D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

payn said:

Yeah an epic ought to have chapters. Between advancing the adventure and leveling, im not convinced there is no accomplishment until the end. The Paizo APs, for example, are really just a collection of modules. At this point, everyone should know what they are signing up for with an epic/AP.

How long it takes to get through one is variable. I knew folks that could blast through a 1-20 level AP in a matter of months. When my core group in the PF1 era was together (pandemic killed it), it took us 2 years to get through an AP playing 2x a month. Its a commitment for sure, but can have a great payoff at the end. Not everyone wants that level of commitment, or the risk of not completing, which is understandable.

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Parmandur said:

I lnow for the big WotC books, they have been specifically designed so that a high school or college group thst starts at the beginning or the school year in September and plays the amount that WotC research indicated was normal for teens to play could finish one by Summer break in May.

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J-H said:

For myself:
2 campaign-length items for sale, total sales 171
6 short modules (one is a 1-7 "campaign" but reasonably short as it's goblins defending a lair), total sales 66

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EzekielRaiden said:

As for ways to fix this? I can think of one strategy that, in a certain sense, would try to hybridize the two models:

1. Gather a team of writers, say 5-8, who will be paid for a block of multiple adventures, not just a single one.
2. Have the team agree on an overall, between-adventures set of events that unfold. Some of them will be actual adventures in the block, others will be general current events.
3. Each author makes a series of adventures that loosely link together--you don't have to do every step in the sequence, but if you do, there are fun bonus bits.
4. The authors are paid in part for the collective sales of the whole block (or phases thereof), and in part for their personal contribution. This way, even if one specific adventure just doesn't sell as much as the others, it doesn't result in that author losing their shirt, but you also don't take away the success of someone who wrote a wildly successful one.

If this works, it approximates the best of both worlds. You have opt-in adventures across a span of levels (so every DM has something they could get value out of), while still having a consistent "background" for things to play out against. You get a light touch of the "Epic" linking story between things, but you don't have to engage with that if it's not interesting to you.

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Staffan said:

I did think of another thing that has definitely changed from Back In The Day, and that's leveling speed. I recall reading somewhere that the expected leveling pace in 1e was one year of fairly intense playing (at least weekly for several hours per session) to hit name level (9-10) and then one year per level after that (partially because the game was expected to shift pace then, as you settled down). 3e sped this up somewhat with the expectation of 4 sessions per level and no slowdown, and 5e sped it up even more. This means that even if you do go for a modular campaign, that campaign will probably have fewer adventures than a similar one had back then.

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overgeeked said:

I think the discussion also brings up a long-time flaw of level-based games. The assumed power scaling prevents people from easily using whatever module or AP they want. You can't, for example, run a 10th-level party through a 3rd-level module or a 1-10 level AP without a lot of work. Which also cuts way down on potential customers/sales. It seems like a ridiculous way to organize things. If you don't use levels, the problem goes away. Likewise, if you scale monster stats by PC level, the problem goes away.

It's much easier to scale monster stats by PC level than to drop levels from level-based games. There are already a few blog posts and products that scale monster stats for 5E. MM on a Business Card from Blog of Holding. Sly Flourish's Forge of Foes. Doctors and Daleks.

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SlyFlourish said:

Why do we worry about them? If they want help, the can come find us with the Googles and the YouTubes.

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SlyFlourish said:

By what, going back in time and buying Castle Amber?

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DEFCON 1 said:

Yeah, leveling causes all kinds of issues with regards to both the mechanics of the game, as well as the narrative and story of the game world. The more levels you have, the wider range in power you have between characters... resulting in two human beings where one could flick the other in the nose and kill the person outright just due to the extended numbers needed to make higher levels meaningful. There's also the problems due to the game not having a set timescale at which leveling is meant to occur... so that one table could have PCs go from Level 1 to 20 over the course of many, many years (both in-game and out-of-game), while another one might have them do the same in the matter of months. So a PC goes from getting killed by a kobold with like one swing at the beginning of the campaign to then withstanding nuclear bomb attacks merely 12 weeks later.

This is precisely why I just try and not take the game mechanics seriously when it comes to the story of the game. None of them ever align, there are always disparities in realism, and every single player out there has different tolerances on what they are willing to suspend their disbelief on. So I just keep them separate-- the game is the game and the story is the story and never the twain shall ever really meet.

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MichaelSomething said:

Gotta -2 that on account of sounding like 4E thinking.

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