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

[Desdichado]

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

From my heart and from my hand, why don't people understand...

Nevermind.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Am I the only one who remembers going through the old modules outside of an established campaign? [...] The GM's didn't focus on elaborate campaign worlds, intricate npc's, pc motivations, etc. Players expected the modules to be linear to a certain extent [...] I suspect most GM's and players no longer play in that way - now characters are expected to be tied to a specific world, closely involved with npc's possessing detailed personalities and quirks. Some may see this as a sign that the hobby has "matured" (whatever that means), but it also seems to be a major problem with the entire concept of packaged adventures.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this, Sir Whiskers. I've noticed this change as well. Used to be, as a DM, you could drop a ham-fisted adventuring rumor onto the party ("Weird things have been coming out of the Barrier Peaks.") and *poof*, the PCs would be off to chase down that rumor and confront whatever villain was behind it.

Nowadays, most campaigns that I've seen or read about are too complex for clumsy plot hooks to work. And what's even more problematic (from an adventuring point of view), the players themselves seem to want more justification for why they should go on an adventure.

Perhaps this is because the players I am familiar with have matured; we're thirtysomethings now, not 10-to-12 year olds, so we require a more thoughtful approach. But sometimes, as the DM, I just want to say to the players, "Look guys, this is the adventure I've prepared for this evening. If you're not going to follow the hook, let's quit playing D&D and do something else."

So even though I am drowning in a sea of high quality adventures, I can't get my players interested in letting me use them! Maybe what I need is a new source of players instead of a new source of adventures. But seriously, even the best designed adventure in the world cannot overcome lack of the players' motivation to go on adventures.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Has anyone solved this problem?

 

[Desdichado]

I have not really experienced that problem -- but I tend to run "adventures" that have very little advanced planning, and are intended to be very flexible. I don't drop ham-fisted hooks really, I drop subtle ones, and regardless of what the players decide, I've got something going on I can slap them with.

One of my favorite methods is to let the hooks they ignore fester until they boil up into huge problems they can't ignore. When I hear the "we could have prevented this if only we'd been a little more proactive" it makes me feel are warm and fuzzy inside.

 

[buzz]

Do we sound like a bunch of old-timers here or what? Were they really that good? Come on! Keep on the Borderlands was a nice little adventure to intro players to D&D but as an adventure module, it sucked. And Tomb of Horrors, although a classic dungeon crawl and challenging, was basically a linear dungeon with no real story in it at all. "Hey dummies, bore through the outside and bypass that one-way tunnel!"

Dang! I wanted to be the first one to say that.

I definitely think that people are wearing rose-colored glasses. When I started playing in 1980, unless you went with the Basic set, there was *one* module for 1st-level PCs, T1 Village of Hommlet... and the continuing modules didn't get published until 1986! All of the other modules were stuff like the Giants series and ToH, all of which were designed for 8th level and up, all of which were pretty much straight dungeon crawls. I ended up homebrewing adventures pretty early on because there simply was not a lot of material available for the levels at which 99% of my games ran.

As for one person here continually saying that there's no support for d20 DMs, I say: poppycock. There are more modules out there than you can shake a stick at, good or no, and most of them demonstrate the kind of "maturity" the hobby has seen, i.e., more than a dungeon-crawl with no story. There are also probably more resources avaiable providing the newbie DM with solid advice than at any time previous.

Heck, even a "bad" example like Sunless Citadel wipes the floor with a lot of the classic modules. It's got tons of hand-holding advice for newbie GMs, a fairly generic setting that can be dropped into any campaign, a dungeon ecology that makes sense, dungeon inhabitants that you could actually *interact* with, and an actual *story*. It was the first adventure I ran under 3e (and after a long break from the hobby), and I can tell you that it was orders of magnitude more useful than the story-less, big-list-of-monsters-to-kill pamphlet that was Keep on the Borderlands.

As for the general discussion, I have to say that I generally don't buy adventures, though I do subscribe to Dungeon... well, I subscribe to Polyhedron and get Dungeon as an added bonus. I *will*, however, sometimes purchase modules if I feel the quality is up to snuff. For example, I happily pick up Penumbra adventures when I can, as they're incredibly well-written, and have more of the "thinking man's D&D" feel that I tend to look for. I don't buy necromancer stuff because, well, my DM is basing the current campaign on them, and I don't want to cheat.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I don’t want to spend my time drawing maps and crunching stats. So I like pre-made campaign worlds and pre-made adventures [...] What I don’t want are 3 part adventures between two giant kingdoms, whose back story takes up two pages of the module.

