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Certain preconceptions seem to follow APs. The introductory explanation from 1d4chan serves as a good example. There we learn that modules are, “An accessory to games that companies sell for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure.”
You guys already know that gatekeeping is force for evil. That bit isn’t news. What’s more worrying to me is the next line in the 1d4chan entry: “A module contains a premade adventure the GM should be able to run for his group with minimal modifications.” More than the condescension, it’s this fundamental misunderstanding that bothers.
Let me be clear: you absolutely can run an AP “with minimal modifications.” You can also read quest text at your players verbatim using your best Ben Stein impression. These practices are how you wind up with a community that thinks of modules as GMing for dummies.
If you’re really giving it your all though, and if you’re embellishing and tailoring the adventure to your players, then you’re operating at a level of creativity every bit as valid as a homebrewed game. Rather than devoting your energy to worldbuilding or plot-crafting, those hours go toward fleshing out NPCs, incorporating player-specific subplots, or adding side-quests to the mix. That level of agency is exactly how you bring players into a game world, and it’s just as easy to do in modules as in homebrew.
So here's my question to the board: Have you ever run into that "modules are dumb" mindset in the wild? How do you respond to it?
Creative Director
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To me, the mindset of "modules are dumb" is akin to "books are dumb."
There are certainly bad books (and thus bad adventures) out there, but ask any writer what's a great way to become a better writer and they'll say "read lots," among other things.
I appreciated published adventures while I was growing up because they inspired me and they were more creative and imaginative than what I could have come up with on my own. After reading a lot of them and using a lot of them in games, I got better at creating my own adventures. Today, after working in the industry for 20 or so years specifically as someone who writes and develops adventures, I STILL enjoy reading published adventures and continue looking for ways to improve my own writing.
A GM who doesn't read and study adventures written by other people is neglecting one of the best resources out there to self-improve.
I haven't run into this mindset in the wild, though, so I guess I count myself fortunate that I've never had to respond to it. If I did... see above for my tactic. (I'd frame it more diplomatically though.)
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My creativity is quite good. Now that I am retired, I have time, too (no energy, but plenty of time). However, my creativity has weak areas. I don't write novels because my written dialogues are flat. And my villains end up practical rather than villainous. To gain a colorful adventure, I start with the Paizo adventure paths.
Then my players derail the plot by creating an even more amazing story from the adventure path, and I improvise and rearrange the path to keep up with them. I create about 50% of the off-the-rails path myself. Yet having the module's original path available lets me measure how far from that path they have ventured. It highlights their creativity.
Since creative director James Jacobs has already spoken up in this thread, I will rely on him to correct my views on him. He loves to imbed potential themes into the adventure paths that can tie the entire six-module adventure together into one strong story. Since different players want different stories, he provides many themes.
For example, the Iron Gods adventure path, where spaceships had crashed into the barbaric land of Numeria, has a natural conflict of science (iron) versus relgion (gods). Or the theme could focus on the science side for the natural barbarian tribes versus the artificial alien technology. The purely religions side has some robots with divine powers striving for godhood: do they deserve to be gods just because they can be gods? Should the ascendence of an evil god be prevented or will that have no noticeable influence on the existing large pantheon with much more powerful gods of good and evil?
My own players in the campaign Iron Gods among Scientists focussed on the contrast between the monopolistic Technic League that wants to hoard the technology for themselves and their own hope of bringing the benefits of tools and technology to the people. They founded businesses--converting a gambling hall into a dance and music hall, starting a waterwheel-powered workshop, and hiring ratfolk escaped from slavery as alchemical workers--because of their attitude. They took a job with the final boss in the final module rather than fighting him. Their excuse was to learn his secret plan, but really the PCs wanted to play with his high technology. At the end, they took over the Technic League and in my version of Golarion it is now called the Technic School (the irredeemably evil Technic League members went renegade and set up elsewhere).
A good story is not simply characters and plot. Theme ties it together to make it one story instead of many separate stories about the same characters. If I were completely improvising the campaign challenges in a homebrew world, I would not have planted seeds of theme far enough in advance to keep a theme running.
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1d4chan is also a place that uses “rape” as a punchline and is shot through with the virulent hate that its namesake imageboard adores. It’s not a credible source for anything, and I strongly suggest you divorce yourself from whatever path led you to taking in the opinions of this hobby’s most racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist, white nationalist wing… there are better uses of your time.
