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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 3761675" data-attributes="member: 16574">No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Just like the quality of a car is not determined by whather or not it has an istalled GPS navigation system, the quality of a game or adventure is not determined by whether or not it has explicitly spelled out ecologies, backstories, and detailed instructions to cover every eventuality. In some circumstances such things may be desirable, just as in some circumstances having a GPS system in your car might be, but in other (I daresay most) circumstances that kind of extraneous detail is at best unnecessary (I can come up with explanations for these things on my own if the players ask -- which they aren't likely to if the game is otherwise fun and interesting) and at worst an annoying distraction (padding out the pagecount and making the game/module cost more, be less convenient to read and use, and likely constraining the creative possibilities -- leaving less space for the DM to personalize the game/adventure or adapt it to the style of his players). Look at Philotomy Jurament's account above of running B4 and "filling in the blanks" on his own -- he didn't need the module to define all of that stuff for him, and in fact it's probably better that it didn't since if it had 1) the module would've likely been 128pp instead of 32pp (with a higher pricetag, taking longer to read and prep, harder to look details up during play, etc.), and 2) the explanations and justifications given wouldn't necessarily have worked as well for him and his group as the ones he came up with on his own, meaning he'd either have to change them (in which case all that extra pagecount and reading was wasted) or perhaps would just decide he didn't want to run the adventure after all.Yes, there were bad games and bad adventures back in the 70s, and the aforementioned Judges Guild module may well be one of them, but they're not bad because they don't spend time explaining ecology and backstory, and attempting to anticipate PC actions, they're bad because the encounters are lame and not fun or interesting for the players, and if they had the same lame encounters plus a bunch of explanations and backstory the adventure would still be lame, it would just have a higher pagecount.</blockquote>

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