Adventure Design Philosophy (was: Best D&D Adventures)

[MerricB]

I'd be tempted to put The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh into this category.

Almost, but it's far more site-based. It's an investigation theme, but not plot-wise, if you get the difference. There's not really many intricacies you have to unravel once you get there.

Cheers!

 

[pemerton]

This was said in the original thread:

Back in the days I had an eye-opening experience when I read my first MERP adventure. It was a dynamic, a 'living dungeon'. It was neatly divided into a description of the static elements (rooms) and a list of inhabitants, their typical time-schedule, tactics, etc.
It didn't have any pre-planned encounters or set-pieces like all the D&D adventures I had read before. I.e. it offered a completely different kind of freedom. _Meaningful_ choices rather than 'door A' or 'door B'.

I've never used MERP adventures but have used a lot of ShadowWorld modules for RM, and they also set up situations (with various NPCs, various intertwining plots etc) and then set the PCs loose among them.

I strongly dislike railroading, but "railroading" is an ambiguous term.

I don't mind an adventure in which a particular climax has to occur for the adventure to be fun (eg the conclusion to the Freeport trilogy). That's not railroading, in my book - the whole point (for me) of a published adventure is that it gives me well-developed and interesting situations that are better than those I could come up with myself.

What I do object to is an adventure that only works if it can be taken for granted whom the players will ally with, whom they will oppose, and so on, or that only works if it can be taken for granted that the players will fall for a particular trick or not uncover some particular piece of information until the right time. This is railroading, because it precludes meaningful choices on the part of the players.

When I ran the Freeport trilogy (adjusted for high-level RM rather than low-level D&D), the players worked out straight away who the villain was (it is pretty obvious, after all) and didn't really align with any of the various factions. They approached the situation in their own way, imposed their own order on the town, and the lighthouse climax (suitably amplified with a number of ideas from Malhavoc's Requiem for a God) was one of the highlights of the campaign.

When I ran OA7 The Test of the Samurai (converted from 6th-ish level AD&D to 10th-ish level RM), my players killed one PC they were meant to align with, more or less ignored another, cheered when the annoying tag-along NPC met his end, and once again enjoyed a very dramatic climax.

I find that the WoTC 3E adventures are not very suited for this sort of playstyle. I think some of the Penumbra adventures really distill it down to a finely-honed point (especially Belly of the Beast, Three Days to Kill, Maiden Voyage and Ebon Mirror) but I haven't yet had a chance to run them - I've got plans to use them as the basis for a HARP campaign.

Unlike the MERP/ShadowWorld approach these adventures remove the exploration element entirely - its not about the players first working out the parameters of various situations and then choosing how to respond, but rather immediately hurling the players into a very intense situation and seeing what happens. I'm hoping that 4e will see more adventures like this - unlike 3E, it has the reward and encounter mechanics (skill challenges, quest XP etc) to really support this sort of adventure design. (Heathen, for Dungeon 155(?), has hints of this.)

 

[MerricB]

Some fascinating points there, pemerton - although I feel that if all adventures were written in that playstyle, we'd be a lot poorer for it. Red Hand of Doom, for instance, does make certain assumptions that are at odds with the philosophy you describe.

I find that the WoTC 3E adventures are not very suited for this sort of playstyle.

If you've read The Standing Stone (3e adventure path module), I'd be interested to know your thoughts on how that adapts to such a playstyle.

Cheers!

 

[knightofround]

I obviously don't mind if it's not your cup of tea. But you're close to touching on the differences here.

....

Well, that's enough for now. Just a few points for you to munch on. Again, if you're into a different kind of experience, that's fine. But I hope you come to see that there are reasons why things were done the way they were, and why those of us who still run and play in old school games continue to do so. It's not because we're unable to keep up with change (like, we're on the internet and all) or that we have "rose colored glasses" or something. It's just a different approach to gaming which aims at delivering a different kind of experience.

