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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 336129" data-attributes="member: 1106">As I said, add elbow grease and anything is possible.  What you're suggesting is no different from gluing Dungeon Magazine adventures together into a campaign - it can be done with some effort, but I'll touch on why big, published campaign modules don't support such a structure in a moment.No, that's not what I'm suggesting.  I'm suggesting that if you are going to release one big campaign module, it's lazy design to railroad the structure as A to B to C to D.  But that's what we're used to, and that's the standard...it therefore goes unquestioned.  As Dancey once said on DND-L, it's too time consuming for even WotC designers to do it any other way (so when they do, they wrap it up in a megadungeon which conveniently restricts player options to little more meaningful than corridor choice)....an implicit assumption of our hobby is to expect DMs to do it when even designers who work full time can't even manage it, because there's so much work involved...or do lots of fudging.  Those DMs who have more time to spend on adventure design than full time game designers probably aren't buying modules.  Those DMs who prefer to fudge probably aren't buying modules.  Those DMs who do use modules find that many of them won't fit their campaign, or are poorly written - and the big ones which are worth the effort to adapt your campaign to (because they're so big they effectively are the campaign) are endless dungeon crawl slugfests. No wonder modules don't sell.I know - Ruins of Adventure is pathetic compared to what is possible...and yet it offers a darn sight more player choice than your average module of that size.  RttToEE doesn't offer nearly that much choice of where to adventure next, what to do next, for instance - beyond the choice of RttToEE Spoilers....again...."Rastor or Nulb" at the start, and "Shall we (a) kill everything, (b) disguise ourselves or (c) diplomacy the factions against each other" once the PCs are in there...and options b and c don't even seem to have occured to many parties...perhaps because they know they're already on the train tracks?  I'm not holding RoA up as a paragon of what I'm describing, because it isn't - it's just a demonstration of a tip of the iceberg of what it is possible and severely lacking in the published campaign modules we're seeing.I can see what you're driving at here, but as a counterpoint, when it comes to player choice, the scale and impact of that choice and number of options available matters significantly.  Meaningful choices and player control writ larger than "left or right" is the point, not the failing of what I am saying.  "If we hadn't gone to the Graveyard, our cleric wouldn't have wound up dead" matters more in terms of a sense of retrospective campaign storytelling and a feeling of players having control over their PCs' destinies than "If we hadn't taken the left corridor, our cleric wouldn't have wound up dead"....and if there are less walls to railroad the players' options, so much the better.RoA PCs can say, "I don't feel like clearing another city block for a while, let's go explore the wilderness for a bit" and it's detailed, and there are plots and dungeons and a bit of roleplaying out there too.  At any one time they have a choice of three or four blocks to clear, or annoying Caldorna or striking out into the wilderness to save the barbarians.  That's a lot more of a feeling of being in control of your PC's destiny than take the sodding left or right corridor.</blockquote>

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