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Yeah, 1d4chan is pretty awful.
On the main subject, I don't think that people who run APs are less creative, I just think that I personally find APs to be too restrictive, and that it limits the space in which I have to be creative. I do mine them for ideas and content and stuff though. For example, I take all the AP specific feats and spells and items and keep them as secret options to give to PCs as treasure (finding a wizards spellbook with a unique spell in it, or a weapon master who trains you and in doing so gives you access to a special feat). As another example, I am currently looking at adapting the castle building/repair rules from Age of Ashes to use in my games.
Last AP I ran was Starfinder's Dead Suns, and as an example I (and my players) found it annoying that no matter what happened, the Stiletto that the PCs fought in space combat has to crash land in a specific location, with the pilot always surviving, because the AP said that they have to encounter that pilot on the ground.
I feel that most APs dictate where the players have to go and what they have to do too much for my tastes. I am much more comfortable (and my games much more enjoyable for my players) when I run a sandbox that I created myself.
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In retrospect, I see that I focused on my reaction to “for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure,” rather than answering the question that DRD1812 asked.
So here's my question to the board: Have you ever run into that "modules are dumb" mindset in the wild? How do you respond to it?
I have never seen a blanket "modules are dumb" attitude. My fellow GMs who run homebrew worlds do so because they love their worlds, not because they hate the modules.
Gamemasters are hard to find. Anything that encourages a player to serve as a GM is a blessing.
Also, before I retired, I regularly ran a campaign in a game store owned by friends. Running a module shows off product sold by my favorite store.
By the way, the Handbook of Heroes comic brings to mind the 1990 novel Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede, the first in her Enchanted Forest series. In that world, dragons kidnap princesses as a status symbol in their society. Princess Cimorene was not suited for her princessly life, so she volunteered to be a princess held by a dragon, more a housekeeper than a captive. Thus, in the Handbook of Heroes comic when the wyrmling heroes show up to rescue a princess from a dragon, I would immediately skew the story to how the heroes can work with the dragon while dealing fairly with the princess, basing new material on Patricia Wrede's book.
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I can't say I've ever seen a "modules are dumb" mentality. I've had the off DM that had a superiority complex about how much better their custom content was to published material but that's not quite the same thing.
How do you respond to it if I found it? I most likely wouldn't respond at all unless there was a good reason too: As as long as they don't obsess over it and detract from the game I really don't care about it. If it's disruptive, then most likely one of out will leave the game.
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I think it helps a lot if you read adventures not looking for "this is what will happen" but looking for "this is what would happen if the players never came". You have an idea of NPCs' goals, methods, and current plans, before the PCs start disrupting those. Then, because you know all this about the NPCs, you can easily improvise their reactions to those meddlin' kids.
That does mean you'll probably have to re-track a lot of things because players will get different endings to many books.
I also think it's better to frame plots as "pull" rather than "push". Instead of the current event saying that now you must go to the other place and do the other thing; let them learn about what kind of bad thing would happen at the other place if they don't go. And since they wouldn't like that, they oughtta go there and put a stop to it. That'll allow you to use most of the material but with far less feeling of railroad.
I think this perspective makes written adventures feel a lot less rigid while still making use of the work that's been done.
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Certain preconceptions seem to follow APs. The introductory explanation from 1d4chan serves as a good example. There we learn that modules are, “An accessory to games that companies sell for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure.”
Wow, you were expecting a quality take on anything from 1d4chan?
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Wow, you were expecting a quality take on anything from 1d4chan?Certain preconceptions seem to follow APs. The introductory explanation from 1d4chan serves as a good example. There we learn that modules are, “An accessory to games that companies sell for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure.”
Reminder that the OP just makes click baity titles and posts to drum up views for their web comic. Usually they manage to land closer to a commonly experienced conundrum, but not in this particular case.
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Wow, you were expecting a quality take on anything from 1d4chan?Certain preconceptions seem to follow APs. The introductory explanation from 1d4chan serves as a good example. There we learn that modules are, “An accessory to games that companies sell for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure.”
Taking anything from 1d4chan seriously is weird enough. Most of the content there is satirical in one way or another.
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Reminder that the OP just makes click baity titles and posts to drum up views for their web comic. Usually they manage to land closer to a commonly experienced conundrum, but not in this particular case.
Wow, I just looked at the "threads" part of their profile and you are right - there is a link to that webcomic on the original post for all of the threads they have started.