Hey there =)

I think you have some good points on the "Best D&D Adventures" thread, and I'm sorry if you took my statement for rudeness =P I totally recognize there's different styles of gaming, I'm just surprised that there's such a strong presence for 1E/2E style play on the thread while most of the forums are so full of 3E/4E content. Thats why I'm wondering if the main reason so many classics is on the list; because its difficult to forget your "first love" so to speak =) Because if there is such a strong desire for 1E/2E style adventures, why don't we see more of them?

I see your point about how a blank statblock in a room (ie no railroading) gives a DM a lot of room to maneuver. But I don't think that makes it automatically a great adventure. I mean, we could take the statblock of a INT 8 badger and put it in the room, and let the DM do all the same permutations onto the encounter as if it were like the Dark Knight scenario. In my opinion its much more challenging (and rewarding) to go through an adventure with more defined characters, groups, organizations, and goals. If we don't like some aspects of the "straightjacket" approach thats fine, but at least the material is there for us to sample. Its easier to go from order to chaos than chaos to order imho. I mean otherwise, why purchase or run an adventure in the first place? If the DM is going to make up the entire history/psychology and connect all the encounters themselves, they might as well write their own adventure from scratch. (Again, nothing wrong with that, just my opinion.)

I wouldn't say that all people who like the classics are wearing "rose colored blinders". I mean heck my intro to D&D was return to the keep of the borderlands, and I thought it was great at the time. It just isn't my style now, and I'm just surprised that so many people are adhering to that adventuring philosophy while playing 3E/4E, because I feel that 3E/4E adventures have steered away from that style of play.

 

[pemerton]

I feel that if all adventures were written in that playstyle, we'd be a lot poorer for it. Red Hand of Doom, for instance, does make certain assumptions that are at odds with the philosophy you describe.

I don't know much about Red Hand of Doom, but I gather the PCs thwart an invasion by Orcs.

That need not be at odds with my philosophy - if I as GM know the players (or their PCs) don't like Orcs, or if the invasion is of a place in which the players have a signficant thematic stake, then this is a situation which sounds like it could work.

But if the adventure only works if the players take a pre-scripted approach to stopping the invasion then I probably wouldn't like it.

In the Freeport adventure it was never really in doubt that the PCs would try and thwart the summoning - the party included three samurai with strong loyalties to the islands in question, a Buddhist paladin who couldn't tolerate beings from beyond the karmic order, an esoteric Buddhits monk who wants to escape the karmic order but via enlightenment rather than Lovecraftian entropy, and two nature sprits who had not shown any particular inclination to turn against their origins.

But within that basic outline, the relationship to the various factions in Freeport itself played out in a pretty dynamic fashion. In the end, one of the Samurai ended up as military ruler of the town.

On the other hand, in a different campaign the culmination to a situation drawn from the Jaiman module for ShadowWorld resulted in one of the PCs allying with the presumed enemies, and standing by while another PC was sacrificed on the altar of a dark god. (The player of the sacrificed PC sort-of consented - at least, he was happy enough to try a new character.)

I guess the bottom line is - I don't like it when what would count as the successful resolution of an adventure is known in advance. I like that to emerge in play.

If you've read The Standing Stone (3e adventure path module), I'd be interested to know your thoughts on how that adapts to such a playstyle.

I don't have it - largely because it was badly renewed on RPGnet. The four AP modules I do have are Sunless Citadel, Speaker in Dreams, Nightfang Spire and Bastion of Broken Souls. Speaker in Dreams looks very railroady to me, and I've never tried to pull it apart and run it without railroading - maybe in my next campaign! Sunless Citadel and Nightfang Spire I got because of the good reviews, but I've never tried to run them - my group tends to balk at that sort of dungeon crawling.

