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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 1120146" data-attributes="member: 6777">Ooh! He picked me! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Joshua already sort of said what I want to say, but hey...In some ways, I think this is a bit of a cop-out. Yeah, you *could* write an adventure that presents me with a hole in the ground, a list of encounters, and then just let me go to town as a DM and make up motivations and personalities for all of them (Keep on the Borderlands, anyone?), but in that case, *why am I paying you to make me do all the work?*I liked that Sunless Citadel provided some motivations for many of the inhabitants, and that some were wholly evil and just needed to get hacked, but some were noted as being willing to negotiate depending on the actions of the PCs. Particularly for an adventure aimed and newbie DMs, I thought this was really cool. I would also suspect that an adventure like the excellent Belly of the Beast by Mike Mearls would not have been very useful if he hadn't laid out the motivations of the various groups involved.Anyone with dice and a pencil can design a hole in the ground with encounters. What I'm willing to pay for are interesting setups, detailed characters, and compelling hooks. To use your example, "The Star of Death" is pretty useless to me if it's just maps and stats. Heck, how much of the interior of that thing did we get to see, anyway? 10%? 5%? However, if it also contains story ideas, motivations, and hooks that could spark "Star Wars," then it's worth my while.Again, there's a point where, if there's too much left to the DM, your product isn't really worth my money.E.g., B1, Into the Unknown, provided maps and keyed encounter areas, but left the placement of monsters, treasure, and any sort of rationale for its existence up to the DM. As an introductory adventure for the newbie DM (its target audience, as it was part of the Basic set), it was completely useless to me, and I never used it. That's why people have fond memories of B2, Keep on the Borderlands, and not the former.As for "story," I didn't really mean railroading or a fixed plot, per se. I simply meant an overall picture of the whys and wherefores of the adventure. Sunless Citadel provided a decent rationale for the existence of the dungeon and why it was inhabited. It provided a couple of different hooks. It provided some interesting background seeds that, in succeeding adventure path modules, actually got developed. It had goals. It had NPC motivations. It was holistic.Sure, some of these elements may not fit in my campaign. However, it's usually easier for me to remove these elements than to provide them. If you provide them, only a certain percentage of DMs need to change anything, and they might not need to change much. If you provide nothing, 100% of the DMs need to provide 100% of them. Which option do you think seems more useful to me, as a consumer?</blockquote>

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