Canned gaming modules can be a handy way to compensate to some degree for Having a Life and not being able to stay up to 2 a.m. every night any more, writing up adventures by scratch.
Granted, they aren’t perfect, and any GM worth his salt will do a little fleshing out, tying of plot items to the characters’ backstories, etc. The module provides the foundation; the GM adds the decorator accents and design decisions.
What I often do with modules is go ahead and retype them myself, organizing them as I feel appropriate. That forces me to read everything, understand it all, and lets me tweak little bits of awkwardness.
But I really hate it — really hate it — when a module is written and/or edited poorly. So for example, looking at one I’m going through at the moment:
- A number of maps that would be very useful, almost critical, are missing.
- The maps that are included have disconnects with the box text and room descriptions. That includes doors being present (or absent), rooms being present (or absent), confusion as to whether a key location is on the mainland or on an island, etc.
- Timeline elements in the mystery that aren’t consistent. Event X took place two years ago, and was caused by Person A. But person A wasn’t involved here until a year go, which fact ties into a different plot element. Eek.
- Canned player hand-outs have inconsistencies like, oh, different names for characters in the module.
Granted, I tend to pick at a lot of the details a lot more than I suspect most folks do. And some of these modules are Living campaign modules that are designed for 3-4 hours, and I manage to drag into 3-4 gaming sessions, so that’s going to focus on some of the problems a lot more.
Still, we’re not necessarily talking here about details that can be glossed over (e.g., locations of bathrooms), but significant plot elements that have key implications in the game play, for the players’ (and GM’s) sakes — sufficiently so that if I didn’t read everything, word-for-word, ahead of time, trying to figure out what was going on, I’d find myself mid-game, scratching my head, and having to retcon stuff to make plot developments limp along in a reasonable direction.
The sort of thing that playtesting and editors are supposed to deal with …
None of this (or little of this) is impossible to work around, but it’s still irksome, and irksome enough to bitch blog about.
Okay, I feel better now.
Woops, sorry for the double track-back, Dave! During my first attempt my ping script died halfway through, so I gave it another go. I should have checked first.
*doh*
No problem; I zapped one of them.