B4: The Lost City is a classic module for D&D. At one point it (in)famously stops giving full description of the rooms but instead lists monsters in each area and tells the DM to figure out why they’re here themselves. Once the reprint will show up in new anthology, I’m sure people who complain online whenever WotC uses “ruling not rules” or “DM decides” or “these parts were left for the DM to fill in” in their design (and then continues buying WotC books to keep removed and doesn’t touch 3rd party or other games for some reason) is going to be normal about it. /s
I think it’s mostly cowardice, personally. People don’t want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren’t as good. It’s better to use someone else’s decisions than risk your own pride.
Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.
It’s work and effort. D&D seems to have evolved from a game of random tables and strategy that required constant improvisation from the DM, to a game of (open ended) story telling. Character death seems to be less of an option.
So now DMs think they need to build a complex story, while allowing players to make choices. They need to prepare challenging encounters that aren’t too challenging. And D&D combat tends to repetition, so they need to find ways to spice it up.
The handful of WotC modules that I’ve seen don’t support that. The module has a single path and a bunch of dull combat encounters.
This. I’m reading the Cyberpunk RED sourcebook now. I really appreciate the GM hints and suggestions. I don’t remember anything like that in the 5e DMG.
Worse, some rules/features are holdovers from previous versions that don’t make sense in the current game.
And combat encounter building is a core pillar of the game. It should not be a loosey goosey “rule of thumb”. If anything, it should be the most reliable set of instructions in the book.
But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.
If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that’s an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.
They could make a program where you give it the players’ character sheets and the encounter and it simulates a bunch of battles to see how they do. But failing that, you could make CR be a good average, where you could just look at that and adjust based on what the strengths and weaknesses are. I haven’t actually played 5e so I don’t know this from personal experience, but my impression is that they haven’t done that. Some creatures just don’t have a CR that matches them in general.
There’s also no system for figuring out the CR of an encounter with an arbitrary set of monsters and enemies with class levels.
That sounds like a party composition problem, then. Don’t everyone play ice mages and then walk into a volcano.
Sounds like monster creation rules need to be figured out before publishing the books, then.
Again, monster creation rules should be reliable. And they shouldn’t include context buffs that absolutely wreck the power curve.
For me, it’s not about risking my pride, it’s risking running a shitty game.
I’m not a good DM. I’m not creative, I don’t know how to balance shit, and I don’t have time to craft any sort of compelling story.
I’m only doing it so that our forever DM can have an opportunity to play the game. So if I drop 40 bucks on a module, I sure as shit want it to hold my hand through it so that I don’t ruin it.
I wasn’t a good DM either. But then I learned. I threw encounters at the players I thought might be fun, and I missed the mark almost every single time. But my players had fun, so I don’t see the problem in getting those encounters wrong. And every failure taught me so much more than every success.
If you fail, but you keep it fun and learn for the future, what have you lost? Only your pride.
I disagree. DM’s always have the ability to put in their own choices and, in this case, room descriptions, regardless of what a module says. But that is work, and one of the things you buy a module for.
To make an extreme example, imagine I sold a campaign module called Blank Slate, where every page just says “and then you decide what happens next” and “decide what rooms are in this dungeon and what monsters are there.”
I disagree - it’s not cowardice to want a complete adventure as a base. The whole point of buying an adventure is that it gives you a complete story from the start instead of having to make up your own. Coming up with reasons that monsters are somewhere might be a fun little writing exercise for some, but it should just be a blog post, not a product people are paying money to run their groups through.
It might be cowardice to not change or expand on the adventure as written to customise it to your group, but even then it’s a group thing - 5e in particular has lots of groups who approach the game with the same attitude they would skyrim or diablo, and their character is just a means for them to interact with the world. Changing the story for those groups doesn’t actually add anything to their experience.
I broadly agree about ignorance being a problem, but I still don’t think it’s cowardice to not want to do things you haven’t been taught how to, and particularly not with 5e - you don’t learn how to run 5e by playing 5e, you learn by playing other systems then coming to 5e because that’s what you can get players for. You play something like 2e and OSR or 3.5/PF1 and run 5e with the mechanics from those games in mind. There isn’t a mechanical base that rulings can be built off in 5e, so it’s not cowardly for new DMs to not want to have to come up with mechanics from scratch.
This is a room. After seeing dozens of rooms with monsters and furniture, you are given a room with nothing in it and told to fill it yourself. You know the general sort of thing that goes in the room, so all that’s left is to decide precisely what. Everything before the room has been given to you, and everything after will be given as well. You just need to come up with one room.
You can have a paid product full of things to put into that room and not learn a damn thing about actually preparing rooms like that. You can memorise every entry on a multiplication table and still not know how to actually multiply two numbers. The most valuable teacher is experience, which is why you have to actually figure out what the gaps in the number sequence are.
So you can try. You can come up with a few monsters you think would be fun, and would fit into that room. You add a bookshelf and a table for flavour, and to make the fight a little bit more interesting. It could go well or it could go wrong, but you learn either way.
Or you can rage against the system that dared tell you to figure out a single room by yourself; dared to tell you to put your pride on the line and risk making a mistake.
The second one sounds cowardly to me.
