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<blockquote data-quote="der_kluge" data-source="post: 9373937" data-attributes="member: 945">In the Ravenloft reviews thread, what struck me is how some of the older, classic modules that I really, really liked (reading at least; the jury is still out on how they run) (Evil Eye, and Circle of Darkness, for the record) are phenomenal reads, but I (as a 30+ year DM) are actually intimidated by how hard they're going to be run well. CoS is kind of like that, too. My 21 year old daughter liked the idea, and wanted to run it, and I was like &quot;hold up there, cowboy, that one is not for beginners&quot;. So yea, I think the really good ones often are very intimidating because they often end up being very free-form, and leave a lot of wiggle room in terms of pacing, or how fleshed out the various locales are. If I were to even run CoS, I'd want to spend an inordinate amount of time and really add a LOT more to the villages, for example, because they just seem way to underdeveloped. But Evil Eye and Circle of Darkness, while fairly epic in scope (especially the latter), they are far smaller in scope than something like ToA or Rime, or the Tiamat line, which are much longer campaign-style games. I don't think WoTC should take all the blame here. 3rd party publishers rarely put out campaign-length modules, instead focusing on smaller modules. But I think plenty of DMs out there don't have the skill level, or the adventure repository to build a campaign piecemeal like this. They want something standalone that they can read, and run. WoTC is simply responding to that demand. Of course, it's also worth mentioning that any sort of 1-10 level campaign is going to be a kind of railroad, because you have to define point A and point Z, and some sort of linear path in order to get to the goal.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="der_kluge, post: 9373937, member: 945"] In the Ravenloft reviews thread, what struck me is how some of the older, classic modules that I really, really liked (reading at least; the jury is still out on how they run) (Evil Eye, and Circle of Darkness, for the record) are phenomenal reads, but I (as a 30+ year DM) are actually intimidated by how hard they're going to be run well. CoS is kind of like that, too. My 21 year old daughter liked the idea, and wanted to run it, and I was like "hold up there, cowboy, that one is not for beginners". So yea, I think the really good ones often are very intimidating because they often end up being very free-form, and leave a lot of wiggle room in terms of pacing, or how fleshed out the various locales are. If I were to even run CoS, I'd want to spend an inordinate amount of time and really add a LOT more to the villages, for example, because they just seem way to underdeveloped. But Evil Eye and Circle of Darkness, while fairly epic in scope (especially the latter), they are far smaller in scope than something like ToA or Rime, or the Tiamat line, which are much longer campaign-style games. I don't think WoTC should take all the blame here. 3rd party publishers rarely put out campaign-length modules, instead focusing on smaller modules. But I think plenty of DMs out there don't have the skill level, or the adventure repository to build a campaign piecemeal like this. They want something standalone that they can read, and run. WoTC is simply responding to that demand. Of course, it's also worth mentioning that any sort of 1-10 level campaign is going to be a kind of railroad, because you have to define point A and point Z, and some sort of linear path in order to get to the goal. [/QUOTE]

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