D&D General How do you know an adventure is "good" just from reading it?

[Eyes of Nine]

It's about as logical as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But that doesn't have to stop you enjoying it.

Yeah, that stopped my players from enjoying it. Maybe my fault, as I tried to shoehorn it into an existing campaign and to put some big bad artifacts from my own campaign in there; and even drop some clues about my big bad

If I had just said "hey, we're going to play a funhouse dungeon - it will make no sense, really" I'm sure they and I would have enjoyed more

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, that stopped my players from enjoying it. Maybe my fault, as I tried to shoehorn it into an existing campaign and to put some big bad artifacts from my own campaign in there; and even drop some clues about my big bad

If I had just said "hey, we're going to play a funhouse dungeon - it will make no sense, really" I'm sure they and I would have enjoyed more

It was written without any idea that it might get published: Lawrence Scheck put it together with bits and pieces from his home Dungeons as a portfolio, and TSR just decided to publish the portfolio as a module.

 

[Charlaquin]

An adventure is as good as the DM running it makes it. You read an adventure to decide if it’s something you’d be interested in running. When a DM reads an adventure and says it’s bad, they’re essentially saying that to make playing it a fun experience is not work they would want to do.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

It was written without any idea that it might get published: Lawrence Scheck put it together with bits and pieces from his home Dungeons as a portfolio, and TSR just decided to publish the portfolio as a module.

We're getting away from the OP, but suffice it to say - I enjoyed reading WPM and imagined playing it for the "ideal" group; but in play the way I used it with my real group - it landed somewhat flat.

Examining that a bit closer - my group enjoyed the first 2-3 puzzles; but by the 15th, they were kind of over it. They wanted more fights - they like tactical play as most of them have come over from boardgames or are not into optimizing their characters and have made a barbarian and just want to "hulk smash". The last two really like to figure out the overarching mystery and talk to people and role-play. WPM didn't have much good for them.

Tomb of Annihilation is a much better fit for this particular group

 

[Teemu]

I find actual play reviews much, much more valuable than read-through reviews. Every single published adventure that I've run has in some ways been different from what I read it as. You can never really grasp the full structure and feel of an adventure until you prep and run it. There is always something in the product that works or comes off different compared to how it appears from just reading.

Thus it's very difficult to get an understanding of an adventure's quality when it first comes out. You have to wait like a year for the actual play reviews to come trickling in, and then you can get a rough consensus. So my advice is to search for reviews and opinions from people who've played through the product, not the first-day reviews where the reviewer has only had time to read the book.

 

[Lanefan]

An adventure is as good as the DM running it makes it. You read an adventure to decide if it’s something you’d be interested in running. When a DM reads an adventure and says it’s bad, they’re essentially saying that to make playing it a fun experience is not work they would want to do.

I'm not sure it's nearly that cut-and-dried.

For one thing, reading a module gives very unreliable guidance as to how things will go when you actually run it. For another, there eventually comes a point where the amount of work required to make a module playable* exceeds that of writing your own module, at which point using the canned one becomes wasted effort. And third, no matter what you do there's simply going to be some modules that for whatever reason don't grab the imagination of some players the way you think they will.

A fairly recent example of the first: I had an old Judges Guild module "Druids of Doom" kicking around, and for some reason pulled it out and gave it a longer look. On reading it through, I thought "hey, I can use this - it fits into the campaign without me having to do much, it doesn't need much conversion, and it's got enough different elements to keep things interesting."

And so I ran it last year, and it ended up being far more DM-side work than I expected mostly due to little things I missed when I read it through: the maps and room write-ups often wildly disagreed as to room and hallway dimensions (to the point where I really think the writer was using one scale and the map-maker another, offset by about 1/3), the dungeon occupants (mostly humans) didn't make sense or tie together nearly as well in play as it seemed they'd do on reading, and some of the specific elements that read as being cool and interesting just didn't work out in play.

* - and I'm not talking abut edition conversion here (that's a separate thing), just what it takes to make a module a) fit into your campaign and b) runnable at the table.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not sure it's nearly that cut-and-dried.