Think about what you’re writing here: This is a room. It’s features and relevence are entirely for you to decide. There is nothing related to the plot. If it was removed entirely, nobody would notice.
Think through the outcomes from this room - in a best case scenario, the DM can use it to do the exact same things they could do literally anywhere else in the adventure. You’re not just defending selling filler, you’re defending selling filler that you have to fill in yourself. I will admit that what you’ve described would be a great “my first homebrew adventure” guide, but that’s very different to an adventure.
You buy an adventure so you don’t have to write your own rooms and encounters. Anyone can string together a bunch of rooms that are only held together by a vague theme - every campaign I played/ran between the ages of 11 and 13 holla - but you buy prewritten adventures for the story. If there’s so little story it can just tell you to freestyle for a while, why buy it in the first place?
No, anger doesn’t sound like cowardice to you. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s disingenous enough that you’re presenting this as a binary option of creativity or cowardice, so don’t pretend being angry and complaining about a low quality is product is cowardice. I was being polite when I said I disagree - you are wrong, as the examples I gave demonstrate. Whether it’s wanting a complete product, wanting a story without filler, having the humility to trust other people’s decisions instead of demanding to substitute your own, or pure laziness, there are plenty of reasons to not want to have to start writing the adventure on the authors behalf.
It’s not the anger that’s cowardly, it’s the refusal to try. It’s taking any other path, so long as you don’t have to risk your own stupid pride. Have the humility to accept you might not make the right call, but the courage to actually make it for yourself.
This adventure comes from a time when modules were a toolbox. One of the most popular modules from the era had a plot of “there’s a bunch of monsters in some nearby caves, and they don’t all like each other”. Tunnels were blocked by debris, allowing the DM to connect it to another dungeon they wanna try. You might come back to the same dungeon a second time, and the contents of the room will change. A module is a starting point, but the DM continues the story from there.
If you don’t know how to prep that, then the empty room is a boon. If you do, then the empty room isn’t an issue. If you don’t want to prep a campaign like that, then maybe this style of module isn’t for you in the first place.
“It’s not what they’re doing that’s cowardly, it’s that they’re not doing what I want them to”. Your argument is based entirely on the fact that you are demanding that they be more creative. The assumption that they have nothing else to do and no other motivations. What right do you have to tell other DMs how to run their stories? You can add all the filler you want to your campaign, but you’re demanding that other GMs have to deal with your filler too, and accusing them of cowardice when they perfectly reasonably tell you to sit and swivel.
Ok, let me stop you there. We do not live in the 80’s. We are not restricted to Gary and his friend’s single system that has been invented. We are not fumbling our way through discovering how TTRPGs work, experimenting with vague outlines to see what happens. It’s been 40 years, we have better everything now. Our superdungeons aren’t just a series of deathtraps and random encounters to kill the players. Our modules aren’t just a list of encounters held together by the vague pretense of a story. Our systems are able to handle nonhuman ancestries. They’re not releasing the adventure for Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set. You can call it a style, but it’s a “style” born of experimentally bumbling through unknown territory - if anything, by choosing to stick to it in an age where we’ve massively advanced the mechanical and storytelling techniques of TTRPGs instead of learning to run more advanced stories could be classified as cowardice - too cowardly to learn what’s changed, too cowardly to risk more advanced narrative, too cowardly to try new things. Hey, look, when I create an unfair dichotomy you’re the one that gets called a coward. Weird.
What do you think is relevent about this? Are you not able to add things to your campaigns without those hooks, or do you believe they’ve disappeared from modern adventures? They have not. like half the tunnels in my current campaign are described as “beyond the scope of this adventure”. Honestly, it’s kinda worrying that you apparently need these structures in place for you to be inventive. If you want to argue for the creation of a learning series that would help you with things like this, go ahead, but once again, they are selling this as an adventure, and should be providing a complete adventure.
Why? What are you even prepping? What is there to prep in the room? Like you said, it’s just an encounter and a featureless box. Put a desk in the room to, uh… “to make the fight a little bit more interesting” [sic]. What’s stopping you from inserting your own empty room to add an “interesting” table to? Why do you need WotC to push this prep on GMs looking for a preprepared adventure?
I ran quite few old modules and I think it’s doing them disservice to just assume their design philosophy was inherently wrong or flawed. Yes, we developed many different ideas and perspectives over the years but they were often aiming for different things and old modules are, I notice, often very good with presenting PCs with a situation and letting them go wild with solutions. I think I prefer them to modern WotC or Paizo formula of a strict linear plot
I do not believe you have run a modern module if you don’t think they let players go wild with solutions. They might include a solution instead of leaving it as an exercise for the DM, but they very much let players approach them however they want.
Anyway, putting random monsters in a room and telling the DM to figure something out is inherently flawed. It’s literally incomplete, and has filler encounters. Those are definitely flaws in a prepared adventure. As I’ve repeatedly said, they wouldn’t be flaws in a different type of publication, but we’re not discussing that type of publication.
Also, you forgot to defend your actual point. Even if they weren’t flaws, how would that make people who don’t like that “style” cowards?
I have run Lost mine of Phandelver, several of Dragon of the Icespire Peak adventures, two and half modules from Candlekeep Mysteries, one from Twelve Peculiar Towers, one dms guild adventure, I think this is far from not having run a modern module as you accuse me of.