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

[Parmandur]

You do not own anything on Beyond. You are renting it. That's predatory. And no, being able to print out a janky, ugly AF pdf does not make up for it.

And I already said I understand why WotC doesn't sell short adventures. I wasn't even saying that they should. I was saying that it is reasonable for people to want that and big anthologies are not the same thing.

6 softcovers or 1 hardcover is a format difference, certainly, but it is still the same thing fundanentally.

 

[Reynard]

6 softcovers or 1 hardcover is a format difference, certainly, but it is still the same thing fundanentally.

No, it's not. In one, I buy what I want. In the other, I have to buy a bunch of stuff I don't want to get the thing I want.

Imagine your favorite beer was an Irish Red, and you went to.your local pub or brewery and the only way to get the red was to buy a flight. Would that make sense to you?

 

[Micah Sweet]

As the thread linked points out, there were a lot of interesting short stories ruined by the injection of the player characters and all the stuff needed to keep them in the parameters of the story. There was a lot of good lore (there was a lot of bad lore too) but much of it was no better than what we're getting now.

That last sentence is deeply subjective, of course.

 

[Parmandur]

No, it's not. In one, I buy what I want. In the other, I have to buy a bunch of stuff I don't want to get the thing I want.

Imagine your favorite beer was an Irish Red, and you went to.your local pub or brewery and the only way to get the red was to buy a flight. Would that make sense to you?

I can appreciate wanting a smaller book, and it is notable thst Beadle and Grimm do sell those in a package at a market rate.

But where you see the potential for options, I see being nicked and dimed: the soft covers are a worse deal for anyone who wants the larger amount of material, straight forwardly.

 

[TiQuinn]

That last sentence is deeply subjective, of course.

It’s a forum. 99% of the posts are subjective.

 

[jayoungr]

It seems like a lot of people were commenting that published adventures require a lot of work to use.

Extra work makes these published adventures shine and can customize them for the storytelling style of an individual group. But I wouldn't take those comments to mean that it's impossible to run them without the extra work.

 

[MerricB]

Extra work makes these published adventures shine and can customize them for the storytelling style of an individual group. But I wouldn't take those comments to mean that it's impossible to run them without the extra work.

Given I've run a lot of the published Wizards adventures without extra work, it's entirely possible. But I have a skill set that makes doing so a lot easier than for many (or so I gather based on many comments I've seen on message boards!)

Cheers,
Merric

 

[delericho]

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.

2nd Edition wasn't a golden age for adventure design, either. There's a reason those "best adventures of all time" are overwhelmingly dominated by adventures from 1st Ed and older - for all of their flaws, that's as good as it gets. Each edition since has had one or two classics (which were themselves often remakes), a bare handful of good adventures, and then a load of... other adventures.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Didn’t have to do this back in my day. Back in my day I opened the adventure and could run it 1 day.

This is, frankly, nonsense.

 

[KYRON45]

Extra work makes these published adventures shine and can customize them for the storytelling style of an individual group. But I wouldn't take those comments to mean that it's impossible to run them without the extra work.

I'm glad you enjoy them as they are then.