20,000 words per month as a writer? Sounds reasonable. James Jacobs backs it up. Delericho, I don’t want to work for you since you expect me to work 30 days ever month, but 2,00 words per day = 10 days and 4 weeks have 20 work days, so half writing and half doing other tasks related to module creation.
However, being expected to write an adventure from just a title and with no further guidance is considerably more problematic.
Not unprecedented in publishing. One of the old DC Comics editors kept his line’s last two years framed on the wall with sales figures. If one sold really well, two years later(his estimate of readers’ staying power), he commissioned a similar cover and assigned the writer to write a story for the book it would appear on.
[MENTION=6776981]Morlock[/MENTION] - Imagine you had to write a 32 page essay, complete, front to back, in a month. That's insanely fast. Can it be done? Sure. But, the quality you get is going to suffer a whole pile.
That 32 page essay has no artwork, sidebars, stat blocks, etc. And the author works on it eight hours a day, five days a week. He doesn’t have five different courses, all with classes, labs, assignments, term papers and essays – he has a single job.
He’s also a professional writer, so I hope he can produce higher quality at the same pace, or similar quality as a faster pace, compared to the non-writer. I can write a 1,500 word article in an afternoon, including some research, in areas I am familiar with, and much of the challenge is getting it down to that word count.
No, it's not nostalgia. It's personal preference in DM'ing style and, IMHO, a superior way to write "adventures for D&D". I'd rather pay $40 for a pristine copy of, say, I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City... than pay $40 for a band new copy of "Hoard of the Dragon Queen". Why? I feel that I1 is a *much* better adventure module in virtually every way.
Let’s remember that some of that high price is because I4 is a collectible, scarce in supply. It’s also a very well regarded module. Less known, less quality modules from the same era will not fetch the same price. Neither will a 32 page cardstock cover module published today, or a lot more people would publish them.
The point is: older modules were written to be used by any DM and plopped into their own campaigns, fitting into their own stories. The modules were designed to be *used as a DM aid in creating a memorable game*. Nowadays, modules have done a 180; with only lip service paid to the DM 'plopping it into his own campaign'. Today's "adventure modules" should be renamed to something like "story-line books"; they expect that the DM will run it as it is, with only minor changes to the set dressing (if that). The main story has been meticulously planned out, with all the tropes of a "good story or novel". Great! ...if we were reading a story or novel. However, we are trying to play a game based on our own choices and imagination. Can a superior DM re-write major sections of, say, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and have it all play out well? Certainly! My point is that the older modules made this a MUCH easier thing to do...for all DM's, not just those with oodles and oodles of experience.
You know what’s really changed? Many gamers back in the day were playing to kick in the door, kill the monster, take the treasure, and repeat as many times as needed until they leveled up. As well, the average gamer today is considerably older – they have less time (to add on, customize, cherry pick the modules they will string together, write their own bridging material, etc. etc.) and more money to spend to buy an adventure that does more of that for them.
Let’s remember that “module” is a subset of “published adventure” in that it is meant to be integrated with the user’s own game, other modules, etc. “Adventure Path” is another form of published adventure.
Or, since we're on the idea of "stand alone" modules, would you pay 40 bucks for A4, on its own, without A1-3? The PC's start out captured, stripped of equipment and thrown in a dungeon? Yeah, that would go over well and wouldn't see tons of cries of "railroad" if it were released today. Or how about D2, without D1, where you start out in the middle of the Underdark, pursuing Drow raiders? Many of the classic modules weren't standalone - they were series, or "adventure paths" with pretty strong story lines and fairly linear plots.
A lot of the classics were modified from tournament adventures, intended to be run in four hours or so with pre-gen characters. A3 is a great example – it is framed by two nine room linear dungeons, each of which was a round in a tournament. That’s why A1 began at the secret door as well.
Future rewrites added the surroundings, the sandbox, a lot of the plot and NPC’s, etc. Just like a DM would have to build all of these things around the module to incorporate it into his game.
Pretty sure Giants and Drow were tournament – Demonweb Pits, I think, was written specifically as the capstone as a module, not a tournament module.
Umm...it's the lack of guidance that is the point. To put it another way, newer adventures hold the PC's and the DM's hands *far* too much for my liking. If the PC's join the Giants in the G series...I can still use it quite easily. The Good Guys would/may hear of their betrayal. Then, fearing "insider knowledge" about the Good Guys defenses, leaders, magical capabilities, etc, make a hasty decision and gather a small army and hire mercenaries in order to assult the Steading of the Hill Giant. I could use that entire module as-is for the PC's. They could shore up defenses, make plans for defence and offence, try and infiltrate the Good Guys army for recon, etc. I then grab ye' old War Machine (my go-to D&D mass combat system; the one from basic D&D...works fine with 1e/2e) and stat up some of the good guys forces. Then we play out a large Siege of the Steading, with the PC's as the 'leaders'...or at least significant generals.
I’m with Pemerton on this. The enemy stats in the module, and the encounter setups, are now useless to me, because the PC’s have sided with the giants. I now have to write up all of their new opponents, plot out their plans, assess what the PC’s can and can’t do with the resources in the Steading, decide what resources are available nearby , ad infinitum.
