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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8059502" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't think that's really reasonable, because DMing is a skill, and identifying the flaws in an adventure from reading it takes skill and experience. It's a bit like a partner giving some tricky contract to a trainee lawyer to handle, then being shocked and upset when he fails to spot various flaws, and even then the trainee has been through a lot more training than most DMs before they start running stuff.And this goes to what I'm saying. Most &quot;professional&quot; module/AP design is utterly amateur-ish. There's no consistency, no standards, no real thought about what might be easy/hard for a DM to deal with, and in many cases it seems like there's been little or no playtesting. There are often professional standards of art and visual design, but that's typically about it.Am I saying this should change? Probably that's not practical. It's been like this for decades and it's not a big money business.But we have people claiming there are these brilliant &quot;professional&quot; APs and my experience is that it's actually a complete crapshoot as they say. Some APs are of a very high standard, and what they do wrong is relatively minor. But most are riddled with issues that, were this a big-money business, or one with a history of specific standards and professionalism, and expectations from readers, be unacceptable.We see too how far people will go - people are claiming no AP is so bad it couldn't be &quot;fun&quot; (whatever that means - and even true it is a meaningless claim by its very definition!), yet engaging in hours, sometimes dozens of hours, of hard work fixing, improving, and adding to these APs, often doing stuff that really shouldn't be necessary. It does seem that no module is &quot;so bad&quot; that someone won't apologise for it, won't claim it's &quot;fun for them&quot;, won't spend countless hours fixing it up. But at that point, we're just seeing how the standards for what people want out of a module are incredibly low in many cases.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8059502, member: 18"] I don't think that's really reasonable, because DMing is a skill, and identifying the flaws in an adventure from reading it takes skill and experience. It's a bit like a partner giving some tricky contract to a trainee lawyer to handle, then being shocked and upset when he fails to spot various flaws, and even then the trainee has been through a lot more training than most DMs before they start running stuff. And this goes to what I'm saying. Most "professional" module/AP design is utterly amateur-ish. There's no consistency, no standards, no real thought about what might be easy/hard for a DM to deal with, and in many cases it seems like there's been little or no playtesting. There are often professional standards of art and visual design, but that's typically about it. Am I saying this should change? Probably that's not practical. It's been like this for decades and it's not a big money business. But we have people claiming there are these brilliant "professional" APs and my experience is that it's actually a complete crapshoot as they say. Some APs are of a very high standard, and what they do wrong is relatively minor. But most are riddled with issues that, were this a big-money business, or one with a history of specific standards and professionalism, and expectations from readers, be unacceptable. We see too how far people will go - people are claiming no AP is so bad it couldn't be "fun" (whatever that means - and even true it is a meaningless claim by its very definition!), yet engaging in hours, sometimes dozens of hours, of hard work fixing, improving, and adding to these APs, often doing stuff that really shouldn't be necessary. It does seem that no module is "so bad" that someone won't apologise for it, won't claim it's "fun for them", won't spend countless hours fixing it up. But at that point, we're just seeing how the standards for what people want out of a module are incredibly low in many cases. [/QUOTE]

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