I've spent far too many hours over the years reading threads in ENWorld dissecting adventures, debating the ideal adventure design and layout, and complaints and advice regarding how to run an engaging adventure, often with calls for more tools and support for DMs in published adventures. I would also lump into this discussion, conversations comparing "old-school", low-fluff, "practical" adventure content versus "overly" verbose, hard-to-digest, hard-to-navigate modern adventure books that seem designed more for "lonely fun" than actually running the adventure.
A lot of this is couched in terms of player expectations, enjoyment, and engagement.
But in my experience, how well an adventure is designed doesn't have as much impact on the players as many of us GMs thinks it does.
I've run terribly obtuse, difficult to digest and prep adventures. I've also run much lighter adventures that lean more into the GM filling in the blanks and improving things on the fly. Neither seemed to make much difference to the players. As a DM, I have enough experience that I can run a good-enough game that my players are enjoying enough to keep playing session after session. And I'm coming to the conclusion that, other than some outliers, the quality of a published adventure has much more to do with the GMs enjoyment than the player's enjoyment.
If I find the logic of an adventure and its antagonists "stupid", or a story being too linear, to too open and directionless, these are things that mainly affect me. One, I may not enjoy the fiction--the plot, NPCs, etc. Reading through an engaging and well-written adventure is certainly part of the enjoyment of running a published adventure. But poor plots don't have the same impact on the players even if I don't "fix" things. Just buy playing and making choices they are making it their own. So the experience is much more forgiving in play. An adventure has to be especially bad, I find, before the players notice or at least care enough to become unengaged.
Two, the poor layout, organization, and lack of tools to help a GM run the game with minimal work, which most published adventures suffer from, is almost entirely something that affects GM enjoyment--at least for experienced GMs. Obviously, if terrible organization and poor prep leads to lots of page flipping and pauses, that will negatively affect the player experience. But, in my experience at least, I put in the prep I need to run the game relatively smoothly. That could mean putting in the time to read and reread bloated adventures and creating notes, look ups, and tools to help me run in. Or, it could mean putting in the time to creat content to fill gaps, fix poorly connected plot threads, etc. in a bare-bones adventure.
I know I'm meandering in this thread, but I'm interested in knowing your thoughts one how important adventure quality is to players in the hands of a conscientious GM. Are GMs enabling sub-par adventure design because we'll run a published adventure that players are excited about and do the work necessary to make it work? Am I expecting too much from adventure designers and writers? Do you have good example of adventures that are compelling, fun to read over and prep, and are also easy to run? Or is their just too much variety in GM expectations and preferences to expect "better" adventure design?
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