TSR/WotC Adventures - Are they REALLY any good? (Warning: Possible Spoilers)

[Raith5]

Good question! I love firstedition adventures for D&D. I have DMed G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King‎ in each edition except 4th and it is always a blast.I also love sandbox style of adventures,such asDwellers of the Forbidden City. I also think Beyond the Crystal Cave is a little sandboxey.

Red Hand of Doom looks great but I have not run nor played it.

I am not sure what makes a good adventure. But I have a suspicion that early adventures in 1st edition were not over thought. They had an idea and ran with it. So there was great diversity. I think 3rd and 4th ed seem to have a feeling of being overally standardized or written by a committee.

I suspect the best way to produce good adventures for DDN will be to not have one single way adventures or designed and written.

 

[Stormonu]

Honestly, I'd be wary of taking selections from any given edition and then trying to draw some wider comment from there. The adventures in each edition are a sufficiently mixed bag that I think such comments will be of limited validity at best.

Well, I didn't want to create too monstrous of a post touching on EVERY adventure; besides, I don't want this thread to just be my opinion and everyone's reaction to it - I'd like other folks to put forth elements of what they were inspired or liked about adventures. I put in the general comments because I just couldn't hope to touch on every module in my opening post.

In all honesty, when doing an Adventure Path (of which A1-4 is an early example), I feel that a railroad beginning is acceptable. Besides, don't most published adventures start from the expectation that the PCs will actually go on the adventure?

It's a tricky path - many later adventures (such as a lot of the Ravenloft adventures) used a very heavy hand at the beginning, most of the time TOO heavy. A4 only really makes sense to run it as written if the party fails (as expected) at the end of A3, and even when I ran it I still had to fudge a good reason why the slavelords just didn't slit the throats of the defeated PCs....

Looking back, "Ravenloft" actually changed the way adventures were written, ...

That it did! However, as you noted, as 2E evolved some of the stories got obnoxious to the point of rendering the PCs as onlookers or secondary characters to the "real story". I do like to see adventures with a strong "the story up until now", but not so much a lot detail of how the story will unfold - I'd rather the PCs be at the rudder for moving events along.

Not sure it's fair to make a comment on 3e without discussing "Sunless Citadel" and "Red Hand of Doom" - both the best-known and also the most highly-regarded adventures of the edition. (Not to mention "Shackled City", which, strictly speaking, was an "official" D&D adventure product, despite being produced by Paizo.)

Unfortunately, while I own those adventures, I haven't seen them in play, so I was personally trying to avoid commenting too much on those I had read but not actually attempted to play.

In case anyone is curious, these are the modules I've actually run/played at least one or two sessions of (* means I've finished it). Most others I have read enough to be familiar with the main plot of the adventure.

[sblock]

B/X, BECMI

B1 - In Search of the Unknown*
B2 - Keep on the Borderlands
B3 - Palace of the Silver Princess*
B4 - The Lost City
B8 - Journey to the Rock*

X1 - Isle of Dread
X2 - Castle Amber
XL1 - Quest for the Heartstone*

1E

A1-A4* Slave Pits of the Undercity, Scourge of the Slavelords, Secrets of the Slaver's Stockade, In the Dungeons of the Slavelords
C1 - Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (converted to 3E)*
C2 - Ghost Tower of Inverness*
I6 - Ravenloft (1E, 2E & 3E)*
I10 - House on Griffon Hill*
L2 - Assassin's Knot*
N1 - Cult of the Reptile God
Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits*
S1 - Tomb of Horrors*
S2 - White Plume Mountain
S3 - Lost Caverns of Tsjocanth
U1-U3* - Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Danger at Dunwater, The Final Enemy

DL1 - Dragons of Despair

2E

Dungeon - Alicorn*
Dungeon - Through the Night*
Dungeon - Siege of Krayts Freehold*
Dungeon - Horror's Harvest*
Dungeon - The Rose of Jumlat*
Dungeon - Old Man Katan and the Mushroom Band (my PCs killed Katan )
Labyrinth of Madness
Dungeon - The Winter Tapestry* (I wrote it )


