Designing RPG Adventures With the Players And Not the GM In Mind, Part One

One of the first rules they teach you in those pesky freshman-year composition courses is "know your audience." Before you sit down to write a text, consider who's going to be reading it and plan accordingly. When it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I've always considered the game master to be the primary audience of published adventures. Game masters are far more likely than players to read the text of an adventure, so why wouldn't a designer write with the game master in mind?

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Because the peculiar genre of tabletop role-playing adventures draws a key distinction between the game master who reads the adventure and the audience of players who probably won't.

Joseph Goodman, the tabletop designer who runs Goodman Games, took a look at this distinction in a fascinating essay titled "A Publisher's Perspective On Adventure Modules That Don't Suck." The piece appears in a collection of over 20 such essays called How To Write Adventure Modules That Don't Suck, an expanded edition of which was published earlier this year from Goodman Games. The collection features essays brimming with game master advice and imaginative encounters ready to drop into virtually any fantasy role-playing game. There's even an essay on designing convincing alien races for science fiction settings. In this first part of the look at this book, and how it can impact your adventure creation, let's focus on Goodman's entry about what he looks for in high-quality adventure design.

Early in the essay, Goodman makes a point that hadn't occurred to me before, at least not in the direct way he words it. "First and foremost," Goodman writes, "a budding adventure author needs to keep one very important thing in mind: Your audience is playing, not reading."

It's fair to say that one sentence shifted my entire perspective on published RPG adventures. I'd always imagined that published adventures should take a game-master-first approach. Goodman, on the other hand, says the first goal of any adventure should be to "give the players a fun time." If I'd been asked what the primary objective of a published adventure should be before reading Goodman's essay, I would have said something like, "Provide the game master with the tools and instructions he or she needs to give the players a fun time." The difference is subtle, but the "players-as-primary-audience" paradigm should color every step of the design process, from the conception of the adventure onward.

What does that mean? For starters, Goodman recommends that adventure designers playtest their ideas at least twice before sitting down to write the final product, first with a group of players the designer knows personally and again with a group the designer doesn't know. Only if both playtest groups had fun should a designer start putting pen to paper, according to Goodman.

He also recommends that adventure designers thoroughly consider the strengths and weaknesses of their chosen system before writing. A fun adventure is one that plays to the strengths of the system being used, while avoiding its weaknesses or blind spots. Once a designer has developed the adventure in enough depth that it delivers a fun experience that plays to the strengths of its system, then (and only then) does Goodman recommend the designer start writing text meant for other game masters to use.

I virtually always take on the role of game master, and I used to judge published adventures from that perspective. If the game master can grasp the material easily, I thought, it would be likely that player fun would follow. Goodman's essay inspired me to start thinking about written adventures on two different axes, the more important of which focuses on what the players need rather than what the game master needs. Adventures that score well on the player-needs axis should feature a variety of challenges that make good use of the mechanics of the chosen system, and that they all link together to tell a coherent story. Adventures that score well on the game-master axis should present all those qualities through clear and concise text and illustrations that allow the game master to bring the adventure to life at the table with minimal fuss. It's a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation with a twist: which group should an adventure writer consider first, the game master or the play group?

It could be possible that an adventure would score well on one axis, while doing poorly on another. For instance, if you, as the game master, found an adventure module with well-written and polished text that conveys only dull ideas. Or, on the other hand, maybe some adventures showcase imaginative encounters that get lost in poorly written text or confusing organization. I suspect that the two axes aren't as mutually exclusive as they would seem to be. My hunch would be that an adventure can start out with fun concepts for players, but that it will also provide value for game masters as well.

So are there famous adventure modules that serve game masters well but lose sight of the needs of players, who are ultimately the true audience for a role playing game? What adventure modules do the best job of striking the balance of providing high-quality material for both the reader and the audience?

​contributed by Fred Love

 

[SMHWorlds]

I am not sure I entirely agree with Mr. Goodman. A module does indeed need to be written with its audience in mind, but the audience is the players and the game master, who is also a player though with different roles instead of just one. Ideally the module should be fun to run, without straying from the established system too many times, and fun to play by offering encounters that offer challenge. Those are the ideals of course and it can be hard hit the mark every time.

I am also not sure what "writing" for the players really means. Certainly I want my players to have fun even if they die horribly. Maximizing their good time makes sense, but doing so at the expense of the game master seems short sighted. Nine times out of ten my "side" the roles I play are going to lose and are designed to lose. So as a game master I like to get some usefulness out of them, give them a chance to live a little before they die horribly. More than just a well written module, some of the content needs to be fun for the game master as well. Ideally all of it will be.

Interesting though. I am not sure how I would describe my own designs.

 

[DragonBelow]

No link?

 

[ccs]

What adventure modules do the best job of striking the balance of providing high-quality material for both the reader and the audience?

I6 Ravenloft - the original from 1e.

 

[Lanefan]

It could be possible that an adventure would score well on one axis, while doing poorly on another. For instance, if you, as the game master, found an adventure module with well-written and polished text that conveys only dull ideas. Or, on the other hand, maybe some adventures showcase imaginative encounters that get lost in poorly written text or confusing organization. I suspect that the two axes aren't as mutually exclusive as they would seem to be. My hunch would be that an adventure can start out with fun concepts for players, but that it will also provide value for game masters as well.

