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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GX.Sigma" data-source="post: 6265018" data-attributes="member: 6690511">There is if Ireena joins the party (like it says in the adventure) and Strahd's motivation is that he desires her (which is only one of four possibilities).Ravenloft: What about all the people in town who are suffering under Strahd? What about Ireena, who will turn into a vampire if Strahd is not killed soon?ToEE: In my experience, just saying that there is a place called "the Temple of Elemental Evil" is enough to make players want to go to it. If you're talking about the moathouse in part 1, it's true that there's no motivation for the PC's to go there. I think the whole mega-adventure (including/especially T1) suffers from very poor presentation.Usually the motivation in old-school modules is along the line of "you are adventurers; here is a place with monsters and treasure; what are you waiting for?" That's just a feature of the old-school playstyle. The characters did not have any assumed motivation beyond treasure-hunting. However, there does seem to be a common problem of not actually telling the players where the adventure is (so how do they know they're supposed to go to the moathouse?). Rest assured, that is a design flaw, not a feature.There's always some amount of non-choice. If you want to run a true sandbox, pick a few different dungeons and spread them out in a wilderness and let the players do whatever they want. I've generally found that players don't mind being shepherded to the adventure, as long as you don't railroad them within the adventure, if that makes sense. A sandbox can only be so big, after all.Ravenloft does have a story--one of the best stories I've ever run. The players go through a creepy town (whose inhabitants may or may not all be ghosts; it's deliciously ambiguous), crawl through the castle while being terrorized by a super-powerful vampire mage who could pop up and kill them any time, find the one artifact that can destroy him, finally defeat him in battle, then chase him to his tomb and kill him. I think it's a problem that old adventures don't have a synopsis like that; you have to read the whole thing and figure it out. For example, the Village of Hommlet could be summarized as "players start out in simple town, gather rumors, attack the moathouse, find out it's way too hard, go back to town and hire more help, find out that the village isn't as simple as they thought, and blunder through a network of intrigue while trying to defeat the Temple's agents."This hasn't been my experience at all. I ran Ravenloft for the first time as a spur-of-the-moment one-shot with almost no preparation (just a skim of the module and one piece of advice from the Internet: pick a real-life time for Strahd to attack and tell the players in advance), and it came together beautifully. Maybe I just got really lucky? (As a note, all I have to add is one more piece of advice: Skip the whole crypts section. It's interminable and boring and not worth your time.)Well, it's supposed to be an incomplete random hodgepodge. That's what's so great about it. You want "plot?" You want "direction?" I think you're confusing "making KotB into something worthwhile" with "making KotB into something it isn't." I'd probably find it difficult to make Dragonlance into something worthwhile, too. I suppose some people like a sandbox, and some people like a railroad.I disagree with this as an assessment of the old-school playstyle. It may be how you DM, but I don't think it's how modules like Keep on the Borderlands were meant to be run. In old-school, sandboxy, location-based D&D adventures, the players' actions craft the story by interacting with the scenario the DM presents. The scenario can be very simple ("here is a dungeon" is good enough for this playstyle), and doesn't need pre-scripted plot. Maybe I'm misinterpreting you here, but in a real sandbox adventure, the DM is anything but a storyteller.</blockquote>

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