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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riastlin" data-source="post: 5413729" data-attributes="member: 94022">I think part of the problem with the whole "There's no non-combat focus" issue is that I think its fairly hard to write that into a book.  After all, what would you put into a PHB to emphasize "out-of-encounter" interactions?   That being said, I understand that many of the adventures have had notable shortcomings in the form of NPC backgrounds/motivations/mannerisms, etc.  I think this is the biggest issue most people have.  I imagine that there are two issues driving this problem.  1) the authors tend to be paid by the word and are thus given word count limits, so when things need cutting, they likely cut from the NPCs rather than the encounters.  2) NPCs are really a gaming group by gaming group kind of thing.  In other words, an NPC who ends up playing a central role in one group's campaign may not ever come up in another's even if they are running the same adventures.  Different players will latch onto different NPCs for whatever reason.  As a result, I think that WotC, for good or ill, has chosen to go with rather brief info on the NPCs and let the DM flesh it out as needed.  As it stands, I don't need highly detailed information on 10 NPCs every adventure because my group is unlikely to interact much with more than 2 (and even that is pushing it). As for rituals, I do know that some of the SOW adventures specifically mention rituals (though in the guise of assuming that the PCs will use certain types of rituals during their investigation).  Again, I'm not sure how exactly to work rituals into a published adventure without making it look like railroading "If the PCs perform the Scry ritual they will learn that BAMF is on Nitwit Island."  In that situation you still need other clues to get the party to Nitwit Island because if the party for some reason does not have access to Scry, then they are hosed.   So in summary, I too would love to see better implementation of rituals in published adventures but I'm not even certain how I would do it myself.  Of course, then my invoker and bard players would have to actually remember that they are, in fact, ritual casters.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/ponder.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hmm:" title="Hmmm    :hmm:" data-shortname=":hmm:" /></blockquote>

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