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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8109506" data-attributes="member: 7006">Yep.  Every adventure is a book of ideas.  Ideas that can be used to create a story for your players to go through and experience.  And to be ultimately useful for as many DMs as possible, it's going to give as many ideas that are thematically linked or narratively linked or mechanically linked as possible... knowing full well that every DM prioritizes each of things differently.  Some bits will be fully embraced, some will be thrown away as garbage.  Some ideas will make a DM says "That is AWESOME!  I can't wait to use this and play this!" and some ideas will make the same DM say "Ugh!  Who thought this was necessary?  This is stupid!"And every single idea in the book will be found on both sides of the list just based on the sheer number of DMs.I mean heck... even something as simple as boxed text will bring out the stalwarts saying "Thank god they included this!!!  Why doesn't every module have this?!?  I have a busy life, I don't want to have to scour the text in the section to know what does and doesn't need to be revealed!"  And it will also bring out the haters that will say about the exact same boxed text "Why the hell do they keep including this stuff?!?  It's always written horribly, all stilted and showy, and it doesn't in any way serve the story I'M telling to my players!  Let ME decide what is important to reveal, don't force it on me!  Why can't the adventure writers understand this yet?!?  They've been doing this for 40 years!!!"Now... take these attitudes and multiply them by the several thousand other ideas found in every book and we now know how it is literally impossible to write something that everybody is going to find useful in the exact same format that the book presents it in.  It never has happened, it's not going to happen, and if your go-to response is "I'm paying them $50 for this!  It should happen, gosh-darn it!!!", you need to get a bit of a reality check.Considering that these adventure books are not novels to be read cover to cover and have these intricately detailed plots that makes complete sense like an Agatha Christie mystery... but instead are merely the repository of a HUGE bunch of (hopefully) thematically compelling ideas that are meant to invigorate and inspire DMs in designing the stories they wish to tell in whatever manner they wish to tell them... thinking a cohesive, narrative whole is at all important or useful to the most amount of people is missing the forest for the 2-years-in-darkness trees.</blockquote>

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