D&D 5E Rejecting the Premise in a Module

[Ruin Explorer]

Seem to go out of the way to absolve players of any responsibility whatsoever.

That's not a rational argument, nor does it address any of the numerous specific points I've made over several posts. That's just a knee-jerk anti-player sentiment, which is pretty funny in how old-fashioned and silly it is.

 

[Oofta]

...
If you find modules more work, not less, they're literally failing to do their job, but I do sympathize, because with a bad enough mod, I find the same thing. Good ones though lighten a DM's workload massively (or ones that are bad but the DM just doesn't fix). You're still not engaging with what I see as the central issue here though - sometimes it's not the DM or the players who are at fault - sometimes it's just a crap module. That's the problem I'm pointing out here. You seem to want to blame players and make out that they're disrespectful or whatever, or that the DM has a hard life, both of which can be true, but in my experience these problems very often come down a badly-written module often accompanied by an inexperienced but not otherwise-bad DM. You can't really "talk to someone" about being inexperienced (especially if you are as well). They know it, you know it. The problem is the module.

Maybe it's because I'm a lazy DM who relies a lot on improv (I like to think of it as being "efficient") but I've never had a mod that was more than a straight boring dungeon crawl that didn't take more time to prep than my home games. YMMV.

But I'm not "blaming" anyone. Every DM can improve, some people shouldn't DM. That doesn't resolve players of responsibility, nor do I think purposely sabotaging a a game is ever justified. Not having fun with a mod? Discuss it with the DM and the other players, don't gank the quest giver just because you're bored.

 

[Raaron]

That's not a rational argument, nor does it address any of the numerous specific points I've made over several posts. That's just a knee-jerk anti-player sentiment, which is pretty funny in how old-fashioned and silly it is.

Saying players have any responsibilities in this whatsoever is knee jerk anti player? It’s not fair to say they have ANY responsibility? Really?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Maybe it's because I'm a lazy DM who relies a lot on improv (I like to think of it as being "efficient") but I've never had a mod that was more than a straight boring dungeon crawl that didn't take more time to prep than my home games. YMMV.

Sounds similar to me, frankly, and it's part of why I stopped using modules as much (that and so many are so bad).

That doesn't resolve players of responsibility, nor do I think purposely sabotaging a a game is ever justified. Not having fun with a mod? Discuss it with the DM and the other players, don't gank the quest giver just because you're bored.

Couldn't agree more.

I just don't think that the PCs going "Well, we've got a pirate ship, and pirate hats, and no moral objections to piracy, what say we become pirates?" to a chorus of "AYE MATEY!"s is the same as one of the PCs deciding he's going to start blasting up the friendly NPCs with his .50 caliber electrothermally-enhanced Desert Eagles (CP2020 man!), which I have seen happen.

Sabotage and a change of direction from what the module intended are different things.

And I said, I think it's very often neither the players nor the DM who are particularly responsible, as much as the module author is. I've seen a lot of bad modules, particularly APs, filled with bad assumptions and bad ideas. I've had to work extensively to fix them. I had to basically re-write an entire book-length adventure for Aeon/Trinity once, which was definitely more effort than just writing an adventure of similar length. I think if my brother had been Storyteller, he'd have run it, and then hit the car-crash section in the middle, and would have struggled to get through it. I did even with extensive re-writes.

Saying players have any responsibilities in this whatsoever is knee jerk anti player? It’s not fair to say they have ANY responsibility? Really?

Straw-manning is not engaging in a rational argument, dude. You're not actually discussing what I've actually said, but your strange interpretation of it. If you want to discuss my actual points, I'm happy to do so, but you can argue your made-up ones with yourself.

 

[Raaron]

I have literally seen the post saying the players have no responsibility to try to fit to the premise of the AP in this thread.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The classic example of it being the module's fault when the PCs go rogue isn't actually a D&D one, it's a Shadowrun one. A number of adventures (esp. in 1E/2E) for Shadowrun feature ridiculous betrayals, or plot twists, which the PCs are clearly supposed to roll with, but where no real justification exists for doing so.

I don't know anything about Shadowrun but it sounds to me as if these modules are struggling to make the cyberpunk genre work as a campaign.

In cyberpunk it's very in genre for the protagonists to be betrayed by their patron part way thru the mission. But at that point they rightly turn against their employer, who is now the main villain. The patron is always a powerful and well-connected person, so in opposing them the protagonists are forced to become outlaws.

It seems as if Shadowrun wants the first part, the betrayal, but doesn't accept the second because there can't be any more normal missions once the PCs are criminals. So it's forced into a nonsensical position.

 

[billd91]

I don't know anything about Shadowrun but it sounds to me as if these modules are struggling to make the cyberpunk genre work as a campaign.

In cyberpunk it's very in genre for the protagonists to be betrayed by their patron part way thru the mission. But at that point they rightly turn against their employer, who is now the main villain. The patron is always a powerful and well-connected person, so in opposing them the protagonists are forced to become outlaws.

It seems as if Shadowrun wants the first part, the betrayal, but doesn't accept the second because there can't be any more normal missions once the PCs are criminals. So it's forced into a nonsensical position.

It's definitely genre - but that's partly why the PCs are supposed to roll with it and get on with their lives (or more likely plot a long course of revenge), on the streets, working from job to job, and staying hungry for the next score, and, quite possibly, on the wrong side of the law. If the players aren't really agreeable with playing with that, then they may not be so simpatico with the genre. And that's fine. Not every genre of game is right for every group.

