For the love of modules...

As a long time lurker, and oftentimes contributor, on RPG forums, I often see people comment that "They don't use modules", "They're too much effort", or the opposite "They're for lazy DMs", "Too plot heavy", "Railroads", etc.  There is often an air of smug disdain in these comments, very much along the lines of "my fun is better than your fun".

It isn't.  Both styles of game are equally valid, and in the hands of an enthusiastic DM as good module can, and does, provide for a unique gaming experience - just as a great homebrewed storyline, or well crafted sandbox campaign can.

I love modules.  For me the meat of the game is, and always has been, the stories they contain, their artwork, their NPCs and settings, and the memories of how players dealt with certain encounters.  The reason for my preference for modules boils down to one key fact.  I was 11 when I was first exposed to the hobby.  I had just started secondary school, at an iconic private school for those fortunate enough to have been born with fine brains, have parents capable of paying for tutoring, or simply fluked the school's entrance exam.  Travel to and from the school took an hour by public transport, the school day was lengthy, and the homework excessive - it was commonplace for me to set off at 7.30 in the morning, get home after 5pm, and then have to do 2 hours of work at home.  Time therefore was very much at a premium. I lost contact with many of my local friends - save a couple who also passed the exam for the same school  - mobile phones and social media were not a thing in 1983. My social network now revolved around the friends I made at secondary school, many of whom also had long journeys from different parts of the city - in short, we were scattered all over the place.  There were a few locally who played D&D, but as they were also under the same school travel/work pressures as myself, arranging regular games was nigh on impossible.  We got our gaming fix in short bursts - in school lunchbreaks, or on the train to and from school with books balanced on our laps, dice bouncing across the carriage floor.

I live in Britain.  Our houses do not have basements.  Gaming, when it happened, took place on dining room tables, which meant it also relied on parental good will - and regular gatherings of screaming teenagers would naturally push that to breaking point.

All of the above meant that lengthy, cohesive campaigns were simply never going to happen.  It was pointless spending hours preparing - time which we did not have much of anyway, there were too many variables which could lead to a game not happening, not enough people available to play. We occasionally got 5 or 6 people together in one place on a Saturday afternoon, but such meetings were sporadic and we never knew when the next one would be.

So modules were necessary. The DM needed something that could be grabbed and digested quickly.  Not lengthy epic adventures, but shorter episodic ones, or those which had a variety of interesting enemies to fight.  We never wanted to 'waste' time roleplaying town encounters, no, it was important to get to the meat of the adventure as quickly as possible, so the Fighters could swing their swords, and the Mages could throw their fireballs.  Lengthy travel would be skipped, rations and other supplies totally ignored, because all that took gaming time, and gaming time was a precious commodity.  We rarely ever finished an adventure, but that didn't matter.  I must have DMed the various entrances to I1 a dozen times, the city itself however, just twice.

I was the one who was almost always called upon to DM games - at school I was the gobby brat who had to be the centre of attention, it was a role I enjoyed.  I still do, for much the same reason. Our games rarely followed the rules as written.  Rulebooks are mostly boring, at least they were to this excitable teenage DM, I hadn't read them in any systematic fashion anyway, but modules had stories, and monsters, and magic, and treasure, so I lapped those up.  The game system and following the rules 'correctly' did not matter to the players either, they just wanted to spend that precious gaming time exploring, killing wacky creatures, finding cool stuff, and getting xp.

People these days slate a lot of the earlier modules for their lack of cohesion.  Everything seems to need a reason, "Why is that there?", "Why does that room have 2 Trolls, but the next one have 3 Ogres, living side by side?  Wouldn't they fight each other?".  When you play the game as we did, in short sporadic bursts, none of that mattered one jot.  They were there to be fought, to have their treasure taken, to give kids enjoyment before the bell went to signal the end of dinner break. That's not to say nothing ever needed a plot - those longer Saturday sessions were for those adventures - Ravenloft, The Saltmarsh series, along with some of the goodies on offer for the other games we played - Paranoia and Marvel Super Heroes being the main two.

AD&D's modules WERE our games, they were our stories, they were my friends' sources of loot and xp, and most importantly they were our childhood memories.

This is why, 30 years on from those teenage years, I'm running a group once again through a selection of those old classics.