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| #1ZardnaarMar 17, 2015 13:27:24 |
As the title says. Modern adventures these days are often adventure path type books which means some sort of metaplot of connect stories set over 15-20 levels.
The AP format as such is around 13 years old now and D&D still has not had a great non Paizo AP made in those 13 years. The last great AP as such for D&D was either Age or Worms or the Savage tide made during the 3.5 run by the folks at Paizo when they had Dungeon magazine. I suspect even the most rabid Paizo hater will likely concede their APs are generally quite good althoguh they have done the odd meh one mostly some of the older 3.5 ones between Rise of the Runelords and the 1st few PFRPG ones. Even Paizos worst efforts are more average than out right bad from what I have seen although the last AP I looked at was in 2012 and the last one I played was their winter witch one briefly last year.
Now I have recently been looking for some decent D&D adventures and this includes looking at older adventures in Dungeon amgazine going back to 1E issue I have. I wish I had more Dungeons to be honest but I was late to the D&D party and they are hard to get in New Zealand even back in the day when they were in print.
This is not really a new thing, 4E was reknowned for a lack of quality adventures not helped by the early Dungeon PDFs when compared to some of the final in print Dungeons under Paizos tenure. Even going back to 3.0 things like City of the Spider Queen were more average than out right bad. A lot of crap adventures were made using the OGL.
I have also been looking at the authors of various adventures. Some names kept popping up again and again.
Richard Baker Wolfgang Baur Grant Boucher Monte Cook Ed Greenwood Gary Gygax James Jacobs Eric Mona Chris Perkins Carl Sargent Christina Styles James M Ward Steve Winter Skip Williams
Note this list is full of TSR alumni although some of them suuch as Grant Boucher I do not recall ever worked for TSR. Boucher was a recurring ontributer to Dungeon in the early issues. Other names are famous in D&D cicrles such as Gygax, Greenwood and Skip Williams AKA "The Sage" while James Jacobs and Erik Mona are now with Paizo. James Jacobs was 1st printed in Dungeon in issue 12 in the late 1980's. Monte may be associated with 3E but he also wrote Labyrinth of Madness for 2E, Carl Sagent is an old TSR employee who designed the Night Below while others such as Christina Styles is a Dungeon magazine veteran and makes 3PP OGL product. Greenwood, Winter, Skip Williams and James M Ward have been published as recently as Quests of Doom for 5E this year.
Note that my list is not a popularity contest but a lot of these authors are still active today most of them are not working for WoTC however. This list be not be exhaustive either as there are plenty of other authors around but it got me thinking about what makes a good adventure writer. It would seems. Note Mike Mearls was also a published writer for Dungeon magazine during 3E tenure. I regard Mearls as a good adventure writer probably not a great one. Even some of the greats however do not always get it right as I know Mearls got flak for Keep on the Shadowfell and HotDQ is average at best IMHO.
1. Experience. Most of these authors have been doing their thing for a while. 2. Most of them cut their teeth for TSR and/or AD&D or BECMI. 3. Most of them have been involved in Dungeon Magazine either as contributers or staff.
So I think that WoTC over the years with various staff purges and recent disasters and the seath of Dragon/Dungeon we are left with a design team with only a couple of experienced adventure designers. They have been out sourcing for a reason. I also suspect why 4E had mostly lack lustre adventures was because the designers themselves struggled with the system. Paizo more or less has a system or template they follow for their APs, on even modern takes on 5E adventures have a certain OSR vibe about them due to who has been writing them. Quests of Doom reminds me a ot of older D&D adventures both because of the 5E rules and the tone of the adventures with exploration and dungeon hacks where bad stuff can happen being present.
With the demise of Dungeon this also magnifies how the experienced authors have huge advantages over everyone else. There is now no new blood as such coming through the ranks so to speak via Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Every WoTC 5E adventure has been designed by AD&D era designers and for those of you who never played AD&D it has been out of print for 15 years (excluding reprints). Paizo has been cultivating new blood via their RPG superstar competitions and I do not always recognise the names of some of their contributers but I do not pay that much attention to new Paizo product but Paizo is the baby of ex WoTC employees as Lisa Stevens was the women who combed through TSRs financials after the WoTC buyout. She put her house on the line to start the company. Other OGL products by other companies are also using ex TSR staffers it seems probaby because they can sell product and Morrus on ENworld admits the industry pays established authers more than new ones. That makes perfect sense.