ALQ3 - A Dozen and One Adventures
DS1 - Freedom
RM1 - Roots of Evil
RQ1 - Night of the Living Dead* (finished 2E version, converted to 4E)


3E

Forge of Fury
Dungeon - The Seventh Arm*
DCC - Bloody Jack's Gold
DCC - Legends are Made, Not Born*
Atlas Games - Three Days to Kill*

Pathfinder

Rise of the Runelords - Burnt Offerings*, The Skinsaw Murders*
Crypt of the Everflame*

4E

H1 - Keep on the Shadowfell*
The Slaying Stone

[/sblock]

Additionally, of course, 3e was supported by a huge number of third-party adventures, something no other edition can boast. And it's probably worth looking to the best of those adventures to see what lessons can be learnt.

Quite true, and for a long time, Dungeon has been the major vehicle D&D has supplied adventures through - though it quite often gets overlooked when the discussion of adventures comes up. I hadn't specifically mentioned them, trying to concentrate on "official" stand-alone adventures, but if you or others feel there are gems out there that should be considered, by all means mention them!

 

[delericho]

Well, I didn't want to create too monstrous of a post touching on EVERY adventure; besides, I don't want this thread to just be my opinion and everyone's reaction to it

Okay, fair enough. In hindsight, I was being over-sensitive. Sorry.

That it did! However, as you noted, as 2E evolved some of the stories got obnoxious to the point of rendering the PCs as onlookers or secondary characters to the "real story". I do like to see adventures with a strong "the story up until now", but not so much a lot detail of how the story will unfold - I'd rather the PCs be at the rudder for moving events along.

I certainly agree with the second (PCs being the rudder).

However, I'm not so sure about the detailed backstories. What I've noticed as I read more and more adventures is that they now tend to have long and lovingly-detailed backstories... that aren't really followed up on in the adventure itself.

If the BBEG has a detailed backstory of lost love and betrayed honour, but the players never learn of this, what's the point? Indeed, even if the PCs do learn these things, but can't put that information to any use, why bother? Isn't it just wasted paper? If all they actually see is "Vampire Lord, CR 16", then their response will be predictable: hack, hack, hack.

I should perhaps note here: even Paizo seem to be as guilty of this as anyone else. Sometimes, they do properly tie the background to the adventure... but not as often as they maybe should.

Quite true, and for a long time, Dungeon has been the major vehicle D&D has supplied adventures through - though it quite often gets overlooked when the discussion of adventures comes up. I hadn't specifically mentioned them, trying to concentrate on "official" stand-alone adventures, but if you or others feel there are gems out there that should be considered, by all means mention them!

To be honest, I'm more interested in thinking about the elements that make for a good adventure, rather than going through specific modules.

Some things that I think would help:

Three layers of puzzles: This was something I saw when playing through various "Lego Star Wars" and similar games - the levels are designed with three levels of puzzles. In order to complete the level (adventure), there are a small number of fairly simple puzzles that must be solved. However, for people who are interested, there is then a second level of puzzles (to find all the "ships in a bottle", or whatever). And then, for people who are really interested, there are a number of other puzzles that have no purpose but to be Easter Eggs for those who find them.

Multiple Solutions: In all the recent discussion of "Caves of Chaos", one thing I noticed was that the groups the enjoyed it more tended to have a DM who could bring out more from the adventure than simple hack-and-slash - they had diplomacy, or sneaking around, or a shadow-war with the various factions, or whatever.

Of course, the adventure itself doesn't really include those things - they're there if the DM knows to bring them out, but they're never actually mentioned.

So, I think something that would help is if the adventure designers gave more thought to multiple solutions to the adventure - which might mean "combat, or diplomacy, or sneaking around", or if might be as simple as literally including multiple different paths to the end.

(Incidentally, providing an adventure with three parts, and letting the players choose which order they want to go through the three parts does not count - that's the illusion of choice, but not actually a real choice.)

Speaking of choices...

Meaningful choices: This is essentially your "PCs at the rudder" thing - the party should have significant and meaningful choices about how to tackle the adventure. This is something that I feel a lot of WotC adventures, and especially Delve-format adventures, fall down on - too often, the adventure is actually just a sequence of combat encounters with little or no ability to very the format.

