Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;994595Just got my copy of ToA today. So far, so good.

One minor quibble: With all the handouts and maps this has, I wish it had been a boxed set rather than a hardcover.

Boxed sets are very expensive to produce. You normally only see them for starter sets, as the quantity produced somewhat mitigates the lower profit margin.

The third major reason TSR went belly up after novel returns from Random House, & Dragon Dice/Spellfire being very stupid biz decisions, was boxed sets.

Quote from: Voros;994719You must dislike Vault of the Drow, Night's Dark Terror, The Lost City, and The Greyhawk boxset too Doom.

Pretty much any old school module or setting.

Uh, no? At least the ones that claim to be adventures. You sure are hostile.

So you haven't know any of the classics I named as apparently you don't know which are adventures? Got'cha.

As to my 'hostility' it is more a low tolerance for bullshit. The books are either sketchy or overwritten, they can't be both.

I went back and looked at CoS and don't know what Lardsdangly means by overwritten, each Keyed description is a few hundred words, topping out at 500 on average. Background on Barovia takes up a whopping ten pages out of 216.

I haven't ran Out of the Abyss yet but if I felt something was missing I'd just make it up or steal something from Vault of the Drow, Kingdom of the Ghouls or The Night Below.

If you think OotA is sketchy you must be really lost with an OSR product like Scenic Dunnsmouth, Yoon-Suin, Red Tide and Fever Dreaming Marlinko.

I believe there are also tax reasons in certain countries to keep things in book instead of box format.

Yeah I've heard that, box sets don't count as books for tax purposes and apparently the shipping costs are significantly higher as well. Plus box sets are much more likely to get damaged in shipping.

Quote from: Voros;995017As to my 'hostility' it is more a low tolerance for bullshit.

I haven't ran Out of the Abyss yet but if I felt something was missing I'd just make it up or steal something from Vault of the Drow, Kingdom of the Ghouls or The Night Below.

Saying a product is good because you can go steal something from another product to fill the vacancies is simply retarded.

QuoteIf you think OotA is sketchy you must be really lost with an OSR product like Scenic Dunnsmouth, Yoon-Suin, Red Tide and Fever Dreaming Marlinko.

Pointing at something else as worse doesn't address why OotA as great.

QuoteI haven't ran Out of the Abyss yet but if I felt something was missing I'd just make it up or steal something from Vault of the Drow, Kingdom of the Ghouls or The Night Below.

Wait. You haven't even played it, and you become an angry twat about someone asking why you think it's good?

Talk about bullshit...

I guess I can rattle off old adventures, and unlike you just admitted, I actually have played them. In Search of the Unknown is a complete adventure, and doesn't claim to cover more than it actually does. The Enemy Within Campaign has actual adventures all through it...and at no point does it say "hey, sucker, fill in the last 200 pages yourself." Against the Giants, even taken as three modules together...still does what is says it does. Hell, even Phandelver did all it said it'd do.

I just don't understand why you praise fraud, and use ignorance as justification for praise. But, to each his own.

Good day.

It looks promising, even with hex crawl potential and a blank map version for those who wanna take Chult in different directions. It'll mostly be AL relevant about druids wanting dinosaurs, but there's a surprising chunk of usable sandboxing material in there. However, these are just first impressions after an hour browse. Proof will be a few months from now when playthroughs come in.

Quote from: Doom;995140Saying a product is good because you can go steal something from another product to fill the vacancies is simply retarded.



Pointing at something else as worse doesn't address why OotA as great.



Wait. You haven't even played it, and you become an angry twat about someone asking why you think it's good?

If you think Yoon-Suin and my other examples are presented as something 'worse' your head is stuck so far up your ass you'll never see daylight.

My point, obvious to anyone not semi-literate, is that all those classic adventures and very fine OSR adventures are far more 'sketchy' than Out of the Abyss.

I never denied that there are some parts of OotA left for you to fill in, I just don't think it matters because adventures are toolboxes for you to use not a full-stop replacement for your own imagination.  

You are the 'snowflake' here complaining like some RPGNet pedant that 'the product' needs to have everything laid out on a silver platter for you.

Quote from: Voros;995017As to my 'hostility' it is more a low tolerance for bullshit. The books are either sketchy or overwritten, they can't be both.

