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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6412791" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I understood the scenario outline from your OP, at this point in time solving the mystery of the guard's suicide doesn't actually drive the adventure forward. It is just tying up a loose plot thread.I've got nothing against social challenges.But to me this seems entirely unmotivated. As I understood the setup, the PCs have no connection to any of the NPCs other than as plot devices. The PCs have no connection to the forest or the dragon. The PCs have no way even of knowing about the forest or the dragon until the end of the scenario - again, there is nothing but the tying up of loose plot threads.My reasons for finding the scenario unappealing are expressed, I think, in this quote from <a href="http://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/itoolkit3.html" target="_blank">Christopher Kubasik</a>:[M]any people mistake character for characterization. Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By "seeing" how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page. But a person thus described is not a character. . . . Character is action. That's a rule of thumb for plays and movies, and is valid as well for roleplaying games . . . This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character's actions. But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character. I don't see how this scenario links at all to meaningful goals for PCs in a fantasy RPG. The social situation does not contain any elements that put pressure on the PCs' goals or personalities. They have no stakes, that I can see, other than - for basically metagame reasons, of knowing that the GM has plonked them into a mystery scenario - trying to work out what triggers the lighting attacks. They have no character-based reason to care about what is going on.That may be true of the other adventures in the series also. Which means I probably wouldn't like them either. But at least a dungeon crawl has D&D tropes, which presumably part of what motivates a person to play D&D. Whereas talking to a pseudo-mediaeval food critic about the ingredients of a soup, not so much.</blockquote>

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