I could go on at length about meaningful choices, but the short version is that I think for a choice to be meaningful it needs three things:

1) It needs to be a genuine choice. If the choice is to go left and fight orcs, or go right and fight orcs, then that looks like a choice, but really isn't.

2) It needs to have some context so the players can make the choice. If the PCs have the choice of going left or right, but no way to know what exists on either branch, then how can there be meaning? They might as well just toss a coin!

3) It needs to have consequences, even if those consequences are just "you don't go the other way".

Anyway, back to adventures...

I'm inclined to think that adventures can also benefit from interesting (even actively hostile) locations, and detailed and interesting villains. However, I tend to think that WotC adventures usually do a fairly decent job on these already... and I also think they're more or less just trappings, and not actually as important as some other elements. After all, a soulless railroad through the City of Brass is still a railroad, and probably not very interesting, despite the location!

 

[Obryn]

I agree that solid adventures that showcase the system's strengths are a must for Next.

I really can't overstate how much damage Keep on the Shadowfell did to 4e when released. I think a lot of 4e's early reputation can be traced directly back to it... It's like the designers specifically released an adventure which would drive people away from the edition. About the best thing to come out of that adventure was Splug. Also, the whole Irontooth thing was actually pretty cool; I admire the designers' chutzpah in throwing a near-certain TPK into the adventure. Sadly, the rest of the adventure is a mashy fighty mess.

(mini-rant)
[sblock]From there, the rest of the H-P-E series got either better or - insanely - worse. I mean, I tweaked KotS until it resembled a fun adventure, and Thunderspire Labyrinth didn't require much work at all to make interesting. Pyramid of Shadows was, if anything, worse than KotS. Trollhaunt Warrens had some promise, but suffered from some issues very similar to KotS in the Warrens itself. Also, by then, the math flaws had started to show. Demon Queen's Enclave (P2) with the drow? Honestly, I don't have much bad to say about it. Amazingly, it's an example of a pretty good adventure somewhat crippled by the more-and-more-cracks-showing monster math. Sadly, we got right back into the bad with Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress, which is the worst published adventure I've ever tried to run. (Marauders of the Dune Sea - the Dark Sun adventure - looks even worse, but I never even tried to run it.)[/sblock]

When I start a new edition, I want to run pre-made adventures so I can get my feet wet. I'd rather have an adventure that shows me how to do things right.

-O

 

[jshaft37]

Any "best adventure" thread should certainly include a mention of B10 Night's Dark Terror. Huge exploration, mini-crawls, town at seige, ruined city and an excellent display of basic and expert rule sets.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Honestly, the biggest two things to a good adventure are:

1. Is it a good story?
2. Do the player characters have meaningful contributions and consequences to that story?


It's rare that 2 is met in linear adventures, and pure hack and slash rarely has a good story. Even dungeon delves, old school style, can be a good story (e.g. the movie Labyrinth).


If, in the end, if one could write up what happened as a book/novella/comic/whatever, and it would be compelling, odds are that it was a pretty good adventure.

Too often WotC treats adventures like a game rather than a story. It can be BOTH of course, but for it to be a good ADVENTURE it needs to also be a story, not just interesting combat after interesting combat.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I liked playing Red Hand, but MAN was there a lot of combat. Still, it felt like we were choosing how to come at the combat, when to fight and when to flee, and occasionally when to make alliances with possible enemies.

But it suffered from that D&D constant of not knowing who the villain is until you meet him face to face and kill him 2d6 rounds later.

We didn't play the last part of Red Hand of Doom because I didn't want to run a dungeon crawl. Talk about lousy ending to an epic adventure.

I had loads of fun as a DM running this adventure and my players really liked it as well and it's the type of adventure I want to see more of. Not this stupid three levels worth of hack-and-slash starting with Keep on the Shadowfell that 4e started with.

Red Hand of Doom feels pretty sand-boxy and free with lots of decisions in the players hand. At the same time it has enough direction that the players don't feel lost. It gets an 11 on a d12 from me.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Gardmore Abbey is quite good, though not without its flaws. Also, some might consider it a set of related adventures instead of one, since it is specifically set up to be left and returned to. Unless over-leveled, I doubt a party could complete it in one go, at least if the DM was moderately tough.

