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The opportunity cost point is a fair one, Voss. I am absolutely not interested in buying books based on whatever celebrity D&D nonsense is going on out there, but if it is taking time from the official release schedule just to pander, yeah, I am not a huge fan of that.

There again, the lack of mechanical bloat is one of the things I like about 5e. I am already irritable with my players trying to source things from Xanathar's Guide to Everything without buying the book themselves.

It doesn't matter if the book is a weird dark comedy. The fluff around the crunch never actually matters. The only thing that matters is if any of it is useful to you and your group.

If they release a resource book that has all the things you need to build and run organizations either as a DM that is employing the players or as players starting a business then that can be a very valuable tool.

That being said, dnd releases books that are not especially great resources of tools for DMs so good luck getting the book it should be.

On the other hand it's not wizards thats making it so maybe the PA guys will actually be able to fill it with useful crunch.

Fair point. I think the danger with releasing too much crunch and additional systems is that it makes it harder for novice GMs to cope with stuff that their players bring to the table. I like that 5e has a pretty slow release schedule in that regard, but it puts off a lot of the veteran players in my old group who want something to sink their teeth into, mechanically.

That depends on how the crunch is presented.

I think I mentioned this in the Pathfinder thread but the books they releases are utter garbage for how the vast majority of DMs actually run their games and use the books.

The players never follow the plan laid out by the adventure books and the DM needs to adjust on the fly anyway. Not only that, they present every adventure in this strict nuanced preparation heavy way that gives every NPC motivations and personalities that the players just may never interact with. All the best DM tips involve less preparation about things that may never come up and more sets of little tools to quickly adjust when the players make choices you could never have planned for anyway. Most experienced DMs want to tell their story, not the books and just pick and choose pieces they like to socket into their game anyway.

What I really want is a series of books that offers tool boxes for DMs.

Make a book for each terrain type on earth. "Forest" for example.

Chapter 1) give 3 examples of the types of communities that would crop up in forests. Be they nomadic, tree dwelling, whatever. Go over resources they might specialize in gather and the things they tend to lack and need to trade for. Explain maybe food stuffs. Basically a culture builder that is race and setting neutral so if you need to create a settlement you can and make it believable. Throw in some tables at the end for randomly generating culture features.

Chapter 2) Go over how some older civilizations that are now long gone might have left remnants in this type of terrain. What ruins can we expect to survive and in what state. Again, tables for generation.

Chapter 3) The creatures that inhabit that type of terrain. Go from mundane animals to some exotic crazy things. Toss in some big stuff. Mention rarity. Provide 2 or 3 or 5 random encounter tables that specify different abundances of different things for if the party are lost/exploring that type of terrain.

Chapter 4) How to use the book. Here you provide some example plot hooks, you mention how some of those more exotic creatures could come into play, you mention some treasures that might be hidden and you provide traps, poisons, and diseases that might be found in such a climate or used by those cultures. If it's a desert or arctic book you provide rules for extreme heat and/or extreme cold and describe what happens to people as they go through heat stroke/frostbite and die from exposure. In the jungle talk about monsoons and flooding rivers. In the plains talk about tornadoes. In the coastal book mention hurricanes.

Get them all as a series and the DM has a collection of resources to build a world and run it instead of a linear path telling somebody elses stories in somebody elses world.

That sounds like an awesome book, I would definitely buy such a sourcebook!

When I think of crunch I dislike it tends to be the "player facing" stuff that bloats the game out with too many options to keep track of. This is probably because I often have players who refuse to learn the rules, but still want to use the system to their advantage, so I have to invest a lot of time into auditing their characters, which is tedious. In 5e it is relatively easy because of the limited number of ways to build your character and the general lack of crazy synergies. The broken stuff tends to be pretty obvious and straightforward. Compare to PF where a lot of the fun for players is making a certain "build" with feats and abilities from as many sourcebooks as you will let them use.

I see this even in 5e, with my student group always pushing for as much mechanical advantage as possible by trying to take stuff from XGTE or DNDwiki.com (cuse that wretched hive of OP homebrew).

