How Do You Feel About Published Adventures as a GM?

[Zaukrie]

They are like coobooks or boxes of lego bricks.

agreed!

 

[Reynard]

They are like coobooks or boxes of lego bricks.

Well, they are sort of like Lego Sets: they are intended and built to be a thing, but that doesn't mean they can't be torn down and put together in different combinations with other "sets". But I think you are overstating the intentionality of the toolkit approach to things like Storm King's Thunder. It is meant to be a campaign in the form it is in, with some replayability because the PCs aren't meant to do everything. Rime is similar.

 

[TheSword]

And yet they still bury an important piece of information like a DC in the middle of a paragraph. Paizo adventures are terrible for utility, and they admit it, because they know most folks read their APs for enjoyment rather than run them (James Jacobs told me this directly on the Paizo forums).

It’s all relative. Tens of thousands of people bought and ran Paizo adventures and had fun with them. I think you’re exaggerating the difficulty by a fair factor. Every single person in our main group ran at least one Paizo AP very well in our Pathfinder days and two of those wouldn’t consider themselves particularly experienced DMs. They made mistakes (like I do running my 15th campaign) but it wasn’t noticeable and they did brilliantly.

I think it’s already been made pretty clear that published adventures need to be great to read and great to run otherwise they’re never going to get ran.

To be honest you’ve been on a bit of a downer about a lot of D&D in the last few months. A lot of your threads seem to originate from a position of negativity since this years schedule and firmer details of 5.5 came out. This one particularly so. Which is really sad because I’ve always seen you as one of the most balanced posters on the boards and one whom I usually agree with a lot.

 

[MichaelSomething]

To be honest you’ve been on a bit of a downer about a lot of D&D in the last few months. A lot of your threads seem to originate from a position of negativity since this years schedule and firmer details of 5.5 came out. This one particularly so. Which is really sad because I’ve always seen you as one of the most balanced posters on the boards and one whom I usually agree with a lot.

Well I'm gonna counteract your negativity with some positivity.

Embrace your hatred. Let it flow through you. Only then will you have the power to strike down those who would destroy D&D!

 

[Reynard]

It’s all relative. Tens of thousands of people bought and ran Paizo adventures and had fun with them. I think you’re exaggerating the difficulty by a fair factor. Every single person in our main group ran at least one Paizo AP very well in our Pathfinder days and two of those wouldn’t consider themselves particularly experienced DMs. They made mistakes (like I do running my 15th campaign) but it wasn’t noticeable and they did brilliantly.

I think it’s already been made pretty clear that published adventures need to be great to read and great to run otherwise they’re never going to get ran.

To be honest you’ve been on a bit of a downer about a lot of D&D in the last few months. A lot of your threads seem to originate from a position of negativity since this years schedule and firmer details of 5.5 came out. This one particularly so. Which is really sad because I’ve always seen you as one of the most balanced posters on the boards and one whom I usually agree with a lot.

I am not sure what I can say to that.

 

[Celebrim]

I should note that when I say I hate pre-written adventures as a GM, I usually mean big campaign length adventures like Paizo APs and WotC 5E adventures.

My biggest problem with most adventure paths, especially in the 3e era where 1-20 AP became a thing, was the highly variable quality of the adventures that made up the path. It's really hard to write one good adventure. Then if you commit yourself to writing like 6-7 adventures you're really pushing your luck to have them all be good scenarios. Like even if 90% of your content was good, less than half of them would make good campaigns, but the reality is usually that closer to 90% of the content is bad and so if you kind of try to force it into one long story it's just a problem. I have definitely repurposed chapters of AP's or encounters from them for my own stuff, but my attempts to play those big APs have all fizzled because even the GMs often admit that the story has gone into a really dull place.

I think one of the bigger problems was trying to force the game to go all the way from 1-20 in one go. That's really not necessary and it's an artificial constraint on the campaign/story design that makes the task even harder. Add to the problem issues of having to meet deadlines and page counts and coordinating large writing teams, and it's no wonder that overall the AP isn't that good.

I personally feel the same thing happened with the original "adventure path", TSR's GDQ where the ending of that series just fails to land because "Queen of the Demonweb Pits" is just so badly written even for its era. (Not that I think the other entries are particularly brilliant, but they are really first attempts at communicating the idea of an adventure to someone else.) And to a lesser extent, the same thing happens with the "Desert of Desolation" AP, as the final module there is a bit of a letdown as well. And for that matter, the same thing happens with the "Saltmarsh" trilogy, as both U2 and U3 are fundamentally flawed adventures IMO.

On the other hand, I feel the original DL modules are genius, "Curse of Strahd" starts with the highly sound I6 and does a vastly better treatment of the setting than I10, and the "Beyond the Witchlight" campaign is just brilliant and I really want to run that so bad. The later two are wonderful things to put in the hand of a relatively novice GM.

 

[zakael19]

It’s all relative. Tens of thousands of people bought and ran Paizo adventures and had fun with them. I think you’re exaggerating the difficulty by a fair factor. Every single person in our main group ran at least one Paizo AP very well in our Pathfinder days and two of those wouldn’t consider themselves particularly experienced DMs. They made mistakes (like I do running my 15th campaign) but it wasn’t noticeable and they did brilliantly.

I think it’s already been made pretty clear that published adventures need to be great to read and great to run otherwise they’re never going to get ran.

To be honest you’ve been on a bit of a downer about a lot of D&D in the last few months. A lot of your threads seem to originate from a position of negativity since this years schedule and firmer details of 5.5 came out. This one particularly so. Which is really sad because I’ve always seen you as one of the most balanced posters on the boards and one whom I usually agree with a lot.

While I can't speak to Paizo AP's, there's such an incredibly vast unknowable gulf between the big WOTC products and something like Necrotic Gnome's modules when it comes to writing a DM can take and run with their own flair without any work at all.

I cannot stress enough that the community acceptance of "well yeah, I'm going to pay $50 for something and then still put lots of work into adjusting it/fixing it/buying secondary products for it/etc" is completely incomprehensible to me. Hell, even Dungeons of Drakkenheim shows that you can get pretty damn close to ideal with a published massive product.

 

[el-remmen]

the intentionality of the toolkit approach

What does matter if it is intentional, if you can still do it? <shrugs in Barthes>

 

[el-remmen]

as both U2 and U3 are fundamentally flawed adventures IMO.

 

[Parmandur]

Well, they are sort of like Lego Sets: they are intended and built to be a thing, but that doesn't mean they can't be torn down and put together in different combinations with other "sets". But I think you are overstating the intentionality of the toolkit approach to things like Storm King's Thunder. It is meant to be a campaign in the form it is in, with some replayability because the PCs aren't meant to do everything. Rime is similar.

Just picking up what Perkins has laid down over the years: he likes to point out how modular tge 5E campaigns are, and they really are when you look at them. Each campaign is built as a series of independent pieces that is easy to repurpise. Nit even "with experience," the modular nature is pretty plain. As far as SKY, check out Appendix A.

These aren't Paizo style strong "Adventure Paths", they are bundled individual modules that have a throuoghline that can be used or ignored. And this is not an unusual experience with the modern big campaign books.