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If YOU Can't Write an Adventure, Why Should I?
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<blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4150258" data-attributes="member: 3820"><p>There was The Serpent Amphora, actually.</p><p></p><p>But yeah, adventures do tend to sell somewhere in levels somewhere between "dismal" and "unhealthy" on a depressingly regular basis. Not only are you selling to about 1 out of every 4-6 consumers of your setting, you can't even guarantee that sale: it has to be a premise that interests that one particular GM. I note this myself as a consumer: you can write a brilliant adventure concerning drow, but if you're sick to the teeth of underground S&M elves with a spider fetish, an adventure with textbook drow just isn't going to be worth the purchase. </p><p></p><p>Another factor that makes it difficult in this day and age (not impossible, just difficult) is the increasing ability for players to customize not just their characters, but their motivations. Depending on game system, you could have two gaming groups side-by-side and the protagonists of each group could be so diverse that they just wouldn't bite at any of the same plot hooks. You see this manifest whenever someone says "I couldn't run this for my players" — it might be motivation, an unexpected party composition, there are all number of potential incompatibilities. That's a great thing that empowers players, and I like running games that are customized to my players — but it also means I just don't find that many adventures that I could actually use without doing work comparable to creating an adventure from scratch. (Of course, when running D&D I also use a homebrew world, which complicates things even further; at least 20% of encounters would have to be rewritten just because the monsters involved just don't exist in the setting. Including, say, drow.) Basically, it's not that it's hard to write an adventure for the game — it's that writing an adventure for my group is a lot easier than writing an adventure for my group and your group and Ted's group and so on. If you're talking about a setting where all of the PCs aren't expected to have the same "job" (like, say, "shadowrunner"), it's rough.</p><p></p><p>But in the end, it's usually just an economic issue. I quite agree that it's a desirable thing for a company to be able to put out adventures, and that they really help the people who evangelize the game most — the people who are running it. Unfortunately, you do tend to need some really good-selling material in order to subsidize the adventures in most cases; the adventures are frequently not paying for themselves, much less providing profits you could use for other things.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Barastrondo, post: 4150258, member: 3820"] There was The Serpent Amphora, actually. But yeah, adventures do tend to sell somewhere in levels somewhere between "dismal" and "unhealthy" on a depressingly regular basis. Not only are you selling to about 1 out of every 4-6 consumers of your setting, you can't even guarantee that sale: it has to be a premise that interests that one particular GM. I note this myself as a consumer: you can write a brilliant adventure concerning drow, but if you're sick to the teeth of underground S&M elves with a spider fetish, an adventure with textbook drow just isn't going to be worth the purchase. Another factor that makes it difficult in this day and age (not impossible, just difficult) is the increasing ability for players to customize not just their characters, but their motivations. Depending on game system, you could have two gaming groups side-by-side and the protagonists of each group could be so diverse that they just wouldn't bite at any of the same plot hooks. You see this manifest whenever someone says "I couldn't run this for my players" — it might be motivation, an unexpected party composition, there are all number of potential incompatibilities. That's a great thing that empowers players, and I like running games that are customized to my players — but it also means I just don't find that many adventures that I could actually use without doing work comparable to creating an adventure from scratch. (Of course, when running D&D I also use a homebrew world, which complicates things even further; at least 20% of encounters would have to be rewritten just because the monsters involved just don't exist in the setting. Including, say, drow.) Basically, it's not that it's hard to write an adventure for the game — it's that writing an adventure for my group is a lot easier than writing an adventure for my group and your group and Ted's group and so on. If you're talking about a setting where all of the PCs aren't expected to have the same "job" (like, say, "shadowrunner"), it's rough. But in the end, it's usually just an economic issue. I quite agree that it's a desirable thing for a company to be able to put out adventures, and that they really help the people who evangelize the game most — the people who are running it. Unfortunately, you do tend to need some really good-selling material in order to subsidize the adventures in most cases; the adventures are frequently not paying for themselves, much less providing profits you could use for other things. [/QUOTE]
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