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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Why does WotC put obviously bad or illogical elements in their adventures?
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<blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7179266" data-attributes="member: 40592"><p>Two things...</p><p></p><p>1) the "Chris Perkins Style" - he's a great ideas man, with a touch of whimsy in what he comes up with. If it's not your thing, you just need to re-flavour.</p><p></p><p>2) WoTC relies on play-test from selected people (including my group), but the time-frames they give us, and the amount of feedback they actually take on board, is usually limited. I have no idea how much internal play test they do, but I suspect it's zero. They get something written, in full, then get it out for a quick review, meaning their ability to make fundamental changes is approaching zero...</p><p></p><p>Certainly, if you look at historical adventures up to and including SKT, we got a playtest adventure which was pretty much completed (excluding art work), but my group certainly never had time to get anywhere near playing any of them, so we spent a bit of time reviewing it on paper, which never works out anywhere as well as if you actually try and throw it on the table with real people, week after week. Typically, we only get a few weeks to get feedback in, and often our feedback is quite fundamental in nature, and often that doesn't get action. For example Curse of Strahd had an 'intro' (Death House) quickly added to what we playtested, and while it was a great little adventure, we never reviewed it and it didn't really address the problem we saw which was that the CoS campaign was more suited for mid-level PC's, not for 1-10 (or 3-10 even). SKT was very similar - I didn't like the beginning, and it put me off reviewing the rest; the published adventure had a really poor (IMO) Chapter 1 added on after review, for taking PC's from 1st to 5th level asap. Tomb of Annihilation aka Dust has gone through a similar thing - we got a copy to review near the end of 2016, with only a few weeks to review it, and it's not actually going to be published until Sep-2017, nearly a year after the adventure was put out for review. Will much of our feedback be taken on board? Obviously I have no idea, but given that my only feedback wasn't on anything specific, but more on the PC levels it was designed for, and the early parts of the adventure... well I suspect it fell in the "too hard" / "ignore" basket...</p><p></p><p>Anyway, nothing is perfect, at least they are including the community in trying to help make their adventures as best they can be. They don't have loads of staff to look after endless quality control, especially difficult given playing a big adventure book takes months if not a year or more.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="hastur_nz, post: 7179266, member: 40592"] Two things... 1) the "Chris Perkins Style" - he's a great ideas man, with a touch of whimsy in what he comes up with. If it's not your thing, you just need to re-flavour. 2) WoTC relies on play-test from selected people (including my group), but the time-frames they give us, and the amount of feedback they actually take on board, is usually limited. I have no idea how much internal play test they do, but I suspect it's zero. They get something written, in full, then get it out for a quick review, meaning their ability to make fundamental changes is approaching zero... Certainly, if you look at historical adventures up to and including SKT, we got a playtest adventure which was pretty much completed (excluding art work), but my group certainly never had time to get anywhere near playing any of them, so we spent a bit of time reviewing it on paper, which never works out anywhere as well as if you actually try and throw it on the table with real people, week after week. Typically, we only get a few weeks to get feedback in, and often our feedback is quite fundamental in nature, and often that doesn't get action. For example Curse of Strahd had an 'intro' (Death House) quickly added to what we playtested, and while it was a great little adventure, we never reviewed it and it didn't really address the problem we saw which was that the CoS campaign was more suited for mid-level PC's, not for 1-10 (or 3-10 even). SKT was very similar - I didn't like the beginning, and it put me off reviewing the rest; the published adventure had a really poor (IMO) Chapter 1 added on after review, for taking PC's from 1st to 5th level asap. Tomb of Annihilation aka Dust has gone through a similar thing - we got a copy to review near the end of 2016, with only a few weeks to review it, and it's not actually going to be published until Sep-2017, nearly a year after the adventure was put out for review. Will much of our feedback be taken on board? Obviously I have no idea, but given that my only feedback wasn't on anything specific, but more on the PC levels it was designed for, and the early parts of the adventure... well I suspect it fell in the "too hard" / "ignore" basket... Anyway, nothing is perfect, at least they are including the community in trying to help make their adventures as best they can be. They don't have loads of staff to look after endless quality control, especially difficult given playing a big adventure book takes months if not a year or more. [/QUOTE]
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Why does WotC put obviously bad or illogical elements in their adventures?
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