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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thornir Alekeg" data-source="post: 2517712" data-attributes="member: 15651">One thing I have found, which has been alluded to by others here, is that the PCs world needs to have a certain amount of stability.  Someone mentioned large cities force players to focus less on combat.  One of the reasons for that is the fact that they are likely to encounter the same people time and again.  They PCs are in one locale.  They may have a "home base," which means they frequent the same bars, meet the same city guards, annoy the same neighbors many times.  Screw with someone, whom you will likely meet again, and there may be consequences at a later time.  Most published adventures don't work with this, unless they are part of a long story arc.  It is a "waste of space" and it reduced the genericness (is that a word?) of the adventure.  If your PCs are always on the move across the continent, travelling from one city to the next dungeon, to the later temple and so on, they never have to worry about the story behind the adventure.  "We killed the BBEG, they townspeople threw us a banquet, gave us some stuff, and now we are off, never to see these people again.  Who cares why the BBEG set up his evil camp here."  Think of it like TV shows.  Some shows are individual episodes.  Very little connection from one to the next.  In many of those shows the story is action focused and fairly linear.  In recent years shows have discovered the story arc.  Now the characters grow, the antagonists return, the intrigue is more complex.A good DM will find ways to weave the individual "episodes" (adventures) into a tapestry.  Good players will help to do so by adding their own work.  But publishers will be hard pressed to create that tapestry for a DM (unless they railroad everyone) because they can't see what will develop as each individual group plays it out.  In my opinion some of the better adventures run you through it, but then spell out information for further adventures.  Perhaps that is the key.  Publishers write an adventure.  At the end they have five or six suggestions for further adventures.  They then write those suggestions into adventures with further suggestions at the end of those (some of which may tie back to earlier suggestions).  The hard part with this is that the adventures then need to be easily scaleable to the current party level.  (Hmmm. Published online, DMs can sign up as a subscription allowing x number of downloads per year as needed or just purchase them one by one.)  Sorry, going off on my own little tangent here...</blockquote>

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