Yet again - Mr. Nail, meet Mr. Hammer, held in the hands of orangefruitbat.

I think a lot of DMs are in the same boat. We need solid, drop-in adventures with good maps and accurate stat blocks. What we do not need is an incredibly long, convoluted backstory that makes the adventure hard to place within our campaign world or adapt on the fly. (How many people adapt on the fly? My guess: a lot more than don't.)

Here's an example of how not to set up your adventure, from WotC's Free Original Adventure section - Bad Moon Waning: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/oa/20030830a

Now the whole adventure is 22 pages of PDF, which is pretty good value considering it's free. But, there are 3 pages of adventure background. Yaargh! I don't need that. That makes my eyes glaze over. The adventure background could've been something simple like (spoiler)

Spoiler

In a town where many of the citizens are werewolves, an evil guy blackmails them into doing his bidding.

(/spoiler) That's it! One line. I don't need pages and page of background. Pages and pages of background just get in the way of me adapting this adventure to my campaign.

So I agree with orangefruitbat. Give us more solidly constructed adventures with good maps and statblocks, and fewer minor episodes in the ongoing saga.

(By the way, I think WotC's Free Original Adventures are generally a tremendous Good Thing, I just singled out this particular one to point to a weakness.)

 

[Arnwyn]

We're a hobby, not a charity.

Then apparently you haven't spent a lot of time with Forgotten Realms products.

With the amount of stuff they're regurgitating, that line seems firmly set as a charity.

 

[buzz]

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.

A campaign setting, that's barely been out six months, with two 160+ page books, a mega adventure, and a monster guide is "poorly supported"? A setting that has someting like 9-10 96-320 page books currently in print is "middle of the road"?

And there I was, back in the day, complaining that the Greyhawk setting was just a 32-page pamphlet and a bunch of maps...

P.S.: Don't forget about Scarred Lands. There's more in print for SL than an average gaming group could use in a lifetime.

 

[dcollins]

What about playtesting?

I want to bring this up, because I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread so far, and it's one of my axes-to-grind. For both rules and adventures, in the early 1st Ed. days, there was always an extensive "Playtester Credit" section. Personally, I think I can track the decline of TSR directly by the waning size, and then absence, of the playtester credit in their published works. The 3rd Edition PHB was a great turnaround, with a massive playtest program, and I think it shows (The 3.5 rules I'm leery of -- no playtest credit).

The classic modules in the G, D, S, A series didn't just spring from nowhere -- as I understand it, they'd been used in tournament situations for a year or more before they were ever published. Today, with more of a focus on the game as a moneymaking scheme, it sure looks like most products are put on paper once and then sent out the door. This might even work better with sourcebooks (PRC broken? Don't use it.) than adventures (Key encounter broken? Everyone does in the middle.)

I can't say as I know how many changes or evolutions occured in the G/D/S/A modules during their pre-publication tournament use, but it just seems like they were incredibly tight on a level that started to break apart in the mid-80's. Does that seem significant to anyone else?

 

[Arnwyn]

A campaign setting, that's barely been out six months, with two 160+ page books, a mega adventure, and a monster guide is "poorly supported"?

That's why I put "I think". What's the upcoming support like? I heard (incorrectly?) that they aren't going to do much with the setting in terms of support. *shrug*

A setting that has someting like 9-10 96-320 page books currently in print is "middle of the road"?

Yep. Like I mentioned, "nowadays" FR will only be releasing about 3 books a year, with no supporting adventures (though we'll see about the new Living City ones). I call that "middle of the road", for sure.

 

[JBTowers]

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?

Patrick

Most companies pay about 2, or 3 cents per word. Try dividing that up between 20 people. How about even 5 people? Let's see...96 pages, 3 cents a word... mabey $70 per person?

Go to Necro's web page and download the submission guidelines. It is barely financially feasible to do an adventure alone, let alone with several others. Hell, if you can do it - then do it alone - and keep all the cash for yourself!