Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paul Farquhar" data-source="post: 8619124" data-attributes="member: 6906155">I think there are a few things going on here.Firstly, the concept of an Adventure Path is deeply flawed. You can't detail a whole 10 level campaign before session zero without severely constraining player freedom. It's simply not possible, there are far too many potential points in which things could happen differently. I might start with a broad outline, but I wouldn't start planning specific encounters until a session or two before they are needed. In ye olden days there would be a module, and it would spawn sequels. But if the first module didn't finish a certain way you wouldn't run the sequel. Desert of Desolation is a prime example of this. Both sequels depend on the party unleashing an efreet in a minor encounter in Pharaoh. If they don't stumble over that encounter then the sequels never happen.Second, the death of authorial voice (bar one). I think pretty much the point in running adventures instead of writing them yourself is to get other peoples ideas. And most of WotC 5e adventures are dominated by just one voice: Chris Perkins. Which would be fine for just one or two, but his style gets predictable after a while. I'm pretty sure WotC have identified this issue, since we are seeing more effort to bring in outside voices recently. But he still has a tendency to muck about with stuff.This relates to the third issue: fixed page length. It's pretty obvious that WotC adventures start out a lot longer, then a heck of a lot of stuff winds up being cut.Finally, my last issue is more personal. I think starter adventures like Lost Mines do too much hand-holding. If you spend too much time holding someone's hand, they don't learn to walk on there own, they learn to always look for the hand. I remember the early starter adventures always had "this area has been deliberately left blank for the DM to complete themselves". Lesson: if confronted with a blank space, make something up.</blockquote>

Verification