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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TikkchikFenTikktikk" data-source="post: 5268823" data-attributes="member: 67494">To be fair to the authors, they lose a lot of control over the final form of their adventure once it is sold to WotC. If you read the "Ask the Author" thread at the forum I linked up-thread here, you'll see that the author of the current Dark Sun adventure does care very much. He follows the discussions there and often elucidates what he was thinking when he designed and developed each sesssion.It becomes clear he had a short deadline to adapt his adventure to the very-beta Dark Sun rules. The author may or may not have play tested it, but it's fair for him to assume that there would be time in the project plan for it to be play tested by WotC before it was sent off to the FLGS for organized play. That pretty clearly didn't happen, which he had no control over. Also, editing made changes to the adventure after he handed it off and without his knowledge. A major editorial change created the bizarre and confusing situation with the skill challenge/survival days/sun sickness situation FUBAR in chapter one.Encounters is not Living Forgotten Realms. It may vaguely look and sound like it, but it is not. Encounter DMs have significant latitude to make the game work at their table. I have significantly altered monsters and encounters to make the sessions more interesting and playable. For example, in the encounter with the preserver dwarf, primal mage, and dust devils session in chapter one, I reduced the number of dust devils to one and reduced the accuracy and damage dice of the remaining monster's area attacks. When it was bloodied it split into two dust devils.In the encounter with the goblins, I reskinned them as "weathered wayfarers", a strange race of small humanoid nomads. I created a little morale table to add a little more effect than just "if the casters die, everyone else runs" and which ended the encounter with a caster surrendering and enabling a great roleplaying session that wouldn't have happened otherwise.The primary reason we are losing players at our FLGS is because we have extremely new and inexperienced/unimaginative DMs (I'm resisting calling them "bad"). IMHO, if Encounters has a fundamental problem, it is that it isn't being run the way organized play should and the people running the game don't have adequate support.I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Encounters team needs to take lessons from the Magic team and create a DM development program to equal the Magic Judge program.</blockquote>

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