So thats the reason I think. All the great adventure designers for the most part no longer work for WoTC and are either freelancers now days or work for Paizo assuming they are still active. In Monte Cooks case Numeneria seems to be doing well and I bet that is because of Montes name on the cover. I think it is funny that 18 years after the death of TSR and 15 years after AD&D went out of print 5E is still drawing on TSR era designers to do its thing.
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| #2Slit518Mar 17, 2015 13:44:29 | I am hoping for an influx of smaller modules myself. Perhaps 1, 2, 3, maybe even 4 level gains at most. Instead, they have these huge, epic, series sprawling, level 1-20 (or 1-15) type adventures which are okay if you want to stay with one plot point. But most people like to play one character for a while, and experience many different things with that character.
It would be nice if WotC opened up their doors to the public to be able to submit smaller adventure ideas. |
| #3pukunuiMar 17, 2015 13:48:22 | 4e's Madness at Gardmore Abbey is one of the best D&D adventures out there. It's more of a sandbox than an AP and it comes with an awesome real Deck of Many Things.
So I would say that while WotC frequently doesn't make good adventures, I wouldn't say that they *can't*.
Also, APs predate WotC by a long shot. If you want to blame someone for the preponderance of plotted adventures, blame the Hickmans and their Dragonlance modules.
EDIT: Mearls and Perkins have both written plenty of awesome adventures over the years.
Also, Steve Winter's been involved with D&D for decades, and he is partly responsible for HotDQ, so experience doesn't always mean quality. |
| #4Mommy_was_an_OrcMar 17, 2015 13:57:20 | I think one of the other general problems is that editions are cycling too fast. Nowadays, if an adventure writer does something fresh and exciting in an adventure, the odds are that the rest of R&D are secretly testing out concepts for the next edition. |
| #5AaronOfBarbariaMar 17, 2015 13:56:17 | Answer: because "good adventure" is entirely subjective, and more often than not the author of an adventure will assume that the DM running it will actually be a DM and thus make adjustments to tailor the adventure to what their group enjoys, but many DMs that run adventure prodcuts expect to be able to run their group, no matter their personal style and how different from that of the author and the author's group it might be, through the adventure with zero alteration and find it perfectly suitable to them.
Of course, I'm not going as far as saying that you can't write an adventure badly - that's certainly possible - I'm just saying that not nearly as many of the adventures out there that get labelled "bad" are actually worse than the ones that get labelled "good." |
| #6ZardnaarMar 17, 2015 15:25:46 |
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| #7ZardnaarMar 17, 2015 15:26:34 |
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| #8UchawiMar 17, 2015 17:39:07 | I don't think WOTC is alone when it comes to making quality adventures, even Paizo gets in a rut. It is the same question when asking why hollywood can't make any good movies any more. Over time there is only so many ways to express yourself in a fantasy setting. The same could be stated for any other genre. It is hard to find a new idea that challenges the status quo. Definitely re-treading old adventures with a new spin is not the right direction. Just like I am not looking forward to the next star wars movies unless they move in a new direction. |
| #9Azzy1974Mar 17, 2015 18:22:11 |
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| #10RastapopoulosMar 17, 2015 19:07:51 |
Personally I prefer one-shot adventures I can fit into my own campaigns here and there. I don't think I would ever run a game where the whole campaign is one big premade set of published adventures. Most of the fun of being a DM to me is making up my own stuff, so whenever I use published adventures I prefer shorter ones that I can mix with my own material.
While on the topic, to me the BEST published adventures generally speaking were AD&D 2e Ravenloft's.
