Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 215993" data-attributes="member: 1288">This caught my attention...At the risk of seeming obtuse, I have to ask--what's the problem?  The DM is supposed to read the entire module thoroughly before running so much as page one.  Many modules express this outright, suggesting the DM "familiarize himself" with the contents before ever cracking it open at the gaming table.As far as how much background is too much, let me put forward this theory.There should be enough background to accomplish the following:1)  Give the DM a good handle on the environment.2)  Answer every possible (well, within reason) "why?" the DM or players might come up with.  If the DM doesn't know why an NPC acts as she does, or why the villains are doing what they're doing, the background is insufficient.3)  Provide plothooks or ideas for aditional stories set in the same environment.The background is excessive if it does the following:1)  Provides a lot of information that has no bearing on the previous three points.  (That is, it's fine to include little details, like the Merchant Prince being the son of a thief.  But if you've got into who the thief was, how he went legit, what efforts he took to help his son become a merchant prince, etc, you've probably gone too far--unless the DM needs all that to run the adventure.2)  Adds details that confuse the issues in the adventure, without actually contributing to it.  Do not, for example, write an adventure in which the main villain and the high priest happen to have the same name, unless that fact is important to the story.3)  Just seems, in general, too long without adding anything.Now, you'll notice that all three good points and all three bad points are entirely subjective.  There's no hard-and-fast rule that's going to work for everybody.  These are the criteria I, personally, would suggest, but you're still going to find a lot of disagreement.  Just the way it goes.</blockquote>

Verification