Quote from: Sacrificial LambI like modules provided they don't railroad. Sadly, too many adventure modules have been "Railroad City".

I've actually found that I'm more likely to railroad when designing my own adventures, because I've invested valuable time and don't want to see it wasted. I'm far more likely to let the players veer off the tracks if it's someone else's creation that I've purchased. Plus, statting up NPCs is my least favourite part of the RPG experience.

Yeah, I wish I hadn't missed the days when a module was simply an exhaustively-mapped little segment of a campaign setting. "Griffin Mountain" for Runequest is an excellent example (and available as a reprint from Moon Design) - plenty of opprtunities for adventure, but no railroady plot.

Quote from: HaffrungOld-school modules =/= stories; they're keyed maps to an evocative and tactically-challenging setting. Nothing more. They may have elements with great potential for story - the insane mage looking for a lost staff, the hostility between the lizard-men and the gnolls, the tale of a civilization's downfall told through wraith-haunted tombs and ancient scrolls - but they presuppose no story.

Absolutely.  My favorite module of all time, in terms of atmosphere and set design, is Shrine of the Kuo-Toa.  It just oozes weird and creepy.

And it's a module the PCs can simply walk through (literally!) if they play their cards right.

I think you guys are missing the point. There are plenty of great modules out there, sure as sure. I've got most of the Into the Underdark line I inhereted from my first GM, Shrine of the Kuo Toa... stuff like that.  

Hell, I like having maps. I LOVE having maps, cause I can't map for shit on my own.  NPC's can be a blessing too. Heck, I've got a few game supplements that are nothign BUT maps and NPC's... almost.

But:

Modules and prepackaged adventures, far too often tell us 'how the game is meant to be run'.   And this goes back to the beginning in some ways. Can you imagine what D&D could have been like if 'dungeon crawling' hadn't been fed to us with a spoon? I can. Every once in a while I've played with someone, or listened to someone talk about their games where dungeoneering was something they'd never even considered! And generally their ideas were pure AWESOME.  

RPG rulesets are a tool.  With a good set of tools you can build almost anything.  But, with modules people get addicted to having blueprints and patterns. They limit our play by showing us 'the way'. When we stretch our wings, we don't explore new territory nearly as often as we simply recreate what we know.  And what we know is the dungeon crawl, the 'Shadowrun with betrayals', the 'mad mage with revenge fantasys... in a dungeon'...

I've got a game, a little bitty thing of a game, produced with love by some schlub on a mac in the mid to late nineties.  It gives me a setting, it gives me conflicts and ideas.  What it doesn't do is spoon feed me 'how to play'.  And when I first got it I was overwhelmed, stunned.  I was confused for a moment, lost, unsure what to do with this thing I had before me. Sure, there was a crap mini-adventure in teh back.  I could cops with it, sure. But by the time I got there I had so many other ideas in my head, so many other things I could do with it that the adventure was a let down, a crash and burn from the high I had floated on.

Its that sense of boundless wonder that comes from absolute freedom to come up with my own way that I am trying to preserve. How many other people picked up that little game and saw the adventure and dismissed the entire thing as 'future cops', or played it and liked it, until they got bored with 'future cops'?   How many people started to get that same euphoric high I had, but it wasn't robust enough to survive the encounter with the prepackaged 'adventure'?


I weep for the death of countless dreams.

Quote from: SpikeThey limit our play by showing us 'the way'.

Or they can fuel our imagination with awesome ideas and examples of excellence.

Really, why are modules any more limiting than reading Conan stories, or watching Sinbad movies? Because all of our inspiration comes from somewhere. It doesn't just beam into our heads from the ether.

Quote from: SpikeModules and prepackaged adventures, far too often tell us 'how the game is meant to be run'.   And this goes back to the beginning in some ways. Can you imagine what D&D could have been like if 'dungeon crawling' hadn't been fed to us with a spoon? I can. Every once in a while I've played with someone, or listened to someone talk about their games where dungeoneering was something they'd never even considered! And generally their ideas were pure AWESOME.  

That was us, back in the day. Sorry, fellow grognards, but TSR-published dungeons bored us to tears. I've meanwhile changed my mind on that one, but it took me a quarter-century. But back then, we made up our own Lankhmar. This in spite of the fact that none of us had read Leiber and that the TSR book was very spotty. But it had that awesome color map, and that was all we needed.

Quote from: HaffrungOr they can fuel our imagination with awesome ideas and examples of excellence.

Really, why are modules any more limiting than reading Conan stories, or watching Sinbad movies? Because all of our inspiration comes from somewhere. It doesn't just beam into our heads from the ether.

