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

[happyhermit]

I might have a different perspective than many in that I played for decades but was never a fan of the old "modules" in general. We played them sure, and I tried a fair variety from different publishers and systems and even run by people outside our regular group, but overall they fell flat next to our usual homebrew. The 5e starter set went a long way towards redeeming published stuff in our eyes, I can't say enough about how good that adventure is IMO. I have seen completely new-to-ttrpg players just start running it and they "got" D&D in a way that usually took much longer, not to mention players, and as a long time GM I found it excellent as well. CoS and SKT have me 100% ready to pick up ToA when it comes out. I actually am waiting to buy the next adventure which would have sounded ridiculous to me a few years ago.

So, here's my take on what I like about the recent adventures and by extension what has convinced me to buy more.

It needs to be readable. If the text comes out looking and sounding like a formula my satisfaction drops precipitously. I may never run a particular section for a variety of reasons, but if the writing is good I will be satisfied anyways. On this note, I am not a fan of in-line stats in general. A sidebar wouldn't be too bad but I much prefer to have them all in one place (referring to the MM is great), "cut-out" cards are wonderful.

I like boxed text, even if I wouldn't normally read it aloud. It gives a nice summary that's quick and easy to check.

If the adventure is particularly linear I am simply not interested, I might slice it up for pieces but I simply don't want to buy, run, or play in it. Reading it irks me because of the assumptions made on what will happen vs. what I or players I know would do.

"Modularity" in the sense of "steal-abilty" is great. SKT was a great example of this for me. The lists of locations that are tied together somehow have been much more inspiring and useful than purpose-made materials I have used (or acquired with the intention to use) in the past. Some of them I just used the idea or shape ie; "Beorunna's Well" while others like "Grudd Haug" almost as-is can be transplanted to so many locations. More elaborate locations like Goldenfields are great as well. Then there is all the non-location stuff, I have stolen the airship, the boats, and other stuff that isn't coming to mind ATM. None of this stuff is new to me and I have rules/art/maps/diagrams already but packaged like this it really comes to life.

Things that I wish they did more of are definitely indexing/listing this kind of thing for reference. Making it even more readable, as a GM/purchaser I would love to have a clearly identified bit of story for many locations, either past lore or even an example of what could happen.

 

[Charles Rampant]

Being fun to read is a great point. I need to be excited while reading it, not bored and just reading it to satisfy game prep requirements.

Side note: Tales from the Yawning Portal is easily the most boring adventure book to read so far, and I think that it is due to the lack of an overarching story. It's just a bunch of stuff, and much of that stuff doesn't even make sense within its own chapter. But perhaps it's just because I'm still in the middle of Forge of Fury, which is probably a lot of fun to play, but reads like just a bunch of rooms with Orcs in them...

 

[Luz]

I've heard a couple people mention the desire for "sub-systems" / "variant rules" to be incorporated, [MENTION=32659]Charles Rampant[/MENTION] and [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] and I think [MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION].

What are examples of that? In a war-based scenario like Red Hand of Doom, including "light weight" mass combat guidelines in the form of victory points?

I6 Ravenloft uses the tarot cards subsystem, and another module is I8 Ravager of Time (another gem from the UK) uses rules for drastically aging the PCs temporarily. Excellent examples that use subsystems/variant rules within the context of the adventure itself. That said, I'm fine with these if it's simple and appropriately tied to the material but I dislike systems that are cumbersome and complicated. The Sin points from Runelords were like that, IIRC.

 

[Eltab]

Sounds like you're saying you'd like to see backgrounds used as hooks to involve the PCs in the adventure?

I'm writing a "mini-AP" set in FR's Great Dale (I hope AL-compatible when I finish). I have a page-full of character background hooks that reference the existing Factions, and groups from 3e-4e lore of the region. They all offer a potential motivation for a player who isn't sure "what my character wants to do" beyond the Page One 'reason for this group to work together'. Examples:
- Order of the Gauntlet: Roaming demons terrorizing civilians? Response obvious!
- Emerald Enclave: Find some useful task to impress the Nentyarch with the benefits of closer cooperation between our organization and his.
- A Shou, you were tasked by your family with finding new long-range commercial possibilities, now that everybody has heard of Uthmere's revival.
- Long having lived on the edges of the frontier, you want to experience the rumored luxuries of 'civilization'.
- A Theskian half-orc, you are concerned that civilization will make you go soft. You want to keep your inner keen edge that is honed by facing adversity.
- A hathran of Rashemen, you are seeking out information after hearing mystic prophecies that Eltab's Bane will soon rise again.
All of these have some event woven into the plot that will fulfill the goal. Hopefully I'm not so cryptic that the average player cannot find his character's hook.

 

[LordEntrails]

...
That said, [MENTION=6804070]LordEntrails[/MENTION] suggested upthread that DMs who run sandbox/open world campaigns aren't the target for most published adventures. I've several bookshelves here that would like to respectfully disagree with that opinion.

You're reversing the logic behind my opinion *G*
I think DMs that sandbox or create their own content are a minority (again, no statistics to back this up!). That's why I think they (us) are not the target audience. They (us) who create our own stuff are probably some of the largest individual consumers of content, I just think we are a minority of the GM's.

