D&D General (SPOILERS for Vecna: Eve of Ruin) Are My Standards Too High for Adventures?

[MichaelSomething]

I miss dragon magazine 2

There's always En5ider! Have bangin' content drops on the regular for less a burger a week!!

 

[Clint_L]

"Are my standards too high..." implies a belief that the quality of an adventure can be objectively measured, and that your standards are superior.

But it's all just a matter of taste. I find that almost all published adventures have way too many combats, and so I change that. But that doesn't mean that fewer combats reflects a higher standard of adventure. It's just what I like.

So it's not that your standards are too high. It's just that the things you value in an adventure are different from most of the published ones that you've encountered. That's okay.

TLDR: It's not them. It's you.

 

[Remathilis]

There’s countless adventures where you get this open world but to piece it all together you literally have to rewrite it for them add etc

Didn’t have to do this back in my day. Back in my day I opened the adventure and could run it 1 day. Now the adventures back in my day are repackaged as a staircase

Right now, there is a wonderful discussion of old Ravenloft adventures going on here, and it's a vastly different opinion than what you're suggesting here. Specifically, the fact many of those Ravenloft adventures are absolute railroads with the PCs having little agency, lots of prescripted things that just happen because the plot demands (IE: NPCs die and that cannot be stopped by anything the PCs do) and a fair amount of "this character's actions don't make any sense" all crammed together to make an adventure that is a great read, but a terrible play-through. Suffice to say, there is a lot of discussion about how to fix or at least make sense of those adventures, and much of it is tantamount to "take the basic idea and write around it".

Those old modules wavered in quality all over the place. For every Ravenloft, there is a Forest Oracle. I can't count how many 2nd edition modules effectively played themselves and the PCs only existed to move the plot along. There were a lot of salvaged modules only made good by a good DM and some clever writing. This has been true for decades, regardless of if the module is published by TSR, WotC, Goodman, Paizo, or any other company.

 

[Remathilis]

So yeah, am I the only one bothered by these things?

Back at the end of 2nd edition, right as third was about to make its debut, TSR/WotC produced a little module called Die Vecna, Die. It's a high-level railroad where you travel across three different campaign worlds (Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Planescape) breaking cardinal rules in each, until the ending comes, and you get a deus ex machina by the Lady of Pain as Vecna becomes a God and joins the Greyhawk pantheon in time to be the PHB.

Eve of Run is spiritual successor to it.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing: Die Vecna Die was a blast to play. But it's absolutely a railroad in the classic 2e definition. Its not high art, nor is Die Vecna Die considered an all-time greats, but TSR/WotC made that adventure nearly 25 years ago. Nothing in Eve or Ruin is remotely new or unique.

 

[KYRON45]

I have a feeling that plenty of tables are going to play Vecna out of the box without running into significant problems. What renders an adventure "unuseable," in your opinion?

In almost 40 years of gaming I have never run a published adventure. I was making a comment based on the context of the general conversation. It seems like a lot of people were commenting that published adventures require a lot of work to use. If that's ok with you then enjoy your purchase. My standards of what makes a game good or fun are likely different than yours and to that again I say, play the game the way that brings you joy.

I have not read this adventure so I have no opinion on it at all. I hope everyone that comes into contact with it gets hours of enjoyment from it.

 

[MockingBird]

You still have to buy the whole hardcover book, no matter how little of it is useful to you.

On Dndbeyond you can buy the individual adventures from the anthology. That's how I purchased Sunless Citadel. I'm not sure if you can do that anymore or just not the newer releases.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Big book takes 12 people say. So 3 smaller projects could maybe use 4 people? Same quality over smaller projects.

I do t think that is how it works. That being said, I imagine there is a reason only smaller creators are making smaller adventures

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

On Dndbeyond you can buy the individual adventures from the anthology. That's how I purchased Sunless Citadel. I'm not sure if you can do that anymore or just not the newer releases.

I don’t think you can do that anymore

 

[MockingBird]

I don’t think you can do that anymore

That's a shame, nice while it lasted I guess.

 

[dead]

Then people should work on becoming stronger. Or maturing. Or whatever terms we wish to use.

But if anyone thinks they can remain pissy because they don't get what they want and expect to be able to express their pissiness in a way that puts the problem on the people who aren't giving them what they want, rather than acknowledging that it's purely their own issues they have... that's when the rest of us will show up and tell them they might need to grow up a little.

If someone doesn't like something.... that's fine. It happens. To all of us. But if that person then tries to blame the one who made the thing they didn't like... that's when the person is acting ridiculous and will get called out on it.

If you are the customer, don't you think they are at least partly at fault if you think they have missed the brief or if you feel the final product is poor in quality? If they don't hear you voice your complaint, how will they ever change?