Help me make WotC adventures better.

[Dausuul]

Wow. Okay. Way to put me on the spot, Rodney. Now I have to put my money where my mouth is and propose actual solutions instead of just snarking at WotC.

Let me see here.

First of all, I don't think all WotC adventures are bad by any means. There have been some really stellar ones, in fact. "Red Hand of Doom" comes to mind as one of the all-time greats. On a much smaller scale, there was that tiny little solo adventure in Dungeon a few months back - "Dark Awakening," it was called. Barely long enough to merit the name, but it packed a really engaging adventure into that space.

But there's also stuff like "Keep on the Shadowfell," which... yeah, kind of sucked.

So, what's the difference?

Mostly, I think it's a question of pacing. You have to keep the energy level high, keep the players engaged, keep the plot moving. This means:

Don't string fight scenes together without a break. This is especially important in 4E where there is no such thing as a brief combat. When every single fight takes 45-60 minutes, you really have to put some breathing space between battles. Put in some exploration, some traps, a social encounter or two, a mysterious location with clues to discover.

"Dark Awakening" was one of the shortest adventures I've ever played, yet it had a lot of exploration scenes and even a social encounter (in a solitaire adventure!) interspersed with the battles. I really got into carefully, stealthily scouting out the dungeon. "Keep on the Shadowfell," on the other hand, felt like a horrendous slog because it was just... fight this, then fight that, then fight the other thing.

Keep the focus. Keep reminding the PCs why they're doing what they're doing. They should be constantly reaching little milestones that advance the overall plot.

"Red Hand of Doom" was brilliant at this. Every few encounters had us defeating one of the evil overlord's lieutenants or winning allies for the big showdown to come. Despite the massive length of the adventure, we always felt we were pressing on toward an objective. In "Keep on the Shadowfell," there were long stretches where we felt like we were just whacking goblins to whack goblins. Our only reward for successfully whacking one group of goblins was to get another group of goblins to whack. 4E combat is engaging, but it's not that engaging.

Change the scene. As a poster upthread mentioned, after a certain number of encounters any dungeon has overstayed its welcome. Wrap it up and move on. Players like to explore new things. To some degree this ties in with the previous point about reaching milestones; one of the ways you can create that feeling of focused advancement is to have the PCs reach literal milestones as they cross the game world.

"Red Hand of Doom" took us all over the place, with adventures in swamps, ruins, mountains, you name it. Most of "Keep on the Shadowfell" took place in, well, the Keep on the Shadowfell. It got old.

More on this as I think of it.

 

[Pseudopsyche]

I'd like to echo the call for diversity. The DMGs include some wonderful advice on identifying types of players and tailoring encounters to them. Let's identify different types of campaigns and D&D games and tailor adventures to them. Designing adventures to appeal to every campaign risks bland flavor (since some DMs have their own campaign settings) and an emphasis on combat (since most campaigns feature combat).

Let's take H1 as an example. I think it works great for DMs who want a straightforward introduction to the system and a dungeon-crawling style of game. I ran it pretty much by the book, to kick off the first D&D campaign I ever ran. In hindsight, I realized that I prefer more narrative logic in my adventures, and I see so many missed opportunities for story and role-playing. If I could go back, I would try to bring the keep to life by making each section its own mini-dungeon with its own story. Maybe the goblins have always lived there and chafe under the rule of the recently arrived Kalarel and the hobgoblins; the PCs can convince them to rise against him. Of course, Keegan and his dead followers are the original inhabitants, and he can send the PCs on missions to specific other portions of the keep, to wipe out intruders or even to retrieve his children's effects from the level beneath. The hobgoblins themselves could be purely mercenary, opening up other role-playing opportunities for turning them against Kalarel. But I feel like H1 focused on engaging encounter design, since that's what every campaign could use. H1 includes a page (22) entitled "DM's Advice: Add More Story." As an inexperienced DM, I would have loved some help and more examples on how to do just that.

Of course, I'm not saying that every adventure should cater to my style. I'm just saying that you should be aware of different styles and work to address all of them (presumably, in proportion to their incidence rates in the community). For myself, I really enjoyed the latest Chaos Scar adventure, Crossroads. It's location-based, so it doesn't assume any particular order of events. It provides some evocative flavor (the gibbet tree) and NPCs with personality (the current occupants of the trading house). It provides useful suggestions and ideas for how to make the adventure relevant to a campaign (put an existing NPC in the tree), as well as obvious hooks for further adventure (the dwarven caravan). It errs more on the side of a toolkit for creating adventure, instead of a scripted adventure (such as H1) or a purely background article (like many of the DM resources in Dungeon magazine).

