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

[MNblockhead]

My biggest bugbear with all hardcover products are no thumb cut outs on the page edge for the various sections. Anyone remember encyclopedia britannica? That's what i mean.

To be able to in an instant flip between various sections would be a steady improvement, regardless of other layout options.

My second issue is a lack of handouts. I remember getting the old ultima gamess and getting full colour maps and various knick knacks, and it was glorious!

If I by the tomb of annihilation, i want npc cards, maps, letters (like an exploration certificate), cultish tokens, all the kind of stuff i dont have the time to make. If i want to run an adventure id love to be able to hand out cool stuff to the players and see their little eyes light up with joy! Then i know its money well spent

This, this, many times over.

If people will pay $60 to $160 for the DnD AP-themed board games, wouldn't enthusiast buy a campaign in a box?

I would love to buy an AP with the box, minis/tokens/pawns, and battle maps/tiles. Perhaps the model could be similar to what Pathfinder and Kobold Press do with supplemental pawns for their monster books. I loathe how to get minis for the current AP I have to buy a stack of blind booster boxes. Give me a Curse of Strahd collection with Strahd, Esmeralda, some of the other main NPCs and collection of zombies, skeletons, werewolves, etc. Perhaps offer two options, and NPC collection and a monster collection. Maps are more difficult. You can buy the map images from the artists web sites in many case. I did that for CoS and printed them on a large-format printer. That is a lot of paper. But perhaps they could have an AP-themed set of numbered dungeon tiles and in the book can list the numbers of suggested tiles to use in an encounter.

I would think Hasbro would be all over trying to find opportunities to cross-sell toys to go with the books.

Looking at what I spend on minis and printing, I should probably just buy a large flatscreen TV to lay on my table and use a VTT. It seems like Fantasy Grounds and Roll 20 already have battlemap and token sets for the official APs.

 

[MNblockhead]

Even with APs you need to put in some time adjusting them for how YOU want to run them. I haven't yet run into a fully plug-n-play adventure I would want to run as a home game without some significant personal DM revision.

Yeah, but you are a level 18 Grandmaster of Flowers and, from what I gather, have been playing and DMing a long time.

An experienced DM can always customize an adventure. It doesn't hurt the experienced DM for an adventure to be formatted and written in a way that is friendly to new DMs.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Thank you, Elfcrusher, for clarifying for me what it is that I think and what my reasoning is - I thought I knew since, well, it is mine after all, but it certainly is nice of you to come and tell me what I think.

You can go ahead and keep having both sides of the discussion all to yourself, since you clearly would rather tell me what I am saying than listen to it.

But, just in case you actually did want someone besides you involved in the discussion:

...they would still be selling just the Corolla (or whatever car it was that was their first hit.)

I didn't realize 5th edition's product strategy was WotC's "first hit." Looked to me like they did things differently and settled on the current methodology after things were not going the way they wanted them to.

You have very curious notions of how product lines are built, but let's think this through: If great sales are a sign that product lines should not be diversified (out of fear of increasing costs by not increasing sales) then when should companies expand their product line?

Companies should expand their product line when either doing so is a risk that the company can likely absorb and market information suggests could prove profitable (read: when the risk appears worth the reward).

What you are talking about though isn't quite just expanding product line - that's what having an adventure and a rules-y supplement every year is for D&D, as is licensing out the D&D property in various ways (apparel, video games, digital tools, and so on) and using the D&D brand on things like board games (Betrayal at Baldur's Gate is awesome, for example). You are also mixing in a change in strategy - which should really only be a thing a business does when either the new strategy appears by all indications that it will improve profitability, or when the current strategy is no longer working.

D&D comes as it does now not because this is WotC's "first hit", but because they already did the thing you wish they would do and it wasn't working for them - and they already went through all the changes to embrace the new strategy, so going back isn't easy. Like if Toyota had discovered their current strategy of releasing a variety of models weren't working out, downsized the company to focus on a smaller selection of models, and then you were asking them to build you a model they deemed to not be profitable enough to keep making and no longer have the factory capacity or manpower to actually produce for you.

 

[Satyrn]

Thank you, Elfcrusher, for clarifying for me what it is that I think and what my reasoning is - I thought I knew since, well, it is mine after all, but it certainly is nice of you to come and tell me what I think.

Oh, hey. If you appreciate him telling you what you think, you'll find what I'm about to tell you is fantastically awesome.

You think you oughtta wire a couple grand into my PayPal.

 

[Wiseblood]

I want adventures. Short adventures. I have a very strong dislike of adventure paths. I want adventures that can be completed in a few sessions not 25 to 30 sessions. I read about 30 pages an hour I don't want to read for ten hours and take notes and customize it. I am paying for someone else to do the work after all.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that each of the published 5E adventure books could use more instances of some form of DM reference tools. Each has had advice of varying degree for DMs, but none has gotten it 100% right.