For one thing, reading a module gives very unreliable guidance as to how things will go when you actually run it. For another, there eventually comes a point where the amount of work required to make a module playable* exceeds that of writing your own module, at which point using the canned one becomes wasted effort.

I mean, yeah, that’s literally what I’m saying. If a module would be too much work to make good, it’s what we’d call a bad module. Where exactly the threshold of too much work lies is going to be different from DM to DM, and I think if you’re interested in the content within a module, you’re more likely to be willing to put more work into it than you would be for one that doesn’t inspire you personally.

And third, no matter what you do there's simply going to be some modules that for whatever reason don't grab the imagination of some players the way you think they will.

Well, sure. But I think what makes a module good from the perspective of a player participating in it is a different question than what makes module good from the perspective of a DM reading it. Generally though, I think any module can be good or bad from a player’s perspective, depending on what the DM does with it.

A fairly recent example of the first: I had an old Judges Guild module "Druids of Doom" kicking around, and for some reason pulled it out and gave it a longer look. On reading it through, I thought "hey, I can use this - it fits into the campaign without me having to do much, it doesn't need much conversion, and it's got enough different elements to keep things interesting."

And so I ran it last year, and it ended up being far more DM-side work than I expected mostly due to little things I missed when I read it through: the maps and room write-ups often wildly disagreed as to room and hallway dimensions (to the point where I really think the writer was using one scale and the map-maker another, offset by about 1/3), the dungeon occupants (mostly humans) didn't make sense or tie together nearly as well in play as it seemed they'd do on reading, and some of the specific elements that read as being cool and interesting just didn't work out in play.

* - and I'm not talking abut edition conversion here (that's a separate thing), just what it takes to make a module a) fit into your campaign and b) runnable at the table.

Yeah, that sounds like one most DMs would agree is bad, because it’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth to make good. But, I think a DM who for whatever reason was super committed to making it work and basically re-wrote the whole thing could run a good game out of it.

On the flip side, I think even if it had been as easy to incorporate as you had first thought it was going to be, it would still have been possible to run it poorly, or at least in a way that, as you said, didn’t grab the players like you thought it would.

 

[pogre]

For me, I don't worry about the plot and story - I can make it work on some level for my players. What I look for are

• cool npcs that the players will love or hate
• fun and different encounter set-ups, usually related to combat
• a big challenge (usually the big villain) that has a twist or is unusual

Everything else is icing for me.

 

[Rabbitbait]

What kind of things inspire you? Like - is it the name? The historical connections? (Tomb for example related but diff from Tomb of Horrors, etc) The setting?

It changes. I like to have a different feel for each campaign, so I like that WOTC mixes it up a bit. Currently not DMing (I GET TO PLAY INSTEAD), but my last campaigns that I DMed were:

• Homebrew Eberron - fairy tale, lost in the woods adventure
• Empire of the Ghouls - Kobold Press - Gritty, semi horror - can be adjusted to make it terrifying
• Across Eberron - DM's Guild series of adventures. Very heroic planar themed campaign, very centred on player backgrounds and goals.
• Homebrew Eberron - Based in Sharn - city campaign with lots of ongoing NPC's. Seldom left the city, very centred on player backgrounds and goals.
• Tomb of Annihilation - Sandbox(ish) meatgrinder for the first half, followed by a very clever lost city and tomb. Great fun.
• Homebrew Eberron/Princes of the Apocolypse. Used the published campaign as a base but it veered off in lost of random directions - set 30 years after the end of our last campaign after the previous characters pretty much killed half the population by accidentally releasing Bel Shalor (whom they eventually re-imprisoned)

Hey, that's all my 5e campaigns I ran. That's nice to look back on.

 

[Gradine]

The trick is that really they can't. There's so much a DM (and a party) add, even through the most basic, by-the-book play. I've found that even most consensus "bad" adventures are enjoyed by most of the people who've actually played it (HotDQ comes to mind as the most egregious example)