To sum up: diversity. Just as Dragon aims to provide something for every player in every issue (but not every article!), your adventure line (but not every adventure) should provide something for every DM. I would like to see more risks taken, particular in the pages of Dungeon magazine, where you can presumably afford to be more specialized. I'm actually very encouraged by the TOC of the current issue, which includes a horror adventure and a city-race adventure. I'd love to see more Eberron adventures or locations, too! And diversify not just in genre, but in DM style!

Anyway, thanks for listening.

 

[Stormonu]

First, I just wanted to echo some sentiments I've seen here: KotS feels like it was designed backwards - as if the encounters were designed first and the plot was tacked on as an afterthought. For module design, I think its much better if the designers hammer out the story/plot and then come back in and fill the adventure with encounters that fit that theme, rather than trying to do the reverse.

Also, I'd also like to say that I prefer adventures that have the map on the inside cover that can be separated from the module. I'd also think an innovative solution to the player vs. DM map problem some folks have with the maps would be to produce a transparency (probably two-piece, since I'm guessing transparencies don't fold well) to go with the map that shows the location of monsters and such on the map, and can just be hidden if the DM needs to show the map itself to the players for some reason. The DM just lays the transparency on the cover map, letting him see where NPCs, traps and whatnot are, and can hide it for scanning to 1" squares or showing PCs.

 

[Dausuul]

Further thoughts:

Don't get too linear. Now, obviously there's a conflict here. The more possible branches your adventure plot contains, the more of those branches will necessarily go unexplored, meaning you're doing more development work for less return. So obviously you can't get too branch-y. The story does have to get from A to B in the end.

But do offer some branches. The players need decision points and meaningful choices... or at least they need to feel that they have them. "Red Hand of Doom" had a clever approach to this, with a number of places we could go and things we could do, but a limited time in which to do them, so we had to decide how much we thought we could handle and what we wanted to tackle first. Similarly, "Dark Awakening" gave me a number of routes to take, though they all led to the same place in the end. "Keep on the Shadowfell" let the rails show a little too clearly.

Proactive bad guys. The bad guy should be an active force in the game world. In RPGs as in fiction, it's usually the villain who drives the plot. So make sure the villain is out there doing things, changing things, messing with the PCs.

"Red Hand of Doom" had this in spades, with the

Spoiler

ever-advancing goblin horde

. So as not to keep picking on "Keep on the Shadowfell," I'll switch to "Bastion of Broken Souls" for the opposite example here; the big villain of that adventure had a serious case of Orcus On His Throne. He just sat in the Bastion waiting for us to come to him.

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

To try to add something that others haven't already, both I and my players really enjoyed seeing a semblance of the Victory Points system from Heroes of Battle appear in Red Hand of Doom. I had been quietly tracking the passing of time from the start (as advised by the module), and when speaking with the captain of the town guard in the initial "Please help us kill the bad things" conversation, she wrapped up by saying something along the lines of "Excellent. I'll see to it that the stablemaster has horses ready for you at dawn." One of the players shrugged with a half-sarcastic OOC remark of "Ok, sure, not like it'll make a difference." When I was able to respond (truthfully ) that there was a list of consequences within the module depending on how they resolve certain issues and how quickly they did so, everyone in the room perked up. It added a very clear sense of ownership and weight to the players' actions to know that yes, there was more to this than a series of rooms with an evil wizard guy at the end.

In fairness, that presumption was probably drawn from the fact that our only module experience prior to RHoD was in using the free 3.5 modules posted on the WotC website. They were almost without exception monster closets, and we used them for expressly that purpose: "Half the group isn't going to be able to make it this Saturday? Okay, somebody else DM a one-shot." So in that respect they were complete successes... but they were also the kind of successes that I don't think any of us would be interested in buying, were they not already free.

 

[Shemeska]

Based on my opinion of 4e in general, my advice here may be discounted, but it's constructive criticism, so hear me out. And it's a good sign that you guys are recognizing complaints by customers and potential customers. Hopefully something good comes out of this.

