For the love of adventures!
This is a good, meaty thread!
I can come at this topic from two angles, I suppose: one, my experience with Fiery Dragon; two, my current role as developer of the
Warcraft RPG. I'll tackle the second angle initially, as that won't take as long.
From what I gather regarding the originally planning for the
Warcraft line, an adventure was not considered most likely because it would not succeed well enough in the current market. This impression bears some truth, I believe, even though I think a published adventure of the mini-campaign sort would just
rock. Economics, then, truly do figure in to why adventures get made or not, despite the great service they can provide as campaign support tools -- i.e., get the
Warcraft RPG core book plus maybe the upcoming
Manual of Monsters ... and there's this adventure waiting for you to pick up as well and get going with a campaign! Suhweeeeeeet ....
Coming at the issue now from the FDP angle, I think both Rich Redman and Clark Peterson offer insightful analysis and critique that pretty much covers what we know at FDP.
Quite frankly, adventures do not sell as well as other types of products. We
LOVE doing them just as much as the Necromancer folks, and we pretty much established our name and place in the d20 landscape with our adventures (
NeMoren's Vault,
The Silver Summoning,
To Stand on Hallowed Ground,
Of Sound Mind ...
Plague of Dreams). Still, our counters represent our bread and butter right now, while the costs of printing adventures become more and more prohibitive.
People do expect a lot from adventures, and rightly they should. FDP adventures have, I think, always done well to play the line between "generic" and "campaign specific," primarily because we (mostly James Bell and Todd Secord) wrote with the classic D&D setting in mind -- you know, the vaguely medieval Britain setting. If you read an FDP adventure closely, you'll catch all sorts of campaign and setting hooks, though the focus remains firmly on the story. Today, though, adventures do sort of need to "go big" in terms of page count and content ... hence the delay in us getting out
Gates of Oblivion.
Clark's point about needing to offer something that
Dungeon cannot does hit upon perhaps the key concern facing published adventures. Essentially, a published adventure must provide DMs something they can't get from
Dungeon or, in many respects, from their own efforts. In your 64 or 96 or 112 pages, you face the task of convincing the DM that she could use your work for any of several reasons, but mostly whether or not she can fit it relatively easily into her current campaign. Moreover, you need to convince her (or one of her players) that your adventure makes for a better purchase than one of the gazillion splatbooks and setting books right there competing for shelf space and consumers' d20 dollars.
Those splatbooks, in fact, play a somewhat significant role in d20 adventure writing, at least from my perspective. In the beginning of 3e, most folks had only the core rulebooks, so adventures could focus on that material quite comfortably. Now, we have numerous splatbooks that offer different
game mechanics options for every single class and every single race, stretching the core rules far beyond a containable sphere for an adventure to handle. On the one hand, such is the beauty of open content: a lot of creative material is available, and publishers can use each others' work. On the other hand, an adventure simply cannot account for PCs built using whatever set of class and/or race rules (not to mention new feats, spells, magic items, and equipment) from however many other publishers. Even if an adventure uses one publisher's OGC, a DM's group may be using totally different d20 rules. So, the landscape of rules options simply spreads too far for adventures to meet the needs of the most DMs possible.
This is why I like that Clark makes the difference between "adventure writing" and "game design." Sure, you want your product to give DMs and players some new "crunch," be it monsters, spells, items, feats, prestige classes, and so forth. Ultimately, though, you must have
story. When you put all the rules away, the story remains as the core of an adventure -- a hallmark, I believe, of FDP adventures from the start. DMs can always use good stories.
Finally, consumers today also look at products with a much more discerning eye toward and with higher standards for physical quality: good layout, good maps, good editing, good art, a good cover. Adventures require these elements just as much as splatbooks or setting books ... though, in the end, the return on investment for ensuring all those good things just does not equal that of settings or rules expansions (unless you do mostly everything else in-house). So, no, you can't churn out adventures simply to make some quick cash. You better treat the product with as much care as your cherished campaign setting tome.
Heh, well, that rambled on a bit.
Suffice to say, Rich Redman makes some salient points that should be discussed, as we are doing here, and Clark offers some very valuable insight on how adventures can be successful products. The real answer likely lies somewhere in between ....
Take care,
Mike
