Is The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh a well-designed adventure module?

[Ed_Laprade]

All right - HOLD THE PHONE!

What is everyone bashing poor Ned about? Is it because he is just too tough for the 1st level party?

Or is it because it seemed out of place that he was in the haunted house in the first place?

Or is it some other reason?

If it is the first ... well ... neither I (when playing) nor the parties I DM'd through it had any problems with him.

If it is the second that is the entire point. He IS out of place. That's one of the big things that is supposed to tip the pc's off to the fact that something more is going on inside the house. More than that, the module says that the merchant put him therein a panick and did not think things through....

If it's something else ... please elaborate!

The real problem, IMHO, is that this is a first level module. Therefore one of the, if not the, first adventure(s) the characters will go through. If they are newbies this teaches them to never trust strangers! Our group, even though we weren't newbies, would debate for quite some time about letting new PCs join the party because the characters had no reason to trust them. And quite a few innocent prisoners got the "he must be another Ned, kill him!" treatment.

So either you deliberately metagame after meeting him, or the game can fall apart because the first thing the players learn is that you can't trust anyone!

My only other beef is that there wasn't any Saltmarsh unless the GM made it up on his own.

 

[Terwox]

I didn't play or read Saltmarsh so I can't contribute there.

But, I can say that I had a blast running the Tomb of Horrors, and I think my players had quite a good time with it too, and I think it's a really poorly designed module.

"Non-sensical death traps" and lots of hokey dungeon dressing might be FUN, but it's fun because it's so goofy and bad. It's fun to beat, but it doesn't make it well-designed.

(Tomb of Horrors was probably a decent tournament module, even though some of it was just so absurdly random as to be bad for even that.)

So, that's how a module can be both very fun but not thought to be well designed. (Obviously if a module was fun it would point towards the module being well designed, though, but it's not a perfect correlation.)

 

[Quasqueton]

Please, folks, can we keep the discussion on the module in the title of the thread. Let's not keep bringing in other modules, especially ones being hotly discussed in another thread still on the first page of the forum.

I'm not a moderator, obviously, but I'm asking that everyone let the above ToH comment go without dragging this thread into that topic. It would be nice if a moderator could cut the above comment from this thread and paste it into the ToH thread. Is that possible?

Quasqueton

 

[Barak]

Alright, I didn't run Saltmarsh, I played in it. Now it's been mentioned that the module itself explains that Ned is supposed to be out of place, which I wouldn't know about, obviously. Also, perhaps the problems my group had with Ned should have been handled better by the DM, perhaps not, I dunno. But here's how it went.

[sblock]
So we're hired to investigate the haunting of a house. We fight rats, and go through a crumbling floor. Well, my dwarf did, not the whole party. Anyway. Then we find that bound guy. My character's first comment was "well, obviously he wasn't tied up by those rats." All Ned 'can' tell us (obviously it turned out to be all he 'would' tell us) is that he got knocked out by behind, tied up and left there. Now, we're green adventurers, sure, but it doesn't mean we're dumb. All that Ned accomplishes by doing that is to let us on that the house is probably not haunted, but used by "regular" folks for some reason. Also, he didn't really accomplish much in the way of backstabbing, since we immediately took him back to town. So I guess he slowed us up some, too. Now, I guess the module itself says that the plan was poorly thought out, but.. -That- poorly thought out? Ned, in a way, actually -did- help us. That was just weird. They'd have been much better off just letting us explore on our own and hunker down, as we might have never found them. Once we had found Ned, however, there was no way we'd end up thinking that the house was, in fact, haunted.
[/sblock]

 

[Storm Raven]

Alright, I didn't run Saltmarsh, I played in it. Now it's been mentioned that the module itself explains that Ned is supposed to be out of place, which I wouldn't know about, obviously. Also, perhaps the problems my group had with Ned should have been handled better by the DM, perhaps not, I dunno. But here's how it went.

And that's exactly how it is supposed to play out, except that Ned is supposed to convince the party to let him accompany them and help out if he can, and then try to dissuade them from exploring the house too thoroughly, and turn on them once contact with the smugglers has been made and battle is joined. The fact that this is more likely to give away the secret oif the house is talked about in the module, Ned's employer panicked, and having little time and no real way to come up with a better plan came up with this one. His presence in the house is supposed to be a clue, albeit a clue unintended by Ned or his employer.

 

[Quasqueton]

Real Life situations such as Ned's get called, "Dumb Crook News" or some such, and we all laugh at it. Book or movie or game situations such as Ned's get called "Dumb Plot Items" or some such, and we call it bad.

I've noticed this kind of thing a lot reading the Media Lounge forum. We're more understanding of plotting mistakes with Real Life capers ("Hey, everyone has a stupid moment or twelve.") than we are in authored situations.

I can completely understand the Ned situation happening in a Real Life scenario, because people panic, don't think things through, and aren't all masterminds. It never bothered me at all in the adventure.

Quasqueton

 

[Mark Hope]

And he would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids and your dumb dog...

 

[Delta]

It's okay ("other"). I thought it was really clever and fresh when I first saw it. The one problem, in retrospect, is that it's so very much like a "Scooby Doo" episode.

The fact that the "ghostly lights" are a ruse by smugglers is clever, but in a fantasy world you shouldn't do that very often (the ghostly lights should really be a supernatural fantasy something to make it worthwhile, in general).

 

[Quasqueton]

Funny, but I think the truly haunted house (with real undead monsters) is a cliche in D&D/Fantasy gaming. I thought that was why the fake haunting worked well -- it's not superstition when you know, for a fact, that ghosts, ghouls, and zombies really do exist and kill people who encounter them.

Experienced D&Ders would probably be more surprised (and entertained) by discovering there weren't really any undead in the house (other than the skeletons in the secret room in the basement), than if they encountered zombies and ghouls as they expected.

Quasqueton

 

[painandgreed]

Then you have the "crafted to the players" issue. I can't think of any supernatural monsters that might cause "ghostly lights" at 1st level. Therefore it's decent assumption, or at least ruins the suspention of disbelief, that the house is not haunted from the begining. It would be a much better module if you could convince the PCs that it was haunted with something more level appropriate. For that, it would supposedly be a fairly known monster. 1E was still pretty ad hoc, but the idea of a generic "haunting" never really played into it. There was always a specific monster associated with it. It probably would have been better if instead of being "haunted" it was threatened by some other 1st level appropriate monster.

Another design questions comes up with the secret room containing the philosophers stone and other hidden treasures. Should such treasures be part of the standard money per level guidleines, or above and beyond it. If players miss such hidden treasure (and I had one party miss it), should they be shorted or should they be rewarded if they find it?