I raise my hat to the folks that did those, most of 2e's Ravenloft adventure's are real masterworks. |
| #11ZHDarkstarMar 17, 2015 20:31:03 |
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| #12Sands666Mar 17, 2015 20:09:54 |
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| #13pukunuiMar 17, 2015 20:27:26 |
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| #14abs1nthMar 17, 2015 20:46:34 | I don't know if it's hubris, personal bias or just differing tastes but I tend to find my own sh*t better than what I read in adventures. I feel like there's so much untapped potential in the medium, it still feels very young, like people are still trying to figure things out. The 5e rules show a more mature rule set but I can't help but feel that a lot of the design lessons learned are derived from video games.
With regards to adventures I just need to look at the way they are structured and present their information. I can't help but feel it is often less work to come up with something myself instead of reading through all the text until I understand what each thing in the adventure does. The biggest sin to me is wasting time and space on information that realistically doesn't affect play.
But also with the deisgn, so much seems so linear, so by the numbers. Do people really like linearity in tabletop games? That seems like the biggest strength compared to video games, that you can have a game where pretty much anything goes. I still haven't found an entire adventure that blew me away only parts that I thought were great. |
| #15RCanineMar 17, 2015 21:11:00 | I think there were some really great adventures in 4E's LFR system, and I think 5E D&D AL material has been of pretty good quality as well. Granted, I haven't been around forever, but I've definitely seen a big standard deviation amongst good and bad OP adventures. |
| #16Sands666Mar 17, 2015 22:56:38 |
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| #17TheNovaLordMar 18, 2015 3:18:45 | They need to contain lots stuff for the pc's to do I stopped playing PF APs because they read like a novel with the pc's just an inconvenient interference. Most game writers would rather be novelists I believe. We need game writers who want to be game writers. This to me is why a lot of PF adventures by 3PP are much better than paizo in house |
| (Reply to #10)arnwolf666 |
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| (Reply to #17)The_White_Sorcerer |
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| (Reply to #14)crimfan07 |
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| #21Ralif_RedhammerMar 18, 2015 7:32:43 | I haven’t tried running a module with 5e yet, but I always shied away from modules in 4e because of how long combat took – I figured it would take forever to get through a module. I am curious to tackle some of Goodman Games new 5e modules, though. |
| #22RastapopoulosMar 18, 2015 9:31:01 |
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| #23AdjuleMar 18, 2015 18:26:05 | Many cite the Dragonlance adventure modules (the ones that became the War of the Lance novels) as the first "adventure path", and depending on who you talk to, the beginning of the decline of the premade adventure. So APs have been around since the eighties.
I guess it depends on the players. Over on the Paizo forums, people applaud the 6-module 15 level APs as the greatest thing to happen to the hobby. Then you come over here and people hate on them pretty heavily. Maybe the storyline is easier to realize over 6 connected modules, compared to WotC's 1-2 modules. The Tyranny of Dragons was about 170 pages of adventure split over 2 modules. No idea how many pages the Elemental Evil will contain. The typical Paizo AP installment is about 55 pages of adventure, so about 330 pages. About 2x the page count for the same number of levels (15 or so). The Rise of the Runelords Anniversary edition itself is 430 pages in total, which includes the bestiaries and other non-adventure stuff.
