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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7673137" data-attributes="member: 37579">Devil's advocate: if you ran Tyranny of Dragons 4-6 times, wouldn't you also expect some variation and fond memories of how the PCs did different things? The one group that used deception and pretended to be cultists, the group that used stealth and snuck through the ruins, and the group that just charged in screaming YOLO!It's about option and choice.If you have a modular adventure (an, *ahem* module) then you have to either run it without much story or adapt it into an existing campaign. If you're busy and don't have time to write a campaign or aren't imaginative enough or are still learning how to plan a story then you are out of luck. A good DM can turn a story-lite module into an interesting, interactive campaign but a poor DM will just turn it into a hack-and-slash affair with no NPCs and plot. If you have an adventure with a storyline then you can just pull out the encounter areas or statblocks and turn it into something else. Episode 6: Castle Naerytar in Hoard of the Dragon Queen could easily have been a small stand-alone 20-page adventure. And if you're running a homegame it doesn't take much to tweak that area and make it something that fits your personal campaign. Pretty much the exact same amount of work as if it were a generic stand-alone product. Storyline adventures give you a choice: you can run the product straight, you can use it as a starting point and let your group go where they want, you can modify the crap out of it and do your own thing, or you can rip it apart and use it for encounters and smaller adventures. There's also the "reading" factor. Not everyone who buys an adventure will be able to run it. People buy expecting to play but can't find a group, or groups fall apart, or another module catches their eye, or the company releases products faster than people can play them. A story-lite module is okay to read but a little dry and boring. A story rich adventure is much more fun to sit down and read, consuming the product that way. This lets you "play" an adventure twice: once when reading it, and once at the table. And frankly, the market has spoken. Paizo is still doing APs and modules, but their module line is their redheaded stepchild. New and upcoming modules seldom get mentioned at convention panels and never receive big announcements or publicity. Most just appear on their product page with no fanfare. They changed them from 32-pages to 64-pages to see if more content would help, but apart from the first one no one really cared, and the number released each year is dwindling. And the module forums on Paizo are a ghost town. If not for RPG Superstar - where a winner gets to write a module - I wonder if they'd just cancel the line. In contrast, their Adventure Path storylines are hugely popular and pretty much drive the company forward.</blockquote>

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