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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 2647278" data-attributes="member: 1106">You've taken it out of context.  This is what I was disagreeing with: "but having a backstory that the players might not discover doesn't make a moduiile bad either." I say, yes, it does.  With the context supplied again, it doesn't matter what your opinion about informing the DM is, it's irrelevant to what I was disagreeing with.It doesn't matter whether it is or isn't arbitrary - if it appears arbitrary to the players, it may as well be arbitrary for all intents and purposes of entertaining them.  If you don't care about entertaining your players, you won't care about this either I suppose.There are adventures written where the (back)story only ever makes sense to the DM, because it's the set of conceits which makes the adventure "go" in the first place, and there's no mechanism by which to convey this history to the players.  This is bad module writing, and it's seemingly quite common in back issues of Dungeon magazine for instance, but that's probably only because Dungeon publishes so many modules.And you're conceding my point - if five players missed the plot boat and the whole point to "why is this happening, why are we doing this", then either the DM or the module probably suck.  This is also bad - it leads to player apathy and removes story from the game.Oh bollocks.  There's a reason why movies bother to go "100 years earlier..." or "one week later" and present a flashback prior to the main story.  No.  I'm saying that a non-obvious backstory may as well be arbitrary for all the players care, because they don't know it, and are unlikely to find it out, so for all intents and purposes of entertaining them it may as well be arbitrary.  This is bad, and although not much can be done to stop bad DMs from continuing to be bad, writing this stuff into published adventures can and should be prevented...ideally...To do otherwise is like being a playwright looking out over a sea of confused faces on the premiere of his new play, but wearing a secret smile because he knew "the backstory", so it all made sense to him.  Yeah, it's that ridiculous...Now don't get me wrong; I think that campaigns should contain secrets that the players may never discover, and can get a thrill out of unveiling for themselves....it's just that entire adventures probably shouldn't be based around backstories that the PCs know nothing about...there's a reason why villains start "monologuing", and directors complain to writers about dialogue which is "exposition", but it seems that some adventure writers and DMs could learn from both these lazy practices because some of them use the backstory as a crutch to enable not telling the story at all.</blockquote>

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