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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5326540" data-attributes="member: 4937">What you describe would get him kicked off my team.  When reading a module from a DM's perspective, I continually ask myself, "What could go wrong?"  In this case, the obvious problem is that we have a very extended series of scenes that depend on one bad guy living.  I consider anything that depends on one NPC surviving to be a plot flaw.   A large amount of text spent on fleshed out contingencies in the event of NPC survival strikes me as a waste of space.  How is the adventure experienced by the 10% or parties that kill the Shadowdancer in 'round one' (or at least, much earlier than intended)?  Is there still something fun to do?Additionally, having played through this sort of thing from a player perspective, it's rarely as fun as the DM thinks it is to jerk players around like this.  You very much get the impression as a player that you have no choices but ride along in the rail car and get ganked for the DM's amusement.  It very much raises the spectre that you are fighting a DM PC and that the DM will not let you succeed in disrupting the DM's plans until the DM decides you can.  You feel as if the DM mainly wants to show you how cool he is.  You feel deprotagonized and disempowered.It's great when a foe becomes a reoccuring one, but it shouldn't be something that you should be striving for explicitly or something that the plot should depend on.This particular flaw is in my opinion the result of a DM pre-imagining how scenes are 'supposed' to play out too much and then investing himself in having exactly the scenes he imagines.   This is the writerly equivalent of that flaw - a guy that seems to be writing screen plays for an action movie rather than modules for an RPG.Yeah, doesn't it though.  As a player, I'd immediately stop playing chase, declare, "It's a trap" (IC and OOC) to the rest of the party, and refuse to be led any further.  One of the reasons that the guys who got on my list got there is that they tned to explicitly allow for challenges to be resolved in several potentially interesting ways.  The scene might become a chase scene, and if it does, that will be fun.  But if it doesn't, that will be fun too.  The stronger the writer is in that, the more respect I have for them, because it indicates alot of strength as a DM and not just strength as a writer.Of course, what this really means is that what each of us want in a module can be very difficult things.  I have the same problem with Nicholas Logue, who you also seem to respect highly.   These are guys who I admit write very strongly and who I would choose if I was the producer for a D&D inspired television series, but who I'd be leery of as adventure writers.   On the other hand, what they write seems to work for a lot of people, and if the whole thing comes off and the player's cooperate and enjoy the mine car ride, then yeah, it will work really well.</blockquote>

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