Modules and the right amount of setting detail

[Lanefan]

So when you pick up an adventure you're not interested in the NPCs, the backstory, or the setting...you're interested in things you can challenge your players with? Monsters, encounters, traps?

I just want a dungeon, or whatever the actual adventure entails. It's about 98.5% likely I'm going to be supplying my own backstory anyway, and probably the NPCs as well; and the setting is already established long before any given adventure crops up.

Night's Dark Terror was the Basic/Expert transition adventure, right? What is it a good example of...needing to explicitly state that it's a setting?

Yes. That adventure (actually a somewhat-connected string of lots and lots of little adventures with a bigger one at the end) includes and is baked in to a map covering about 200 miles on a side. That's mighty hard to just drop into an established world, and to disconnect it from its included setting and stick it somewhere else would be a huge amount of work.

Lan-"the point of published adventures is to reduce work, not add to it"-efan

 

[N'raac]

Ok...by your definition, the B-series were not modules because they were set in Mystara.

But back to my question...so you've set up two kinds of modules: one that should be setting independent and presumably setting-light? And the other which is setting-dependent and presumably should be setting-medium or heavy?

I'm saying the latter is moving away from a "module" as it cannot easily be inserted into an existing game world. The B series need to be assessed on their own merits, but the early ones, at least, were pretty modular. They were not tied to the Mystara setting, and could easily be plunked down into Greyhawk, the FR. or a home brewed setting.

 

[MasterTrancer]

For me a module has to reduce the work like [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] said just above: it should be self-contained, not requiring me to buy (or just consult) any other book on the setting (rulebooks aside of course!).

The scope should be fairly contained, so that I can plug it in a different from where the designers designed it into without having to delete tons of previous information; that said, I'm fine whether it includes "notes", which could be translated into hooks for another part of the world, since that can add flavour to the module and even help tie it in a whole campaign.

All in all, I think that a good module should be a read on his own, having the right amount of detail (e.g.: the quest-giver could be sent by a King in the module, and I can easily adapt this changing the King with, say, Grand-Duke Stephan Karameikos should I play in Mystara; the very same quest-giver, if she lives IN the module and the PCs meet her more than once, should have some details and at least a partial statblock).

If an adventure is funny, I'll tweak by myself to fit it wherever I want, if it's somewhat dull (but serves some purpose) I try to get over it quickly. And if it's terrible, something can always be garnered for another time!

 

[Agamon]

Just like when I create my own adventures, I don't want to have anything superfluous to the adventure. Creating my own, that's extra work I don't need to do. In a published adventure, that's extra material that I don't need to know or need to ignore or change for my own setting.

So yes, backstory is useful if it helps explain the adventure. Environmental descriptions (towns, forests, NPCS, etc) are fine if they are interacted with in the adventure. Anything unnecessary shouldn't be there, and anything else I want to to change, I can. Just as I've done in the past.

 

[Quickleaf]

I'm saying the latter is moving away from a "module" as it cannot easily be inserted into an existing game world. The B series need to be assessed on their own merits, but the early ones, at least, were pretty modular. They were not tied to the Mystara setting, and could easily be plunked down into Greyhawk, the FR. or a home brewed setting.

Are you arguing semantics about " module" vs " adventure"? Or are you prescriptively asserting what sort of product (modules not adventures) should be the focus of D&D publishers? I'm not clear.

 

[nijineko]

I think we are getting bogged down in semantics and terminology.

For example: we could define a campaign as a series or group of adventure paths, an adventure path as a series or group of modules, a module as a series or group of adventures, an adventure as a series or group of encounters, and an encounter as a series, group of, or individual, NPC(s)... or we could claim that module and adventure or module and campaign terms are interchangeable.

It seems that the real question is: how big of a chunk and/or how many chunks do i want my outsourced material to come in, and how much information do i want in the header and footer sections of each chunk?

The answer will come down to personal preference. I prefer maximum information, myself, because it happens to be easy for me to strip away or replace excess if i don't happen to need it for some reason (like it doesn't fit some pertinent detail somewhere). As for the rest, I just use it or ignore it as needed.

 

[Quickleaf]

The answer will come down to personal preference. I prefer maximum information, myself, because it happens to be easy for me to strip away or replace excess if i don't happen to need it for some reason (like it doesn't fit some pertinent detail somewhere). As for the rest, I just use it or ignore it as needed.

! That brings up a great question:

Some people feel the opposite from you, that stripping out setting assumptions is harder than putting setting details in. I'm curious to hear viewpoints on both sided about why?

 

[Lanefan]

Stripping stuff out is straight-up more work.

There are two steps when preparing a canned adventure for use in my game:
A - strip extra stuff out
B - put my own stuff in

Obviously, if there's no extra stuff to strip out step A goes away. I always have to do step B.

Lanefan

 

[N'raac]

Are you arguing semantics about " module" vs " adventure"? Or are you prescriptively asserting what sort of product (modules not adventures) should be the focus of D&D publishers? I'm not clear.

I'm saying the original modules were just that - modular components designed to be plugged into pretty much any campaign setting. They are a subset of "adventures", some of which are modules and others of which are not as modular. An adventure with strong ties to a specific campaign setting, unable to easily plug into a different setting, is much less a module. An adventure with its own setting is even les modular.

If I want to build my own world, I want modules. If I want a game clearly tied to a specific setting, I'd prefer adventures linked to that setting (but maybe I can tie modules in). If I want a campaign more or less pre-written for me, an adventure path seems the better choice, even if I decide to add in adventures from the same setting, or modules that can plug into any setting.

 

[Agamon]

My idea of stripping stuff out is just ignoring it, so it isn't anything painstaking. As I stated in my previous post, if there's unnecessary information in there, then the stuff that might need ignoring becomes cumbersome. Otherwise, it's not much of an issue. Leaving setting fluff out might be leaving out something good I could use. Personally, I find things like maps, plots and NPCs more useful for swiping for my campaign than actual encounters.