Disappointed in Dungeon, at least for adventures.

[Stormonu]

You just don't see much cool, off-the -wall type stuff anymore like The Jingling Mordo Circus from issue #7. Good times.

Or Old Man Katan and His Mushroom Band, though I forget what issue that was from.

Do they even do the Challenge of Champions in Dungeon anymore?

 

[wedgeski]

They seriously need to let you organize by level.

See sig. A little out-of-date because we stopped for an extended period over the holiday and did other things, but the game picks up again this weekend so I'll bring it up-to-date.

 

[Stoat]

Or Old Man Katan and His Mushroom Band, though I forget what issue that was from.

I tried to run that adventure in College. It went like this:

Me: You're walking along when you hear some jolly whistling and singing coming from over the next hill. An old man comes into view, followed by a line of animate, singing mushrooms. The whole group of them is singing Zip-a-dee-doo-da. In harmony.

Players: Yeah. Whatever the hell this is, we don't want to have anything to do with it.

 

[Tuft]

Or Old Man Katan and His Mushroom Band, though I forget what issue that was from.

Do they even do the Challenge of Champions in Dungeon anymore?

Ooooh! Challenge of Champions! Those were great, great fun. Our DM even ported those to both other settings and other systems (E.g, the "Dragonstar" universe meets "Star Trek", "Aliens" and "WH40K", with "Feng Shui"-derived homebrew rules) because we enjoyed those so immensely!

 

[Keldryn]

Absolutely true. 4e maps are nice to look at, but a pain to draw. I think the next big innovation from Wotc needs to be large scale map prinouts that people can use so the players get to see what the DM sees!

I agree completely. The exquisitely-drawn maps in modern published adventures are really no more useful to me then the spartan black & white dungeon maps from 30 years ago. I've made hasty arrangements of tiles and/or lines drawn on a dry erase met, looked at it, and told my players "well, it looks absolutely stunning in MY book. Sorry."

All of WoTC's published adventures (whether retail or from Dungeon) should do either have their maps constructed from Dungeon Tiles that are still readily available at the time of publication and/or provide ready-made battle grids for the entire adventure, not just 2 to 4 set-piece battles.

For the maps which are constructed from Dungeon Tiles, the adventure should also provide a quick summary of which sets were used (and if more than one copy of a set is needed).

There are a few possible ways of including battle grids for the entire adventure:

• include full-color poster maps for the entire adventure, although this could easily be prohibitively expensive
• continue to provide the full-color poster maps for the set-piece battles, and include lower-quality black & white battle maps on 8.5" x 11" or 11" x 17" loose pages for the rest of the adventure
• continue to provide the full-color poster maps for the set-pieces, and make the battle maps for the rest of the adventure available in print-friendly versions through D&D Insider. The DM can decide whether to print in color or black & white.

The last option is probably the most viable; judging by the level of detail on most of the maps included with WOTC's published adventures, they most likely drawn at a larger scale anyway. Rather than just have a gigantic dungeon map print across multiple sheets of paper, have these print-friendly maps be arranged as "chunks" that the DM can add them to the table without revealing parts of the map that are not accessible but happened to be printed on that sheet of paper.

Including full battle maps for the entire adventure becomes more viable if the locations within the adventure are trimmed down in size; I feel that most of WoTC's published dungeons are too big already. Smaller dungeons would allow for high-quality battle maps for the entire adventure, and I would be very happy with that.

As much as I like using dungeon tiles (and I have downloaded some of the WorldWorks and EZ Dungeons 3D cardstock dungeons, but haven't assembled any yet), most modules have maps that can't be easily created with reusable tiles. I've re-drawn the dungeon maps, in their entirety, from The Sunless Citadel and B7 Rahasia in Dungeon Designer 2 (this was a few years ago) and printed them out in black & white at a 1" = 5' scale. This worked extremely well, and my players absolutely loved it (rather than complaining about how long it took me to build rooms with tiles or Lego blocks). Unfortunately, this also added an extra 6 to 8 hours of prep time per module (if I actually use DD often enough I can get more efficient with it). That's too much prep time for a published adventure.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I'm mixed on this. Cool looking maps are cool looking, but really on the DM sees that. In the group I play in that's going through the SoW AP, one of the big problems we've had is large numbers of maps that have incredible details and complicated art, yet is impossible to put down on paper/battlemat.

Couldn't this problem be solved by having WoTC provide those maps at the proper scale?

 

[Dm_from_Brazil]

So we're starting over at level 1 with War of the Burning Sky. I've been doing prep for it and counted 18 significant NPCs to roleplay in the first adventure. That's more than the entire heroic tier of Scales of War.

By the way, it is more than the total number of characters in "Hamlet".
...Thereby, War of the Burning Sky should be better than "Hamlet", also...

(Ok, sarcasm aside, is really interesting that a Level 1 adventure has more characters -PCs not included!- than a play. This makes one think if we are "trying too hard"...)

 

[Truename]

By the way, it is more than the total number of characters in "Hamlet".
...Thereby, War of the Burning Sky should be better than "Hamlet", also...

(Ok, sarcasm aside, is really interesting that a Level 1 adventure has more characters -PCs not included!- than a play. This makes one think if we are "trying too hard"...)

Well, there are a few differences between plays and adventures that might make the comparison moot.

As for "we trying too hard," I'm not, but you can if you want.

 

[Zaukrie]

What is it, 200 first level adventures in teh Chaos Scar so far?

ugh.

I kind of ignore the actual maps now, and just use whatever terrain shapes I want....

 

[malraux]

Couldn't this problem be solved by having WoTC provide those maps at the proper scale?

Given this is an all electronic publication, not really. I don't have a large size printer, really don't want to print out and glue together a bunch of 8x11 sheets of paper and setting up a dedicated gaming projector is not a minor project. That said, I do like the way the published modules come with a fold out adventure map or two.