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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4455138" data-attributes="member: 710">And what will avoid this happening if you have the overview? The Overview might want you "this guy is important", but that doesn't protect him from your player characters. And if you give him statistics to match that overview, all you get is the risk of a TPK if the parties want to kill him anyway.I will not elaborate on this particularly example, but generally speaking:Why do we assume that an overview would fix any of this problems. The only real advantage of the overview is that we can see where the story is going and that we can decide we like it. Ultimately though, the overview is irrelevant. What matters is if the individual adventures are good or not. And if they are not, the best overview of the world will not make them better. And our worry that the story-line will not be good, that there will be surprises that are wrecked by player interaction, all show just one thing: We don't trust WotC to get it right. And this trust can't be established by an overview. WotC has to do one thing first, and the rest is irrelevant: They have to give us good adventures. If then the entire AP still goes into a direction you don't care for, jump off the boat. If it goes interesting places, keep running it. And as gamers, we only have to consider: WotC is not a faceless entity that's just out to get our money with no regard to its fans. There are designers and developers at work there that are part of the community. They have played D&D and other games for a long time. And it is them (plus freelancers, that are equally part of the community) that are creating the adventures. Not some corporate executives, not a marketing expert, not a Hasbro CEO. Let's not forget this. We should give them some trust - like that they know how players can wreck plots, and that they hear us complaining about lack of overviews and lack of adventure quality, and that they will try to address them. Instead of complaining about "Do they want to define fun for us?", address the things that help us all to figure out what we want and what they might be lacking. Didn't like the first two adventures in the path - Why? Were the BBEG boring or to clichéd? Didn't you like the skill challenge in scene Y? Did you miss a big map of the dungeon area? Was the hook disappointing? Were some of the monsters broken or boring? Where the encounter setups uninteresting? Was the basic story idea weak? How would you improve on the flaws? What was missing?</blockquote>

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