D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

LesserThan said:

I think the meaning was independent authors do better on DMG than WotC products there, and in some cases DMG products sale better than WotC physical books.

WotC is the low bar, not the high one.
I think Merric is the one from ENWorld that has a large following on DMG, or was that M Blackman?

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Nah. Although I've written a couple of adventures that haven't done badly, M.T. Black is the one who has really done well selling short adventures.

That he chose a nom-de-plume so close to my real name - and we're both Australians - has caused more than a little confusion.

Cheers,
Merric

CleverNickName said:

I'm confused. You say it doesn't work, then give two examples of how it does work (Don Quixote, Pickwick Papers).

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I have run more than one campaign that way myself!

The difference to what I'm saying is that you're not splitting apart an existing epic set of adventures and using parts of different epics to create your own campaign.

It's not "Let's run DL1 Dragons of Despair, then jump over to U2 Danger at Dunwater, then over to H3 The Bloodstone Wars". (Well, pick adventures with a better level progression!)

I have been persuaded by the arguments here that some of the parts of epic plotlines can be split apart and used separately, though not all of them.

Cheers!

overgeeked said:

Yes, and? Not everything has to do as well as WotC to be viable.

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Is Matt wanting people to publish short adventures (which they already do, in bulk on the DMs Guild, but also from places like Goodman Games), or for Wizards to do it?

If it's the first... well, that already happens, though it's hard.
If it's the second, then my point stands.

Cheers,
Merric

MerricB said:

I have run more than one campaign that way myself!

The difference to what I'm saying is that you're not splitting apart an existing epic set of adventures and using parts of different epics to create your own campaign.

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Ah, gotcha. I wouldn't even know where to start with that! "It's like Eberron, but Strahd is actually Tiamat!" Um, what?

I was going in the other direction: modules can be stacked together to make a campaign, like steps can be stacked together to make a stairway. Sounds like we agree.

Staffan said:

But making something more specific usually makes it more interesting. And it's usually made more so by tying it closer to the game world. For example, "fishing town" sounds pretty dull to me. But "fishing town on the shores of Lake Galifar, where you have agents of the neighboring nations the Eldeen Reaches and Aundair infiltrating things, and where there's a lot of bad blood between the followers of the Sovereign Host and those of the Silver Flame" sounds a lot more interesting. But the latter only really fits in a particular place in a particular setting, and is therefore less commercially viable despite likely being more artistically interesting.

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That's just it, though: even a not-very-adroit DM can quickly change the names "Eldeen Reaches" and "Aundair" to nations that already exist in the setting, and most DMs will be able to either insert a "Lake Galifar" somewhere or put the fishing village on the shore of a pre-existing lake or sea in the setting in use. What's useful is the write-up of the village itself plus whatever the actual adventure opportunity is in or near it.

Take U1 Secret of Saltmarsh. All I need for that is a small previously-unknown town that I can rename as Saltmarsh, on the seacoast of a realm that might have a smuggling problem. That narrows its potential location down to just about any seacoast in any realm; and after that the module is pretty much self-contained. If I plan to run U2 and U3 after it then I'l need to tack on a swamp and at least one more village, which is a trivial amount of work for me.

Staffan said:

I'm not saying modules are bad. I'm saying that it's really, really hard to make money off them. To the point where most publishers had sworn them off entirely because there's no money in modules, until Paizo showed how adventure paths could work. And that in turn lead us to the current situation where the adventure market, such as it is, is completely dominated by Epics.

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Some APs can be broken out into stand-alone modules and run piecemeal or in conjunction with other things - Princes of the Apocalypse is a fine example - but you're still stuck with that terrible hardcover-book format.

Staffan said:

It should also be noted that production standards have gone up significantly since the 80s and 90s. Significantly, full-color art (and therefore color printing) is the default these days, and usually significantly more of it.

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Other than maybe the front cover, full-colour art is a needless luxury. Internal art of any kind is only necessary IMO to fill what would otherwise be white space at the end of sections or levels; if art (other than player handout sketches) in any way adds to the page count, that's a mistake.

Staffan said:

That would also add to the price tag.

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Indeed, which is a good reason to eschew it.

MerricB said:

Paizo used to produce a line of stand-alone adventures.

In the past four and a bit years of 2E, they've made 7 of them, as far as I can see.

Even with their subscriptions, they couldn't keep them going.

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I think short adventures are handled better with their Society (and WotC's Living Campaigns).

They are not quite tailored for groups on their own (but nothing stops small groups from getting these adventures and running them on their own), but they fill that gap. This is especially good for the gamestores that run them in that you can have that short adventure, but have it run over a session and be done with it.

It fills that gap in some ways that shorter adventures and modules did, but allowing even more flexibility in people hopping in and out of the group.

Paizo still produces quite a number of the Society scenarios and does double of what they used to with both Starfinder and PF2e going strong (as far as I understand it) currently in their present seasons.

CleverNickName said:

I was going in the other direction: modules can be stacked together to make a campaign, like steps can be stacked together to make a stairway. Sounds like we agree.

