D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

It's an interesting question. In the past I have linked commercial scenarios into a personal campaign, usually based around character arcs. As an independent resource producer we are still trying to figure out what people want. We've done a short adventure collection (Trials of a Young Wizard) and a megadungeon (under Mirt's Folly), we've done mega challenging (the Warren) and straight forward dungeon hacks (the Orc Battle Forge). They all sell pretty much the same.... Www.dunrominuniversitypress.co.uk

mamba said:

once they have their VTT, I’d assume they do, much easier to collect such data then.

If they had data now / back then, I am not so sure we would have the current adventuring day

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I see no reason that they wouldn't?

payn said:

I dont think its as strong as a clue as you might think. I have heard many times from adventure writers that they are, "creative types; not mechanics types". Instead of assuming the adventure isnt planned for a day, it might not be understood that it should be.

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It's also not that strong a clue, because WotC Adventures are full of Dungeons that push the Adventure Day envelope. They do use the tool, though not every day is going to be a full day.

Clint_L said:

I'm in category 4, all the way! I don't even think about the "adventuring day" - that is not a concept that comes into my head outside of discussions on these forums. I just think in terms of narrative structure.

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Parmandur said:

Yup, no reason you have to, aside from providing a maximum challenge, which obviously isn't everyone's goal all the time.

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I am in the same category as @Clint_L except, I don't even think about "narrative structure" (unless he means something different than I do by that). And as as for @Parmandur's "maximum challenge," I think I do that fairly well and still never think about the so-called adventuring day.

Which is not to say I think I am doing something right that everyone else is doing wrong or something, but rather that even in those four categories there is room for a lot of spread.

Parmandur said:

I see no reason that they wouldn't?

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because that is a lot more encounters than most people would run in a day. 3 to 4 is much more reasonable than 6 to 8 imo, and much more in line with what people actually do, if I go by what I read around here

I don’t think they had any data to back up the 6-8 decision when they made it.

EDIT: Google led me to


“Basically, In the original playtest of the Game, there were only 3 difficulties, Easy(Now Medium), Average(Now Hard), and Tough(Now Deadly). With clear guidelines on how to run this, with 4 on Average, 6-8 on Easy, and 2 or 3 on Deadly.

After the playtest for some reason, despite this being fine and fitting the typical balance paradigm that DnD has always had(at least 3-4 encounters per day), they added a new difficulty called "EASY", changing the old Easy to Medium, making the Average to Hard, and making Tough slightly easier and making it Deadly, and did this without actually changing the math much.”

So it sounds like a similar fumble to doubling the HP on a whim in 4e

I - as a forever DM - agree with Matt, but I've found that with my players, they generally want an Epic.

Both groups have lamented shorter campaigns and adventures. My preference would be a 10-session mini campaign with a direct goal. Then we can move on to a new story, new setting, etc.

My players want multi-year long adventures. One told me, "I feel like I can't get into my character until the 10th session"; almost all have loved the story of that D&D group that's played the same campaign for 40 years .

grimmgoose said:

I - as a forever DM - agree with Matt, but I've found that with my players, they generally want an Epic.

Both groups have lamented shorter campaigns and adventures. My preference would be a 10-session mini campaign with a direct goal. Then we can move on to a new story, new setting, etc.

My players want multi-year long adventures. One told me, "I feel like I can't get into my character until the 10th session"; almost all have loved the story of that D&D group that's played the same campaign for 40 years .

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Yup. It's a very romantic idea- most people want that, and the promised method is by playing a big ol' adventure book. "Complete THIS, and you'll have been playing for years!" But it's much more plausible to go sandbox, the GM seeding adventures around, the players picking them up as they're interesting, and then growing the game organically from there. You piss of a count in adventure 2, and the GM adds some fallout during adventure 3, the players decide they need to do something so you find an appropriate adventure for 4,

A "grand campaign" adventure, 1-20 or even 3-12, is also a lot of work for the GM. They need to learn all this stuff and then keep the context in their heads, even if they're not using it.

mamba said:

because that is a lot more encounters than most people would run in a day

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Is it...?

mamba said:

because that is a lot more encounters than most people would run in a day. 3 to 4 is much more reasonable than 6 to 8 imo, and much more in line with what people actually do, if I go by what I read around here

I don’t think they had any data to back up the 6-8 decision when they made it.

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Well, most of the open playtesting process was done with Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread. And my in my experience, 6-8 encounters of the difficulty that was called “easy” at the time and is now called “medium” between long rests was the norm in those modules.

mamba said:

EDIT: Google led me to

D&D 5E - The actual adventuring day is 3-4 encounters per day, Wizards just last minute decided to make Easy Encounters from the playtest, the average.

