Obvious player things that modules often don't get

[Arkham]

Ah yes, Monty Hall's Demiplane.

Totally. Though I suppose it is this specific module, not something general. But I have often seen modules not quite fully fathom the consequences of the things they introduce. :-/

 

[Mark Hope]

Totally. Though I suppose it is this specific module, not something general. But I have often seen modules not quite fully fathom the consequences of the things they introduce. :-/

An old homebrew of mine got to very high level and the enemies and problems that the PCs faced were so dire that they practically had to rely upon extra-planar extra-temporal refuges in order to prepare for and recover from their battles. I was reminded of it years later when I read Monte Cook's article on high level adventures, where he says that the best way to deal with suposedly "game-breaking" powers is to require their use rather than ban them.

 

[rvalle]

Actually, whenever I play a Cleric, I tend to use Stone Shape very frequently. I ended up using that a LOT in the WLD.

I figure with the type of things that the WLD was built to hold, the walls are built to resist such things.

I'm not sure about Find the Path yet. I think it will only work on guiding them to the exit of the area they are in.. the the whole thing.

So far nothing my group has done has 'broken' the WLD but they are only 8th level. The really fun stuff is still coming.

rv

 

[kaomera]

How about the chance that the players may have seen the cover of the adventure, or read an ad about it? This has gotten much better, but it seemed to happen a lot in 1e AD&D. I can specifically remember having a game break completely down because the DM was using the maps / cover of a module (T1, maybe? I'm remembering an incident with giant crayfish lurking in a pond, and another involving a statue that was actually a golem, but I'm not sure which one this was...) as a DM's screen, and the illustrations completely gave away the surprise encounter we where about to walk into. As players none of us could decide just how suspicious we should act and everything still be kosher. We finally had to show the DM the picture in question, and he quickly added in-game hints to bring our IC and OOC knowledge back into balance...

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

WotC's Adventure Path was horrible about showing new monsters or the climactic scenes on the module cover for most of its run.

 

[Cor Azer]

Disintegrate things. As often as possible.

A player of mine once used spells such as Disintegrate and Dig to shave off the dirt from walls in dungeons to find secret doors. Made a lot of searches pointless until my friendly-local rat bastard DM suggested that occasionally, such walls might be load-bearing walls...

 

[Lidgar]

Sometimes modules don't take the fact that PCs will often loot EVERYTHING into account.

The old ones were good at this (i.e., ToEE). But now many of them say things like "mostly worthless" or "of little worth" for items like furniture or bed linens. Of course, not many DM's award experience for every copper brought out of a dungeon nowadays.

While on that topic, I really don't like generic statements in modules like "the bag contains 5 pieces of jewelry worth 6,000 gp in total." Most times the players want to know what those pieces of jewelry (or gems) are, and I don't play with a laptop to randomly generate items on the fly...

 

[Mark CMG]

Ask which way doors open.

Hinges are on the outside of a door meant to keep something in and on the inside of a door meant to keep something out.