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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manchu" data-source="post: 6552320" data-attributes="member: 6791825">I totally disagree about both points.On the first one, I don't think you quite cotton what I'm getting at -- which boils down to NOT using published modules as railroads. That in turn means all the published encounters may or may not ever occur. The carefully sequenced events are out the window. What is left? A lot of setting details and high level plot points so the DM can know "what's going on" at any particular point while the PCs are doing whatever it is they decide to do. The opposite of that seems to be what you are getting at by saying "stay[ing] roughly in line with the story" where one of the DM's main jobs is heavily narrowing the PCs' choices (i.e., railroading).On the second point, "encounter balance" is not as important in 5E as in 4E. 5E simply doesn't require the "precise" (very relative term there) rules of encounter design that 4E had. That inherently means published encounters are less valuable in 5E simply because from-scratch encounters take less time to design in 5E. Your argument seems to be, if you have the really complex tools the job requires then you don't need someone else to do it for you ... which is true, but it totally misses the point that those complex tools are missing in 5E because they are no longer necessary. It's weird because then you go on to basically make the same point as me using dungeon terrain as an example. Dungeon terrain is (a) a factor in how challenging an encounter is (a.k.a., "balance") and (b) exactly the sort of thing I was referring to as set-piece design, which in both cases count as IMO "virtues" of published encounters.Surely, planning something is not the same thing as testing it ...</blockquote>

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