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

[Psion]

W Also, by design, our mini-campaigns have to cover about 4 to 5 levels worth of advancement. That gives you bang for your buck.

Speaking for myself, that is too much. Related to your point 1 below, sure, give me something I couldn't do myself. But I find that the more levels an adventure takes up, the harder it is to fit into an ongoing campaign. If my players are 5th, and I have something planned at 7th, an adventure for levels 5-10 is not going to do it too me.

Similarly, even if I like an adventure, I find adventures that last too long in one mode cramp my style. After running an adventure for a while, I like a change of pace. For that reason and adventure needs to one or more of
a) short (2 or 3 sessions)
b) have variety
c) have exit avenues.

Accordingly, I think that large adventures that don't provide avenues for you to sidetrack or exit the adventure (the 2e adventure Night Below was particularly reprehensible in this manner) are no-sales for me.

FWIW, I think for a sizeable adventure, VoLK is pretty good on this score. It is sizable, but gives you options and makes it easy to step out or run other adventures.

1. Too short. The old paradigm of 16 to 32 pages just isnt enough for the modern purchaser. They say, heck I could do that myself. At 32 pages, that may be true. At 96 pages, I dont know about that.

Again, speaking for myself, for reasons cited above, I have become increasingly hesitant of large adventures. I know this is not universal, but I think as more GMs experience not getting all that they thought they would out of a long adventure, their buying habits will press in that direction.

5. Dungeon Magazine. Basically, you have to justify to the consumer why they should spend 8 bucks for your module when they could get 3-4 adventures from Dungeon for 6 bucks. That is a killer. If you as a company cant answer that question, you are dead making adventures. Most companies failed to answer that question.

Just so. Lots of people make the argument that dungeon is a better value. I have never found that to be particularly compelling, in part based on some NG adventures. With store-purchased adventures, I know what I am getting and can make the buying decision that corresponds to my style and current needs. With Dungeon, it's a bit more of a grab bag. Sure, one adventure may be good, but you also pay for 2 or 3 adventures you can't use. Since they moved to a smaller format, it's more like 1-3 adventures that you may or may not be able to use.

Foolishness of series modules. This is another problem. It comes about for a number of reasons. (1) publsierhs want to get a module out the door so they do "Part 1" while they finish part 2. But this leads to problems. It closes the door on the person from getting directly into part 2 unless they have part 1. customers hate that.

Too true.

 

[Umbran]

Some of you mentioned that you think that you have all the adventures that you want now. However, isn;t that a disservice to new gamers?

We're a hobby, not a charity.

I have few enough dollars to spend on gaming products as it is. I'm not going to start buying adventures I don't want, need, or use just to make sure someone else will have them. I buy products because I will use them, not to subsidize them for someone else. To suggest that this is somehow a disservice, and therefore a wrongful act, is bunk.

 

[Aeolius]

Show me an underwater adventure set firmly in the World of Greyhawk, and I'll buy it.

Granted, as I own most of the WotC splatbooks and hardback supplements, I'd like to see adventures that utilize them. This eliminates all third-party publishers, as they either have to firmly abide by OGL/d20 or get WotC permission for using information outside of their allowance. What's the point of devising the Marinelord or Waverider, if they never get used?

As WotC has handed GH off to the RPGA, we won't be seeing GH-specific modules for the masses anytime soon. RttToEE was an exception, of course. Yes, I could get a free membership to the RPGA and download adventure to my heart's content, but are there any adventure set beneath the surface of the Dramidj Ocean or Oljatt Sea? No. I want an adventure that I can see proudly displayed at my FLGS, not secreted away on a website like a half-forgotten afterthought.

Even within the bounds of OGL/d20, some gems have been unearthed and caught my eye. PEG's "Hostile Climes: Depths of Despair" had undersea elements. Did I buy it? Yes. MEG's forthcoming "The Deep" is an undersea supplement complete with an adventure. Will I buy it? Yes. Green Ronin's "Skull & Bones" is primarily a swashbuckling supplement, but I'll be picking that one up, as well.