Kind of like how WotC and others have stated at other times that those who are vocal on social media (like ENWorld) are actually a minority of their customers.

 

[LordEntrails]

...
It's one thing to say "make it easy to run", but what does that mean in clear terms?

It sounds like you're saying at the top of that easy-to-run list is: Provide an unambiguous linear path option. Is that right?

I don't have a detailed definition of what it means in order to be "easy to run". That would could be a dissertation of it's own.

But no, easy to run does not have to be linear. It is easy to author an easy to run adventure by making it linear, but an adventure does not have to be linear in order for it to be easy to run.

Things that make non-linear adventures easier to run include; cross-referencing, intuitive organization & structuring, indexing, visual aids (i.e. flow charts, maps, etc) and visual clues in the adventure to help spur memory clues.

...
I'm sure you didn't mean any offence here, but "railroad" is to me a pejorative term that is ....

No offense intended. Language is imperfect at best.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm just looking to make the text denser, more like the early 1e modules that - even allowing for occasional bouts of Gygaxian prose - mostly managed to pack a lot of info into a small page count.

Agreed, with reservations: 4e was very good at the big set-piece encounter or combat, but they were generally a) inflexible, and b) unavoidable.

Not sure what you mean by 'inflexible' but unavoidable? Encounters, like AL has been at times, tended very much to every table running the same Encounter each week (at least, IMX, and I participated from the 2nd season on), well, until Crystal Cave. It was just convenient when tables could gain/lose/shuffle players each week.

Outside of that, though, no so much. A typical/suggested use for a skill challenge, for instance, was to avoid an encounter, or to change the circumstance (and thus difficulty) of one.

 

[Lanefan]

Not sure what you mean by 'inflexible'

Inflexible in that as written the encounter or set-piece was what it was, with no provisions given for changes - it kinda just sat there and waited for the PCs to find it.

but unavoidable? ...
Outside of that, though, no so much. A typical/suggested use for a skill challenge, for instance, was to avoid an encounter, or to change the circumstance (and thus difficulty) of one.

In some cases, yes, but in quite a few others the adventure was intentionally designed such that to be able to complete it you had no choice but to go through the set pieces. Which is fine as far as it goes - some of the 4e module set-pieces really are quite well done - but hard if not impossible to avoid.

Encounters, like AL has been at times, tended very much to every table running the same Encounter each week (at least, IMX, and I participated from the 2nd season on), well, until Crystal Cave. It was just convenient when tables could gain/lose/shuffle players each week.

This is a different issue entirely. I have nothing to do at all with AL and thus don't consider it when discussing this stuff. I'm speaking purely from the standpoint of the home-game DM/player.

Lanefan

 

[Tony Vargas]

Inflexible in that as written the encounter or set-piece was what it was, with no provisions given for changes - it kinda just sat there and waited for the PCs to find it.
In some cases, yes

In some published adventures, you mean. Sure, and that'd always been the way, some modules felt like un-related monsters just sitting in their rooms waiting to be killed & looted (Munchkin's like that for a reason). Other's didn't.
But in 4e you not only had decent encounter guidelines to make your set-piece encounters to the level of difficulty desired, you had decent skill challenge guidelines to deal with the possibility of evading them or taking them on different terms. You could even combine them. And, ironically, while they were /called/ 'set-piece,' they could be much more dynamic in how they played out...

but in quite a few others the adventure was intentionally designed such that to be able to complete it you had no choice but to go through the set pieces. Which is fine as far as it goes

Sure, lots of modules have gotten presented that way, going back pretty far. (I won't say 'all the way,' since I believe I've seen the very first published adventure, and it wasn't railroady, at all - it was hard to tell how PCs would engage with it at all, really.)
Some would have notes like "if there's a combat in area 51 the orcs from area 13 move to area 49 and set an ambush," or whatever, some would just say there's so many hundred orcs in the complex and let the DM decide how many were in a given area at a given time, most would have a wandering damage table somewhere...

Once 3e introduced CR, you'd see more (and more concrete) notes about adjusting an encounter up or down based on the number or levels of the players, because encounter design became a more quantitative thing.

This is a different issue entirely. I have nothing to do at all with AL and thus don't consider it when discussing this stuff. I'm speaking purely from the standpoint of the home-game DM/player.

But published modules without DM latitude or embellishment?

 

[pogre]

Being fun to read is a great point. I need to be excited while reading it, not bored and just reading it to satisfy game prep requirements.

Side note: Tales from the Yawning Portal is easily the most boring adventure book to read so far, and I think that it is due to the lack of an overarching story. It's just a bunch of stuff, and much of that stuff doesn't even make sense within its own chapter. But perhaps it's just because I'm still in the middle of Forge of Fury, which is probably a lot of fun to play, but reads like just a bunch of rooms with Orcs in them...

Oddly, I almost always agree with everything CharlesRampant says but we are on opposite sides here. Forge of Fury is ideal in this regard from my perspective. Give me what I need to run encounters - that's it.