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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 2453923" data-attributes="member: 2268">You do. You also touch an important point, at least in my opinion, that should be mentioned before the quality of a module's design is discussed, namely what the module was designed to do. See, as far as I can see, adventures can be as diverse as literary genres can be, or tools in a toolbox, or  computer programs. Simply lumping them all together as "roleplaying adventures" and comparing them on that premise is about as effective lumping all books together and then go and compare, say, the biography of Otto von Bismarck with the latest horror novel from Stephen King. Of course, the focus in roleplaying adventures is much tighter than in books, and I agree that there are mechanistic and layout factors that faciliate an ease of use, and a smoothness of play with an adventure, like the important stats of NPCs where they are needed, clear floorplans of the important locations being identical to what is described in the textboxes, etc.But as far as I read that Castle Amber thread (and I have to agree to Spell, it made me wonder, too, why the heck they played that adventure in the first place, if something is so obviously not your taste, don't try it, and don't blame the bad taste in your mouth on the adventure afterwards), the general design wasn't what was criticized most, it were the whacky storyline, the weird events, and at a lot of points the author showed clearly that he simply wanted to trash the module from the first minute. He even put a monk in the group especially to break the boxing scene as fast as possible. He went through the module with a certain kind of arrogance, and it showed in most of his descriptions. I mean, come on...emphasizing that some interactions were not written out in the module, but came from him, because he improvised? I don't want to sound like a "grumpy old roleplayer", but as far as I see it, that was pretty much standard back then, and still is today...if you get the rooms, the monsters, and the backstory of the setting, you either play it as a straight hackfest, or you make the story your own. That was part of the fun, that a module looked different with each DM, that you wrote your own adventure each time, and didn't have a predestined storyline rolling along with the help of the characters.As far as I can judge it, Castle Amber doesn't have too many flaws, design-wise, especially for a Basic D&D module, which didn't require half as much rules information as today's adventures do, and is consistent with its own story premises. The weirdness of the module might not be to everybody's taste, but that's what taste is all about.And considering the title of this thread here, I guess a lot of the negative feedback stem from the fact that the adventure presented in the link might be "old school" indeed, but the whole tone of how the game session is described is so far off from how playing it felt if you liked it, that it sounds like Quasqueton was out to mock those who really enjoyed playing modules like Castle Amber by calling this a "real tale of old school feel", while it comes over as the description of somebody who didn't understand what he saw, didn't bother to get behind it, and decided to trash it where possible with a certain "old stuff is nonsense" mindset. I think something like "old school module meets 3E" would have been more appropriate, and even then it wouldn't really be appropriate...and probably would have caused claims of another "Edition Wars" thread. *shrug*</blockquote>

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