D&D 5E Adventures not Adventure Paths

[Flexor the Mighty!]

These days, I DM my homebrew campaign (which occasionally uses content from published adventures), a bunch of short-form D&D Expeditions adventures, and one Adventure Path, currently Princes of the Apocalypse.

Short adventures are terribly difficult to sell in print these days. Frog God packages its short adventures together to form longer hardcover/pdf bundles (such as the recently released Quests of DOom 2) because it makes more financial sense, and I'm not sure what the distribution is like for the Goodman Games adventures.

There are a lot of short adventures in electronic form, although (as with most adventures) only a few can really be called "good". In some ways, they're even harder to sell than the APs! You buy an AP to get a campaign - and a lot of people find that convenient - but there aren't likely to be that many of them about. When there are a lot of short adventures, the competition makes it harder for one to distinguish itself.

Cheers!

Digital is fine with me since I'll be marking it up and can print out the maps and pages I need. The rest can stay on the tablet. I think AP's like WotC is putting out also appeal to the probably sizeable number of people who just read RPG stuff since they can't game for whatever reason. High production values and all that. Usability is much more important for me.

 

[iserith]

I've run a few adventure paths - Scales of War, Shackled City, Age of Worms. They all ran too long for my current tastes. I prefer a campaign to be pretty tight in terms of real time. Six months or less is about as long as I want to run a campaign anymore. So during Session Zero we decide as a group how long a given campaign will last, then I prepare accordingly. This means most adventure paths just won't make the cut.

 

[redrick]

Never run an AP myself. My longest running single campaign, about 9 months, was primarily a string of pre-published adventures, with homebrew mixed in to create a single unified world with consistent adversaries. From the player's perspective, it probably wasn't any less rail-roady than an AP — when one adventure wrapped up, I decided which adventure we would run next, while PC actions opened up side quests that I put together myself as needed. On the other hand, it gave me the freedom to pick whichever new adventure best suited the current campaign, and also let me get excited about doing something totally new, instead of just continuing on a course that had been charted out when I first started the campaign.

The other DM's in our group (we've been rotating the chair), have run almost entirely homebrew material. The worldbuilding is a big part of the fun for them.

I'm cool with Wizards doing its thing with the APs, though. A lot of people seem to be running them, which is great, and there's a slowly growing body of 5e material available from 3rd parties, with or without the official sanction of an OGL. That's not to mention all the great adventures for other editions and retroclones that can be easily converted. There's so much material out there.

 

[fjw70]

I don't mind APs but I don't like the hardcover format. These days I prefer PDF products that I can print out what I need for a few sessions and put into a binder. Makes running at the table much easier.

That said I have bought every 5e AP so far.

 

[Staffan]

Here's an idea that I think would be awesome: A series of four mini-campaigns/big adventures, each covering one tier of adventuring. They would be sort-of stand-alone - they'd support going from one to the next, but it wouldn't be a requirement. Ideally, each would be its own semi-sandbox - I'm thinking something along the lines of the old Quest for Glory computer games, where each game had something of a storyline, but also involved a lot of exploration of the region where you found yourself.

 

[Sunseeker]

The only reason I wouldn't buy "adventures" is because most of them are so basically simple that there's no rational reason to pay someone else to create them.

Save the burning village! $5.99!
Rescue the missing princess! $3.99
Destroy all Kobolds! $6.99

If you're looking for simplistic "adventure paths" again, why pay for them? Recovering the Orb of Power consists of:
Destroy all Kobolds! $6.99
Adventure in the Temple of Doom! $5.99
and
Battle Against the Dragon! $8.99

All in a bundle deal with an extra page of notes on how to tie them together (because apparently that's hard) for $25.99! Which is actually more than them individually but you have to pay for the extra page on how to connect the adventures.

I just don't see that as worth the money.

 

[BlueDrake]

My group finished Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat. It took about 6 months meeting once a week for 4-6 hours. It's the ONLY campaign I've ever seen finished. We got bored with Prices of the Apocalypse. My group isn't into dungeon crawling so much and the very large dungeon didn't hold our interest.

I don't mind the APs, but I do wish they'd publish some shorter adventures. Honestly Hoard of the Dragon Queen by itself was the perfect length. 8 chapters with 8 distinct locations felt pretty good. By the time we got to the end of Rise of Tiamat it was starting to feel like it was dragging a little bit.