Adventures don't Sell? Do you agree? Redman Article

[Belen]

For those of you who have read the Rich Redmond article (http://www.thegamemechanics.com/opinion/rich-004.asp), do you agree with his thesis?

For those who have not read the article, the basic premise is that adventures do not sell because 1.) Only GMs buy them 2.) They do not fit within the campaign, so they are left on the shelf.

I have to admit that I both agree and disagree on this subject. I agree with the first part of number 2. Most adventures produced for the d20 system are tied to specific campaign worlds. The effect is that a GM has to do work to make the adventure work within the world. In some cases, such as the more unusally flavored worlds like Arcanis, Midnight or Scarred Lands, it is too much work to bother. (Love AU, but the new races really limit Monte. After all, you cannot pick up a Diamond throne adventure and use it in a normal camapign.)

The main problem with adventures these days is that they are not generic enough. All the third party publishers want to showcase their own little worlds and prove how creative they can be. So we can adventures that are really tied to their company, their rules quirks, and their believe system.

However, would I be right in assuming that a line of generic city, forest, prairie, etc. adventures would really spark your interest? I would kill for such as those, especially with the smaller number of adventures in Dungeon. Am I the only one?

And if the publishers are so wary of producing them, then why don't they test the PDF waters? I would pay $5 a pop for a good line of generic PDF adventures that I could place in my campaign. That is close to some PDF sourcebooks!

You know, Mr. Redman, I think that you're article is somewhat correct, but short-sighted. Back in the days of TSR when we got adventures, they were mostly generic and easy to fit into campaigns, and they SOLD! Now we have too many publishers who just will not give us what we want.

I will not buy a Scarred Lands, Ravenloft, Diamond Throne, or Arcanis adventure, but I will be first in line to buy a dark gothic, city, or forest generic adventure. You write things that can be imported into my game, and I will buy them.

Dave

 

[Zogg]

I agree with some of the points made in the article...though not necessarily with your points. I think WotC does a good job of releasing "generic" adventures for free on their website, which also undermines the market for adventures that should be sold.

I think the price range for adventures could probably be more expensive with the number of entertainment hours they provide for the number of individuals. Think about it - 5 people go to see a movie and pay ~$7 to $9 a piece for 2 hours of hit-or-miss entertainment. That's a combined price of $35-$45 dollars. Even if the movie is Oscar-winning material or even just a fanboy's wetdream it's still much more expensive than the going module and provides a very finite amount of enjoyment.

Now take a run of the mill adventure (for instance, PLAGUE OF DREAMS for Monte Cook's AU - buy it today!) - I got mine for ~$12 at one of the many online stores, though we can't ignore the requisite cost of needing the AU book ($30) and the Diamond Throne pdf ($9) which comes to roughly $51 for the DM and $30-$39 for the PCs. While these prices are higher per person than for the 2-hour movie, the bucks we spend on the setting & adventure go a LONG WAY in comparison.

I'm not going to do all the intricate math involved, but I can understand why raising the price on adventures makes sense. Economically raising the price on a low-demand item, however, does NOT make sense. All in all, there's a lot to be considered.

 

[Staffan]

My point of view totally disregards economics, and just focuses on what the heck I want from an adventure.

I want adventures to be tied to a setting. I want them to exploit the setting's characteristic stuff. This is probably the tenth time I've said this, but the best large-scale adventure I've seen was Dragon's Crown for Dark Sun, which included lots of travel all over the place, sorcerer-kings, avangions, man-eating halflings, thri-kreen going mad, psionics, ancient ruins from the Cleansing wars, the Sea of Silt, and other stuff. That wouldn't have worked as a "generic" adventure, but it worked perfectly with Dark Sun. Likewise, I'd love to see an adventure with a similar scope for Forgotten Realms, one that had PCs going from the Dalelands to Thay and then to Iriaebor, dealing with local important stuff at each place, and using special stuff for the setting (Shades, Red Wizards, and the like).

 

[Belen]

The vast majority of GMs use homebrew or heavily modified worlds. This is why generic is best because it would sell the the majority. It is a lot easier to customize a generic adventure for a world setting than reverse engineer it for a homebrew etc.

Unfortunately, TSR does not release enough adventures to really be useful. Heck, more generic adventure paths and the like would rock.

Unfortunately, there is this opinion in the community that because WOTC does not produce them because they do not sell, that they really do not sell.

FR adventures, Dark Sun adventures, etc do not sell. Not one has ever produced a set of adventures that are completley generic.

Dave

 

[dcollins]

Of course, the creators and business managers of 3rd Edition explicitly agree with this thesis. It's the whole reason the d20 System and OGL were created in the first place -- to offload the unprofitable adventure-making business outside WOTC.

I'm still sort of aggrieved that this is this case -- it's still hard to wrap my head around why those early TSR adventures sold millions (it was the whole "thing you could buy" for RPG's, really, when you went in a store as an existing player), it now its a cost sink, apparently. One could speculate, that it's just in contrast to the newer strategy of pitching competitive power-inflation books at all the players, which make adventures pale in comparison. Or maybe all the revolutionary generic-fantasy adventures have been done. Or something.

Unfortunately, there is this opinion in the community that because WOTC does not produce them because they do not sell, that they really do not sell.

Note that people like Ryan Dancey (creator of d20 System license) has gone on record, and can be quoted circa 2000, as having business numbers that prove adventures are unprofitable and that d20 was created to offload them to other companies.