I recently made a post on Reddit about rebalancing your game to center around "hard" according to the XP budget being your average encounter, to make for shorter, more efficient adventuring days, with a bit of challenge to then, I came across this post, the top rated one saying this. " Funny...

www.enworld.org

“Basically, In the original playtest of the Game, there were only 3 difficulties, Easy(Now Medium), Average(Now Hard), and Tough(Now Deadly). With clear guidelines on how to run this, with 4 on Average, 6-8 on Easy, and 2 or 3 on Deadly.

After the playtest for some reason, despite this being fine and fitting the typical balance paradigm that DnD has always had(at least 3-4 encounters per day), they added a new difficulty called "EASY", changing the old Easy to Medium, making the Average to Hard, and making Tough slightly easier and making it Deadly, and did this without actually changing the math much.”

So it sounds like a similar fumble to doubling the HP on a whim in 4e

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I don’t think it was a whim. During the playtest, “easy” encounters were by far the most common, and I remember a lot of argument on the WotC forums at the time that it felt wrong for typical encounters to be “Easy” rather than “Average.”

EzekielRaiden said:

While I surely do not share the interest, I consider it an absolute requirement that any future full, proper, no-pretense, we-actually-recognize-it-as-one edition of D&D provide full-throated, well-tested, effective rules for "Novice Levels" or "Zero Levels" or whatever folks might want to call them.

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Agreed.

EzekielRaiden said:

Gonna have to stop you right there. I am attached to my character before a single die has hit the table. I am not able to roleplay a character to which I have no attachment. It would be like trying to write a poem about something you literally could not care less about, or trying to give an enthusiastic performance with a song you genuinely feel no emotions about whatsoever. I just can't do it.

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Heh. I write a few hundred poems and lyrics a year, most of them about things I don't really care about other than (maybe) in the actual moments of writing. Once one is done, it's dropped and on to the next.

Before any dice hit the table, I don't even know what my character will be other than maybe a vague concept e.g. "I'll shoot for a female Human Thief this time". That's the joy of having a lot of char-gen be random; and any caring for/about the character comes after it has a) entered play and b) proven itself to be any or all of entertaining-enduring-endearing.

EzekielRaiden said:

Whereas I find that you get them to do the craziest things, all throughout the campaign, by ensuring (a) they know they won't be harshly punished for creativity, (b) they feel confident that they can accurately gauge the risks involved, and (c) they actually feel comfortable taking risks, because they know you don't just willy-nilly take away the stuff they're invested in (even if you may torture them ruthlessly over some change or cost ).

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A risk isn't a risk if there's no real risk attached. If it's comfortable, it's probably not a real risk.

EzekielRaiden said:

When creativity is rewarding, when players play in good faith, when DMs support sincere enthusiasm, when the players know (as Jafar so kindly taught us!) "after all, there are things SO much worse than death!"--that's when you get players doing the crazy stuff, gladly throwing themselves into devil-pacts and swinging from chandeliers with Flynn-ly abandon and smooching dapper swains left and right.

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What's also rewarding is when the players (and I) are all laughing ourselves silly at the insane ways in which they just killed off some of their own characters, meanwhile those players whose characters bit it are enthusiastically pulling out the dice to roll up replacements.

That doesn't happen if-when the players get too attached to said characters.

EzekielRaiden said:

That is also my preference, unless I'm very specifically aiming for a full 1-to-max adventure path. (Someday, someday I will find a 4e group willing to run Zeitgeist. And it will be beautiful.)

It doesn't at all need to be slower though. 4e has 30 levels. Three years is 36 months. Accounting for occasional delays, e.g. say 3 months total of missed weekly sessions (aka about 4 missed sessions per year, which IMO seems pretty conservative!), running from level 1 to level 30 (gaining 29 levels) means gaining around one level per month, give or take. Since 4e characters start off actually competent and fulfilling their class concept right away, as opposed to feeble and inept and extremely likely to die, there is no issue with spending four weeks at 1st level. (And yes, I have lost multiple 5e characters before they even reached level 2, and I even effectively lost a particular one thrice in one campaign!) Indeed, it can be quite pleasant to stick with a focused skillset at first so you really learn exactly what you can do with it before moving on.

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IME a scheduled-weekly game averages about 45 played sessions a year, plus any off-cycle sessions that might arise e.g. going to the pub mid-week with a player to update a character that got separated from the party and ain't rejoining them any time soon.

EzekielRaiden said:

But being trapped in a world where one bad roll can literally mean the end of your adventuring career, where death is not merely a danger but an everpresent, constant, paranoia-inducing threat? I don't enjoy that in the least--and stretching it out over months of play? God, I'd almost rather you actually torture me than do that. At least the latter gets it over with.

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Where I love rolling up new characters, because of the potential (you never know what you're gonna get) and the creativity involved (what's this guy gonna do or think, what's his outlook on life, etc.). At low level, unless my luck runs consistently hot, I expect to be rolling up new ones on a regular basis until-unless one of them survives long enough to matter.

In fairness, it helps to be using a system where basic get-it-into-play char-gen is fairly fast; and I'm not sure either 4e or 5e fit this bill.