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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9799816" data-attributes="member: 7006">I'm one who actually prefers the longer-written style of modules and adventures because it gives me more narrative flow and more description amongst characters, locations, attitudes, atmosphere and the like.  Thus when I run it and improvise my descriptions or areas and the attitudes and voices of my NPCs... I am able to draw from a deeper well of information.  I also have more background material that I can slip in as needed to give the NPCs more depth, and to set up future locations and events.Modules that are "easy-to-run" for me often just merely look like a space to have a fight or the most basic of interaction.  "When the party begins a long rest, five goblins will come out to attack them.  DC 15 Perception to notice them if a PC is on watch.  If captured, a goblin will reveal the hobgoblin leader in the cave across the way has three people being held."  To me... this is like barely an encounter-- where you could replace the entire fight with the party finding a piece of paper on the ground that served the exact same purpose.  So why bother having it?  Oftentimes most of the 4E modules from the online Dungeon were like that... a series of three fights that had the barest linkage between them to inspire the PCs to enter this three-encounter gauntlet and fight their way through.  I mean I can come up with three fights on my own and pay the barest lip service as to why the party is going to fight through them, I don't need someone to print that on paper for me.  But if the adventure tells me why these three fights are a part of a larger ecosystem of the events going on in the area, and various bits and bobs of information and objects the party could discover from them that will breadcrumb them to other locations that are driving the narratives of the various enemy NPCs... I am getting a larger world within which to improvise around.Now admittedly, as everyone probably knows I don't really give a crap about the "game" aspect of D&D in and of itself... any "game" aspects are there only in service of driving the PCs forward in their narrative stories.  So long-form adventures with a lot of detail that I can remember and sprinkle in to the game are my juice... and modules that are just pre-built combat set pieces or roleplay encounters that give you a simple Mass Effect-like "three responses to choose from" (all in the name of "simplicity") do me little to no good.  I'm sure there are a number of players for whom the idea of improvising the give and take of roleplay is a large hurdle and for which a module that spells it out for them is a godsend ("Here's what the NPC will say if you knock at their door and are nice to them, here's what they say if you knock and are rude, here's what they say if you didn't knock but just broke into their house.")  So for those people, that type of "easy-to-run" adventure where the bits are just flatly laid out in front of the DM and where the DM can just open it up for the first time having never even read it before and then just run it right off from the page, is great.  But those kinds of adventures just don't serve a purpose for me.  Because I will never not have read a module beforehand before running it, because I need to know how this encounter or event actually fits into the world and narrative I am dropping it into.</blockquote>

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