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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6105906" data-attributes="member: 4937">Could be.  I'm just saying that what you consider worth throwing out, isn't necessarily what others consider worth throwing out.  I've read LotR about 18 times now.  I can remember back to a time when my engagement with the text was the same as you describe - maybe the second reading or there abouts.  I pretty much thought bad all the parts you think bad, and like you loved Moria and Helm's Deep and well pretty much all of Aragorn's story.  I too skipped text back then.  But I didn't really understand the story.  I thought it was cool, no doubt, but I didn't think the story was beautiful.   Now, when I read the text, my engagement is almost exactly the opposite.  The parts of the story I thought slow are now the ones I find to be the best parts, and the parts I thought cool, I now realize take up almost none of the text and are unimportant to the story and moreover this particular movement in how I see the story is one the author designed and intended.   It, like almost nothing in the text, is not there by accident.  I'm convinced there is not a less accidental peice of fiction in the whole of the 20th century.The Hobbit is much the same thing, just roughly 1/6th as long and consequently with less story in it.  The Hobbit is the story of an unlikely friendship between a rustic Hobbit with ridiculous manners, and a proud and dignified Dwarf King - and how that friendship transforms each of them.  Everything else in the story is a vehicle for that.  That's why the Dragon's death - the ostencible goal of the quest - is told in flashback, and why the story keeps going after the dragon is dead almost as if it hasn't happened.  That's why the reader misses the Battle of the Five Armies.  Tolkien is trying to tell the reader that those aren't the climaxes of the story.  Tolkien certainly approves of killing dragons and valiant defences of the lives of free peoples, but he doesn't think that life is about that.  The whole story exists as a setup for the two friend's reconciliation, Thorin forgiving Bilbo, and the timely and yet tragicly untimely final full understanding of each other.When you try to change either The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings to make them into stories about the glories of war and violence and might making right - if you have Frodo throw Gollum into the fire in the final confrontation - then you do violence to the books and make war upon them because ultimately, you hate them and everything they have to say.  You are completely ignoring the young officer, sitting in a trench sunk in the mud with his men around him, undergoing an artillery barrage, who imagined a green space and wrote down, without fully knowing what it meant, "In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit."Anyway, enough Tolkien.Now that I have some context on the adventure, I have to say that as a DM I would have wished that your Centipede trick would work without a hitch, and probably would have looked for some excuse to allow it to work even though mechanically it was a total mess.   As I said in the beginning, I thought it added to the adventure, and now that I know what that adventure was I believe that even more.   In fact, had I been running the adventure, I would hope that I had actually added such a thing to the text and contract the journey - shortening both the distance and the expected time consumed in travelling.  I'm not at all a fan of that Adventure Path, and not really a fan of that entry in it particularly.  Incidently, there is no city in the text, and you can be forgiven for not remembering why you wanted to get somewhere, because the text is really really weak on what the PC's motivations are supposed to be and has several assumptions about player behavior that are weak as well as a couple of potential glaring holes in the plot.  I suppose a many parties can be lead around without complaint on that particular railroad, but I know I wouldn't be one of them.   The twist, such as it is, is by now greatly overused.   So while this might be a matter of taste, on that particular module I completely agree with your taste.  It's padded with filller, lacks substance, doesn't provide enough oppurtunities for player choice, is far far more interesting of a scenario for an evil party, and has generally uninspired encounter design.   Interestingly, the text explicitly rewards metagaming.  If you abandon the plot and do what is obvious based on genera (head to the most interesting feature in the landscape), it just works and you can skip pretty much the whole module and finish it in probably about 2-3 hours.  That's fine except that doesn't work for an entry in an adventure path at all, since AP's depend implicitly and explicitly on the party mining sufficient resources out of each stage to be ready for the next - one of the reasons I'm rarely happy with published adventure paths.   Anyway, the point of this whole post is this: there has been a lot of talk about how you and I sit in separate camps in terms of what adventures we like and that its all a matter of taste and I for one have never been convinced that is true.  I'm fully sympathetic to you wanting to skip over the overland travel in this particular case.  It's poorly done and if you adhere strictly to text and the party doesn't do something to truncate it, it's tredious and uninteresting in the extreme.  I'd like to think that the designer intends you to truncate the journey (he mentions the use of teleport several times), and as best as I can tell from your story the DM allowed you to truncate the journey - albiet only by throwing out the rules which is I think a less than ideal solution (although in this case as I said, I'm sympathetic to the desire to do it).  Had you actually had the power to do what you say (which sadly, by the rules I don't believe you do), and summon a centipede to carry the party, then my rulings on it would be: a) You can do the first stage journey in about 5-6 hours b) because the terrain is as smooth as the skin of a decaying corpse, no ride checks are required outside of combat because there is nothing that would provoke them c) there would be on average 2 random encounters with the possibility in both cases that based on the initial encounter distance (there are no ambush predators in the wandering encounter table), both would be avoidable.   Ideally, the whole tedious journey would be over in less than 30 minutes of real time.  You can decide whether you think that unjust.In point of fact though, I would have probably rewritten the module to make the centipede trick unneccessary though by having your guide arrange or provide mounts of some sort (giant carrion beattles with howdahs or fiendish giant vultures for example) and assumed a much briefer travel time.  I would have also endeavored to make the setting a bit more interesting and provide stronger hooks for good aligned PCs and contingencies for PC's going off the rails.  I also probably would have replaced or enhanced the useless pitiful unevocative wandering encounters with a few staged scenes, ideally ones that had options in addition to or instead of combat.  As written, I give the module a C+, granting that the writer might well have done all those things too but in the format that has to fit in a block of Dungeon magazine, it's hard to write those things out in a way that is coherent to every reader.  Modules inherently have to be written more railroadish than they can be ran, because they have to work for novice DM's and parties as well as experienced ones.</blockquote>

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