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!