@Lance845: I agree with Da Boss, that idea for source books does sound great. When you were talking about communities based on the terrain type, it reminded me of a book a read where there was a village in a forest where the main occupation was lumber production, the villages name was "Cutter's Hollow". It would be nice for these books to go into common architecture styles for each area too.

Yup. Thats the kind of thing I want. If a community lives in the forest they obviously have to use the resources available. How big can they get on that? What does that end up looking like?

We as DMs can then break the rules and add in our own quirks but it would be awesome to have a series of tool box books to lay a foundation on.

Wizards, Pazio, and basically every other game company out there release all their supplements wrong. It's crap that they make these prebuilt adventure paths instead of these tool boxes. I mean... sure, outline an adventure in the back of the tool box as an example of putting it all together. But give me the damn tools up front instead of me having to sift through YOUR adventure for pieces I like.

I do think Wizards (or an enterprising third party) would do well at some point to release a book that has basically no rules content, but is packed full of advice on the creative side of things. How to build a world that makes sense and is engaging, how to roleplay a character in a way that lines up with your stats and the game's setting, how to write stories that make use of what's in the world and aren't linear, that sort of thing.

Honestly, I think the biggest issue with 5e in general is that there's so much 'assumed' knowledge they omit from the books. There's basically nothing on roleplaying or worldbuilding beyond some tables to roll on if you're lazy or don't care that much, and I think that's because they work on the assumption that a lot of this is still that will be passed down from older players to newer ones simply by dint of the audience growing.

But the success of Matt Colville's Running The Game series, for instance, which often doesn't even touch on rules but covers history, politics, characters, worldbuilding, shows that there's clearly an audience for something like that. I can see why Wizards wouldn't necessarily publish it as once you strip away the rules there's nothing inherently on-brand about it, but surely there's a third party publisher out there who has the inclination to put something like this out there.

I wonder how people find the time to follow a 'celebrity' group, DnD is already a time vampire. As a player I have to spend 4.5 hours a week playing the campaign, along with extra time writing about my character and painting up models for him. The last thing I want after all that is more DnD, and I can only imagine what it would be like if you're a DM!

 Gitzbitah wrote:
You know, I've seen that opinion quite a bit on the internet. I have the opposite take on it- being employed in a corporation run by a veteran adventurer makes a lot more sense for a group of new heroes than 6 random guys who meet in a tavern and decide to stick together and go face mortal peril. You'll stick it out to improve your odds of surviving.

downside :



.. from 1981.

nothing new under etc etc etc

 Kroem wrote:
I wonder how people find the time to follow a 'celebrity' group, DnD is already a time vampire. As a player I have to spend 4.5 hours a week playing the campaign, along with extra time writing about my character and painting up models for him. The last thing I want after all that is more DnD, and I can only imagine what it would be like if you're a DM!

I tried watching some streams and podcasts to get a feel for roleplaying, but I do have to say, DnD is a game that is utterly boring to watch. If you're not actively involved in it, then it's just watching people talk in funny voices about things with no visual reference and no action.

And I definitely think something like "Source Book: Forgotten Realms" that contained mostly background info and stuff would be a lot of help. It's really hard building a character backstory when you don't have any reference material to really help you. DnD wikis are amazingly sparse for such an old game with such a big community, and they have more on rules than world building. My first character literally lived under a rock just to explain how I didn't know jack gak about anything in-universe.

Strokes for folks, I guess. I'd take a few hours of Critical Role over most stuff on TV.

It's almost certainly a uniquely slow form of narrative compared to books or shows or movies, with 5 or 6 hours between action sequences and then 3 hours to resolve a 60-second fight, but it's the stuff that fills that time that makes it great. A show or movie is usually one thing, a D&D game (played or watched) can be by turns an action fantasy epic, a detective story, a political intrigue, a sitcom, a family drama, an improv comedy show... Rarely does it sit on one thing long enough to get boring, for me at least. And when you're a dozen episodes in and you've already spent upwards for 40 hours with these character, you'll kind of watch them do anything.

