NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6456615" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree that this is almost certainly true.Given the limited evidence we have, I think these sorts of conjectures are trickier.My sense, given the player's complaint that triggered the OP, plus other posts in this and other threads, is that the challenge element isn't at the heart of [MENTION=15142]Maj[/MENTION]oruOakheart's game.  (Eg as best I recall, but perhaps I'm wrong, he favours the use of GM force/fudging to avoid a TPK.) I think "the experience" is at the heart of the game - turning up, playing your character within the broad world and plot confines that the GM dictates, and experiencing whatever it is that the GM serves up. This will require overcoming some challenges, but my sense is that the experience is more important than the overcoming.This is my guess as to why the player in the OP didn't like the food-critic scenario - because it is a long way from the D&D experience of exploring places, beating up monsters, and finding out how many hit points you lose in the process (which isn't ultimately about challenge if the GM will manipulate ingame events to make sure that you never all drop below zero all at once).To me, it seems like a very mainsteam mid-to-late-80s through 90s style of play, that I think was especially mainstream during the 2nd ed AD&D era.Because I use a lot of modules, I have views on what makes for a good one. A good module presents interesting situations (in D&D this means interesting locations and antagonists that are both thematically and mechanically interesting). And it should be reasonably easy to strip these situations off the module-writer's chassis (which almost inevitably will assume some sort of plot sequence) and re-arrange or re-deploy them as makes sense for the game actually being played.A module that I think is pretty good for this is OA7 Test of the Samurai. Another is B10 Night's Dark Terror. A module that I think is not very good for this is Dead Gods. Another is Expedition to the Demonweb Pits.More traditional (early AD&D) dungeon modules can be OK for this provided it is feasible to turn them from an exploration focus to a more pithy encounter focus. I think I achieved this with G2 in my 4e game. I don't think G1 and G3 would lend themselves to it in the same way, though, as they have too much traditional dungeon-crawling/cleansing in their lower levels.Used in this way I don't think that modules have to be the RPG equivaent of microwave dinners.</blockquote>

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