 

[Mort]

EDIT - The classic example of it being the module's fault when the PCs go rogue isn't actually a D&D one, it's a Shadowrun one. A number of adventures (esp. in 1E/2E) for Shadowrun feature ridiculous betrayals, or plot twists, which the PCs are clearly supposed to roll with, but where no real justification exists for doing so. People like to deny this, but it really is the case in a number of official adventures for earlier SR - this is part of why the legend of "just steal the cars" exists. Part of it is that official adventures, and generic suggested rewards in SR was just ridiculous lowballs for people full of expensive cyberware massively breaking the law and murdering a bunch of people and committing massive theft/industrial espionage, whilst risking not only their freedom, but their lives. But the other part was that so many adventures and so on had situations where it just made no sense to continue with the adventure - your employer backstabbed you, or wanted you to do some ridiculous thing not previous agreed to, with no extra reward (indeed, often the reward would somehow have decreased by then), and sensible, kind players who would go along with a lot of railroading woul be like "To hell with this, steal the cars!". I feel like when an entire group goes rogue like that in D&D ("to hell with this, let's become pirates!") then something similar has to be going wrong.

This explains a lot! My only experience with Shadowrun has been at several GenCons. My friend and I sign up for 1 Shadowrun adventure per con, hoping against hope that "this time" it'll be good (the descriptions are always so great!) An they're just not - EVERY one has some kind of big betrayal that makes the rest o the adventure pointless.

The last one adventure were at (I'm going to name names - It was A Girl and her Dragon) at GenCon 2019 had that problem and it had the cardinal sin of half the characters being completely useless for the mission we were given (which is amazing given that characters were pregens - so the organizer/GM literally made characters that were useless for the adventure).

To this date (something like 30 years of GenCon) it is the only adventure I walked out of half way through - so I guess I rejected the premise.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's definitely genre - but that's partly why the PCs are supposed to roll with it and get on with their lives (or more likely plot a long course of revenge), on the streets, working from job to job, and staying hungry for the next score, and, quite possibly, on the wrong side of the law. If the players aren't really agreeable with playing with that, then they may not be so simpatico with the genre. And that's fine. Not every genre of game is right for every group.

Nah.

@Doug McCrae is right. The issue is that the adventures in question expect you to keep going with a now-pointless mission, or work for someone offering you even less money, which is completely antithetical to the genre. The problem is the adventure design - RPG players are natural cyberpunks, in my experience. But quite a number of early Shadowrun adventures seemed to be written on the basis that the PCs were some sort of, well, suckers.

To be fair this did improve with later SR stuff. (EDIT: but see below)

What really highlights this as an SR/adventure issue, not a player issue is CP2020, where the same players didn't have any problems, because those adventures, when you got betrayed or whatever, the adventure actually accepted it, and accepted that you might ditch things then and there, or seek revenge, instead of merely seeking alternative backers.

This explains a lot! My only experience with Shadowrun has been at several GenCons. My friend and I sign up for 1 Shadowrun adventure per con, hoping against hope that "this time" it'll be good (the descriptions are always so great!) An they're just not - EVERY one has some kind of big betrayal that makes the rest o the adventure pointless.

The last one adventure were at (I'm going to name names - It was A Girl and her Dragon) at GenCon 2019 had that problem and it had the cardinal sin of half the characters being completely useless for the mission we were given (which is amazing given that characters were pregens - so the organizer/GM literally made characters that were useless for the adventure).

Oh wow, still happening in 2019 huh? Goddamn. And yeah that's exactly it - the betrayal renders the rest of the adventure pointless - it's very different to the betrayals in cyberpunk books/movies/etc. - those tend to merely change the story, re-frame it, or whatever, but Shadowrun demands (literally, in at least one edition) that the players buy into this deal where Mr Johnson hires them to do something (rather than being more self-motivated cyberpunks, which admittedly would be harder on the GM, because SR is complex and doing stuff on the fly doesn't always work great), yet loads of the official adventures completely take a dump on that buy-in.

It's a really good illustration of how modules can be the problem actually, because a lot of the complaints here have been "Well players bought in to the premise, so they have to stick with it!", but these adventures just destroy their own premise, and not even really in a genre-appropriate "you knew the risks" kind of way which would allow for counter-betrayals and so on. One from the '90s even had a bit which basically instructed you to prevent the players from preparing for betrayal or engaging in counter-betrayals, basically with heinous railroading.

 

[Fauchard1520]

I have literally seen the post saying the players have no responsibility to try to fit to the premise of the AP in this thread.

It's kind of an odd hair to split, but I don't think players need to conform to the module as they're playing it. I think that responsibility comes in when you're between sessions. If things have gone so far off the rails that books 2-6 of the AP are about to get invalidated, I think it's time to discuss that as a group.

"OK guys. We can go off in this other direction, but we're switching to homebrew if we do this. Do you guys still want to play [Insert AP title] or revert to our own thing?"

Sure it parts the veil and breaks immersion, but I know that I'd be a bit salty as a player if my group had decided to play Saltmarsh only to have random hijinks send us spinning off into homebrew One Piece land. I want to enjoy my shenanigans, then get back on track for the next plot point.