D&D 5E What do you want in a published adventure? / Adventure design best practices?

Libramarian said:

The DM should be able to run a published adventure off the page with no prep.

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A worthy goal for certain types of adventures - most of the Encounters modules prior to Crystal Cave were like that. Just pick it up and run the chapter for that session, even if it's the middle of the season and you hadn't looked at it before, sometimes even hadn't DM'd before. (Crystal Cave, though, was easily one of the best Encounters modules, probably because it branched a little here and there and felt less rail-roady, even if it meant the DM needed a little prep, and it played better if tables stuck together and attendance was consistent.)

It'd be ideal for intro modules like LMoP to run well with little or no prep, and an intro module that ran well in the hands of a novice DM would be the Holy Grail (pregens with pre-picked spells, and extensive notes for the DM on handle spells and checks that'd likely come up might be a way to go at it).

I have done this successfully with some adventures (both short and long, dungeon crawl and scene-based), and struggled to do this with others, so I think it's a totally valid and doable design goal. Of course the experience might be enriched with more prep time, but the pick-up-and-play experience should be decent and not a disaster.

I think it was the 4e DMG that described what to do to run a game if you only have 1 hour to prep, what you can do with 4 hours, etc. Maybe an adventure could be like that: here's what you get if you run this without even reading it first, here's what you can do if you have more time.

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I vaguely remember that bit of the DMG. One of the things that struck me about 4e was how bizarrely easy it was to prep & run: when I had an idea for a convention game that didn't get scheduled (it was too short for the slots at that con), so never prepped for, and then suddenly had a chance to run in open gaming, I happened to have some pregen characters (which was good, because a single character, IMX, takes longer to build than a whole 'day's worth of encounters!), so passed those out, and, in the few minutes everyone was picking out which character to play, flipped through my MM and created four 4th level encounters, re-skinning two of them in the process to match the game's elemental theme (a black dragon as a water elemental, and specters as air elementals).

I ran it a few more times over the years, with more elaborate pregens, spent more time prepping encounters, and added a 'skill challenge.' Those were better, I'm sure, but that first time was just fine, too.

5e, IMX, lends itself to minimal prep very differently. If I don't have enough time to prep a 5e game (which is typical), I'll just improv everything at the table. Works great, and if I get anything 'wrong,' well, that was a Ruling.

A bit late to the party, but here's my input as a fairly new DM, with little to no prep time. I prefer pdfs, so some of my input is geared that way

-boxed text, written to take into account different entry points and potential changes depending on what has happened so far. (I like the examples above where a couple of options are given)

-I love the idea of monster/npc cards: easy to do with a pdf; perhaps provide a link to a pdf of the cards in print versions? I prefer full stat blocks, but don't see the point of repeating them throughout the adventure description.

-Clearly designated sections in the descriptions for things like tactics, treasure, potential changes, etc. (akin to what [MENTION=6785802]guachi[/MENTION] mentions--seems like I saw another list in this thread, but I can't find it)

-Printer friendly maps that include a grid

-Printer friendly pdf (either the "main" pdf or as a supplement for those who want to print it out)

-motivations/tactics/personality notes on main NPCs

-Notes that address a fairly wide variety of approaches players may take to a situation. Often during play, my players choose to do something/try something that reveals a rather glaring lack in the adventure as written. Sometimes it's because they want to do something truly innovative, and I understand why the author didn't foresee it; but a lot of times it is a pretty logical choice/approach that was over looked in the written adventure.

One example of the latter: Quite a while ago I ran adventure that "concluded" with the PCs in possession of a red dragon egg. The adventure included suggestions for handling two different PC choices for what to do with the egg: selling it or destroying it. My players--for reasons entirely consistent with their PCs backgrounds and personalities--chose to keep the egg. There was no direction at all for how one might approach this (the egg will hatch in X days/months, how newborn dragon might respond, etc.) It was a choice that should have been foreseen and some direction provided for how to approach it. [thanks to the now defunct WOTC forums, and some other internet digging, I did figure out an approach, but it took a lot of time I don't really have at this point]

In terms of the "subsystems" conversation above, while I don't see them as necessary, I can see how they would be helpful. Cave of the Missing (available on DMS Guild) uses an interesting and somewhat different approach to both role playing encounters (when PCs are looking for info/assistance) and "random" encounters. The RP approach took me a while to get my head around, and I wish the author would have included a paragraph or two about how that system worked at the beginning of the adventure, but I did find it very helpful both in running that adventure, and in thinking about future ones. The random encounter variation was easier to understand, and didn't need a separate explanation.

