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 bitching 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.
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 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.
A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how.
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.
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.
Worse, some rules/features are holdovers from previous versions that don’t make sense in the current game.
Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR)
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.
But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others.
That sounds like a party composition problem, then. Don’t everyone play ice mages and then walk into a volcano.
Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others.
Sounds like monster creation rules need to be figured out before publishing the books, then.
Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.
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?
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. [… That] sounds cowardly to me.
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.
