What are the elements of a good published campaign/module/adventure path?

[Quickleaf]

A good adventure needs three things:

1. Usability: It has got to be easy to use in play. Have a table of contents and make the page layout easy to read, for starters. Utilize some sort of pagination marking to divide different sections. Provide clear stat-blocks. For most of the adventure use brevity or bullet point format over walls of text (though background or story material may be excepted). Provide DM tips to problem areas. For encounters, give everything the DM needs in one place, don't have them searching the adventure book during play. Finally, provide multiple ways for a DM to adapt the adventure to their needs (whether re-leveling, scaling for a small/large party, using with in/experienced players, changing the setting, or just stealing encounters).

2. Playtesting: Use at least one competent playtest group with diverse player styles to run the adventure thru its paces, then incorporate that feedback into the final edit. So many adventures seem designed for some least common denominator of player, and have glaring holes in logic, plot, or challenges easily overcome with the right ritual or spell. Playtesting is supposed to catch this stuff.

3. Non-linearity: The dungeons should be jacquayed. There should be multiple side quests that overlap the main plot. In a mystery, more suspects than just the villain should have a reason to lie. Various encounters should be pursuable in different orders, depending on player preference. There should also be encounters tied to a sort of "villainous plan countdown" if appropriate. Challenges should be open-ended with multiple outcomes. Failures, for the most part, should be Fail Forwards. E adventure should encourage and reward lateral out-of-the-box thinking. Node-based matrix adventure design should be embraced. RPing is about making interesting choices, so give the players opportunities to do that!

Everything else is either artistic add-ons, or more about quality of writing.

How's that for an opinion?

 

[Mistwell]

From what I have consistently heard, the CoC adventure "Masks of Nyarlathotep" is the best adventure of all time.

For me, the most important factor is that it not railroad the players. Which, unfortunately, is very common.

 

[dd.stevenson]

The dungeons should be jacquayed.

As an aside: i agree that this is important, but as a DM nothing is easier than adding an extra entrance to a dungeon, throwing in a trap door, or knocking a hole in the wall to get a little jacquay up in it. Nary a published adventure goes by without me adding something like this, and I don't believe I've ever once regretted doing so.

 

[WbtE]

Standards differ depending on whether you're talking about a site- or story-based adventure.

For a site-based adventure, my first concern is the map. It has to be clear, informative, and preferably non-linear (unless it's fairly small). Even if everything else is awful, a good map can be re-purposed. Past that, I'd like the designer to have considered how the encounters fit together and what this means for the tempo of the adventure - too often monsters are right beside each other and either don't react to nearby fights or snowball into an almighty brawl. It's a bonus if the adventure has some interesting gimmicks. My last concern is a good reason for the party to be there - I can sort that out for myself.

Story-based adventures are much more difficult, especially if the designer is aiming to bring out certain themes. It's not so bad to present ticking clock scenarios and leave the party to sort out their response, although some might argue that this is not much of a story. I suppose my main concern in this type of adventure is the character of the antagonist(s): giving them a strong identity, again, allows for re-purposing the content and lets the referee consider the scenario more as an interaction of intentions than a series of events to drag the players through.

Note that there's also the art of designing for the beginner, which requires a lot more hand-holding and explanation in the text. Unfortunately, most modules these days seem to be aimed at the "begi-pert" - a creature who knows exactly what they're doing except when they don't - leading to very uneven levels of explanation. It would be good for the hobby if designers started labeling their creations as "A module for beginning DMs" and so forth.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

For me, I’ve found with the adventure paths a couple of things make them even better. Beware, spoilers for the Shackled City and Age of Worms AP are below.

1. Foreshadowing

Wherever possible, the early adventures in the AP should be used to foreshadow things that are revealed later on the campaign. The longer the gap between the foreshadowing and the reveal, the more impact it has, as it makes the players think “Wow, that was right in front of our faces this whole time.”

