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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5873437" data-attributes="member: 92305">Exactly. You can see this in some other games. Ever seen an old Classic Traveller published scenario? GDW (the publisher) wouldn't even put in baddies to fight, like you'd see in a D&D module. You'd basically get a location and maybe some stats on a particular equipment or NPCs important to the scenario. The rest was up to the GM. For example, the Classic Traveller scenario called Annic Nova gives the GM deckplans for a strange starship, but not much else. It would be like getting a neat dungeon complex but no monsters or humanoids to fight. It was up to the GM to decide why the ship was where it was, and it was up to the GM to populate the ship the way he needed to. So...the scenario becomes very, very, flexilble and customizeable to a campaign. The GM could envision a ship full of robots, and the PCs discovering her. Or, maybe the ship is crewed by an enemy star kingdom. These are two very bland ideas--the sky, and the GM's imagination, are the limit.    Let's bring the focus back to D&D. Yes, many old school adventures are just underground mazes with a different type of monster in each room. There's hardly any story to be had. Well, you've got to think of that adventure module as you do what I wrote above about the empty starship. TSR, as a publisher, has given you a framework to build upon. It's up to you, as GM, to make the thing interesting. Why is there a couple of vampires in a cavern room right next to an umber hulk? Take that and make it interesting. In my first game, as I described above, the GM set up a war between the hobbies and the gobbies, and as my character and part approached, we were caught in the middle of it. THAT was the scenario the that GM decided to play. He could have done something else. He could have taken the Ogre that's in the Caves and made him a warlord with a growing humanoid army--the population of the Caves being that army, and the Caves being his HQ. Whatever makes sense to you, is what you do. Whatever fits into your campaign is what you do. Story, in most old school adventures, is left to the realm of the GM. All the publisher is providing is a number of obstacles for the player to over come.    EDIT: Look at all the color my original GM brought to the Caves scenario.  No where does it talk about the gate guard, but he thought it would be interesting to to start the game there, at dusk, having to convince this guy that my fighter wasn't a threat and that he justed needed a bed for the night. In the old days, there wasn't a skill and a throw to make.  We didn't have a Diplomacy skill.  Most sitations like this were just roleplayed out.  Dice throwing was usually reserved for combat or as a last ditch reaction to decide something.  Most of the time, the DM just reacted to what the player said his character was doing. That scenario with the gate guard could have gone a lot of ways.  What if I hadn't, in the GM's estimation, convinced the guard to let my character in?  Maybe I'm stuck outside, having to make a camp--maybe being attacked in the middle of the night by bandits or having to face a randomly rolled encounter. The entire game could change as the circumstances change. It's up to the GM to judge those circumstances and let the game proceed in the most interesting fashion.</blockquote>

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