WotC 4e adventures tend to be exceedingly formulaic and rapidly devolve into grinding fight after grinding fight. Make the story and the locations the focus of the adventure, not the 'you must be X level at each stage of the adventure and therefore you must have Y number of combat encounters' design shtick that has often felt to me to be at the center of 4e adventure design. Don't allow your system mechanics to dictate plot, setting, and story elements of an adventure. It's boring, jarring, and artificial.

Drop the delve format. Please, drop the delve format. You guys fell in love with it in late 3.x, but it seriously disrupts the flow and story of an adventure. It makes things feel like disjointed combat encounters linked together, and that has only gotten worse in your adventures as time has gone by.

Dungeon's adventures have felt far too often like what the guys on staff at WotC manage to write when they can squeeze in time to do so. It seems like it doesn't get the attention of printed work, and that's a problem. There's a perception that Dungeon and DDI articles in general are somewhere between afterthoughts and at the level of the web articles that were released for free during the 3.x period, but now they're behind a paywall. What's my point? Either provide your staff with more time to work on stuff in Dungeon, more time in development, more editing, more playtesting before release, or take them off of it and hire more outside freelancers.

With slim (but often well written) exception (Shwalb, Kulp, etc), a lot of stuff is just in-house guys, and Dungeon lacks the sense of community contribution that it had when it was a printed magazine. There's no longer lots of discussion by people pitching ideas to the magazine, and I think that you're at risk of having the creative well running dry if you don't bring in new writers and -advertise- that you want people to contribute adventures. Now 4e isn't my thing, so it isn't me looking for work, but when I talk to multiple freelancers at last GenCon and all of them sigh and shake their head regarding hearing anything back from the e-zines regarding pitches, you have a problem in reality or in perception. And in this instance, they hurt you just the same.

Get new people involved. Get new ideas.

Don't force every adventure to be PoL. This cannot be said enough. You've taken a bruising over forcing core 4e and PoL quasi-setting into other settings, and you're doing the same to supposedly generic adventures. Honestly if you're going to make generic adventures, make generic adventures, because if people don't like the tropes and themes of the PoL quasi-setting, they're going to be seriously turned off by the trend of having literally everything in that setting, even if it's generic or even if it's nominally part of another supposedly unique setting. Please please allow material that isn't PoL. Allow things to exclude parts of the core or go beyond the core themes and tropes. Diversity in adventure content and design is key, and you're not providing that right now.

 

[The_Gneech]

I'm making it my mission to change the way we design, develop, and edit adventures. It's not going to be a fast process, or an easy one, but I've formed my task force and have visited the quartermaster for ammunition and supplies. However, like any mission, mine needs some good Intelligence before the work can begin.

So, what I'd like to hear from the community is what you think would make published adventures better. What areas are WotC adventures lacking in that could be improved? What makes a good adventure for you, and why are the published adventures so far not doing that for you?

Heyas Rodney! You're a brave, brave man. And while I have my issues w/ 4E, I'm going to try to keep them separated from my response as much as possible (unless they really are germane).

FIRST: What makes a good adventure?

One of the things I liked "in the old days" (say, "Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh" old) was that there was a lot of variety to the modules being put out. Part of that is because the whole game was new and people were still figuring out what worked "best," obviously, but it also made for a lot of variety that seems lacking now. One adventure was a piratey yo-ho foray, another was trying to survive on Monster Island, while a third was dealing with this crazy temple to !Cthulhu with a giant sleeping god hanging from the ceiling. (Not to mention one that's a giant space ark with insane robots kicking out monsters.)

Somewhere along the line, that wide canvas started to shrink away. Not just at WotC, but for many of the 3rd party types, the standard template is "here's a valley, with town X here and dungeon Y there." It's a good template, but it's surely not the ONLY template. One of the things Goodman Games really nails with its "old school" feel is the ability to come up with some locations that feel like we haven't really been there before. Even something that is at its heart a pure dungeon crawl, like "Curse of the Emerald Cobra," still manages to feel exotic with its village-on-rope-bridges and steppe pyramid locale.

NOTE: Speaking only for my own personal preferences, I'm not necessarily referring to "elemental motes" and sailing ships made of ice pirated by djinni, or tromping various levels of hell. Those can be good of course, but I think they're seriously overdone these days. I strongly prefer the more grounded "sword and sorcery" of older editions, where there may be extradimensional portals at the bottom of the Temple of Elemental Evil, but MOST of the adventure is set right there in the natural world.