One of the best moments in my Shackled City AP campaign was the Beholder showing up in the first adventure. Just me putting the Beholder mini on the table had some of my players in shock, especially when they realised that it was an actual Beholder, and not some illusion. Even better though was that, about 10 adventures later, the Beholder is revealed to be the party’s patron.

Now some of my players were like “Aha! I knew he was evil!” but that still didn’t make the reveal any less cool of a moment. It also made the subsequent combat with the Beholder so much more than just another fight.

Similarly, near the end of the Shackled City AP the PC’s face off against Hookface, an ancient red dragon. Despite having never seen Hookface before the combat, this encounter was memorable because I’d foreshadowed his appearance numerous times during the campaign. The party had hear rumours of a red dragon, had been told tales of an ancient red dragon that supposedly lived in the area, etc. So by the time they spotted a massive red dragon in the air, they immediately knew who it was.

2. An effective way of giving the players the background information

This is a bit of a harder one to do, but I’ve found that showing, rather than telling, the PC’s is the best way to achieve this and is very effective when done well. Having a wealth of background information is all well and good, but it has so much more impact when it isn’t simply dumped on the players in slabs.

My group is currently playing the Age of Worms AP. In the current adventure they travel to the ancient city of Kuluth-Mar, which is where the main villain of the campaign rose to power centuries ago. While there, the party experience several visions of what happened long ago. They provide a lot really good background information but, at the same time, aren’t too detailed, and leave the PC’s with many unanswered questions. So it pushes the players on to want to find out more.

Similarly, in my Shackled City AP, a poster called delvesdeep wrote up a series of Haunted Dreams that the PC’s start having at night as the campaign goes on. These dreams are pretty abstract and confusing to begin with but, over time, tell the backstory of how Adimarchus became trapped in his cage (sidenote: These dreams completely change the backstory of the campaign as it makes Adimarchus an angel who was set-up and tragically fell into madness due to betrayal. In my opinion, they also make the campaign so much more awesome!).

By starting out abstract, they intrigue the players as they try and figure out just what they mean. As they go along it slowly fills them in on the backstory, so it isn’t dumped on them all in one hit. It also invests them a lot more in the story.

Those two things, to me, make a huge difference in making an AP feel like a massive sweeping campaign, rather than a series of connected adventures.

 

[howandwhy99]

Any good adventure is a game for players to improve at, not a path for their characters to follow. Remember, pretending a character is not required to play D&D. Go back to your wargame sensibilities. Read up on wargame scenarios and why so many of those were published. That's where D&D gets adventure modules from, places like Advanced Squad Leader.

Good adventures should: be balanced, built from the game rules (duh), have a high degree of variance, be a dynamic situation throughout its evolution, not include pre-determined outcomes beyond the rules (no guaranteed places or people the PCs must meet), offer numerous options to achieve any singular objectives within (any 1 of 3 keys opens the door is poor, all the ways you can checkmate a king is good), and my preference for D&D: not determine objectives for the players. Good adventures should provide the appropriate ratios of XP-gaining challenges for all characters classes too. Everything else is more or less easily modified. Put the pyramid adventure in the snowy north, use the cave one in a high mountain peak, change the unnamed NPC duke to the named NPC leader of a local territory, and so on. Integrate all modules into the campaign world growing from play, balanced as appropriate to alignment and level.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think tastes vary so much, it is hard to narrow this down to core qualities that work for all lines (what works for Paizo's pathfinder modules might not work for a Numenera module or a Lamentations of the Flame Princess Module).

That said for me, the modules that always remained useful to me for years were the ones that either has a solid and simple premise that was super easy to implement or those that were one part setting and part adventure. Also I would say there is a third kind of module where the adventure itself is less the point and it just hapoens to have so many good small ideas I can pull from it constantly. My favorite module remains Feast of Goblyns. It has a couple of sections I might criticize but got more use out of that adventure than any other.

