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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ourchair" data-source="post: 5367771" data-attributes="member: 85362">Great topic and I've found that glaring as well.I kind of look at it differently, I think the WotC designers who write the adventures assume that newbie DMs are super-capable of retooling the adventures they've written. You get an inkling of that sensibility in the Dungeon Delve book, in which each adventure is given notes on how to expand it to a full-length adventure, but they're all 'encounter additions' that don't really explain how to make sense of how they fit in from a narrative perspective.In other published adventures, they say you can customize or tweak these things but they pretty much leave you to your own devices on how to do that. So in a sense, they don't really contradict their own advice so much as they kind of shrug their shoulders and assume that people can figure it all out.I think this is kind of symptomatic of the product and editing philosophy during the Heinsoo/pre-Mearls days, when the first set of products basically avoided spelling out fluff components so that players and DMs were free to make sense of everything on their own and visualize the campaign and characters any way they see fit.Unfortunately, newbie DMs like me who came to 4th Edition also felt like we weren't being handheld enough because of that. I completely appreciate that in 4th Edition we aren't beholden to fluff that rigidly informs how the game is designed and the game world is played. That means most of the stuff we got from WotC, becomes really grind-spammed and flavor-deficient when taken at face value, . Power source books before Primal Power look like ancient README files from DOS-era game patches, and adventures played out of the book as is, assume the adventurers are going to monotonously grind their way through 4-6 hours of combat.So my theory is that adventures don't contradict the advice of 'say yes' and 'don't railroad' so much as designers couldn't be bothered to provide the tools to do that, thinking that its the DM himself or herself that would know how best to say yes and not railroad, since after all, it won't be THEM that's at the table.</blockquote>

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