Recent content by DEFCON 1

We can also just hope that there will be players who will build their character to theme and not just min-max for mechanical benefit. If someone is going through the effort of making their fighter a banneret, you would like to see them actually embrace the concept of the character fully and not...

I believe reworking the backstory and changing names to fit your setting would not fall under my personal definition of 'no prep'. You actually read the module, saw what needed to be changed to fit your campaign, and then did it. I myself would call that 'prep', and thus to your credit you...

I would suggest that "easy to prep" is not the same as "little to no prep". The former is about success rate. The latter is about effort. All kinds of module designs could be easy for a DM to prepare for their game... but at least the DM is actually doing the work preparing to run their game...

You proved that when you insinuated I was a trust fund baby. If you are going to dish it out, make sure you can also take it.

It's kept the industry in business for 50 years thus far. Heck, in the decades before people could make, sell or buy PDFs that were 4 page bullet-point modules (if that)... almost all modules one could buy were 16 to 32 pages full of very minute type, writing out paragraphs upon paragraphs of...

If you don't have 6 extra minutes in your entire week to read a couple paragraphs for preparation rather than a handful of bullet points... you have more things to deal with in your life that you probably shouldn't be wasting a bunch of it Dungeon Mastering. If you are going to DM... make sure...

Are you reading it, or are you scanning it? To me they are two different things and it is obvious to me while playing when the DM is doing one versus the other. Scanning a module to remind yourself of information you already have a familiarity with takes a lot less time and usually can be done...

Yes.

I would suggest they are not "nothing" like the same thing, but are more "somewhat" like the same thing. Because in both cases neither DM is spending any time right before the game going over the adventure they have in front of them to actually be prepared to run the game. Both of them are...

I would say that is true... in that they usually are Adventurer's League modules and thus are your prototypical D&D-styled written adventures. But even though that might be true... I still have little to no faith than a person who tries to run an adventure "off-the-page" is actually going to be...

For me it is simple... I will always read a module or adventure many time before ever running it, because I need to make sure it fits into the world and area the characters are in, and makes sense as a stop on the narrative the characters are creating and journeying on. So there will never be a...

I'm one who actually prefers the longer-written style of modules and adventures because it gives me more narrative flow and more description amongst characters, locations, attitudes, atmosphere and the like. Thus when I run it and improvise my descriptions or areas and the attitudes and voices...

I wonder if your way of thinking on this goes hand-in-hand with what I've gathered about the way your table runs and plays from reading your posts over the years? Wherein it seems (to me) that your campaigns tend to appear much less about specific characters and more so on the experiences of...

Absolutely. But that's where the meta issue comes in, where the players don't do things they think their PCs would do because "out of game" they are trying to be nice or keep the peace. And I don't blame them necessarily for that, because group dynamics can be very tricky things.

Kobold Press doesn't sell at that price because they can... they sell at that price because they have to. Few people would buy the products otherwise because that's just the reality for most non-WotC 3rd party sellers. All of these companies sell their product at the price for which the market...