I long ago found it true that some modules play better than they read (a lot of Judges' Guild stuff is like this) while others read better than they play. I don't think this is due to any specific intention of "writing for the player rather than the DM" because, really, how can one write for an audience-once-removed?

So are there famous adventure modules that serve game masters well but lose sight of the needs of players, who are ultimately the true audience for a role playing game?

Some of the old modules that started out as tournament adventures can be like this, unless the DM does some tweaking: lots of good DM advice but they don't play out well - too linear. Ghost Tower of Inverness is an example of such. Quite a few 4e-era modules have the same problem - too linear, not enough choice points; thus easy to DM but rather dull to play as you march through the gauntlet from one encounter area to the next.

What adventure modules do the best job of striking the balance of providing high-quality material for both the reader and the audience?

L1 Secret of Bone Hill is good for this - great design, easy enough to DM, players love it.

And there's a third type of module you don't ask about, but they exist: those that are horrible from the DM side (disorganized, not enough info or clarity, major errors or typos, etc.) but the players seem to love 'em. I've always found B10 Night's Dark Terror to be one such: players like it but the DM has to really work hard to figure out what the story line is supposed to be; and what's relevant to it and what is superfluous, as it's not made clear at all what is supposed to connect with what and in what order. I've DMed that thing twice and read it through several more times and I still get "aha!" moments every time I look it over and realize another connection or plot detail I'd missed up until then.

Lanefan

 

[Kichwas]

I suspect some publishers might very well make modules with the GM/DM in mind as the audience and ignore players on purpose...

If your aim is to sell books, you need to make a potential reader interested - and you can do this by selling them a “shiny piece of junk”; great art, cool commentary, catchy titles, and so on... all lacking substance...

Back in “d20 era” I remember a lot of supplimemts that used “bikini amazon cover art” to get sales... and I never heard anyone talk up the quality of actually using those books...

 

[dco]

For my group a good adventure needs some roleplaying, some action and players should make some decisions at some point.

 

[Lwaxy]

You always need to consider both,and the GM is the first audience, while the players ultimately are a secondary audience, dependent on how the GM relates the story. It happens often enough, after all, that a group thinks an adventure is bad just because the GM can't make the story work, or that an adventure is loved because the GM turns it into something special despite a bad base product.

As a GM, I prefer if the adventure is structured enough for me to find stuff easily,and for references to be clear. If I like the story enough, I can put the work in to organize it myself, but with a full schedule, I often tend to put those adventures on the back burner.

Something else to consider, many GMs use published stuff only as reference to create their own loosely related stories. I hardly ever take the story as is, I need to adapt it to the groups I am running it for. For those GMs, it does not help all that much if the story is not written with them in mind.

Also, strengths of a system might be a good point. But really, with few exceptions, my groups play everything with Pathfinder. Most things are easily adaptable. Other groups play everything with Fate, or Savage Worlds. An adventure, as well as a setting, is much better off in my opinion if it does not stick to the system so closely as to make it hard for the GM to transfer it. And even when it comes to PF, I can hardly use the stat blocks as they are, especially in a time where everyone can grab a copy of about anything somewhere from the web. To make sure there is still some surprise for all the players, I need to constantly adapt and twist around. So give me more system less adventures, please, and just make sure the story is consistent. Trust the GMs to decide how to use them, and if it fits into the play style of the group.

Playing the strengths of a system can also mean to be too repetitive with those strengths. In Pathfinder and in Shadowrun,for example, there tends to be so much focus on battle, other aspects often drown. Even Paizo has adventures where less dungeons and more intrigue and mystery would be a lot better. When the supposed "strength" of a system is overused, it also becomes dull. And yes, I realize that writing with the players in mind one should manage to avoid that. But some players want those fights and dungeons, others do not. I know my groups, so you need to convince me to use something or not. So, write for the GM first, but don't forget that the GM is a player, too, and should be able to see through the issues from all sides. If she can't, then even the perfect adventure is probably not going to help the group all that much.

And yeah, there are a lot of disorganized adventures which would make great stories if I finally get to organizing them into something usable for today's play styles. That includes many of the older stuff from the 80s and 90s. The need for well structured easy instant adventures is not something that existed back then.

 

[lyle.spade]

An aside to this post and these comments, I bought that book several months ago and was mostly disappointed by it. The articles in it, all by different authors who each claim to "not suck," vary widely in quality - and I mean both ideas and writing skill - and a number of the ideas, while decent, border on the trite, like how you should build encounters that take into account PCs' abilities and equipment (no kidding?).

I found about 1/3 of the articles to be genuinely useful, while the rest were a rehash of GM advice you can read on any free blog or think up yourself if you spend a few minutes with your players asking what interests them. Perhaps a completely green GM - as in, "I bought the 5e Starter Set and ran Phandelver and that's it" - would find some utility, but if you've run a few sessions and pay attention to your players at all and reflect on your craft at all, you won't get much of anything new out of this volume.

 

[AriochQ]

Ironic this article appears today, I have been thinking about this topic of late. I have been running some Adventurer's League adventures and the quality varies wildly. In some of them, it is clear the adventure designer has taken the "I am going to push the players through my story" approach. These adventures usually include slight nuances that are almost always missed by the players (AL adventures usually fit into a 4 hour time block). Not only do they railroad, they railroad in the most annoying way possible.