Why can't they be sketchy to some people and overblown to others?

By that logic since everything is subjective why bother discussing it?

If someone thinks a few hundred words per key description is 'overwritten' they want a list not an adventure supplement.

'Sketchy' is obviously more subjective, I don't expect every detail to be explicated in an supplement, particularly when it is sandboxy. By defintion a sandbox is going to have areas that need to be filled in by the DM. One can take issue with the approach but it is a bit like complaining an apple isn't an orange. If they did detail everything the way Doom apparently needs or else he is lost then it would be accused of being overwritten and railroady.

I suspect a lot of the contradictory claims you see online are because most of the critics haven't actually read or played the games and are just spewing the same complaints they assume have been true since 2e or WoTC took over D&D because they feel like shitting on 5e or WoTC makes them hip. In Doom's particular case it seems it is because he is imaginatively stunted.

Okay update time.

My group has had quite a blast with it. It has a decided pre-made sandbox feel to it. Or at least there's lots of stuff on the island that is in now way there to 'serve the plot of the quest.' Our party took a detour that absolutely gives us nothing but xp and treasure we probably won't be able to carry through the jungle. We ended up in an abandoned mine, complete with rickity mine carts with brakes that fail that send you on mad spirals down to who-knows-what and is it better to leap out or crouch and brace for impact, and oh this passage is free of kobolds, let's stop here (finds out why there are no kobolds). And oh, the kobolds are in awe of the dragon at the bottom, but will they ally with you and together you can take the dragon and its' treasure, or is it a trap? Some decidedly in-my-mind old school pointless fun in the middle of a semi-grand quest.

Worst part was arriving at the island and the amount of 'players decisions affect how close they get to the goal' was limited to choosing of your guide. Best part is that the 'goal,' is not the only part of the island that is interesting and you do not in any way feel railroaded.

Jungle survival is fun as well. We have a druid, a druid-barbarian, a wood-elf rogue, and a half-orc fighter (me). All of us are trained in survival. We're well prepared with rain-catchers, insect repellant, antitoxins, disease cures, the druids are memorizing food and water creating spells and so on. The only foolish decision we are making is that my fighter is still wearing half plate, but I'm doing that deliberately (modeling the conquistadors like de Soto who came to the jungles of Florida with full 16th century armor and very quickly found out how foolish that was) and fully expect to end up in less (he has a set of studded that he wore on the boat). Still, it is absolutely reckless to even go into this jungle, and we are having a grand old time threading the needle between 'playing smart' and the fact that playing smart would really mean either not going in at all or going in with a troop of 20-30 experienced jungle experts.

Tentative thumbs up.

Quote from: Voros;995184If you think Yoon-Suin and my other examples are presented as something 'worse' your head is stuck so far up your ass you'll never see daylight.

My point, obvious to anyone not semi-literate, is that all those classic adventures and very fine OSR adventures are far more 'sketchy' than Out of the Abyss.

I never denied that there are some parts of OotA left for you to fill in, I just don't think it matters because adventures are toolboxes for you to use not a full-stop replacement for your own imagination.  

You are the 'snowflake' here complaining like some RPGNet pedant that 'the product' needs to have everything laid out on a silver platter for you.

Some people like filling in blanks, so having blanks can be a positive rather than a negative. Depends on the presentation IMO. Sometimes a module blindsides me with a blank, like a room that probably should have had a description.

I wonder if there's a double-standard even among old-school gamers, where if an old-school or OSR product has 'blanks' in it, that's considered a feature, and if a WoTC product has blanks in it, that's a bug.

Also, I can see how that argument could theoretically also be correct.

Quote from: RPGPundit;996553I wonder if there's a double-standard even among old-school gamers, where if an old-school or OSR product has 'blanks' in it, that's considered a feature, and if a WoTC product has blanks in it, that's a bug.

Also, I can see how that argument could theoretically also be correct.

I think it has more to do with how WOTC hosed their own rep with gamers and how it still hasnt quite recovered fully.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;995662...

Tentative thumbs up.

Got my copy yesterday. Probably the strongest old school or OSR influenced WoTC release so far. I've heard the ToH comparisons but Dwellers of the Forbidden City is an even stronger influence I think, not a surprise of course since it is listed as inspiration and an entire section is named after it!