Mild spoilers below:

Good: There is a lot going on, with multiple factions that don't entirely trust each other, but not always at war either. The one faction most likely to be useful to the party is separated from the rest by some dangerous neutral creatures and obstacles and hasn't been there long, which makes it reasonably coherent why they are still there. It's mostly organized reasonably well (important in a big adventure). It largely avoids any of the linear and railroad traps that WotC adventures are so noted for having.

Bad: It's missing key summaries that would have been very useful, most notably one listing all the entrances and exits. This is especially glaring since links between the maps are a bit confusing in the text. More critical, the main thread of the adventure suffers from an unnecessary symmetry in NPCs and magic item(s). Thus, the DM has to practically master the large adventure before starting it, and a good one will want to ignore some of the advice in it.

Neutral: In it's push to be a more naturalistic setting while avoiding linear adventures, the layout has mostly regressed to boring. That is, it doesn't provide much room or guidance to having great encounters, and most of what it defaults to is going to be pretty dull in the "take advantage of the environment" department. Fortunately, there is enough material there to shift things around and correct some of this. (For example, very few of the stated encounters take place in a vertical environment, but there are vertical environments handy for you to shift encounters to.)

Bottom Line: Gardmore Abbey is the rare WotC adventure that makes a better setting than adventure. This is great for people like me that prefer to customize anyway, but as perhaps a hybrid adventure/settting, GA might not be what some people want in an "adventure" module.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I will say that my favorite adventure thus far from DDI's online Dungeon Magazine has been Last Breath of Ashenport. Cool premise, some of the "oh crap" moments come from the party and townsfolk being charmed rather than combat, and the locations within the town where the PCs can find their way are many and varied.

Another AD&D module that I've always loved (although the story is kind of lacking, unless you use the wizard's disappearance as a plot hook for additional adventures) is Lost Island of Castanamir. A very fun "wizard's tower" exploration module, but with just enough weirdness in the portal system and the gingwatzim creatures/plants/items to keep players on their toes. Light on combat, but any module that had magical Roombas cleaning rooms two decades before they were ever actually invented is kinda cool.

 

[Herschel]

No, and yes.

One of the issues with published adventures is writing them with any flexibility and still having them make sense. Generally, choose one or the other. I prefer to run them flexibly and that means I'd better be ready for when they go off the rails and not get too upset when there's inconsistencies in "logic".

Lets face it, D&D module history shows us the random rooms will contain an Orc and a pie, and the greatest practitioners of magical creation spent their time and skills creating artifact-level traps in completely random and meaningless places. They're generally kind of dumb.

And I like many of them.

A lot.

Ravenloft/Castle Ravenloft (2E) I really enjoyed. Their style just works very well them (though I think it was used too often in other adventures).

Desert of Desolation: Possibly my favorite series of modules ever, and this is with the first module containing exploding pineapples and a random gnome mining with a spoon. And the Waters of Athis? Gee, where did that story line lead them. ;-)

White Plume Mountain: How do you even get in to the place?

The Assassin's Knot: Hey, we get to play investigators. Investigators who blow stuff up.

The Isle of Dread/Dwellers of the Forbidden City: Are we facing Yuan-Ti, or Sleestaks? Hey look, it's a big, tropical island of random stuff to explore! What's out goal here? Who knows? Lets just wander around for a level or two, we'll either die or get rescued, right? And if someone does get offed, where does their new character come from? IF we make the South Side of this HUGE island, you can either be a cultist villager or a pirate but either way you're done with the group for a month 'cause the hydra got you on the North end of the island.

The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar: What a great way to start your adventuring career, provided you live and find the loot in the random, posh lair in a ruined dungeon. That painting alone is worth a mint. Is it LED or Plasma?

Keep on the Shadowfell: Whoah, now this is how an adventure should start! Simple starting hook, iminent danger, better bring your A-game or your career will be short and ........ more, and..., um, more, and ... what the heck, is this the adventure version of an endless Ramstein sound loop?

What I really want from DDN is a robust, tight, balanced core system where magic items and modules/adventures can add as much randomness, chaos and swing as a group desires.