Value for money? How long does it take you to play through published adventures?

[MerricB]

The last two seasons of D&D Encounters have eschewed a week by week breakdown of what happens each session in favour of just providing an adventure and letting individual DMs run it as they will. So, it isn't so good for players who travel from store to store, but it's much better for running D&D in a more traditional manner.

The other thing about Scourge of the Sword Coast is that there's a lot of material in it. I used to run each Encounters session in about an hour; that was the time it took to do the set-up and then run one 4E combat. Murder at Baldur's Gate, which basically allowed me to work out the details of individual encounters, clocked in at about 90 minutes or fewer per session. Scourge of the Sword Coast? We're running at 2+ hours per session, and we're not going to have enough time to finish the entire adventure in the 13 sessions we've been given. I tend to run D&D games faster than many other DMs, so we're easily looking at 26 hours or more of play time from one adventure.

Looking back at my campaign notes, I can see the the standard 4E adventure (with its slow, slow combats) would normally take us 20-24 hours. The Pathfinder AP adventures? Somewhere around 12-16 hours for us for each adventure; however, as my experience covers only Council of Thieves and Kingmaker, it doesn't really cover the more traditional and stable forms of the recent APs.

As a comparison, it took my AD&D group about 12 hours to get through X2: Castle Amber.

How do these numbers stack up against your experiences playing published adventures? Which systems and adventures take longer?

Cheers!

 

[howandwhy99]

I'd say dozens to a hundred hours for something like B2 to wipe out the threat at the caves. But that's only a focused adventure, not where they leave and come back to the area. Plus you have to account for the rules the DM is using. Some rulesets slow play down, some make it go faster. Not to mention an adventure area will repopulate if not actively defended, which could count as further adventure. And of course players can simply play slowly at the table.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

How do these numbers stack up against your experiences playing published adventures? Which systems and adventures take longer?

The only real data point I can contribute is some 30 hours for The Slaying Stone. The feeling of our group(s) being painfully slow comes from the fact that we play only once every three weeks and the "active" time is only about, say, two and a half hours.

Regarding the influence of system and adventure, I say the combination of both is the deciding factor. What the 4e authors never seem to have learned is that a good 4e adventure is designed differently than those of other versions of D&D. Give me a 4e adventure with 3-4 complex combats and a lot of freedom for roleplaying and build-up and I'm happy. And don't force the combats into a single dungeon level.

Regardless of this, the more convoluted the plot is the more time an adventure takes. While this sound trivial, there's something more to it. The longer adventure leads to more sessions, more sessions means longer real time, and this means that the amount of time needed for recapping and planning grows much more than the added elements would cause.

 

[MerricB]

What the 4e authors never seem to have learned is that a good 4e adventure is designed differently than those of other versions of D&D. Give me a 4e adventure with 3-4 complex combats and a lot of freedom for roleplaying and build-up and I'm happy.

Some of the Encounters seasons showed how to design a 4E adventure, and some of the Game Days. Not sure about the late published adventures though, since I didn't run those.

 

[Zardnaar]

Very hard top say. B2 took us a year or so playing once a week for 1.5 hours minus school holidays so probably 30-40 hours. Never finished Labyrinth of Madness or The Night Below. Kingmaker took us 2-3 sessions each part of the AP.

 

[delericho]

When I ran "Shackled City", it took us three long sessions (6+ hours each) to get through each of the 11 adventures (we used the Dungeon version, not the hardback).

We used very few 4e adventures, but the ones we did typically took an hour per encounter.

To be honest, though, I question a calculation of value based on the time it takes to play through a module. Rather, I would argue that their value lies in the amount of time and effort the DM saves by using a module.

 

[Morrus]

Age of Worms and WotBS both took about 18 months of 3-4 hours per week. On Kingmaker #1 we've spent a month on the first adventure but I don't know how far though it we are.

 

[Kinak]

My Answer:
For Rise of the Runelords, it's been about two months of weekly 2-3 hour sessions per chapter. So about 15-20 hours (we miss some weeks).

Even assuming I'd paid subscription price (rather than getting the hardback), that'd come to less than a dollar per hour. Pretty good value by that metric.

My Metric:
But that's not really how I measure their value. I've been GMing a long time and am a pretty good GM, but the less obvious your mistakes, the less guidance you get from the players. So having something like an AP can be invaluable in shaking me out of my rut.

So the Dark Fantasy Lovecraftian Conspiracy Sandbox adventure with side orders of Body Horror, Grey-on-Grey Morality, and Endlessly-Layered Mysteries... that's not going to do me any good. I have to run Pathfinder rather than Call of Cthulhu so my games don't go full-on Lovecraft already.

Sometimes I need to be reminded that roleplaying can be about just killing some giants and saving the day. And, you know, to do things like include an appropriate number of female NPCs and not totally ignore the fact that romance exists.

So spending a year running Rise of the Runelords has made me a better GM than running several years of my own campaign would have. I'm not really sure how to put a price tag on that, but I'm comfortable asserting it's worth way more than the sticker price.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[TerraDave]

As I think it through, a surprisingly consistent 20-25 hours.

This is for a standard "module" albeit from a range of editions. Something equivalent to multiple modules...would clearly take more time.

I am actually surprised how consistent it is, across meeting frequencies, editions, campaign types, etc. And I am clearly doing something as a DM to make this happen...like dropping redundant 4e encounters, for example.

But still.

 

[dd.stevenson]

Good thread!

The only published adventures I've run all the way through (as opposed to halfway through, which would be a lot), are the first two carrion crown APs. Each took about three months, at three hours a week. Better value than any other form of for-pay entertainment out there, but of course that's not much use if you want to compare the value of paizo adventures with the value of other adventures!