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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6748931" data-attributes="member: 17607">Dude, it's been three hours, and this is a big question -- give us some time to think about it!Edit: Will need some time to provide a more detailed answer on what I like, mainly because I like different kinds of adventures depending on whether I am DMing or playing, but I can say that the one style of adventure I dislike both as a DM and as a player is the 'branching' style adventure.As a DM, I dislike branching adventures because they require me to prep lots of material that I likely won't use in the game session -- few things are more discouraging than getting to the end of a long week and realizing I still need to pull minis, prepare maps, and generally refresh my memory on roughly 8+ hours worth of encounters, of which I'm only going to use about half of what I prep for the Saturday Expeditions session at the FLGS. I'm always tempted to shave a couple of hours off my prep time by simply trying to decide which path I want to encourage the table to take, and hope they follow my lead. It helps a little when an adventure branches out after an initial encounter and then collapses back to a single final encounter, so there are just different paths taken through the adventure rather than actual different adventures, but that just leads into what I dislike as a player.As a player, I dislike branching adventures because they make a false promise: you can make a meaningful decision as to how you interact with this adventure! I say it's a false promise because, for starters, many such adventures start with a branching path but converge to a single final climactic encounter, which is the same for every branch. So it doesn't matter what decisions you make, you end up in exactly the same place (though maybe with slightly different details depending on the branch you chose). Secondly, branching adventures cause conflict -- when some party members see a specific branch option as being optimal for their character's backstory/RP motivation, or even more commonly, when only one branch contains a specific item that a player wants for his character (I'm trying to think of the Season 2 adventure where you don't get the spell scroll unless you encounter a specific area); in a linear adventure, we may be on the plot wagon, but at least we're all on the plot wagon together. Lastly, it's frustrating to play a branching adventure and discover that the branches you chose to take weren't the 'official' branches the adventure's first sets of players followed, and as such you now have to retrofit your own adventure experience to match the 'canon result'. (Best example of this: my Oath of Vengeance Paladin killed Spernik twice in Season 1, and, if it hadn't been for a persistent DM, likely would have to kill Ellison Berenguer twice as well.)I would much rather see a well-written, well-tested linear adventure than a similarly written and tested branchiing adventure, and I say this knowing that branching adventures also take more time to effectively playtest.Just my $0.02US, and more about what I'm looking for in a mod later when time permits.--Pauper</blockquote>

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