However, I think that the best thing they can do is tell everyone you don't need to know the books inside out to run the adventures. And you can and should change things to suit your game. Tomb of Annihilation in particular has numerous NPCs with all kinds of motivations. Merchant Princes, Guides, Factions in Chult, schisms within organizations.....there are tons of them.

You do not need to use them all in order to run Tomb of Annihilation.

I think the intention is to throw many hooks out there, and have a DM pick those that appeal to him or what he thinks will appeal to his players. I personally think this is the best approach they can take.

I do agree that perhaps it could be stated more clearly, or they could do more to help DMs. Storm King's flow chart is a great tool. Tomb's Dramatis Peronsae list is another example. I think if each of the books took about 4 to 5 pages to just have DM reference pages like that, then they'd all be improved.

Having said that, I don't really see 5E as being all that unique in this aspect. Every edition of D&D has its fair share of challenges when it comes to formatting or complexity of rules and mechanics or simply in how information is presented. I don't think that the large adventure books of 5E are the worst example of a challenge for DMs compared to many of the past examples. They're simply the new challenge.

But I also think that the amount of community support in this regard is at an all time high. DMs who are finding the adventures challenging have more resources at their disposal. Whether it's Sean McGovern's guides as mentioned in the articles (which are great), or more general DMing advice like that offered by Matt Colville on his youtube videos, or advice straight from the designers via twitch or twitter or any other media.

DMing is not as hard as we tend to make it on ourselves. You don't need to know everything in the book. If you forget that Shago has been placed in Fort Belaurian at his mother's behest in order to spy on the Flaming Fist, but that he's actually come to side with the Flaming Fist, it really doesn't matter. He can simply be a guide that the PCs can hire or not.

If on the other hand you think your players might find the struggle between the native Merchant Princes and the outsider Flaming Fist as each struggles for power in Chult to be of interest, then you'll likely find Shago's allegiance important.

I think the more information they pack into these adventures, the better. I think we just have to remember that we can play it however we like, or however it shakes out at the table. There is no need to commit it all to memory or to use every shred of detail offered by the designers.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I want adventures. Short adventures. I have a very strong dislike of adventure paths. I want adventures that can be completed in a few sessions not 25 to 30 sessions. I read about 30 pages an hour I don't want to read for ten hours and take notes and customize it. I am paying for someone else to do the work after all.

Yep, I spent so much time tweaking OotA that I would have little more time just writing up my own campaign.

 

[3catcircus]

I want adventures. Short adventures. I have a very strong dislike of adventure paths. I want adventures that can be completed in a few sessions not 25 to 30 sessions. I read about 30 pages an hour I don't want to read for ten hours and take notes and customize it. I am paying for someone else to do the work after all.

Yes - and no. The biggest problem I see is either you have a bunch of APs that are run in a vacuum, or you go the other way and have a bunch of completely random and unconnected adventures.

Take a look at any of the published adventures set in a published campaign - they're mostly clustered in a few areas, with a few outliers here and there. And if they aren't in a published campaign world (or if adapting to a different world), it's a lot of grunt work in many cases to do so.

What would help DMs of all experience levels would be for WotC to develop APs with deliberate branches and loops using standalone adventures. You could even have several APs criss-cross using standalone adventures.

That way, you give the players many bounded options rather than either too linear or too sandboxy with no structure while making it very easy for the DM to run.

Another thing that helped immensely was what they did with RHoD - that adventure could be dropped in to both FR and Eberron and the designers explicitly described how to do so. Too often, there ends up being any number of non-optimal homebrew locations that DMs come up with, but nothing from the designers.

 

[Hussar]

Maybe. With each new hardcover, Wotc releases two free pdf adventurers written by the same authors. The pdf would be geared for new dms.

This, right here.

Back when Paizo published the AP's in Dungeon, at the beginning of the AP season, they would drop a pdf on the website that gave a pretty detailed overview of the AP and also notes for conversion to other settings. A fantastic resource.

I think WotC AP's would greatly benefit from something similar. A .pdf file on the WotC site that outlines the adventures, has a pretty frank section on possible pitfalls and how to smooth them over and then maybe 5 one page adventure/encounters for introducing different NPC's that can help the party get back on track if they wander too far into the weeds.

I think that the biggest challenge in running these AP's is always getting information into the player's hands. Giving new DM's advice on how and where to info dump on the players might be welcome.

 

[CubicsRube]

There are a bunch of pregens on the WotC site.

Yep. But they are generic ones. Not tailored to the spedcific AP as i mentioned above.i
Its not a lot of work the refit some of the npcs already provided in each ap as a pregen and provide the option of playing them if need be.