It certainly does take some imagination, and thus more investment than something where all the visuals, locations, music ect is there for you, but that's part of the fun. There's a reason so many of these shows' communities have a huge fanart output, which in turn feeds into the imagination process of what follows.

It's not for everyone, and if you've tried it and bounced off that's definitely a fair response, but I'll always find time for it. And that's on top of an average 2 games a week of my own. On the other hand, I can't watch sport on TV for more than about 30 seconds without feeling my brain switch off, so I totally get where you're coming from.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:

And I definitely think something like "Source Book: Forgotten Realms" that contained mostly background info and stuff would be a lot of help. It's really hard building a character backstory when you don't have any reference material to really help you. DnD wikis are amazingly sparse for such an old game with such a big community, and they have more on rules than world building. My first character literally lived under a rock just to explain how I didn't know jack gak about anything in-universe.

I do think one of the best arguments for homebrew settings, providing you've got a DM willing to put the effort in (and it is a lot of effort, to be fair), is that you can kind of get around this as you have a direct channel to the person who can give you this info. You don't need to buy 4 different books to learn about the culture of Elves in the setting, or get the details on a war that's just ended, or ask why the Dragons don't exist any more. It's a lot of work on the DM side, but a fantastic resource for the players.

The Acquisition Inc. podcasts are what got me into DnD. The first podcast they did with Wil Wheaton, the joking and banter among the party which slowly dies down over the course of the fight against the necromancer and his dogs (including Rudy the Undead Hound) as party member goes down. Jerry Holkins repeated critical failures, including that critical failure, and the day being saved by the redshirt made for a great climax. That hush after Jerry rolls the die is wonderful, you can just tell from it that it is yet another 1 (or, as Scott and Mike put it "It wasn't even a one! It was the goddamn symbol dice!" "They had run out of numbers!"). And then he uses Wil's encounter power to re-roll...

There are some games that I don't mind listening to as a podcast, but I definitely don't really have time to watch stuff. I tried, but I couldn't. I bounced off Critical Role because it didn't feel like a "real" game to me. I watched Matt Colville's stream and I liked it, but not enough to keep watching (I think my style is pretty similar to his these days, and not really like the Mercer style any more.)

My issue with celebrity D&D is that it makes people think they have to play the game one way or whatever. We have enough one true wayism in our hobby, and I am a bit put off by it.
I am also not particularly likely to like someone's design just because they are a charismatic person who runs a well produced podcast or stream, the two skill sets are pretty different.

The only 2 I have been able to really get into is DnD is for Nerds and Harmond Quest.

Harmond quest has animated bits and has one of the main dudes behind rick and morty.

DnD is for nerds has the dm making all the rolls so there is no time spent asking about numbers for all the various stuff. Also, the first 2 "seasons" focus on the same cast of characters, but afterwards they just start telling smaller stories with new characters every time and it keeps it all very lively and interesting with different tones and themes.

Yeah, I agree that it's hard to watch D&D streams and such, but I really enjoy them for playing while I'm painting minis or crafting (Though recently I have been doing audio books). It's hard to keep up with them, even though I devote a lot of time to the hobby, I can't seem to keep up with how much is streamed. I watched Team Four Star's "At the Table" as my main D&D stream. I also watched all of the short lived Dungeons and Cosmonauts. It didn't have as high production value as many D&D streams, but I liked it. I've also watched some of Matt Colville's games, but was never able to get into Critical Role, I think because it was an overwhelming amount to catch up on (then I stopped watching D&D streams for a while, right when they started the new campaign).

 Kroem wrote:
I wonder how people find the time to follow a 'celebrity' group, DnD is already a time vampire. As a player I have to spend 4.5 hours a week playing the campaign, along with extra time writing about my character and painting up models for him. The last thing I want after all that is more DnD, and I can only imagine what it would be like if you're a DM!

From my experience, you follow a "celebrity" group when your own group has fizzled or you are not actively playing.

A couple of people in my group watch Critical Role. They enjoy it. They also play, obviously. Me, I'd rather go through various rpg material for inspiration for campaigns and characters, etc.

