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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8058160" data-attributes="member: 18">Fair question - what I'm saying is - if using a module/AP/etc. is more work than a home campaign, why on earth do it? It's literally perverse.The guy I'm responding to seems to think it's some sort of Herculean task, and seems not to enjoy it, but is apparently willingly doing it (?!?!). So I think it's fair to ask "But why?".You and this other guy seem to be working on this bizarre binary thing, where there are exactly two ways to run a module:1) Obsessively memorize the entire thing, and try and run it as close to how it is written as possible, even if this means 2+ hours before every single session.2) Don't even glance at it, and just read through it as you get to stuff, probably in a bored voice whilst checking your phone.I mean, I'll be real - I have played with both types of DM! They definitely exist! I'm not sure I've been either, but whatever. But neither of those ways looks like good DMing to me, and people who do 1 often are terrible DMs in my experience, because they're among the worst railroaders, tantrum throwers, and so on. I've literally see Type 1 DMs stop a campaign because the PCs didn't choose the right thing, and the campaign didn't allow for it. Literally. More than once actually. For balance, let me say also that I've seen Type 2 DMs turn extremely good modules into extremely boring and bad ones, just by being extremely lazy.But I think it's a false dichotomy, and both these kinds are freaks, and not great at DMing. Most DMs aren't much like either.I think a good DM, unless they genuinely have memory problems (which sucks, I admit, and you need to find workarounds if so, or consider being a player), reads through a module/AP once, cover to cover, makes notes somewhere (depending on the format and technological era - things were very different in 1990 to 2020!), maybe literally highlights a real document or PDF (I don't buy fancy expensive adventures - if it's too expensive to write on, it's inappropriate as a module imho - it's just a collectible) for stuff that's easily missed. You take quick notes after a session (like, if this takes you more than 10 minutes, something is wrong), sometimes you don't even need to do that. Then before the session, you flick through the module/AP and check your notes. If you're me, or my brother, or at least one of the other DMs I play with, who I've talked to about this, this takes about 5-20 minutes with a module/AP (totally different if you're running a home campaign ofc).Now, if it's me, and the campaign has problems - like a badly-written or boring bit, or terrible encounter design, I may need to put in a few hours, or even a lot of hours, fixing that. But I do that after I read it, not before a session - this is why I stopped using modules. Too many of them were so bad I had to spend more time revising them than it would take me to write something more personalized and engaging for the PCs.So when I hear someone finds just reading a module/AP to be an "enormous effort" and that they maybe put in 2-4 hours before every session just to understand it - especially if, like you, they find it far easier to do home campaigns, then I don't know what hell is going on with them. Why would you ever do that? It's like saying you get intense leg pains when you play tennis, and you don't enjoy tennis, but you keep playing tennis. What's going on to make that happen?And I'll be honest, I have no comprehension of how you even could spend 2-4 hours/session (assuming 3-5 hour sessions) on a module/AP, every session (and maybe he didn't mean that, but it kinda seemed like he maybe did). I don't even know what you'd be doing. Reading an entire AP segment (which is likely a six to a dozen or more actual sessions of material) cover-to-cover is usually like 1-3 hours, and much less for a lot of modules (some are under 5-10 minutes at a normal reading/comprehension speed). Do you re-read the entire AP every time or something?EDIT - Apologies for the wall of text. I feel like I could make myself understood better if I could edit this down a lot, but it would take a while.</blockquote>

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