What would you like to see more in an adventure?

[CRGreathouse]

Look, a 7-way tie! Personally, I voted for interesting NPCs, interesting monster fight scenes, and web enhancements.

 

[MythandLore]

Multiple choice- I voted once for every thing because in my opinion I would like to see some of each in an adventure.

Ditto.

 

[rounser]

Non-linear scenario, with lots of choice. I'm not so much interested in story so much as being engaged.

Good point. A simple scenario with true player choice and decision making is often more fun than some complex story woven around NPCs.

I think this gets overlooked a lot.

 

[Psion]

After seeing and reviewing a lot of adventures, I must say I am getting sick of site-based scenarios. They are all beginning to look the same.

What I would like to see is some good event-based scenarios. As an example of what is NOT a good event based scenario, I offer up Standing Stone. The scenario relied on some unreasonably... uh, unreasonable NPCs and conditions to pull its ruse off, which made it come off very weak IMO.

A lot of event-based adventures I see have very little flexibility, and tend to make overly generous (or even outright illogical) assumptions as to what the players are likely to do. Further, too many of them are rather inflexible and offer little or no troubleshooting guidelines for likely alternate PC actions. I think this stems from too many adventure authors thinking in terms of "plots" in which they can predict the characters paths. Adventures aren't plots. They are situations.

Edit - spelling, grammar

 

[Xilo]

I chose creative combat..

At the moment my main character is a fightre..and she has some cool feats. the more creative the combat the more creative i can be with my feats!

 

[CRGreathouse]

Perhaps you should redo the poll as single selection, "choose the most important" poll - these results aren't really meaningful.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Pretty much everything here.

The one thing it's got to avoid is dungeon syndrome. Night Below and Temple of Elemental Evil broke down for my campaign when it became straight dungeon crawling while others like the Ebon Mirror and Monte's advneture with the undead ghost dragon, despite having some dungeon like elements, ran much smoother.

One of the things I loved about the old Warhammer Empire in Flames deal, was that it provided source material and adventure material and lots of options with ties into many potential products. Good stuff all around in many ways.

 

[megamania]

What makes an adventure a "good" one? If ten years from now you still remember it. The tricky part now is...each group has a different sense of importance and what will stick in their minds for a decade.

I like difficult traps/situations and strange and unique creatures (or combos) myself. Stories with twists are only as good as the DM can deliver it.

 

[Cbas10]

For me (as a DM or as a player), great storylines, interesting background information, and life-like characters are an absolute must. Unexpected twists in the storyline are pretty much 100% necessary, too. Just like movies and books, If I can guess the plotline and ending of a story in the first quarter of the story, the rest is simply a really long and tedious epilogue. This boredom is magnified a thousand-fold if I have to continue to show up for games every week for 4+ hours a pop...

Having a known plot and resolution in the opening scene of an adventure is pretty much the same thing as rail-roading. Having NPCs without any depth is pretty much the same thing as the DM telling his players, "Don't worry about role-playing; he's just another 6th level fighter from whom you can buy magical swords." Additionally, having storylines and adventure concepts that are not generic enough (i.e. most Kalamar modules; they are GREAT, but they are way too Kalamar-specific for me to want to convert to my game).

Puzzles, monsters, wierd encounters, and such do not thrill me. Chances are, every store-bought adventure will have to be altered to fit my game and the campaign I am running. I might certainly keep some of these aspects if they are truly interesting, but they will certainly NOT influence my decision on whether or not I want to buy it.

Personally, I don't care if anything is Open Content or not; I don't plan on writing anything for any d20 games. Whether something is OC or not has absolutely nothing to do with buying and using a book. As for Web Enhancements, I'm not a huge fan of them. Generally (especially with WotC), Web Enhanced material is either (A) Material that was not good enough for the book in the first place...or (B) Material that is actually REALLY good but was cut from the book to make room for some other asinine monster, prestige class, or uber-kewl magic item (this just irritates me to think that publishers can find a reason to include substandard material in a $30+ book while better material has to be excluded). Maps are the exception; Map web enhancements are always good...

 

[johnsemlak]

I marked detailed NPCs and the puzzles/traps category.

In 'other', I would like to seek good illustrations to be shown to players, idealy of every significant location (like S1-Tomb of Horrors, with better illustrations perhaps).