My one concern about all of this would be some sort of "One-True-Way-To-Play-ism" that these programs may engender.

 reds8n wrote:

downside :

Spoiler:

.. from 1981.

nothing new under etc etc etc

I recall getting this issue in the mail, BITD when I had a subscription. However, A real D&D tax man carried a trident. In some earlier issue there was a tax-man NPC, IIRC. The April 1980 April Fool's edition (issue #36)

 Lance845 wrote:
That depends on how the crunch is presented.

I think I mentioned this in the Pathfinder thread but the books they releases are utter garbage for how the vast majority of DMs actually run their games and use the books.

The players never follow the plan laid out by the adventure books and the DM needs to adjust on the fly anyway. Not only that, they present every adventure in this strict nuanced preparation heavy way that gives every NPC motivations and personalities that the players just may never interact with. All the best DM tips involve less preparation about things that may never come up and more sets of little tools to quickly adjust when the players make choices you could never have planned for anyway. Most experienced DMs want to tell their story, not the books and just pick and choose pieces they like to socket into their game anyway.

What I really want is a series of books that offers tool boxes for DMs.

Make a book for each terrain type on earth. "Forest" for example.

Chapter 1) give 3 examples of the types of communities that would crop up in forests. Be they nomadic, tree dwelling, whatever. Go over resources they might specialize in gather and the things they tend to lack and need to trade for. Explain maybe food stuffs. Basically a culture builder that is race and setting neutral so if you need to create a settlement you can and make it believable. Throw in some tables at the end for randomly generating culture features.

Chapter 2) Go over how some older civilizations that are now long gone might have left remnants in this type of terrain. What ruins can we expect to survive and in what state. Again, tables for generation.

Chapter 3) The creatures that inhabit that type of terrain. Go from mundane animals to some exotic crazy things. Toss in some big stuff. Mention rarity. Provide 2 or 3 or 5 random encounter tables that specify different abundances of different things for if the party are lost/exploring that type of terrain.

Chapter 4) How to use the book. Here you provide some example plot hooks, you mention how some of those more exotic creatures could come into play, you mention some treasures that might be hidden and you provide traps, poisons, and diseases that might be found in such a climate or used by those cultures. If it's a desert or arctic book you provide rules for extreme heat and/or extreme cold and describe what happens to people as they go through heat stroke/frostbite and die from exposure. In the jungle talk about monsoons and flooding rivers. In the plains talk about tornadoes. In the coastal book mention hurricanes.

Get them all as a series and the DM has a collection of resources to build a world and run it instead of a linear path telling somebody elses stories in somebody elses world.

Uh, pass. WotC made those books for 3rd edition: It's Hot Outside, It's Cold Outside, It's Wet Outside and It's Not Outside. (Sandstorm, Frostburn, Stormwrack and Dungeonscape) They were terrible and sold poorly.
TSR also did the Wilderness and Dungeoneers Survival Guides at the end of 1st edition. They were raided for the non-weapon proficiencies for 2nd edition and not much else.

On the other hand, people do buy the Paizo books, even the tiny overpriced and overspecialized ones. I'm not really convinced that the 'vast majority' don't use them or find them utter garbage.

I very much doubt that anything WotC published is anything like the thing I suggested. I doubly doubt that TSR did it either.

The books I was suggesting don't have anything at a surface level for players because I am not looking for anything that is necessarily for any particular game system. I am looking for world building books which comes with seeds for plot hooks and ways to introduce or run content within the world.

These are DM tools. Not a players guide for more feats spells and weapon options.

Maybe it's different in your part of the world, but I have never been a part of, ran, or seen anyone run, a campaign that the DM didn't make up themselves. I have, not once, seen anyone get any of the books with campaigns in them, and use them for anything but picking out the bits they liked for their own games.

Sounds like you are talking more about a world Atlas than anything else. From the wikipedia, the books Voss ided do look like what you're talking about- and if they were historically bad sellers I could see WoTC dismissing the concept.