Them presenting the comic as "for illustrative purposes" seems misleading. When I first saw this thread I thought they where linking some random comic they saw that happened to match the subject they where talking about.
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Welcome, one and all, to an ad. I don't have anything against promoting your work, but citing 1d4chan and using a clickbait title in General might not have been the best plan.
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Welcome, one and all, to an ad. I don't have anything against promoting your work, but citing 1d4chan and using a clickbait title in General might not have been the best plan.
It's honestly a bummer, their comic is amusing. Not really inclined to read it if stuff like this keeps up.
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At the risk of validating something from 1d4chan, I'll say that I've definitely encountered people who are pretty opposed to any pre-written material.
And I think they have a point, in the very narrow spaces they play in. If you have an experienced GM that has the skills, the inclination, and the time to build a homebrew world for a stable group of players who were friends prior to gaming together, I have very little doubt that the homebrew campaign is better.
It's absolutely a great game ... until the GM moves, or loses interest, or has a baby, etc.
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Reminder that the OP just makes click baity titles and posts to drum up views for their web comic. Usually they manage to land closer to a commonly experienced conundrum, but not in this particular case.Wow, you were expecting a quality take on anything from 1d4chan?Certain preconceptions seem to follow APs. The introductory explanation from 1d4chan serves as a good example. There we learn that modules are, “An accessory to games that companies sell for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure.”
Glah…yuk you are right. This is right up there with Neal Litherland’s clickbaity threads that led to his blog every time…
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Glah…yuk you are right. This is right up there with Neal Litherland’s clickbaity threads that led to his blog every time…Reminder that the OP just makes click baity titles and posts to drum up views for their web comic. Usually they manage to land closer to a commonly experienced conundrum, but not in this particular case.Wow, you were expecting a quality take on anything from 1d4chan?Certain preconceptions seem to follow APs. The introductory explanation from 1d4chan serves as a good example. There we learn that modules are, “An accessory to games that companies sell for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure.”
Really? That's more than a little tasteless of them.
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Eh. It's harmless, the link is obvious, all the way at the back and has the same name every time, you're not forced to click on it. And the OP writes some thread starter that people find interesting enough to have a discussion among themselves. On a scale of one to typical internet, this is pretty mild.
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Meh. People were saying that about printed adventures before a lot of us actually had home access to the internet.
Yeah referring to 1d4chan is stirring things up a bit. I know I'm being manipulated, but pretty basically. The average tourist trinket salesman does a harder sell.
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Eh. It's harmless, the link is obvious, all the way at the back and has the same name every time, you're not forced to click on it. And the OP writes some thread starter that people find interesting enough to have a discussion among themselves. On a scale of one to typical internet, this is pretty mild.
I guess I feel differently. It’s a pretty blatant form of “subtle advertising”, That isn’t subtle. I also don’t like the lack of disclaimer that the thread OP and the linked site creator is one and the same. Finally, primarily using my phone I don’t “click” on things, so don’t hover over them with a mouse to see the address. So I don’t know what it is. Of course no-one is *forcing* me to press on it…
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I will say that this is something that has been noticed elsewhere. In particular, the guy at The Alexandrian (who is not me) talks about this sort of thign at length - the art of module-writing and of its usage has decayed over the years, and so forth. In particular how it's moved from a presentation of "here is the location you find yourself, here is the situation, here are implied things that you might think to do and implied facts about the world" on to a much more rigid and railroaded structure, and finally into a space where it's often rigid, railroaded, and broken, offering no way to deal if the players do anything other than follow the plot-rails, and offering very little in the way of reason why they would choose to do the next thing, other than the fact that it's where the plot-train goes.
Just as an example from my personal experience, the very first encounter of the first module put out for 5e - the PCs have been hired as guards to a merchant caravan. They come upon a previous group, slaughtered and left lying int he road. The plot-rails say that they are supposed to get out of the wagon and go search the bodies, so that they can be properly ambushed by the goblins hiding in the trees. It offers no support at all to what might occur if the players, say, get paranoid, and try to scan the trees from where they are. No indication is given as to how good the goblins might or might not be at stealth.
That's not to say that a competent GM could not overcome this problem. They most certainly could - but the adventure is written as a "this happens and then this happens and then this happens" and any step off the rails leaves the GM having to come up with just about everything on the fly. The "with minimal modifications" thing seems to have been internalized not just by a decent chunk of the players, but by a decent chunk of the module-writers as well.