I've used the first half of Bastion of Broken Souls (the second half I think is a pointless dungeon crawl and would never run, except maybe for the climactic bit where the heart leaps out, which is a dramatic image!). It has some interesting ideas, but handles them in a disappointing fashion. Just one example (SPOILER ALERT):

To progress the adventure, the PCs have to make contact with an imprisoned former god. This requires opening a gate to the prison plane. That gate takes the form of an angel, and will open only if the angel is killed.

So far, so good - this is great stuff! But the module writer assumes that the PCs will simply fight the angel to the death. And then go into the prison plane and fight the foremer god to the death. And all with no repercussions, no gods caring that their angel has been killed, no development of the situation. Boring! And completely draining away all the thematic power of the setup.

When they eventually got to the angel (I beefed up that part of the adventure using a bit from the Infinte Staircase Planescape module and a bit from Beyond Countless Doorways) my party persuaded her to let herself be sacrificed in the interests of the greater good - and then had to fight off her companion (a Deva, I think, rather than a Planetar - or something like that), who wasn't wise enough to see the need for the sacrifice. Then they made friends with the imprisoned god and got the information they needed that way. And when they came back out of the prison plane they then had to fight their way through a combination of heavenly and diabolic forces (the imprisoning of the god having been a communal decision by both heaven and hell) in order to act on the forbidden information the imprisoned god had given them.

It is this sort of variability of PC response to a situation that I feel many WoTC adventures (both modules and in Dungeon) don't really foster.

(Also - Basion also has an irritating tag-along character, a Slaad called Nurn. My PCs met him in human form and got some interesting information out of him about a few of the factional issues at play in the module. Subsequently they discovered him in Slaad form while scrying a particular location and promptly killed him - I think one of my players suspected that the frog and the man were the same being, but couldn't get a warning out in time, and wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to.)

 

[Mr Baron]

1ed modules

IMO, the newer modules by Paizo, Necro, Malhavoic WotC, etc provide for a deeper playing experience than what as in the early modules. The newer modules tend to be bigger with more detail.

For example take Necro's Vault of Larin Karr. It is a mini campaign with a combination of wilderness and dungeon encounters. It is very open ended, lots of exploring opportunities. While there is an overall plot arc, it is not linear. In 1st ed, you did not have this type of module design.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

It's been a while, but shouldn't A1-A4 properly be grouped into the same plotline as the G and D series?

Maybe that was just my own "houseruled" plotline...?

 

[ExploderWizard]

It's been a while, but shouldn't A1-A4 properly be grouped into the same plotline as the G and D series?

Maybe that was just my own "houseruled" plotline...?

The A series was republished as Scourge of the Slavelords which added a lot of additional material including linking the series from T1-4 (PC's begin as heroes in Hommlet) to the G and D series. The original publications of the A series were tournament modules without these connections.

 

[gargoyle2k7]

1st edition (and even many 2nd ed) modules were created long before the concepts of "dungeon ecology" and "character hooks". Most were written to be generic adventures, where the DM was free to place them where needed, and develop them to his/her own taste. In other words, although the general theme was "go here, kill the monsters and take their stuff", the reasons and reactions were up to the DM. Toward the end of 2E and during 3E we did see a lot more "let's make sense of this, and give the PCs a reason to do it" style of adventure, but it did lead to some railroading (Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, I'm looking at you...). Still, don't forget that a module is still only a tool, and the DM needs to go through it, and tweak it as necessary to fit his/her campaign. Running any group of adventures without tweaks just becomes a reckless hodgepodge of unrelated exploits, IMHO.

 

[gargoyle2k7]

As to the various themes ("kill the monsters and take their stuff", "investigate this mystery", etc.), just like novels there are only so many archetypal plotlines. The devil is in the detail; exactly what you encounter makes the difference. Each adventrue, whether homegrown or "storebought" should be tailored to the group playing it. After all, if you have a group of actors, storytellers and wallflowers, you don't really want to run a combat-heavy adventure. Likewise, hack-n-slashers will get bored with a diplomacy and intrigue adventure. Look at the group you run games for and create or modify adventures to their tastes.