5e is very much aimed at a broad demographic, and WoTC are actively working to expand that market. You can see evidence for that in most every book appealing to DMs and players. Volo's contains lots of monster PC classes, along with detailed cultural write ups of monsters. Then, they're actively courting new players- last year they tried to grab Magic players, this year they're going after Stranger Things fans and fans of gaming streaming. If this does well, you know they'll release something based on Matt Mercer next year.

At the same time, they're doing stuff for grognards- Ghosts of Saltmarsh looks to be pure nautical nostalgia.

If environmental supplements were created, I'd imagine they'd be presented with an attached campaign and 2 new races, at which point it would be difficult to determine the difference from a campaign book.

Now that's a really fascinating experience, Lance. I almost always start from a campaign straight from the book. And, inevitably, it ends up being mostly my own creation, because no campaign survives contact with the players. But they're lovely jumping off points.

Less an Atlas. I have owned those. The GreyHawk Gazeteer was a 3rd ed map of the Flanaese region of Oerth with a guide to the regions, nations, and cities.

That was basically an Atlas of the Greyhawk setting.


As to the books Voss mentions. Here is a quote from Sandstorm.

This beautifully illustrated supplement continues a series of releases that focus on how the environment can affect D&D gameplay in every capacity. Sandstorm™ contains rules on how to adapt to hazardous hot and arid weather conditions, such as navigating desert terrain and surviving in fierce heat or harsh weather. There are expanded rules for environmental hazards and manipulation of hot weather elements, as well as new spells, feats, magic items, and prestige classes. New monsters associated with deserts and wastelands are included, as well as variants on current monsters. Sandstorm provides enough adventure material included for months of gameplay.

So I would assume that roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 of this books content involves prestiege classes (that are overly specialized for specific environments and thus basically useless), equipment, spells (again overly specialized and basically useless), feats, (same again), and monsters which are mostly going to "an ork, but this time hot!".

There are probably 2-3 pages on hot weather rules and how it can impact players in probably overly complex ways. And then a bunch of fluff. This and the others like it that sold poorly, are typical WotC overly specialized books that were basically boxes of player options not DM tools. None of this helps a DM build a world and run a game. It's just some more monster manual entries and character options.


Heres what it doesn't have that I want.
1) Civilizations that live in those environments and how.
2) ruins that would be left in those environments and what impact those environments have on those ruins over time.
3) tables not just for super special monster variants but general wildlife encounters and their place in the ecosystem.
4) Diseases, Poisons, and Traps indexes for a DM to use to build their own dungeons, encounters, trials, and tribulations.
5) A sections for bringing all those bits together and how best to build something fun out of it.


What I am talking about is a general guideline of an environment, with examples to get your ideas flowing (or to use) and tables for generating content to populate your own world or help run it.

A DMG for example might have a random encounter table for different environments. But it will be a single table for each environment.

When the whole book is about "forests" in general the section of the types of creatures that inhabit a Forest can include 5 tables for encounters while trekking through the woods with different mixes and/or probabilities based on the type of forest you want it to be along with some guide lines for building your own random encounter tables or adjusting the ones you have. Some tips for including 2 tables and rolling on 1 the first 2 times you do so and the 2nd the 3rd time just to add more mix to what can be happening in this environment in the world.

Something about the ease of foraging in a forest vs the difficulty of foraging in a desert (in their respective books).

What I am talking about is very content dense with guidelines, tips, and tricks for the dm to work with.

Wizards has never released that book. And the books they did release were overly specialized dross for the players.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As another, potentially better, example of my problems with the current product line and my wants, I was just at my local comic/game store and came across pathfinders Ultimate Intrigue book.

This book is roughly 250 pages. Only 50ish of which are about rules or whatever for a dm to run a game about intrigue. None of those pages talk much about potential pitfalls when planning out games about intrigue, social encounters, or plots that amount to mysteries. So little of it is tips for how to build a plot based on intrigue. What is there is mostly amounts to foot notes.

What it does provide is some sub system frame works for how the players can make a dc x check to convince npcs to help or hinder or whatever. How "influence" can be a kind of currency for them and how that can be used to get them access to magic or items or helpers. So basically 50 pages of rules for a dm to learn so the players have more tools in their tool box, but NOTHING that provides better tools for building the adventure to begin with. Nothing to streamline preparation, or help keep something as complex as intrigue managable despite the players unwitting actions. How is a topic as potentially complex as running intrigue in a game relegated to less than 1/5th the page count?

