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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 6268375" data-attributes="member: 54710">This article addressed a worthy subject, but didn't have much that's interesting to say.First, the example themes at the beginning of the article were terrible.  Look at them.  Hardly any of them even mentioned the PCs.  Dragonlance was not a campaign about the efforts of the Queen of Darkness.  Dragonlance was about the Heroes of the Lance!  Similarly -- although I can't speak in the same way to Wyatt's home campaigns -- I have to imagine that the campaign was really about the adventures of the PCs.It can seem like a semantic difference, but many D&D campaigns are crippled in the conception phase by inexperienced DMs spending all their time thinking about what the NPCs are doing in the background when they should be focusing on the PC experience.  The whole purpose of the DMG is to help inexperienced DMs turn into good DMs.  Training DMs to boil down their campaign into a single sentence that doesn't mention the PCs?!?  That's awful advice!  The 4e DMG advice isn't so bad.  Personally, I think the 4e DM's material tends to get a little underrated.  As to literary themes, I'll confess, I love literary themes.  Or, to be more accurate, I love themes that go further than a question of plot alone, whether that be a sub-genre theme (e.g. arabian, horror, renaissance) or a more conceptual theme (e.g. how powerful individuals deal with their own mortality, the effect of colonialism on both the colonizers and the peoples colonized).  But the challenge for this kind of theme isn't thinking it up -- it's making it work in D&D.  The article doesn't even touch on the kind of advice that a DMG might provide.As to the poll, I know that picking on Wandering Monster polls is a little like hunting down wounded goblins, but wouldn't this poll be so much more useful if we could select all the answers that apply?  There wasn't a single question that I didn't want to answer "yes, I think about all of these and you should provide assistance for all of them in the DMG."-KS</blockquote>

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