the day when it comes to reviews, whether or not we find them useful or meaningful will ultimately come down to whether the reviewer cares about the same things we do. If we know that X reviewer is really concerned with "combat balance" for example and they crap on an adventure and give it a scathing review, we can go in and take their results with a massive grain of salt. And not really care that they crap on it, because they are crapping on something we ourselves feel to be pointless. So they are in 'Old man yells at clouds' territory, and why waste our time getting defensive about something like that?
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