SECOND: What makes a weak adventure?

Strangely enough, being tied too strongly into any setting, even a super-generic one like the "points of light" is supposed to be, makes an adventure much more of a hit-or-miss proposal for me. The more of the implied setting I have to pull out, the less interested I am in bothering with it.

By the same token, "adventure #4 of 6" is almost useless to me. I know lots of people got very excited by the "adventure path" concept, but frankly I don't care for it. A single mega-adventure, a la the excellent Red Hand of Doom is fine -- if it happens to be a story I'm interested in -- but for the most part I want smaller things I can plug in to my campaign when and where I need. I'll do the connecting myself.

From what I've seen of the 4E stuff, WotC seems to be trying to have it both ways here, by making adventures that are theoretically tied together but in actuality are little more than a bunch of encounters that only connect by virtue of being stapled into the same book. Net result: it doesn't really do either very well. Thinking of Thunderspire Labyrinth here ... the Seven-Pillared Hall is a great hub, and the various subadventures in it are varying degrees of cool, but there was no through-line really to tie them together, and the references to both Keep on the Shadowfell and Pyramid of Shadows might just as well have been scribbled into the margins for all the connection they had. While that in itself is not a bad thing (I didn't run Keep, I probably won't run Pyramid), a lot of the promo text for Thunderspire suggests that it's supposed to be part of a trilogy, which made me hesitant to buy it.

Honestly, my recommendation would be not to leave out such margin scribbles -- go ahead and include them -- just don't use them as selling points. Because in my experience at least, if I feel like I need Pyramid to use Thunderspire, I end up just not buying either of them.

OTHER POINTS -- THE DELVE FORMAT
Count me in the anti-delve camp here. I strongly dislike the delve format, for many reasons.

1. It's hard to see the big picture. Especially when the "complete dungeon map" is in one book and then each room has its own map in the other, and the numbering doesn't match up. "The guards in area 2 will hear. 'Area 2? Where the heck is area 2? All I see here is an H and a Q.'"
2. Artificial page count restrictions make for inconsistent and often incomplete writeups! So we've got a 10x10 room with an orc and a pie ... which gets a half page of backstory and roleplaying advice because it's such a simple encounter. Then we get a three-tiered boss fight that's all stat blocks and no staging information at all, because that would run over to the next page. No way to run a railroad.
3. How much am I paying for this useless cardboard folder with its pretty, pretty round-cut edges? I'd rather have more pages of adventure in the good old booklet form.

Pretty maps are pretty, yes. But honestly, I am perfectly happy with blue lines on a grid printed on the inside cover as long as the writing they illustrate is strong.

FINALLY, WELL, SOME OF THE PROBLEM -IS- 4E PHILOSOPHY
Please don't just dismiss this as edition-warring, because I am trying to give serious feedback here. 4E from day one has been presented in an over-the-top "OVER 9000!" Everything is badass and superawesome!!! way and, while that is probably good for getting attention, it's not sustainable. Somebody who wants to stick around, or has been around for a long time and doesn't need to be sold on the game, gets "awesome fatigue."

But if you look at some of the classics that people remember fondly, they're not all "awesome." Bone Hill is mysterious. Temple of Elemental Evil is brooding and malevolent. Barrier Peaks is just plain weird.

4E, for all its "Throw it all in! Get right to the good parts!" philosophy, is actually very monotonous to me, and that includes the adventures. "You're in a perfectly balanced room with kobolds. Now you're in a perfectly balanced room with undead. Now you're in a perfectly balanced room where some of the floor is made of fire. Now you're in a perfectly balanced room with dire wolves. And when you're done with each room, you'll be right back where you started and fresh to go on to the next room."

This ties in with the famous fracas about Mike Mearls vs. the Rust Monster. In the long run, if every encounter is simply balanced within itself, and at the end of each one you're right where you started, +300 XP, it makes encounter design much easier -- but it kills story. And I think this is a serious problem that 4E is going to have to deal with before you're ever going to get really good adventures out of it.

