"Are the Authors of the Dungeon & Dragons Hardcover Adventures Blind to the Plight of DMs?"

[jgsugden]

An RPG is a joint storytelling device. The DM leads the storytelling, but all players contribute to it. The problem here is that the non-DMs have very different ways to contribute to that storytelling and no single approach in the books will serve all groups well.

If you provide narrowly tailored adventures that forcefully guide the PCs from encounter to encounter, some groups will resent the railroading.

If you provide a more open structure where PCs can shape the story, some groups will get lost in the options and wander off course from the intended adventure.

You can't win as an adventure designer...

The best thing to do is to provide the broad and open ended experience and add sidebards to help pull PCs "back on track" if they venture too far from the printed material.

Personally, this is why I do not use adventure paths as written. I steal from them, but when I run a world, I drop several story hooks out there for the PCs to encounter and let them pick which hook they want to explore. Each hook leads to a story idea and usually the first night's worth of encounters appropriate for the PCs at their current level, I wait to really build the whole adventure until after the PCs have started to play through it. This allows me to adapt to what interests them, and to make sure it is well tailored to their abilities. I stay just enough ahead of the PCs that I can plan where I expect them to go and wing what they do unexpectedly.

 

[MarkB]

I've run the first half of Out of the Abyss, and whilst I didn't find it too hard to navigate, I felt like it eventually outstayed its welcome. The party worked their way through Neverlight Grove, which was fine but felt a little linear, and through Blingdenstone, which was a lot of fun and a great area to embellish, but by the time they'd gone through those areas they'd already leveled up significantly. If I'd run Gracklstugh as well, they'd have been totally overlevelled for the second half, and frankly, after the excellent progress they'd made with the gnomes, trying to push them through an entire new town's worth of political intrigue just to scrape together one or two more clues that I'd basically have had to arbitrarily hold back the gnomes from giving them just didn't seem worthwhile. They made one flying stop in Gracklstugh as part of a gnomish trade caravan, and that was it for that chapter of the book.

A couple of my players really want me to continue the campaign, but I've had trouble mustering the enthusiasm for it. Even just reading the Gauntlgrym chapter feels like an information overload, and I don't relish the task of trying to dump all that info on my players in a coherent fashion.

 

[Gardens & Goblins]

I'd much prefer a bumper book of encounters & npcs, grouped by theme and level.

Colour coded, clearly indexed, card sized entries, with permission to print for convenience.

Then I can mix and match as needed - from a one shot to a campaign.

Cobbling together an adventure is relatively easy. Or at least, its a skill that doesn't take much time or energy to become proficient at. Such a bumper book of encounters & npcs could save me time, provide inspiration and support.

Such a resource, to my mind, would be useful to a DM as a DM tool - a creative resource for a creative practice - rather than these glossy, precrafted adventures.

 

[MNblockhead]

In my thinking, the big APs are for more experienced DMs and those needing more easily-digested adventure material are better served by the Adventurer's League material. Unfortunately, many new DMs may not know to look at the AL material. They are more likely to buy the fancy AP books from the FLGS or Amazon. WoTC should consider publishing a hard bound "annual" of select AL adventures with aditional artwork and other other aids, targeted at DMs that want easier to run adventures and who may want to run each as a more independent module, rather than committing to campaign lasting many months.

I am running Curse of Strahd now and love it. But it is a lot of work to prep. It is dense with details and interlinked relationships. I decided to run CoS because I was having trouble finding the time to world build and create adventures for my monthly homebrew games. But the advantage of home brew is that I created all the content, so I remember it easier and, in a pinch, I can improvise much easier. CoS has required a lot of work to prep. I've used outlines and relationship maps created by third parties to help with my prep and progress tracking, and that is after having read through the book twice and watching the Dice, Camera, Action series. It is still fun for me and I enjoy the adventure path a great deal, including the deadly sandbox it runs through. But I can see this being daunting for a new DM.

It is certainly much easier to prepare an adventure that has clear phases and the major encounter set up. Not only can you prep the game with a minimal amount of time reading over just the portion you are likely to get through in the session, but you can prepare all the minis, battlemaps, and statblocks you'll need. Running CoS requires more thoughtful prep to be able to set up for whatever the characters run into. I like to think that I've been able to handle this with a minimal amount of time required for players to sit around while I set up a battle, for example, but it takes time to plan and some experience as a DM.

For new DMs, I would recommend skipping the big APs and trying:

1. In Volo's Wake - a series of easy to run AL adventures

2. Tales from the Yawning Portal - some are harder to digest than other but most are fairly straight-forward dungeon crawls. Some of the room mechanics can be difficult for new DMs to run without some prep, but you only have to digest the material from that one duneon, not an entire AP.

3. Trail of the Apprentice. Sure, it is "family friendly" but it is also new-DM friendly. There is no reason why a group of adult players would not enjoy this easy to digest and run AP. It deals with were rats and mummies and orc raids, and all that fun stuff with an ongoing mystery to solve. I like DMing it and I would enjoy playing in it.

 

[Gardens & Goblins]

Double.. post. o_o

Or my doppelganger is at it again..

 

[pogre]

In my thinking, the big APs are for more experienced DMs and those needing more easily-digested adventure material are better served by the Adventurer's League material.

This was my immediate thought as well. I also agree that WOTC would be well-served in stating on those big APs "designed for experience DMs" and direct new DMs to AL stuff or a new line of shorter, easier to run adventures.

As for the rest of the blog, the criticism that it is easier to run your own stuff rather than someone else's = water is wet.

Steal what you want ignore the rest.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This was my immediate thought as well. I also agree that WOTC would be well-served in stating on those big APs "designed for experience DMs" and direct new DMs to AL stuff or a new line of shorter, easier to run adventures.

Directing would-be DMs to try playing for 3-18(3d6) years first wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

As for the rest of the blog, the criticism that it is easier to run your own stuff rather than someone else's = water is wet.

On the other hand, the observation that it's a lot easier to buy an AP than to write your own from scratch is some pretty wet water, too.

 

[delericho]

In an ideal world, I suspect these big adventures wouldn't be presented as hardback books. The format just isn't great for presenting that information. I suspect something like the old "Night Below" boxed set is closer to ideal - several small booklets so that you can reference only what you need at the time (and potentially have several pages open simultaneously), and separate maps.

But the hardback book format has one massive advantage over other formats: it gives much better bang for your buck. The costs of assembling a boxed set are vastly higher, so the same $50 that gets you a 256-page "Curse of Strahd" probably gets you a third of the page count as a box.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Directing would-be DMs to try playing for 3-18(3d6) years first wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

Yes it would.

Telling people the barrier to entry is bigger than they think it is - and they should be thinking anyone literate enough to read the book can pick up the game and get playing it, even if their role during play is the DM, because that is what the current barrier to entry actually is - is a way to reduce the number of new hobbyists, not a way to improve anything for anyone.

 

[AmerginLiath]

The adventure-cum-sourcebook does actually answer an interesting need that’s long existed. When using prepared adventures, DMs have for decades faced the conundrum of the players zigging when expected to zag and asking “what’s behind this [meant to be purely ornamental] door?” For example, I fondly remember running White Plume Mountain decades ago and having the characters look at the provided area map and decide to check out the Hut of Thingizzard the Witch, a random element the author marked on it but wrote nothing about in the adventure, before venturing into said mountain. With the sourcebook info added to the new hardcover adventures, a 5e DM (especially a newer one, like me in my teen days) has something to draw from in crafting ideas and giving answers to knowledge questions about what’s going on outside the strict confines of the story, especially if they don’t usually run FR.