The other 200 pages are more class options, spells, feats, equipment, etc etc... That you would expect from all these books.


For a DM to find tools to help improve the way they run their games they either need to look for small publications like the lazy dms guide book, forums for dm advice, or blogs like the alexandrian. Literally the only book in the entire line up with anything actually truely helpful for the dm is the dmg. One of the 3 best selling books btw and the only one wholly set up to help the dm run the game.

 Paradigm wrote:
I do think Wizards (or an enterprising third party) would do well at some point to release a book that has basically no rules content, but is packed full of advice on the creative side of things. How to build a world that makes sense and is engaging, how to roleplay a character in a way that lines up with your stats and the game's setting, how to write stories that make use of what's in the world and aren't linear, that sort of thing.

Honestly, I think the biggest issue with 5e in general is that there's so much 'assumed' knowledge they omit from the books. There's basically nothing on roleplaying or worldbuilding beyond some tables to roll on if you're lazy or don't care that much, and I think that's because they work on the assumption that a lot of this is still that will be passed down from older players to newer ones simply by dint of the audience growing.

But the success of Matt Colville's Running The Game series, for instance, which often doesn't even touch on rules but covers history, politics, characters, worldbuilding, shows that there's clearly an audience for something like that. I can see why Wizards wouldn't necessarily publish it as once you strip away the rules there's nothing inherently on-brand about it, but surely there's a third party publisher out there who has the inclination to put something like this out there.

True there is an audience for such things but it is more general.
There are some very good books on worldbuilding out there.
A particualar favourite of mine is Hello Future me, Tough he talks from a novel writing point of view His on Worlbuilding series is great.

@Lance: I think you're missing the point of adventure modules: the idea is that DM's can take that book and run the story. No immediate writing required. Guiding your players in what they do isn't that hard. And if they do go of track. That's where all the stuff you called useless a few posts back comes in handy.

Most beginning (and even veteran platers) don't want big lore, just the current ongoings and the current story/ events.

@Earth127 As Gitzbitah said, no plot survive contact with the players. They make plans you didn't think of, they ask for going to places that re not in the module. Events unfold differently because it's not a premade plot, it's a story you are all telling together.

I don't have a problem with adventure modules in general, but they way they are written is the exact opposite of how any veteran DM is preparing their games.

I didn't say I wanted big lore. I said I wanted information and tools to help build and run things quickly so it's easier to make up on the go and do preparation light work on DMing.

I think adventure modules probably work well for people like me, who are fairly new to tabletop role playing and are still trying to wrap their heads around exactly how much freedom you actually have in these systems.

Then they become kind of an annoyance, because you reach that point where you come up with a fun sounding plan/solution to the problem at hand, but the DM follows the book and shoehorns you right into the next plot point because they didn't have anything to make that plan work.

So kinda mixed feelings on it. I works really well when I'm uncertain what I'm doing, but then when the group comes up with some off the walls idea, the DM either has to think fast or steer the car back onto the road.

 LordofHats wrote:
I think adventure modules probably work well for people like me, who are fairly new to tabletop role playing and are still trying to wrap their heads around exactly how much freedom you actually have in these systems.

Then they become kind of an annoyance, because you reach that point where you come up with a fun sounding plan/solution to the problem at hand, but the DM follows the book and shoehorns you right into the next plot point because they didn't have anything to make that plan work.

So kinda mixed feelings on it. I works really well when I'm uncertain what I'm doing, but then when the group comes up with some off the walls idea, the DM either has to think fast or steer the car back onto the road.