 

[Arnwyn]

I think I agree with the article.

And that's both sad and unfortunate - but true. The lack of support for DMs, especially in 3e, is appalling. It's like the comments I'm seeing more and more now, these days: "3e/d20 is the game everyone wants to play - but no one wants to DM." I think I'm beginning to agree with this.

We have so many character options that we'd die horribly if caught underneath them all - but no where to use them! (This is a bit of hyperbole, of course. There are many, many campaign settings out which is designed for DMs. However, the lack of support for many of them is quite bad. Kalamar is one of the good ones, for example. FR is middle of the road, nowadays. Midnight seems to be poorly supported, right now I think.)

But are players buying campaign settings as well? *shrug* Beats me. I think reason #2 has more bite than I originally thought. (I buy everything NG, and they're all generic...)

Back in the days of TSR when we got adventures, they were mostly generic and easy to fit into campaigns, and they SOLD!

I don't think you have any proof of this (and if we look at the fate of TSR, and the verifiable fact that they did not have money to pay the printers at the end of their days, I'm not convinced that they sold).

 

[MaxKaladin]

For those of you who have read the Rich Redmond article (http://www.thegamemechanics.com/opinion/rich-004.asp), do you agree with his thesis?

For those who have not read the article, the basic premise is that adventures do not sell because 1.) Only GMs buy them 2.) They do not fit within the campaign, so they are left on the shelf.

Agree. Especially the 2nd part. I find that modules either do not mesh well with my world, do not work well with my party, seem to have holes in them I need to plug, have balance problems with my world (typically way too much magic in the old days), or some combination of the above. By the time I finish doing the necessary work to make a module usable for me, I haven't saved any time over starting from scratch.

I know there are GMs out there who make good use of modules and even run them exclusively. That's fine, but then the first problem comes up. GMs are a smaller market.

In the past, I have been known to buy the occasional module, but that was either because I was running he published setting it was placed in and wanted it for the setting info published in it or because I found some particularly interesting bit of "crunch" that I liked. Usually that amounted to local maps. That's about all I've ever used modules for.

While I *might* be interested in generic _encounters_, old style generic _adventures_ wouldn't interest me. I didn't run them in the old days for the same reasons as I gave above. I also think the gaming population has changed. It used to be, back in the beginning, that modules were basically canned dungeon crawls with enough generic story to get you to the dungeon door. That doesn't really mesh what a lot of people really expect from their game these days. Generic encounters are small enough in scope to remove most of these problems.

 

[Aaron2]

Alot of the old classic 1e modules (the G series esp.) were so small that they could easily fit into Dungeon magazine. Dungeon has about three new small and often generic adventures a month. I play every week but couldn't possibly use that many.

Necromancer Games produces a large number of mostly generic 3e modules. But, even that one company produces way more adventures than I could ever possibly use myself.

OTOH, there is a perception among gamers that unless new material is coming out for a game, the game is "dead" and there is no sense playing it. For that reason, adventures still have some importance (unless you go the splatbook route).


Aaron

 

[Faraer]

The diversification of D&D campaign styles -- kicked off by Dragonlance, encouraged by TSR in the 90s, while 3E tried to both refocus the game and cater to a wider range of heroic fantasy than before -- is part of why modules aren't big sellers. The new focus on selling to players (one of the things, like 3E's very specific definition of 'game balance', that often gets taken for granted) also makes sales of modules and other DM-focused material seem small in comparison.

The wordcount bloat that set in in the late 80s and 90s also limits the applicability and popularity of adventures. With a little discipline, a little negative sensibility, we could have 10 T1s or G1s in the space of a typical sourcebook. Adventures where the story is what the players do, not what was preconceived by the author. Don't make the mistake of thinking they're 'dated' because the current vogue differs -- they're examples of brilliant, focused, inspiring, deliberate game design.

The shared experience of the classic D&D and AD&D modules is a sore thing to lose, and we'd better hope what's gained in return makes up for it. Scenario support is important to the health of games far beyond the money they make directly

I also think the adventure module is an excellent, and underappreciated, medium. It can tell a story while leaving the full story to play, entertain the DM once as it's read and once as it's played, and convey source material about a world or how the game is played.

A peculiarity of the question about genericness is a lot of people seem to close their eyes as soon as some work is associated with a named campaign setting, but are open to equally specific works with the 'generic' label. Adventures with all distinctiveness and strong taste pared out of them would be as much a niche market as ones explicitly specific to a world. It would also be better if modules actually represented the strengths of their nominal settings, as the adventures WotC has published for the Realms, for example, don't.

 

[Belen]

Andy,

I really have to disagree. I know that Ryan Dancey has the numbers, but do those numbers reflect the glut of adventures for 2e after the system had lost so many players, or do they reflect the height of the older edition.

Certainly they cannot reflect 3e numbers because we have hardly seen any adventures for 3e. Nothing like in the old days. Heck, I used to collect adventures and leave the source books alone. And I know that you have the numbers for the 3e adventures that WOTC released with 3e, but those lacked a lot of the high adventure that we loved in the old days.

And as we have seen, the third party publishers did not produce adventures en masse. They pulled a WOTC and wrote source books alone.

I mean did we really need 10 different elven racial books, yet not one adventure that featured those elves?

Dave