Oh, another thing I appreciate are suggestions on how to adjust encounters depending on party size and/or level. (Dan Hass' adventures and the AL adventures both do this in somewhat different ways)

ArwensDaughter said:

-Notes that address a fairly wide variety of approaches players may take to a situation. Often during play, my players choose to do something/try something that reveals a rather glaring lack in the adventure as written. Sometimes it's because they want to do something truly innovative, and I understand why the author didn't foresee it; but a lot of times it is a pretty logical choice/approach that was over looked in the written adventure.

One example of the latter: Quite a while ago I ran adventure that "concluded" with the PCs in possession of a red dragon egg. The adventure included suggestions for handling two different PC choices for what to do with the egg: selling it or destroying it. My players--for reasons entirely consistent with their PCs backgrounds and personalities--chose to keep the egg. There was no direction at all for how one might approach this (the egg will hatch in X days/months, how newborn dragon might respond, etc.) It was a choice that should have been foreseen and some direction provided for how to approach it. [thanks to the now defunct WOTC forums, and some other internet digging, I did figure out an approach, but it took a lot of time I don't really have at this point]

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For a new-ish DM, that's a great insight.

That's something I've observed about a lot of adventures as well – they can be hard to adapt to a given campaign and lack details about "what if" scenarios that, from the player's side, seem pretty obvious.

Probably the kind of thing that ideally is revealed during playtesting.

I've debated making this offer, but I do think it could be used as a good talking point or example for this thread. So here goes;

If you want to see what I think is a good format for an adventure, PM me with your email address and I will send you a link for my DMsG adventure. All I would ask for in return is your thoughtful feedback, either in this thread, through a PM/email, or on the DMsG site.

It uses (sometimes modified) the list of encounter sections/headers I posted before and has, what I think) are a good collection of examples of various things. It's not perfect when it comes to what to include/exclude, but I do think it is close to something like the consensus we are getting towards with this thread.

I'll share my thoughts on your adventure [MENTION=6804070]LordEntrails[/MENTION] and also the one you mentioned [MENTION=6804968]ArwensDaughter[/MENTION] once I get a chance to read them.

On a related note, someone was surprised when I mentioned that DMs Guild now offers print-on-demand. Wanting to gauge the quality and what's possible for their pod service, I just received a print copy of the Elemental Evil Player's Companion. Btw it's not just WOTC products that are pod on DMs Guild, a smattering of smaller publisher/individual offerings too.

About 26-28 pages (which makes me guess the usual 8/16/32 page "reams" limitation is not a factor). Sturdy glossy soft cover, nice clear full-cover heavyweight pages with no bleeding. Staple bound, feels sturdy enough, but it's really cheap binding. From this product, doesn't seem like it's possible (given the way DMs Guild is doing this through whoever fulfills their pod orders) to do "pull-out maps" or anything that would detach from the binding easily. I took a few pictures to share...

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Sturdy for a softcover, good feel

See the staples?

Staples midway through the booklet

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Yea, the POD option has been there for awhile. I might do it in the future, but would have to learn the formatting rules they have. They are mainly around sizing/margins and color saturation. Shouldn't be difficult to learn, just have not had the need.

Let me know what you think, also feel free to paste any examples from my adventure (good or bad) in this thread for discussion.

On Twitter, Mike Mearls recently asked an interesting question: what's the best use of layout and information design you've seen in a dungeon adventure?

Some cool call-outs there.

I was looking at some dungeons recently, and it brought up the question of cellars, kitchens, storage rooms, toilets, and other rooms that tend to have a bland same-ness across dungeons.

One of my favorite cartographers Herwin Wielink did a map called The Caves of Uthiam which is beautiful and evocative as a piece of art. It also has areas like "kitchen", "sleep quarters", and "storage" which feel distinctly banal compared to more fantastic areas like "Hall of the Builders" or "Crowncave."

Another example. I'm converting an old Dungeon #63 adventure called Blood and Fire; in that adventure there's a fairly interesting dungeon called The Ivory Tower surrounded by a moat of flames... with an area called "the old cellars" (which holds a roper instead of the tried-and-true otyugh! gasp!) and a nondescript "kitchen" with some slaves.

I'm curious what you think about such areas.

Should they be given brief description and just left as bland elements in otherwise fantastic dungeons? Because their contribution to the dungeon's verisimilitude overshadows any blandness?

Should they be cut out of most dungeons because they don't add anything interesting? "Seen one, seen them all"? I notice a lot of the One Page Dungeon contest entries cut these sorts of bland/repeated areas out.

Should they be reimagined to make them more fantastical, even if that might mean going a little over the top?

Banal rooms...

Well, in Rise of Tiamat, our Fighter decided to go off by himself in Chuth's lair ... right to the rooms where two dozen Cultists were eating / sleeping.
The description of the Kitchen and the Dining Room suddenly became very important.

I wasn't at my creative best that day; no Cultist thought to do the Jurassic Park thing (hide under the cabinet) OR throw an infinite supply of butcher knives at him.