If the goal was to save time by purchasing the pre-written adventures (G1, 2 and 3, D1, 2 and 3 and Q1 - that is, the whole adventure), it failed miserably. I have to go back and do all the work myself anyway, and I have about 6.5 modules full of paid-for but useless materials. To analogize to your Dwellers of the Forbidden City analogy, assume the PC’s explore a level or two, then use Create Food and Water spells to travel on, or back, through the desert and abandon the city and its factions to their fate, not that they pursue different alliances and/or tactics within the City – that’s closer to “we ally with the giants”.
How much guidance do you have for “we go back through the Great Sahara Sandbox”?
Back to GDQ:
It's *because* there is a "lack of guidance" throughout the entire module that allows it so much freedom. The "story" of G1? : "Giants are up to something in the nearby hills. Check it out". In a nutshell. What exactly are they up to? That's 'semi-spelled out', but easily ignored. Nothing in the module hinges upon something that happened before it. Could it be important that the PC's did something (or didn't do something)? Sure, but that's up to the DM to decide. He doesn't have to "ignore" something later on or otherwise "rewrite" an entire 'chapter' of the adventure because the PC's did something unexpected. At most he makes a few notes about likely outcomes and then rolls with it.
The alliance with the Hill Giants means that the following six modules have to be entirely rewritten as they have ceased to be relevant.
So what you're saying is that this is "bad"?
Using our imaginations to take what is there and let a unique and exciting story unfold from a more "bare-bones" module is "less good" than trying to stick to the "plot and story" without colouring outside of the lines?
Which plot? A step by step, encounter by encounter railroad, which seems to be what you describe, or the “Plot” of “you are brave, bold, moral heroes who have come to defeat the Giant uprising!” which gets changed to “no, we sell out and try to ally with the Giants”?
By not having everything encountered in the adventure spelled out for the DM, it allows more "imaginatory sparks", I guess is what I'm saying. A module that says "The orcs fear the giants, and do what they say. Captured orcs will betray the party at the first opportunity, hoping to gain favor with their giantish overlords" is one thing. Saying "The orcs fear the giants because [insert two or three sentences detailing exactly why]. Captured orcs will betray the party at the first opportunity [insert several sentences about who they will run to, what they will say, why they run to Giant NPC #7, what they will do if taken outside of the giant's control, and why, etc]"... is a completely different thing.
Yeah, it’s an encyclopedia of every possible decision tree which won’t be in a 32 page module, a 224 page series of 7 modules, or a 6 volume adventure path. I can’t imagine how many pages would be needed for all the scripts that could be needed for what you are suggesting of the “second version”, which makes it a complete straw man in my view.
Give me the first version every time, thank you.
Let me, the DM, decide why the orcs will betray the giants. Let me, the DM, decide how they will do it. Let me, the DM, decide who they run to. Let me, the DM, decide if any or all of that changes if they leave the control of the giants. Why have all that extra "hand holding" in there? That space could have been spent on adding another room or two to the dungeon.
Why bother giving you the Steading, its occupants and their plans and tactics at all? There are two extremes here, complete DM DIY (which, if we are buying any published adventure, we have already abandoned) and a fully scripted scenario where the players are merely to play their assigned roles (which no one has suggested). There is huge middle ground in between.
Ultimately, the day of those 32 page modules is pretty clearly done. The market has spoken - no one is writing them because no one was making money at them. If they were selling today, at price points and in volumes that would make WoTC more money than those pretty hardcovers, do you think WoTC would not be producing them? Surely someone would!
Many of us are looking back at "the day" through tinted lenses. How did the game scene really run 25 - 35 years ago? Well:
- there were lots of games, and they were small - typically a couple of books on cardstock. AD&D was the exception, with its huge hardcovers.
- all those games typically maybe half a dozen published adventures, then faded away - perhaps one or two supplements, but those were the really well supported ones. Again, AD&D was the exception, but...
- the shelves were filled with adventure modules, by the game designers and by third party publishers - they were not full of supplemental rules for players and GM's - most games stood or fell on those 64 - 80 pages of stapled rules, often in a boxed set.
What happened? Adventures are used by DM's. The Player
M ratio is pretty high. Splatbooks get used by players and DM's - WAY bigger market, so let's publish splatbooks instead of adventures.
New editions excite the market - a new edition isn't an opportunity to fix errata and make some changes that confess the prior edition was far less than perfect - no, it's a marketing bonanza, so plan on a new edition every 5 - 10 years, and try to squeeze them in faster - they let us retool and sell old material again. Each new supplement has a smaller and smaller audience. If you didn't buy This Setting, you won't be buying its sourcebooks, for example. Smaller audience = lower sales less profits. Ideally, we publish adventures about as fast as you can use them, so you will buy them all. If we publish 4x what you will use, then you only need to buy 1 in 4 of our expensive products. But really, adventures aren't the moneymaker - they support sales of the splatbooks and the core rules. So when we release the Adventure, we need sourcebooks on the world surrounding it, new splatbooks applicable to it, ad infinitum.
The days of walls full of 32 page adventures are done.
