You know what I hate?

[Master of the Game]

I really hate it when adventures just give you a couple of suggestions of thing to do and then tell you to make up the rest. It seems to me that people who buy a ready-made adventure don't want to make up the rest, or they would have just written an adventure themselves to begin with.

Perhaps it's just my own personal bias, but I stopped buying adventures after I bought two "Giant Dungeons" back during second edition (Undermountain and Dragon Mountain) only to find them half-empty. Now every time I read an adventure like that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I've been reading a lot of adventures lately, and most have moved away from this, but every time I see it (or even just a hint of it) I just want to put the book down in frustration.

 

[der_kluge]

When I started reading your post, I thought "Oh, he'd have really hated Undermountain", and then lo and behold, you mention it in the thread.

Brilliant!

 

[skinnydwarf]

I've been running "Assault on Blacktooth Ridge" (a Castles & Crusades adventure) the last few sessions, and it has a few places like that.

Personally, I like it, because it gives me a chance to make some of my own stuff. Sure, I could've just written my own adventure, but it helps to have a base to start from. The town and character descriptions are full of little details to build on.

 

[Agamon]

Undermountain was double bad for this. I mean, okay, I can come up with some extra stuff for an adventure. But room upon room upon room of dungeon? With a stocked room sprinkled here and there admist the empty ones? That's just horrible. You have to somehow come up with hundreds of rooms worth of occupants in a dungeon that makes little sense, and then make it work with what little they wrote. That was the epitomy of bad 2E adventure design. Hopefully the Expedition to Undermountain is nothing like its predecessor.

 

[IamTheTest]

It seems like the safe bet would be to have every room fleshed out and let the DM change things if s/he wanted to. Just my two cents.

 

[moritheil]

I don't know what you hate.

 

[jaerdaph]

So does World's Largest Dungeon do what Undermountain does not?

 

[marune]

IIRC, Undermoutain was labeled as an accessory not an adventure.

 

[DM_Jeff]

So does World's Largest Dungeon do what Undermountain does not?

WLD has very little, if ANY, unlabled areas and rooms. UM was, as a poster just wrote, an accessory which was really a bunch of poster-sized dungeon rooms you get to mostly fill yourself (which, even for an accessory is pretty poor).

I'm with the original poster. I always wanted to go through 2nd Edition Undermountain and literally redo the maps to only include the rooms with stuff in them! Never got around to it, and eventually sold it on Ebay.

While I'm at it, my beef is an entire section of a dungeon labeld with rooms to have each room description read "there's nothing in this room". First adventure in the otherwise great Shakled City was LOADED with this sort of time- and game-wasting malarky.

-DM Jeff

 

[Arnwyn]

I really hate it when adventures just give you a couple of suggestions of thing to do and then tell you to make up the rest. It seems to me that people who buy a ready-made adventure don't want to make up the rest, or they would have just written an adventure themselves to begin with.

I am totally with you. If I purchase an adventure, I expect it to be complete (because that's why I'm buying it!). That "make it up yourself" nonsense is just that - nonsense.

Dragon Mountain and Undermountain are both major transgressors, but I'm not quite down on Undermountain because it was an accessory and not an adventure. But Undermountain still bugs me because it was (what I call products like that nowadays) "too big for its britches". If you don't have the room to detail it, then don't make it so damn big!

Quit. Wasting. My. Time. And. Money.