Or it could be that the Forgotten Realms are just that boring. Or both. |
| #24AlHazredMar 19, 2015 5:21:00 | If I look at my favorite adventures from the past fifteen years, I see a few additional names: Richard Pett and Nicolas Logue. These were a couple of the Dungeon magazine authors whose stuff was so evocative, such as Richard Pett's "The Styes" from #121 and Nicolas Logue's "Chimes at Midnight" from #133. Just thought I should mention them as additions to the stable of reliable module authors. |
| #25ZardnaarMar 19, 2015 10:13:56 |
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| #26Brock_LandersMar 19, 2015 14:04:24 | In my 26 years of DMing, I have never felt the need to run a published adventure, I only ran one, once, the 2nd Ed Ravenloft adventure, Touch of Death, and that was an impromptu thing for a request at a barbecue. |
| #27Brock_LandersMar 19, 2015 14:06:04 |
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| (Reply to #27)AaronOfBarbaria |
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| #29GuntharMar 19, 2015 16:57:52 | Yeah, quite a few _1, _2, _3 modules were written, and some just blend together rather well anyway, ie: Dwellers of Forbidden City, Isle of Dread and Tomb of the Lizard King. |
| (Reply to #22)dmgorgon |
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| #31ZardnaarMar 19, 2015 19:06:56 |
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| #32ZardnaarMar 19, 2015 19:07:03 |
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| #33ZardnaarMar 19, 2015 19:09:17 |
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| #34pukunuiMar 19, 2015 19:40:06 |
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| (Reply to #19)crimfan07 |
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| (Reply to #21)crimfan07 |
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| (Reply to #33)AaronOfBarbaria |
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| #38arnwolf666Mar 19, 2015 23:49:29 | I think the key to doing a good adventure path is to almost have them as individual modules that are linked in with theme and sandbox it alot. I love adventure path's. I reccomend Kingmaker for a good sandbox adventure. But the thing is with all published adventures is to use them as inspiration and don't think twice about deviating from them when neccessary based on player choices. That is a real easy thing for me. If the players kill NPC X, then I invent NPC Y for later use. If a cult leader is killed a new one arises who may be just as bad. If you have players killing everything in sight, that is a problem for any game. If you have good aligned parties, I have had villains just surrender (rarely I admit), just to escape late. |
| #39Brock_LandersMar 20, 2015 0:38:28 |
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| #40ZardnaarMar 20, 2015 4:14:52 |
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| #41ZardnaarMar 20, 2015 4:22:58 |
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| (Reply to #37)crimfan07 |
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| #43RedSiegfriedMar 20, 2015 5:32:31 | I think I stopped caring about WotC D&D adventure modules when it seemed there was a pattern developing where every adventure had a big bad villain who was either a poorly thought out insane person, a poorly thought out woman, or a poorly thought out insane woman.
I know it wasn't really like that, it just seemed that way to me. |
| #44masterfat78Mar 20, 2015 9:56:57 |
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| #45FFSAAMar 20, 2015 11:00:05 | 5E can be difficult to write for and that hasn't helped anything. In the modules we have so far there have been a number of complaints that can be traced back to the system itself. Early character death is due to poor balance and high randomness in the first couple levels making characters far more fragile than their 4E equivalent. Also railroading is due to a number of things that have forced designers to either make up their own new rules or use combat rules to handle non-combat situations. |
| (Reply to #45)AaronOfBarbaria |
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| #47masterfat78Mar 20, 2015 12:07:26 |
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| #48Brock_LandersMar 20, 2015 12:27:24 |
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| (Reply to #44)arnwolf666 |
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| #50masterfat78Mar 20, 2015 14:51:23 |
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| #51masterfat78Mar 20, 2015 14:54:31 |
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| #52Brock_LandersMar 20, 2015 14:55:59 |
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| (Reply to #47)AaronOfBarbaria |
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| #54ZardnaarMar 20, 2015 16:23:22 |
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| (Reply to #44)crimfan07 |
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| #56Brock_LandersMar 20, 2015 17:48:53 |
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| #57ZardnaarMar 20, 2015 22:07:04 |
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| #58masterfat78Mar 21, 2015 7:27:40 |
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| #59AaronOfBarbariaMar 21, 2015 18:22:19 | I assign neither like or dislike to my disagreements with FFSAA, they are just a think that happens. And the comment from Mearls that you reference is being used out of context; it was not an expression that there is a problem, but rather a piece of advice that if you want X then you can do Y (start at highe level) to get it. Lastly, l am not saying 5th edition doesn't have any flaws, nor am I the one that brought up 4th edition. |