And that's not surprising, since that's exactly how a newbie GM will tend to experience it. If you have no idea what your'e doing, and you want to GM a group of people who also have no idea what they're doing, and you're all trying to figure it out as you go along, and you decide to use a module... you get guided pretty directly into a very railroaded playstyle. Sure, a more capable GM would do it better... but a lot of the modern modules aren't helpful in teaching GMs to be more capable.
I want to make clear that I'm speaking of modules in general, not of Paizo products in particular. I've not had yet had the opportunity to deal with any Paizo-written modules myself, and cannot speak to them one way or the other. In general, though, I suspect that this is a hazard of any module that focuses too much on following a plotline, and too little on laying out a setting and offering opportunities for the players to pursue or not.
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Do you have an example of a good old module, by those standards? The old school stuff I'm thinking of tends to give even less support. Not so much plot rails as just static locations with little to no guidance for handling any PC actions, not just unexpected ones.
But maybe you're thinking of some middle stage that I missed.
No - that's actually what he meant as the "good old module", and I find that I can at least see his point. They weren't *trying* to put you on rails, and it was obviously the case, so as soon as you set down in wherever you were, the DM/GM already knew that the plot would be build-as-you-go. They gave you the setting, and the characters, and let you set things in motion yourself. He used the Village of Hommlet as his example, and by the sounds of things, it was pretty much exactly as you describe. At the same times, once you started digging into it and drawing implications, it held together pretty well, and the world became richer.
It also meant that they included all of the potentially meaningful character/setting elements up front, rather than including only those that they expected to be directly impactful on the intended plotline.
The newer ones, with the more built-in plots, strongly suggest (intentionally or otherwise) that "just follow the rails" is the correct way to use them. This is problematic, because ti tends to suggest to first-time GMs that don't know any better that railroading is the correct way to run things, and it also leads to the "fundamental misunderstanding" of "A module contains a premade adventure the GM should be able to run for his group with minimal modifications." People think that way, because that's the way the modules are written. Further, many of the more recent modules, if you dig in and start drawing implications, they fall apart entirely.
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Played/ran several AD&D and 3.5 modules and hated them. Have been in two AP's and they are alright, so long as you force yourself into the mindset of "this is the adventure we are doing, stick to it."
For me I vastly prefer an adventure be about the characters, not the places they go or the things they fight. Being a generic stand in hero for an adventure doesn't interest me. I rather each character have a tie in to the things that are going on and have personal missions within the group's overall goal.
I would prefer a GM who has the drive to invent and change things, who reads lots of fantasy books and has looked over a lot of AP's and modules to get inspired to make things of their own and perhaps supplement from different sources in areas they aren't as confident in.
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I've run a mix of homebrew and modules/APs over the years. I think both are good and really, for me, it depends on the mood I'm in. On the whole, when I run from a module, I can deliver a more complete experience to the players. I don't have to worry about treasure, creating filler rooms or encounters for a dungeon, writing a plot, foreshadowing villains. It's all taken care of for me. I can focus on sprinkling in scenes that let certain characters shine, creating cool unique items to hand out as treasure, and bringing in backstory NPCs as either side-quests or, if I can manage it, weaving them into the main plot.
I'm loving running James Jacobs's Abomination Vaults currently for exactly this reason. It's an archetypical adventure but you can see his understanding of how to write an adventure for a home GM in how he's composed it: there's a complete megadungeon and a few things that happen in Otari, but much of it is left open-ended so that it's incredibly simple to tack on additional NPCs or plots that are going in within that simplistic setup. And I think you should add stuff tailored to your players, or perhaps more interesting, tailored to the themes you're trying to convey. At this point, my players don't really know what's part of the module and what I've added in myself.
The fact that I don't have to spend hours drawing maps and scouring bestiaries for traps and creatures means I can focus on the things that matter to telling a good story.
I tend to find that in any homebrew game, at least one of the core game loops takes a backseat. They tend to have great worlds or stories, but maybe the GM doesn't care about evenly interspersing treasure and just gives big chunks of gold occasionally, maybe there are a dearth of combat encounters and sessions tend to center around a single epic showdown with a villain-of-the-week, maybe traps go unused, or other similar things. It's still a really fun game, but often I feel that if a GM just lifted and shifted some content from a module, they could have done even better.
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I wouldn't really worry about what 1d4chan.org thinks.
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A GM who doesn't read and study adventures written by other people is neglecting one of the best resources out there to self-improve.
