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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Melan" data-source="post: 2981307" data-attributes="member: 1713">A DM has to go beyond the text of the module. If he is incapable of that, he will proverbially bleed to death on his first session. A module may provide helpful advice to run the game. Keep has a lot of it - including, IIRC, a recommendation that the DM should go beyond the text if necessary. I will try to check this at home.I accept this is an approach which may work well. Even so, do we need so many pages in such a small module to describe farmers and small craftsmen? If Hommlet had been 32 or 64 pages, sure, it would have been acceptable. But Hommlet is much smaller than that.If the project describes hundreds of mundane candlemakers, clothiers and haberdashers, it is still pretty much wasted space from the perspective of a game revolving around adventuring.I see the inn as a place to relax and the bar as a place to go out to and meet people, but you are right in that some groups may see the inn and never bother to check what else is there. On the other hand, both times I ran the adventure and presented the possible places the characters could visit (not including those which would not be apparent on first sight), they checked each to see "what is there to do". One of these groups was made up of newbies to gaming (university students who were interested in D&D with no previous experience except CRPGs and Fighting Fantasy gamebooks). Unfortunately, like everyone else, anecdotal evidence is all I have. Make no mistake, I don't consider the 10% probability an example of B2's excellent design. But I most definitely don't see it as a game breaking deal in any case.Eh. Keep is mostly about seeking out danger and defeating it for personal gain. That's the main theme - the enemy faction's presence in the keep is treated as a side issue. It is there but it isn't dominant. Hommlet is more about countering a growing threat by dealing the evil in the Moathouse a preventive strike. The higher activity of the evildoers is more appropriate here - just like it is in Reptile God. The evil cleric is not a "major interaction" in Keep on the Borderlands - it is fun to meet, but the module will run great without the PCs encountering him. The cult is, however, the focus of the whole adventure in Reptile God. That's a big difference, and for this reason, I consider your comparison inappropriate. The equivalent would be not finding the Caves of Chaos - that would indeed radically alter the whole game.In my opinion, Keep is well designed because much of the text is dedicated to describing the places the party will likely explore - places where adventure can take place. This is supplemented by a few additional encounters that can happen - the cleric, the wilderness, the NPCs of the keep - plus advice to the novice Dungeon Master, pregenerated PCs, etc. Not all of the side elements will come into play, but some will, and it will make for a more varied experience than, say, a fixed encounter chain along the lines of "if more than two caves are cleared, the evil cleric will try to infiltrate the group or hire the bandits to kill them".In Hommlet, too much is dedicated to exposition and not enough to the action - moreover, I maintain that the content itself is pretty weak. YMMV, IMHO, OMGWTFBBQ and other fancy acronyms may apply.</blockquote>

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