| #60pukunuiMar 22, 2015 1:28:24 |
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| #61masterfat78Mar 22, 2015 3:12:31 |
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| #62pukunuiMar 22, 2015 3:19:02 | My understanding is that one of the main complaints with 4e was that everyone started out a hero at 1st level. You couldn't do that "my PC is a Joe Shmoe commoner" thing that you could with previous editions. Therefore, the 5e designers deliberately made the first few levels weak and simple so that you could have that "not quite a hero yet" experience. When Mearls was talking about starting at 3rd level, he was meaning that you could skip ahead to that point where your character is a bona fide hero and not just a trainee anymore. |
| #63RamzourMar 22, 2015 3:22:02 | I honestly don't understand the complaints about 1st level being dangerous. You're supposed to level up to level 2 after one session (and level 3 after your second session) and there is no obligation that your first gaming session has to be full of combat. So if you don't like the fragility of level 1 PCs, then avoid combat (when possible) until level 2 or 3. I've run many 1st level games since 5e came out and not once was there a PC death. Of course, other groups might have a different experience. But like I said, if you find this a problem, then there are other ways to gain XP besides combat. |
| (Reply to #44)CCS |
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| (Reply to #51)arnwolf666 |
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| (Reply to #63)arnwolf666 |
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| (Reply to #61)AaronOfBarbaria |
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| #68RanthalanMar 22, 2015 14:38:13 | Level 1 in 5E is weak? I wonder what the people who think that would've thought of 1E. You kids with your multiple spells at 1st level, and don't even get me started about how cantrips weren't even a thing. *Shakes fist in impotent rage* |
| #69abs1nthMar 22, 2015 14:50:58 | I like level 1 a lot. What I don't like is the huge power jump between it and the second level. It's very difficult for me to rationalize and means I have to readjust all encounters afterwards at least to some degree. Makes it very difficult to have a sandbox and not become Oblivion, if you know what I mean. |
| (Reply to #69)AaronOfBarbaria |
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| #71masterfat78Mar 22, 2015 15:39:54 |
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| #72abs1nthMar 22, 2015 16:13:33 |
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| #73ZHDarkstarMar 22, 2015 16:07:03 | All I know is that the next time one of my players complain about an adventure, they're going to meet the legendary gelomancer, Bhyl Cauzbee. A single casting of Cauzbee's Jigglin' Painbow summons one of every ooze and gelatinous cube in the MM. |
| (Reply to #72)AaronOfBarbaria |
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| (Reply to #71)Ranthalan |
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| #76GwaithadorMar 22, 2015 17:49:58 | A fine list of module, adventure path, supermodule, mega adventurer designers. I'm a big fan of Mona and Jacobs because of what they did for Greyhawk in 3e. I think all the designers listed have more hits than misses. I think "adventure paths" were simply the refinement of the idea of modules that could be linked such as Against the Giants, The Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Shrine of the Kuo Toa, Vault of the Drow and Queen of the Demon Web Pits.
Regarding the side discussion of first levels. I think starting first level is very important to people unfamiliar with 5th edition. It allows them to learn the game mechanics in morsel size bits. Some new players unfamiliar with RPGs, previous D&D versions or the particulars of the 5e rule set benefit from the introductory/apprentice levels. Personally, I like starting first level, because those early adventures help me steer the direction of my character development. Something story wise might happen that makes me veer off in a direction I didn't anticipate in my character's trajectory. |
| #77abs1nthMar 22, 2015 20:29:22 |
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| #78arnwolf666Mar 22, 2015 23:31:32 | As much as I enjoy world building, sometimes, not all the time, you gotta focus more on the story than realism in power levels. I agree and can see why it is a problem. I put great thought into my settings trying to make it feel organic. I try to always have very powerful encounters that need avoided early on to keep that feel. I also try to keep very powerful NPC's around that may or may not like the PC's. Sometimes my NPC's are more realistic than the PC's in the sense that they don't always try to kill the PC's at low level. They look at the PC's as an annoyance and are more pissed at some of their henchman for not being able to take care of the problem or keep the PC's from even being aware that there was a problem. Much of that in 5E is easier for me now because players go through the levels so much faster these days. |
| #79ShasarakMar 23, 2015 0:49:55 |
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| #80RamzourMar 23, 2015 2:22:42 |
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| #81RamzourMar 23, 2015 2:25:45 |
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| #82ShasarakMar 23, 2015 3:36:57 |
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| #83RamzourMar 23, 2015 3:54:46 |
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| (Reply to #80)arnwolf666 |
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