My FLGS kindly holds a copy of any D&D materials that include aquatic themes, for my perusal.

"Pirates! is in" they say with a smile as I walked in the door.
"Cool." I say as I begin to examine the book. I see undersea magic items, ghost ships, and an interesting idea here and there "Sold."

 

[orangefruitbat]

NG is the backbone of my campaign

NG has been the backbone of my last two campaigns. I’m a pretty creative guy who loves designing his own adventures, but work and home keep me too busy to spend a lot of time at things. I don’t want to spend my time drawing maps and crunching stats. So I like pre-made campaign worlds and pre-made adventures – but then customize them heavily (albeit with a lot of winging it). Think Babylon 5 – alternating meta-plot and standalone adventures (not that I can compare to the illustrious JMS in terms of story craft).

The first game was in Scarred Lands, and the second game is in the Forgotten Realms. Very different worlds, with different assumptions of how things work. So any adventure I run has to fit into the campaign (It’s a lot harder to do this in SL because of the unique history and cosmology of the place).

What I don’t want are 3 part adventures between two giant kingdoms, whose back story takes up two pages of the module. I want things I can drop into my game quickly – I want a cavern complex for the cultists planning to overthrow the kingdom or a deadly forest that the party has to travel through to find the hermit who knows the secret of the king’s bastard children. I don’t want linear adventures, cause I’m mixing things up with my overall campaign plot. Plus the fact that my players are notorious for not doing what I want and unerringly seeking out the end of the adventure (20 minutes in to Death in Freeport and they want to check out the lighthouse – the other two adventures aren’t even published yet). I was also one of the 20,000 who purchased the Crucible of Freya. Combined with the online freebies, it’s one of the best introductory adventures available (blows Keep on the Borderlands out of the water). I’ve run this module 3 times now, and each time it was different.

At the same time, I’m not huge into pure dungeon crawls. I like dungeons, but more than three or four fights in an evening gets tedious. And an area filled with traps means the rogue moves slowly, searching every 5’ square, and everyone else stands 35’ back. Kinda boring. So our party only entered three levels of Rappan Athuk and that was to find the remains of a comrade of one of the party members – who they discovered was now a skeletal warrior guarding one of the levels. But I used other levels as standalone adventures so I got my money’s worth there too.

Right now, my campaign is drawing on the Grey Citadel, Vault of Larin Karr, as well as politics in Cormyr after the death of king Azoun IV. And it’s working pretty well.

Cheers

Orangefruitbat

PS- despite what I said above, I still really like the Freeport trilogy. Especially the third one, where the party goes to a ball with all the political bigwigs.

 

[PatrickLawinger]

I am actually proposing a company that would write adventure material for other companies, so I think authorship would be fine, but I could just be gung-ho about seeing more adventures produced.

I have worked for a d20 company before, so I am faily certain of the "drill." I also work as a publisher now with a large portion of my work managing authors, so we shall see.

Who is the contract with? Who gets the money? How much money?

If someone (or a group) writes an adventure for your company and you can't find someone to "publish" it, do they get paid? Do you publish it? Can they shop it around on their own? Is it going to be print? pdf? is payment by word, royalty, or % of profit?

Sorry, I just think that before you try to propose something this involved you really need to sit down and create a solid business plan that addresses all of the "details." I am not saying you have to be in it to "get rich" but, in my experience, anyone planning a company without worries about "making money" not only doesn't make money, they lose it in droves and go out of business.

You need to find out if you have a market (will companies purchase what you want to sell) etc. What charges will that market bear? Does this amount of money cover your projected expenses?

In general, if a company is going to publish something THEY want control over it. They will want to do the editing, rules editing, etc. I have a hard time seeing you able to set up a company that does the writing for other companies' books. A company that takes care of the artwork, sure, development, possibly, authorship? um, not so sure.

Sorry, I really am not trying to be mean, but I just don't see a viable business plan here. What I see is an "idea" that sounds like it might be nice, until you start hitting details. I think if you sit down and try to plan it out, talk to companies you'd want to sell/write for, etc. that you'll find it isn't viable.