Great line, James! I do a bit of 3rd party stuff over at Adventure a Week, and I always like to say that 1st party adventures are a great way to understand how designers imagine their game to look like in practice.
Even if I plan to transition into homebrew, you better believe that I'm reading the adventures when I encounter a new system. It's one of the best ways to grok gameplay quickly.
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I wouldn't really worry about what 1d4chan.org thinks.
It's just a convenient example of the mindset.
Where I've personally encountered it was a Ravenloft game over in 5e. It was my father-in-law's group, and he absolutely loathed the idea of "you're trapped by the magic fog and can't leave." He's more sensitive to railroading than most, so even though the GM on that one went out of his way to tailor the campaign, he still felt as if he were being forced down a narrow path.
In other words, even though it was a well-executed campaign, he let the notion of being in an AP ruin the experience for him. This thread is more-or-less a direct response to that experience.
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I wouldn't really worry about what 1d4chan.org thinks.It's just a convenient example of the mindset.
Where I've personally encountered it was a Ravenloft game over in 5e. It was my father-in-law's group, and he absolutely loathed the idea of "you're trapped by the magic fog and can't leave." He's more sensitive to railroading than most, so even though the GM on that one went out of his way to tailor the campaign, he still felt as if he were being forced down a narrow path.
In other words, even though it was a well-executed campaign, he let the notion of being in an AP ruin the experience for him. This thread is more-or-less a direct response to that experience.
Was he being railroaded, though? While railroading is often an issue in printed modules, it can absolutely show up in purely homebrew games as well, and I'm certain that module+ games are no different. The statements "I hate modules" and "I hate railroading" are often aligned, but they're not the same thing.
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Advertising aside. I have come up against derision before for running APs.
An eye opener for one player was being allowed to play in 3 of them as I was running 3 of the same adventure for a bit. All three adventures had been heavilly modified in tone, plot points, npcs and events.
But the worst are GMs who think that they are better because they made their own worlds or adventures. Most of the time people aren't better writters than AP writers, and when they are there is an even smaller subset who are willing / able to make all the changes required to make a world feel alive for the players tailoring events and elements to them.
There are lazy AP GMs too, in my experience a bad GM will be a bad GM regardless of AP or homebrew.
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I think a lot of people see people say "I would rather play a sandbox campaign/a homebrew adventure" and think it means "I think APs are bad", when a lot of the time it is just a preference for a style of game where you have more freedom to run off and do stuff.
Take movies for example - I don't enjoy romantic comedies. I don't think that means they are bad or dumb or anything, I just don't enjoy Romance plots in movies (and find it exhausting that they are crammed into every genre). I'm not going to judge anyone or think less of anyone for watching them, it's just a difference in personal preference. There are movies and games that I don't enjoy, but would still give 4+ star ratings to because I can differentiate between what I like because of preference and what I like because of quality (imagine if a movie critic gave every Western 1 star because they just don't like Westerns).
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I've run homebrew, I've run modules, I've run society. There are definitely trash modules out there, as well as GM's that are bad at running AP's (though I've never run into one who I thought that would be better at running a homebrew or sandbox game)
Games are games, and personally, I can't imagine being beset with so much choice for people to GM that I'd be turning my nose up just because it's an AP.
Also...who's surprised to discover 1d4chan is still a thing?
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My creativity is quite good. Now that I am retired, I have time, too (no energy, but plenty of time). However, my creativity has weak areas. I don't write novels because my written dialogues are flat. And my villains end up practical rather than villainous. To gain a colorful adventure, I start with the Paizo adventure paths.
Don't sell yourself short.
I don't know what kind of dialogue you write, but flowery poetry isn't the sort of thing I expect people to say in my fantasy world.
As long as every guard walking around isn't talking about taking an arrow to the knee, I'm going to be okay with dialogue that seems mundane and everyday. Why? Because that's honestly more realistic for the average character to say. No one walks around speaking in iambic pentameter or incredibly vague "mysterious" warnings. Or if they did we would all avoid them for being the crazy person.
Just because it's a fantasy world doesn't mean all aspect need to be "fantastic". In fact, the juxtaposition of the mundane next to the fantastical is what makes up part of the fantasy.
Come on, who among us doesn't know "I don't think he knows about second breakfast"?
As for practical villains...I rather like practical villains. They make sense and are relatable. You can only have so many villains who are out to destroy the world because their god thinks it would be neat.
