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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 7671867" data-attributes="member: 5834">D&D back in the day did not ask players what type of adventures they liked. They made great adventures and let the players decide. This sandbox versus linear stuff seems like a bad way to determine what type of adventures they should make. The people that like to make their own stuff up aren't going to buy adventures consistently. The people that do buy adventures are more concerned with other aspects of the adventure like story content, maps, type of monster, ease of use in various settings, and other aspects. Whether or not it is a sandbox is pretty low on the list. I can't help but think that the sandbox talk is a red herring.Adventure design should be focused on creating the strongest possible adventure with a high level of differentiation from the previous release while maintaining consistent production quality. Sandbox versus linear shouldn't even be a factor. The primary factor should be interesting to read and run with quality bits a DM can use in any adventure including additional monsters, magic items, and rule details for DMs. I wonder how well these general surveys are targeting DMs that buy adventures and run them like myself. I hear many DMs on here proclaiming how much they like to create and run their own adventures. If they're doing these surveys while continuing to avoid buying adventures because they make theirs up, that skews the results from people like myself that will purchase a well-designed adventure. Even worse is players that will never run the game or purchase an adventure taking these surveys. That will further skew the results because they think they like a sandbox adventure, but they really just like to play while someone else DMs.I have never purchased an adventure based on whether it was a sandbox versus a linear adventure. I always look first at the general description of the adventure. That is much more important. I especially like to check if it is different enough from the previous adventure I ran that I think my players won't be burnt out on the material. If it is highly redundant such as cultists in the previous adventure versus cultists in the new adventure, then I likely won't buy it. I want differentiation on just about every level between adventures. Adventures are more like fiction books. There's no way to tell exactly what people will like. Each adventure is a fictional story the players are going to be involved in. You have to consider the influences that may have driven them to play a game like D&D and create adventures based on as many of those inspirations as possible. That's why I hope at the very least they have an OGL for adventure creation. 3rd parties will take more risks designing adventures than the current WotC company. WotC seems to be on a corporate leash at the moment that doesn't allow them to take many risks. Failure does not seem like an option at WotC at the moment.</blockquote>

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