Patrick

 

[jasamcarl]

Eh? Where's the fluff?

Adventures aren't - you called them crunch yourself in that other thread.
Encounter level lairs and dungeons aren't, they're simply static location adventures.
Detailed towns aren't, unless you only consider encounters "not fluff" if they're in a "dungeon", or don't like to know what shops have, or where NPCs live, or have some mental block against "urban dungeons" (e.g. a theives' guild) and adventure locations etc.
NPC stats aren't. Which leaves NPC personalities as the only thing which fits that description.

There's discussion in this very thread on why I think you're theoretically right but practically wrong on this point - pulling bits and pieces together from seperate sources requires extensive conversion, sometimes enough that you'd have been better off making it from scratch instead. It's also why small adventures don't sell - they don't fit with the rest of the campaign.

If you go back to that thread, you'll find that I clarified what I thought constituted crunch in a module, namely maps, EL, treasure, rolled hit die, etc. Those things have a specific mechanical application. Providing fluff locations such as shops as well as distended character motivation and broad town maps is what i generally think wouldn't sell. The adventure 'crunch' can be easily had in any number of villians guides, trap compendiums, map folios, the wizards site, etc.

While it you say its difficult to find small items that specifically fit a campaign, i think in most DMs minds its still worth it, because they are extensive time savers. Mini campaigns less so, because 1) there is no neccessity for balance and 2) unlike statblocks, most DMs and even some players like improvising and doing this stuff themselves. In other words, i suspect that most groups adapt play to conform to available crunch and large-scale setting realities, and that is the creative role that they are willing to play; most don't really need this spelled out for them.

 

[jasamcarl]

I still think there is something Clark said that remains unaddressed and somewhat unnoticed -- saturation of the market. How big exactly is the market for adventures, anyway? He says Crucible of Freya is their best selling module at about 20,000 units. That's a tiny fraction of the amount of PHB's sold (and hence, a relative gauge of 3e gamers.) There's a difference between saying a handful of good but small publishers can make a profit with adventures as their bread and butter and saying there's a large market for adventures.

Bingo!!! If the optimum adventure can only sell around the same amount as an average sourcebook, the market isn't sending the signal that competition is needed here, it is instead saying that this is a niche one or two companies can fill.

The type of dynamic thinking i would expect from a Danny Elfman fan.

 

[Umbran]

1. Too short. The old paradigm of 16 to 32 pages just isnt enough for the modern purchaser. They say, heck I could do that myself. At 32 pages, that may be true. At 96 pages, I dont know about that.

Clark, you are a wise man, and speak many truths. But here you're a bit off.

There are any number of us out here who have run multi-year, plot heavy campaigns without using a single published adventure or setting. In the process, we each probably develop material equivalent to a campaign setting and multiple 96-page adventures.

We don't do it all at once because we don't have to. We usually only need it a few sessions worth at a time. But don't confuse that with the inability to come up with the material. If we DMs could not do it, your adventures would be as much a necessity as the DMG.

 

[Davelozzi]

I believe that adventures will sell, especially in a PDF environment.

While all I have to go on is Rich's info that his d20 Modern adventure only sold 25 copies in a month, my hunch is that you're wrong. Only folks like us who hang out on d20 websites are generally even aware of these adventures, and there's enough of them that it's hard to really know what's what. You can't flip through them liek you could a print adventure in the store so it's virtually impossible to judge in advance whether or not it will fit your campaign. On top of that, many people (myself included) just really prefer a print book and won't buy .PDFs. $5 - $8 for a .PDF compared to $10 - $15 for a real, printed adventure that I can hold, flip through, judge, read, run and then keep on my bookshelf afterwards? No contest.

Think about it. 25 copies in a month? Even if it sold horribly it could easily sell many times more than that sitting on the shelf of your local gamestore. Even if most stores only bought a single copy.

 

[Davelozzi]

Show me an underwater adventure set firmly in the World of Greyhawk, and I'll buy it.

You, sir, have just perfectly summed up the argument in support of Mr. Redman's thesis.