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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9849700" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Oh, so if I try to use a book as what it purports to be rather than what "anyone who even casually read" it automatically knows I'm a chump who hasn't seen the true brilliance of it. Well that's just a different way a product can be bad in my book. If that's what they're selling thay should come right out and say it. They could even have some notes on what elements to strip out or modify if using a given "module" on its own and save people doing that a lot of work.I'm glad you've consistently found a use for these books, because to me, and I'm sure many other people who've bounced off of them, they seem bordering on a scam. The thing we are sold is "you can just run this prewritten thing" and then we find it is often more work than just coming up with something from scratch.To me personally the issue is that I find being able to run these campaigns with confidence requires essentially committing them half to memory so I can understand all the moving parts and adjust for player decisions and whatever elements of my own I introduce. Other people's mileage will naturally vary wildly, just understand that as written they do not work well with my brain which does not struggle with most aspects of running D&D, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Maybe someone in this equation just needs to suck it up and get gud, but I, as the paying customer feel the onus should be on WotC to publish accessible material more than on me to get better at accessing it.An adventure in an anthology does not require me to read the other adventures to know what elements are only there to set something up for a different adventure, or to reference back to some earlier part for info on an NPC, much less to divine which parts are actually secretly separate modules.If "links" between chapters and elements are not clearly identified as such for evaluation and possible removal then they are in fact worse than no links at all to anyone who dislikes them, as they actively create work to tease out and expunge them before the DM can create their own. Yes, people have some real minor nit-picks sometimes, but often these are just the most articulatable things that caused them to give up on or turn on a product that they bought hoping it would make their DMing life easier, only to find it didn't or didn't in the way they anticipated. I would hazard that most often people's bugaboos about an adventure are the things that made them realize partly through running it or prepping to run it that they were going to have to do far more work than anticipated to make the campaign what they want it to be. It might be the smallest thing in the world to anyone else, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a problem for them.I do actually agree with most of that. The underdark travel chapter is why I bought Out of the Abyss and I wasn't disappointed with that part, and, despite my complaints about WotC campaign books, I'm currently running Waterdeep Dragon Heist (because I played in it years ago and had a blast) and while I think it is way too much work for the DM as written somewhere under that campaign there is a pretty good toolbox for running urban adventures (I just kind of wish I could directly access that toolbox without having to peel away the adventure layer).I do see the value in having some sort of giant campaign books as an example of what a big campaign could look like, I just wish the examples they made were more accessible to more people. As is I suspect they've encouraged as many people to bounce off DMing as embrace it.</blockquote>

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