Things I generally like to see in modules:

1) Hooks that work for a variety of parties and are believable
2) Avoidance of scenes or set pieces (I find these sorts of things hard to work with). Don't like things that feel like cut scenes in video games for example.
3) Interesting locations and npcs
4) Good organization
5) If the module employs unusual structure or experiments a bit, some explanation to the GM of ho to run it effectively
6) Stuff that is useful even if I don't run the adventure itself

 

[Umbran]

3. Non-linearity: The dungeons should be jacquayed.

Given that's a made-up word, perhaps we should give the uninitiated another route to understanding?

Voilà! Jaquaying the Dungeon

 

[Aenghus]

Tastes differ so I don't think that there can be a comprehensive list of necessary qualities for a good adventure module. If there are stated design goals for the adventure we can attempt to assess how well the adventure achieves those goals.

My personal constant is that sloppiness annoys me. Glaring logical flaws in the adventure, missing maps, unsound assumptions can torpedo an adventure that otherwise has potential in it's individual components.

I find that adventures written to read well can be harder to use in a game, as important information hidden in large tracts of prose, no matter how well written, are much harder to reference on the fly.

Adventures which aren't strongly integrated into a setting are easier to adapt and have a larger catchment audience but can suffer from being generic and flat. Tightly integrated adventures can be much more evocative of a setting, but are often difficult to impossible to adapt to other settings and campaigns.

Faulty assumptions about possible PC motivations can sabotage an adventure.

There are practical limits as to how non-linear adventures can be before most of the printed content risks being skipped. Most printed adventures are horrifyingly linear, as that's the easiest sort of adventure to write, and work ok for passive players and games that suit reactive play. This allows more time to be devoted to the writing of the adventure, props and handouts, rather than making the adventure less linear. Call of Cthulhu adventures have a high writing standard, but do tend to have very linear plots, especially the older ones.

Linear plots are also much easier on new referees and new players. Dungeon crawls automatically reduce the number of decisions points presented to the players, which can be very useful to new players learning a game. Conversely, more experienced players generally want more decision points in their games.

All of which is problematic, as adventures don't sell well anyway. The more targetted an adventure is the smaller it's prospective audience.

 

[Halivar]

Well, there is apparently one are where tastes do not differ all that much: everyone in this thread so far appreciates non-linearity in their adventures. A Jaquayization, if you will (never heard that term before this thread), of not just the dungeon, but the story, too. This has gotten me thinking about my own home adventure design.

Quick almost-segue to help me arrange my further thoughts:

Orson Scott Card suggests that speculative fiction (a broad umbrella that I believe very much applies to RPG's) can be divided into event stories, milieu stories, and character stories. The linear adventure represents an event story. This happens, then that happens, and so on and so forth. The milieu story often doesn't really care about the events, per se, but only insofar as they allow you to dwell in the milieu (Tolkien was a milieu writer by OSC's paradigm). Character stories are where the PC's and NPC's are the star of the show; the macguffin is merely a catalyst for character interaction. The story concludes with a change in the disposition of character relationships.

The reason I bring this up is that I, as a DM, write purely event story adventures. I come up with the overall event and work from there ("an evil wizard is taking over the town so it can be used as a waystation for the bandit king"). Then I plug NPC's into the shaped holes in the story. Non-linearity is introduced by solely via improvisation and reactive DM'ing.

I'm going to experiment with some character-based adventure design. Instead of writing "an evil wizard is taking over the town so it can be used as a waystation for the bandit king", for instance, write down the wizard, his history, his goals, his fears, his ticks. Then do the same for the bandit king. And the mayor of the town. And the comely but broken-by-life tavern wench looking for a way out. Make a web of characters, each one as compelling as possible, defining their relationships, and then, only then, decide if the wizard would really like working with a bandit king, after all. Let the events write themselves.

Sorry if this is all very off-topic to my original question, but you guys are inspiring me.

EDIT: and I forgot to even tie in the point of this post: I think this could help add player options with regards to where to take things. Players worry about story, and the DM just worries about getting the people right.