The thing is if you are a new player how much freedom you have is nigh infinite. You might be learning that, but it's the DM who leaves it all open for you to make your choices and discover the consequences. What the adventure modules have or don't have is of little consequence because a special DM trick is that a lot of what happens behind the screen could be as simple as having you guys suggest a solution and the DM saying "Yup! That works!". It makes you guys feel clever and like you "won" when there really was a secret panel inside the drawer even if there never was one to begin with. Part of preparation light DMing is knowing that the players are going to come up with stuff you never thought of and instead of spending all your time telling players no and forcing them onto a path you planned out meticulously (or the adventure module was written meticulously to be), you instead just let the players participate more in the story telling.

The players don't know that you never planned for there to be the secret compartment that houses clue Y to the plot. You just knew that you had Clue Y and the players needed to find it somewhere. You had some rough ideas of how you could get it into their hands, but when the players came up with the idea of checking the drawer for compartments they gave the answer to you. And because they don't know how much or little work you actually do preparing they both feel like they figured out your little game AND you got away with not wasting your time creating a lot of stuff they were never going to think of.


If you are a new DM however the adventure modules do not prepare you well for the level of freedom the players have or for being prepared to take on the creative solutions the players are going to throw at you. Each NPC comes with almost a script. But it's a limited script for the information they need to give to move the plot and nothing for the crap the players are going to actually say to them. It says this item is in this room and requires DC whatever search to find. Well.... what if the players don't decide to go into that room? What if they fail that search? Adventure modules could be presented in much better ways to help a DM actually run the game in the way these games always go, but they are not. New players have every tool at their disposal. New DMs have the DMG and the accumulated general advice they can find on forums and in magazines. Adventure modules need to be written better.

The thing is if you are a new player how much freedom you have is nigh infinite.

I'm more referring to realizing that's true, than whether or not it is true. People coming into Tabletop RPGS from other kinds of entertainment I think take awhile to realize how off the rails they can go. It's not something you really appreciate on your first few sessions and adventures. Especially not if you're accustomed to video game RPGS, where you at most have a handful of options and are accustomed to the game itself kind of guiding you through what to do next.

Then comes the issue that some players seem to have little interest in getting creative and are okay with following the rails cause that's how they enjoy the game.

I'm relatively new to DM'ing, so I don't claim to be an expert - but it seems like adventure modules make a better "jumping off point" than the stated purpose of actually running them by the book, especially if you have a group who are inclined to ignore obvious hooks, or are more self-motivated to go and find their own story to follow.
I've not used any modules myself, but I would consider it if I had less free time to prep sessions, just to have something to improvise from.

I think there is no inherent problem with written adventures, but I think the only one Wizards has released that is really appropriate for new GMs is the one in the Starter Set.
The others are huge big hardbacked books with loads of info in them, it really is a lot to process for a new GM. And there is a feeling that "we have to get through the book!" that probably comes from that too.
In dungeons and dragons the story is what happens at the table, not whatever was planned out ahead of time by the DM. It is totally okay to drop a thread if it is not proving satisfying. I think these big books give a sense of security, like if I follow this I will have a fairly epic campaign of good quality, but it is not actually much easier than stringing together a series of smaller adventures, and that will often be just as fun for you and your players, and less stress.
When I started I had a lot more free time than money so I used to make all my stuff from scratch. Now I buy those books as collectors items and to loot for locations as Lance says. It saves me time. Then I just drop the locations into my world and they are ready to go once I want them.

In that sense I wish Wizards would release more bite size simple content designed to be played independent of any greater plot (perhaps with some recurring themes to make it easier to thread into a plot if you like). I would prefer a small adventure in a single location over these globe trotting things. That is what most people actually play.

I do like megadungeons too, but mostly as a design geek, I like looking at how people make them and the imaginary geography of them. I have a fair collection of megadungeons at this point and have run a lot of them, and I think it is my favourite style of play these days, despite not having done a lot of it when I started out.

I've not tried a megadungeon as yet, but there's an underdark plot hook that I'm planning to dangle in front of my players soon, which I guess is megadungeon-adjacent at the very least.

I do like the idea of having content that comes without having a strongly baked-in plot, that would make me much more likely to invest.

As a new-ish DM, there's a lot of stuff I want to spend money on, and huge, self-contained Modules are near to the bottom of the list, but a compendium of easy to drop-in content would be near the top.