Having a villain who wants to destroy a town because he wants to turn it into something else, or take all the resources or something like that is much more believable for me.
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I think a lot of people see people say "I would rather play a sandbox campaign/a homebrew adventure" and think it means "I think APs are bad", when a lot of the time it is just a preference for a style of game where you have more freedom to run off and do stuff.
...and the module/homebrew slider is actually independent of the railroad/sandbox slider. As a pretty clear example, based on what @considerably is saying, Abomination Vaults is basically a sandbox module (with a sandbox scoped to the town and the dungeon).
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When I GM, I prefer homebrew campaigns as a big part of the fun for me is world building and coming up with storylines. Modules are a good source of inspiration though!
As a player, I don't mind modules but I do tend to find they lean too heavily on combat. I'm personally not a big fan of dungeons, but they are fine in moderation, but sometimes modules have too many dungeons for my liking. But a GM can definitely cut down the amount of combats (my group uses milestone leveling so missing XP isn't a problem).
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My creativity is quite good. Now that I am retired, I have time, too (no energy, but plenty of time). However, my creativity has weak areas. I don't write novels because my written dialogues are flat. And my villains end up practical rather than villainous. To gain a colorful adventure, I start with the Paizo adventure paths.
Don't sell yourself short.
I don't know what kind of dialogue you write, but flowery poetry isn't the sort of thing I expect people to say in my fantasy world.
As long as every guard walking around isn't talking about taking an arrow to the knee, I'm going to be okay with dialogue that seems mundane and everyday. Why? Because that's honestly more realistic for the average character to say. No one walks around speaking in iambic pentameter or incredibly vague "mysterious" warnings. Or if they did we would all avoid them for being the crazy person.
Just because it's a fantasy world doesn't mean all aspect need to be "fantastic". In fact, the juxtaposition of the mundane next to the fantastical is what makes up part of the fantasy.
Come on, who among us doesn't know "I don't think he knows about second breakfast"?
My views on the language of fantasy are strongly influenced by Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night where she tells how fantasy dialects contribute to setting and character.
Nevertheless, while my inability to write consistent individual voices stops me from writing stories for sale, it has little effect on my gamemastering. Modules don't provide dialog. They sometimes provide an introductory speech by a villain, but after that, every word is up to me. My players are accustomed to every NPC sounding like an American with a Michigan accent (I left Michigan in 1991, but my accent persists).
As for practical villains...I rather like practical villains. They make sense and are relatable. You can only have so many villains who are out to destroy the world because their god thinks it would be neat.
Having a villain who wants to destroy a town because he wants to turn it into something else, or take all the resources or something like that is much more believable for me.
My wife has learned to exploit my villain's practicality. If her character can keep the villain talking and explaining himself, then he grows more practical as I try to fill out the character's motives. And then her character can make a deal. This is why the party did not fight the black dragon Ibzairiak, final boss of Fangs of war. Instead, they talked him into breaking with the hobgoblin Ironfang Legion and allying with the Chernesardo Rangers.
Though the players exploiting practicality often leads to unusual adventures. At the beginning of The Divinity Drive, 6th module of Iron Gods, my wife's gadgeteer character talked to the final boss Unity over the radio and asked for a job as repair crew. And they were hired! I had to toss out the plot of the module, add extra rooms because they were no longer railroaded by the fights, and invent repair tasks for them. The new storyline led to very unusual encounters, such as (Make a Roll for Existential Philosophy (Divinity Drive Spoiler).
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I can understand the issue of being unable to write individual voices, and now have a better understanding of what you mean when you describe your dialogue as flat. Although I wouldn't use flat to describe that myself, but rather as lacking unique identity. Regardless, for an RPG I think it's not a big problem. When I GM most dialogue is presented in the 3rd person so I too lack uniqueness in dialogue.
As for the practicality of villains allowing the party to bargain with them, I don't think that's always a bad thing. Although if it happens to often I have to wonder if you're not putting enough into the motivation behind and the "momentum" of the characters actions thus far. Unless the PCs are going to give the BBEG everything they want in the first place I'm not sure if makes sense for the BBEG to stop what they're doing. Or to even trust the PCs to do a thing (like repair their ship).
Still, I enjoy that kind of "wacky, off the wall" storyline as combat is actually not all the interesting in the overarching story but is very engaging as an individual event. Balancing these two types of things is what makes for a fun engaging story overall, IMO.