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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shoak1" data-source="post: 7167373" data-attributes="member: 54380">Does Monopoly have a referee?  Does Battlestar Galactica?  Does Life?  It is MUCH MUCH more common for people to play games without referees !!!  Why?  Because most gamers don't like having someone decide things for them - they like to play in a predetermined world and BEAT IT.  So it confounds me that you cant see why some people would want to minimize the referee's role in D and D, interjecting themselves in between player cause and effect.  I GET that you like the DM to do so - I REALLY REALLY do.....But I'm really baffled that you don't see how it runs counter to the way most of us gamers think.Several players I have played with over the years have told me the same thing - that they have a DM that thinks his improv is invisible to them...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Good idea.  Maybe that will help us communicate better.  I'll go first, then maybe u could reciprocate.First I figured out how much time we had and therefore how many encounters I could do (as I recall about 8 aside from the castle).  I cherry picked the best material and the places I thought would make the best 3D settings, i think i used the fortuneteller thing, the 3 villages, and both hag places.  I got rid of all the ridiculous super high and low level stuff in the module.Secondly I constructed my adventure path and the seatbelts for it.  Nothing too fancy - the dude in barovia village says go to valaki, there's a legendary vampire hunter they need to get with there if they have any hope of beating strahd.  Then enroute to vallaki they get fortune read, then in vallaki rictavio tells them to get 3 items , 1 each in 2 hag places and in other village to west?, then they bring them to ricctavio, he tells them there are two more located in different parts of the castle (just to make sure they explore the whole castle I painstakingly put together).I then tied in some elements from our current campaign (zombie apocolypse) into the Strahd storyline.Then I made a simplified version of wandering monster chart (1 roll per journey leg, modded by survival/perception skills, with level appropriate baddies not the crap on the published chart).  I then examined all the encounters to get a rough idea of how many long rests would be needed in total, calced travel time, and created my time crunch mechanism.  In x days Strahd was gonna finish some huge project.  Then I went back and tweaked the encounter difficulties to be right for the budget, including details of what monsters to add/subtract based on the number of players.Then came my detailing of the encounters.  I consolidated the village (Barovia, Vallaki, and the other one) stuff into 5-7 step "town sequences" where they rolled a skill challenge to gather info, got to buy/sell via skill challenge, had one or two encounters - sort of a mini-game.  I made DCs for everything, contingency plans, tactics/strategy write-ups for baddies, made stat sheets, distributed of treasure based on DMG guidelines (not the crazy crap in module).  I added some chrome like cool traps, some gadgets, magic items, etc.  Found a printable 3D pipe organ.....Finally I built all the sets in 3D, picked out the figures and got everything ready.</blockquote>

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