TALKING DOWN -- THE *OTHER* 4E PROBLEM
This is more a stylistic issue that has become prominent in 4E, rather than anything to do with actual game mechanics, but it's also relevant to adventure design. I know that the idea is to make the game "accessible," but the writing style in 4E has a real problem with making me feel like the writer thinks I'm stupid -- or least figures I might be -- and so has to keep their words short and make sure they don't lose my attention.

I'm not the first to have said this, and unfortunately I haven't been able to find the exact quote I'm looking for on the topic, but one blogger wrote eloquently about the "Gygaxian" mode of writing, where an obviously smart writer was writing for somebody he considered an equal. This was fine when I was 12, and it's still fine now.

I think this is one of the things people may be pointing to when they talk about "dumbing down" games -- not necessarily that the game itself is "dumb" but that there's a general feeling of "let's not use big words that will scare the kids away". (The other thing being a certain sense that adventuring has become "push button: receive treasure," which is closer to my topic above regarding a steady diet of perfectly-balanced encounters.)


IF YOU'VE READ THIS FAR, I THANK YOU
There are at least two reasons to buy an adventure: how it runs at the table, and how it is to read. I've bought (and love) several adventures that for one reason or another I will probably never run, and think of them as "great adventures." And in many cases I've lifted pieces -- the grell attack in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is a terrific single encounter that I used with great success in a scenario that was otherwise completely of my own devising.

The delve format, and the focus on making something that you can just pick up and run with barely looking it over once, is probably great for a certain audience, particularly convention play, and I know that's an important part of the D&D brand. But, well, it doesn't make for "great adventures," it makes for "serviceable convention play." The long-running home campaign is a different beast, and I think at some level you're going to have to look at your adventure design with an eye toward which audience you're trying to reach. It might be in your best interest to do different adventures in different formats -- have a series of "Convention Play Modules" and a series of "Campaign Modules," with each one optimized to serve its intended audience best.

Thanks for asking.

-The Gneech

 

[Pbartender]

Something else to mention:

A lot of people are talking about expanding the variety in encounters. Normally, I'd view this as a good thing. A half dozen encounters in a row using the same three types of goblin gets real boring real fast. However...

The encounters still need to make sense within the context of the adventure. If I'm sending a party in to take out a band of rampaging hobgoblin bandits, I'd expect to see mostly goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears), maybe a handful of allies (maybe orcs, kobolds, ogres and the like), and a few monstrous "pets". What I wouldn't expect to see is gnomes and fire elementals (Rescue at Rivenroar, I'm looking at you!).

 

[Oryan77]

Coupons for free booze is an instant favorite of mine. If I buy an adventure, and it comes with, say, free beer (any kind, I won't be picky), it will be at the top of my list of all time favorite adventures. Even if an underage child buys the adventure, that's still ok. The coupon can be given to his father, or he can hold on to it until he turns of age.

Other than that, one thing that WotC adventures really seem to lack is more focus on the NPCs fluff. I miss adventures having lots of boxed text that includes what the NPC says, or what the NPC might say. It helps give me an idea on how to roleplay the NPC in a way that I may not have thought of.

Really, it's the little things that matter to me that seem to be missing from current adventures. I enjoy being told how a room is furnished & decorated. I think my players enjoy it also because it gives them more to interact with. Rather than killing the badguy and leaving, they might snoop around. And rather than just telling me, "I search for traps/loot", they can tell me, "I search under the rug" or "Do the paintings look like they could be valuable?"

Basically, there is way more focus on crunch than there is fluff. And by fluff, I don't mean just the adventure background & NPC histories. I mean details that will help me bring the world alive.

 

[S'mon]

You don't want your customers to feel they're not getting enough bang for their buck. A lot of the people who buy published adventures are doing so because it's easier than making their own. If every level of adventuring costs them a $15 published module, they're going to be dropping $450 on an entire 1-30 campaign. That's a steep price to pay. It's much easier to swallow in the more reasonable 9-adventure format seen in the H-P-E series.

Is this really a problem? I only get to run 2 sessions/month max and I find there's far more I want to do than I can ever get done! Maybe it's because I'm old with job, wife & child, and the target demographic have more time to fill, and less money? But people spend $60/£40 on computer games with far less play value, don't they?

Anyway if it is a problem, they could sell more packets of multiple short (1-3 session, 3-10 encounter) adventures, rather than what feel like heavily 'padded' 30 or 50 encounter multi-level epics.