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The main difference between something like the A1-A4 series and a modern hardcover AP is that the modern one is expected by both players and DMs to be the whole campaign; while it was generally assumed that the A-series would be baked into a bigger campaign, with other likely-unrelated adventures happening before and after.

Thus, one group might go B1-->L1-->T1-->A-series-->WGA4-->S2-->S4 while another group might go U1-->U2-->B10-->A-series-->I3-->Dark Tower-->G1-->D1.

Another big difference is that when a DM builds a campaign out of disparate standalones the sense is often that the players can always jump ship and do something different in the setting. For example, you-as-DM might have Ghost Tower of Inverness on deck as their next adventure, but they left-turn and go swamp-hauling instead and so you pull out Tomb of the Lizard King.

Oh, and to whoever said they saw Expedition to the Barrier Peaks on Amazon for $75: RIPOFF ALERT!

Acaeum currently shows it ranging from US $10 (fair condition) to US$38 (mint condition).

Staffan said:

• The preponderance of big campaign-length adventures like Curse of Strahd (which, for the sake of brevity, I'll call Epics) is bad for the hobby, and shorter adventures (which I'll call modules) would be better.
• The main reason is that with modules, you get a sense of accomplishment. You went to Do A Thing, and then you Did A Thing, and now A Thing is Done. Then you can move on to do A Different Thing. But with Epics, doing The Thing takes a really long time, and you're likely to get distracted long before The Thing is done, either by real-life issues, by not being able to keep track of everything that's going on, or by getting distracted by the new shiny.

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I think this misses out on a critical point.

Doing A Thing comes in different flavors. Doing One Small Thing has a lesser impact than Doing A Huge Dramatic Thing.

Is the preponderance of multi-volume fantasy or sci-fi novels ruining the publishing industry, which should move back to short stories that anyone can read quickly? No--because they serve different needs. Some people get far more out of running several modules, both for the reasons you've cited here and for others. Other people get far more out of long-form narratives: they have the time to build up themes, to establish ongoing relationships (good, bad, or ambiguous) with other characters, to show how a character evolves in response to a complex threat rather than a simple one.

As you say, the issues are that the module-in-theory doesn't have the limitations that the module-in-practice usually does. In practice, they become very formulaic, lessening the already reduced impact; they tend to be scattershot, requiring a great deal of effort to "stitch together" something interesting; and they are all too often Generic Dungeon Crawl #36 because you have to aim for the largest market slice if you want to succeed.

As for ways to fix this? I can think of one strategy that, in a certain sense, would try to hybridize the two models:

1. Gather a team of writers, say 5-8, who will be paid for a block of multiple adventures, not just a single one.
2. Have the team agree on an overall, between-adventures set of events that unfold. Some of them will be actual adventures in the block, others will be general current events.
3. Each author makes a series of adventures that loosely link together--you don't have to do every step in the sequence, but if you do, there are fun bonus bits.
4. The authors are paid in part for the collective sales of the whole block (or phases thereof), and in part for their personal contribution. This way, even if one specific adventure just doesn't sell as much as the others, it doesn't result in that author losing their shirt, but you also don't take away the success of someone who wrote a wildly successful one.

If this works, it approximates the best of both worlds. You have opt-in adventures across a span of levels (so every DM has something they could get value out of), while still having a consistent "background" for things to play out against. You get a light touch of the "Epic" linking story between things, but you don't have to engage with that if it's not interesting to you.

Obviously, folks who just want simple dungeon crawls and folks who want complex plot writing will be best served sticking with adventure modules and adventure paths, respectively, but these adventure "blocks" could address the issues without totally giving up the strengths.

MerricB said:

Is Matt wanting people to publish short adventures (which they already do, in bulk on the DMs Guild, but also from places like Goodman Games), or for Wizards to do it?

If it's the first... well, that already happens, though it's hard.
If it's the second, then my point stands.

Cheers,
Merric

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I don’t think his video is addressed to wizards or any publisher. It appears he is talking to players, possibly even inexperienced players. In the same way that a lot of his videos are directed to new players and GMs

I think he’s saying that the reason he is saying what he is saying is that according to his survey many people consider the big hardcover 1-10+ level adventure to be the default way to play D&D and plenty don’t even understand how you could play by having a setting and a bunch of small unlinked (except by the gm and the players) adventures, they don’t understand how to play other than via the big hardcovers.

He then explains how this can be done, & was done. He explains the method that plenty of people have described above ie. B2 ~ B10 ~ I2 ~G1 etc

He also say that he thinks the fact that the default view of the way to play is by big adventure is bad due to reasons like having less time to play and being a big thing to deal with for a new dm and a bunch of new players, he encourages being introduced to the game via smaller bite sized pieces.

Now obviously plenty of people are already aware of the existence of a campaign via a bunch of connected small adventures - I think they are not really the target of his video. They aren’t particularly informed by this except to let them know that (in his view) a surprising number of the people he surveyed weren’t.

Edit: I have played for decades as have the people I play with and I found it informative, I hadn’t considered it to be the case. I was similarly shocked some years ago when I found out that some people had been playing online for years and had never played face to face. Not my experience but food for thought about how the industry works.