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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3686063" data-attributes="member: 18549">Where the heck do people get the idea that there is no such thing as quality?  How laissez-faire can we get with relativism?  I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Alfred Hitchcock is a better director than, say, Ed Wood, on a spectrum of measurable differences in competence that allowed him to produce films that are actually simply better than those of directors who lack his competence.  But as soon as you start to ask questions like "what is it that makes us like or dislike the way a module is put together," the holy host descends to tell us that it's 100% personal opinion, and that The Whispering Cairn is not only not a better module than Orc and Pie, but the very concept of comparing them at all--and figuring out the factors that might make one better than the other--is completely meaningless since quality is entirely subjective.  It's like some kind of aesthetic positivism from the bizarro world.There are modules that are so well-constructed that when you sit down to play them, enjoying yourself is as easy as dropping your dice.  There are modules that might be fun, if you can manage to piece them together and squeeze the fun out of the mess of a narrative and scraps of game mechanics that were provided.  There are modules that are just simply a drag.  If you enjoy rewriting modules from the ground up, you'll probably have more fun with the latter than with the former.  However, the former is more like what an ideal module is supposed to be (because if you're paying money for it, you shouldn't have to rewrite it to be able to have fun with it), and there are techniques that can help to make any given module more like that ideal.  That's what people mean when they say something is well-designed.  It is full-service.[edit]I should point out that I don't believe that there is one good way to design adventures.  Different approaches work for different people.  As mentioned above, one approach is to slap down a bunch of encounter areas, characters, sites, etc., and let the DM piece them together.  Another approach is to put together something with the kind of driven coherence that the adventure paths attempt to provide.  Either of these methods can produce good modules or bad modules depending on the quality of the design of the modules.  The approach is actually irrelevent to the quality of the design.  It's a question of how competently the designer puts together the product.[edit again]On reflection, it seems to me that being able to come up with multiple approaches to module design may itself be a sign of a competent designer.  A designer that can produce multiple effective approaches to module writing has the potential to make an impact on the audience and provide interesting gaming experiences that would not have come about if the designer had just stuck with the same old formulas.  If we assume that the two approaches listed in my first edit are two out of many, it seems likely that a skilled designer would have a broader repertoire of approaches than an unskilled designer.</blockquote>

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