As usual, Haffrung speaks the truth.

When we started out, we played through a few published modules as well as homemade stuff.  Some of the homemade stuff was inspired by the modules, but I remember games clearly inspired by (read: ripped off; we were young!) Clash of the Titans, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Hobbit, Conan stories (ah, Pete, why did you burn it all?), the Belgariad, etc.  Most of our DMs never ran a dungeon/underdark adventure, ever.

Modules were just more grist for the adventure mill.

I ran D&D/AD&D for twenty years. I had three major dungeons, one of them from a module. The third one was enormous, though - a gigantic tesseract dungeon. It took two years to get a third of the way through it, and it was never cleared. Most of the time the PCs were in the cities or wilderness, with an occasional mini-dungeon - one or two small levels of caves or tunnels - thrown in. I hardly ever used published modules. I made my own world, and did my own thing. In fact, as time went on, I bought less and less modules, because they became more and more specific to some plot or place that just had no counterpart in my world.

-clash

Quote from: SpikeModules and prepackaged adventures, far too often tell us 'how the game is meant to be run'.   And this goes back to the beginning in some ways. Can you imagine what D&D could have been like if 'dungeon crawling' hadn't been fed to us with a spoon?  

You mean where the main action in the module is political, wilderness based, city based, in fact anything but a dungeon? Lots of the classic D&D modules cover things other than dungeoneering.

Quote from: HaffrungOr they can fuel our imagination with awesome ideas and examples of excellence.

Bad product will always suck the life out of a game.  Good product can always breathe life into one.  Modules, adventures, rules supplements, what-have-you -- all alike.

!i!

I frankly think "creativity" in the sense implied by the original post is highly overrated, and not often present in the volume suggested.  

I can spend hours poring over making a stock fantasy world for my D&D game, or I can buy Wilderlands and have far more detail than I'd ever care to bother with on my own.  The only difference is the sense of personal ownership, and a well written setting or adventure should allow enough liberty with the material as to render even that difference nonexistent.  

I like gaming.  I want to actually game.  The biggest reason I've never really GMed is because I don't want the workload.  Some people love it, and that's good for them.  I can enjoy it in small doses playing about in my spare time occasionally, but by and large I don't care.  

I can spend hours and hours of labor on something that isn't gonna be all that impressive in the end anyway, or I can take something someone else has done, tweak it for my own purposes, and actualyl get to the game table with a hell of a lot less work.

This is a hobby, not a career, and hobbies should be fun.  I'll save that kind of time and effort for my actual career goals, and use the gaming to blow of steam and have a little fun.

Quote from: ancientgamerI tended to look at them in the store and I bought a few but I never used them straight.  I thought some people would have been better served to get a book of interesting NPCs, plot hooks, or something like that.  Something to get the imagination going without being spoon-fed.

Absolutely. And I'm still surprised MOST modules/adventures aren't exactly this. That's all I've ever used those modules for anyway, to stripmine for my own use. And by then, it has little, if any, resemblance to the original idea.

Quote from: KazAbsolutely. And I'm still surprised MOST modules/adventures aren't exactly this. That's all I've ever used those modules for anyway, to stripmine for my own use. And by then, it has little, if any, resemblance to the original idea.

Seriously, if more modules and settings were written like Wilderlands, I would've been eating that shit up for years, especially at the cheap price of most adventure modules.

Shrug.

When I started playing there were no such things.

Then I swore I'd never use one.

Now, at age 52, it's "I barely have time to game with a prewritten adventure.  It's this or nothing."

Times change, situations change, people change, and your mileage may thingummy.

I'm in my 30's and juggling a job, a fiancee, an upcoming wedding (11/3), and a fairly new house all at once.  I'm sure this is less than some others have, but sometimes I don't have much time.

While I'm able to prepare original material for my 1/week games, it takes quite a bit of time to do so.  There are days & weeks where I just don't have that much time.

Good pre-written modules are a godsend.  Sure, I can come up with something as complex and detailed if I spend the time to do it, but in most cases I have something else I should really be doing.

Also, frankly, some modules do stuff better than I'd be able to do myself.  Unless I spend a good deal of time on writing, I tend to do things quick & dirty - low amounts of NPCs, small dungeons, and so on.  I don't have the patience anymore to create huge, multi-level dungeons and populate them; I'd rather have someone else do the heavy lifting and let me tweak it to my campaign.


I've done both, and I like doing both.  The simple reality is that I'd have less time for all the other things in my life if I didn't have store-bought modules to fall back on every once in a while.

-O