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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iron_Chef" data-source="post: 943497" data-attributes="member: 4530">We'll have to disagree here. I think CoTSQ is pure junk; you think it's great. Any module that forces the players to save the world, traps them in an area and then railroads them through a meatgrinder with little opportunity for roleplaying other thinking of a clever one-liner while hacking-n-slashing, is a shining example of what's wrong with adventure design and D&D in particular. "The world's most popular RPG" should have official support for more intelligent, RP-oriented styles of play both in the rulebooks and adventures, not the constant focus on video game power-ups that plague 3e game design. None of the official adventures are particularly clever or exciting, just "back to the dungeon" meatgrinders any hack could write. They're not even good dungeon crawls like back in 1e. Just souped-up "extreme" carbon copies with a seeming target audience of 13 year old boys in mind; horrible art in most cases, too. Drives me nuts. Our DM is normally great at winging it and brilliant at portraying NPCs (strangely enough, he absolutely sucks as a player when forced to focus on one character, lol), but his time is currently limited and despite years of advance knowledge that this is precisely the kind of adventure we hate, he's running it anyway, and inflicting in-game penalties on us for dragging our feet, using our religion against us, stripping us of everything and everyone we hold dear. Heavy-handed. It just seems like an extraordinarily bad fit (though annihilating those pesky drow with my cloudkill was great fun in an otherwise completely unmemorable session). We can't just "go find another group or DM" as you suggest. The option is to play or not to play, to scrap the campaign or continue on. It sucks to throw in the towel at 11th level after all the work I've put in to building my PC, complete with detailed family history, resulting mental and emotional states, etc., slow building of personal and business relationships, etc. The DM just throws all that in the dumpster and expects us to rejoice in endless brain-dead slaughter? Maybe if I'd built my character as a combat monster with a double digit I.Q. I wouldn't complain. But the messages this adventure and DM is sending are:1.  "never worship any god because I will use your faith to railroad you. same goes for organizations; don't join them either"2. "never bother to build intricate personal or fiscal relationships because they can be taken away at a moment's notice without warning." 3. "never do anything that doesn't focus on making you a combat monster with no ties to the world around you or your character will suck and you will die screaming in an endless dungeon crawl mega-meatgrinder." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" />I love my DM, but he should know better. Everytime I step in to substitute DM, he complains the adventures require too much thinking and he lets everyone else do all the brain work. Then he says he feels "inspired" and jumps back in to DM, and everything is awesome for awhile, couldn't be better, no complaints at all, but sooner or later, he makes a bad decision like dumping CoTSQ on our heads, and we wonder what the heck happened to our awesome campaign! *sigh* He should have come to me and asked me to fill in for awhile until his schedule cleared up.</blockquote>

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