Help me make WotC adventures better.
- Thread starter RodneyThompson
- Start date
Smeelbo
First Post
You may not want to hear this, but:
1) Editing. Most of the adventures you publish, while crediting an editor, don't appear to actually have been edited. They are full of typos, errors, inconsistancies, lame story elements, badly designed encounters, NPCs that lack credible motivations, groups of NPCs who cannot possibly cooperate (for example, no languages in common), maps that don't match the written description (or is it the other way around), and awful tactics. In general, it takes me dozens of hours to "edit" your published adventures, and if they weren't a store function, I wouldn't run them at all. In general, they are amateurish to the point of being personally embarrassing to run.
2) Verisimilitude. Most adventures make hardly any sense on any level. The motivations of the NPCs are often incomprehensible, their strategy and tactics are counterproductive, the quest makes little or no sense, and in general, it is unrewarding for the players to attempt to reason about the situation. Every time I have to explain something lame, or act as if it isn't lame, I feel like a whore.
3) Challenging Enemy Tactics. Monsters tactics rarely rise above the level of "suicide by adventurer." Tactics blocks give the lamest advice, and almost never make good use of creature powers or cooperation. For example, flying creatures never take advantage of their ability to fly, but instead invariable close with the characters. If 4E is supposed to emphasize tactics, why are monster tactics so stupid?
4) Terrain. Every combat, the party is largely going to use the same few At-Will and Encounter powers, and the monsters will have an even smaller number of powers available to them. Interesting terrain that can be used by both sides creatively will make for much more variety in combat. Mostly, what I see is a haphazard mish mosh of pits, bridges, water, and difficult terrain, laid out with no apparent forethought, and which the monsters appear to make little or no use of.
5) Minimize Grind. Most combats appear to written with the notion that the best way to have a more challenging combat is to increase monster defenses and hit point. I have found that most combats take 8 rounds or more, which it at least 3 rounds too long. Better tactics and terrains are a much better challenge.
6) Don't Force Lame Skill Challenges. Because, as published, Skill Challenges are a priori broken, and nothing has been done to improve them, we instead get these arbitrarily modified challenges that force the players to participate. Instead, it's time to admit that Skill Challenges are a failure, and offer an alternate mechanism that actually works. As written, unless all characters are forced to participate, the rational response to a skill challenge is always to have the character with the best chance make all the rolls, and for all characters with sub-optimal skills to avoid rolling at all. You know this: that is why almost all recently published Skill Challenges include some mechanism to force characters to roll.
The solution is trivial. The reason Skill Challenges are a priori a failed design is that failed rolls mostly count against the party, and so in order to succeed, the party should avoid failed skill checks. Thus, only the best characters should roll. Instead, Skill Challenges should be limited not by a number of failures, but by a number of rounds, with all successes counting towards the party, but with minimal penalties for any individual failed roll. So for example, if a challenge lasted three rounds, and the outcome depended on the number of successes the party as a whole attained, then it is in the party's interest to have all characters roll, since they could all contribute successes. If the party exceeds the required number of successes, then they gain some advantage, while if they fall short, they pay some cost for failure. The margin of success or failure could determine different results.
7) Accountability. There is a section for credits, but on the whole, it appears the persons credited do their jobs poorly, if at all. Why do these people have jobs? In theory, I purchase an adventure to save me the time of creating it myself, but when I find myself spending dozens of hours de-lamifying the adventure as published, why did I give up my cash? It would take me fewer hours to create an adventure from scratch, and it would be a much better experience for the players and myself. There are a lot of people without jobs, why can it possibly be that someone is collecting an hourly wage putting out such crap? If it a gardner, a maid, or a carpet layer did as poor a job as most adventure production teams, I would be giving them negative reviews on Angie's List, and I wouldn't hire them again. Why should I give you guys a pass?
I sell a lot of D&D books, but with the exception of introductory adventures, the rest just sit on the shelf. It's gotten to the point that I only bring enough copies of an published adventure to sell to the few completists, but no more, and I don't worry about re-stocking them.
Smeelbo
1) Editing. Most of the adventures you publish, while crediting an editor, don't appear to actually have been edited. They are full of typos, errors, inconsistancies, lame story elements, badly designed encounters, NPCs that lack credible motivations, groups of NPCs who cannot possibly cooperate (for example, no languages in common), maps that don't match the written description (or is it the other way around), and awful tactics. In general, it takes me dozens of hours to "edit" your published adventures, and if they weren't a store function, I wouldn't run them at all. In general, they are amateurish to the point of being personally embarrassing to run.
2) Verisimilitude. Most adventures make hardly any sense on any level. The motivations of the NPCs are often incomprehensible, their strategy and tactics are counterproductive, the quest makes little or no sense, and in general, it is unrewarding for the players to attempt to reason about the situation. Every time I have to explain something lame, or act as if it isn't lame, I feel like a whore.
3) Challenging Enemy Tactics. Monsters tactics rarely rise above the level of "suicide by adventurer." Tactics blocks give the lamest advice, and almost never make good use of creature powers or cooperation. For example, flying creatures never take advantage of their ability to fly, but instead invariable close with the characters. If 4E is supposed to emphasize tactics, why are monster tactics so stupid?
4) Terrain. Every combat, the party is largely going to use the same few At-Will and Encounter powers, and the monsters will have an even smaller number of powers available to them. Interesting terrain that can be used by both sides creatively will make for much more variety in combat. Mostly, what I see is a haphazard mish mosh of pits, bridges, water, and difficult terrain, laid out with no apparent forethought, and which the monsters appear to make little or no use of.
5) Minimize Grind. Most combats appear to written with the notion that the best way to have a more challenging combat is to increase monster defenses and hit point. I have found that most combats take 8 rounds or more, which it at least 3 rounds too long. Better tactics and terrains are a much better challenge.
6) Don't Force Lame Skill Challenges. Because, as published, Skill Challenges are a priori broken, and nothing has been done to improve them, we instead get these arbitrarily modified challenges that force the players to participate. Instead, it's time to admit that Skill Challenges are a failure, and offer an alternate mechanism that actually works. As written, unless all characters are forced to participate, the rational response to a skill challenge is always to have the character with the best chance make all the rolls, and for all characters with sub-optimal skills to avoid rolling at all. You know this: that is why almost all recently published Skill Challenges include some mechanism to force characters to roll.
The solution is trivial. The reason Skill Challenges are a priori a failed design is that failed rolls mostly count against the party, and so in order to succeed, the party should avoid failed skill checks. Thus, only the best characters should roll. Instead, Skill Challenges should be limited not by a number of failures, but by a number of rounds, with all successes counting towards the party, but with minimal penalties for any individual failed roll. So for example, if a challenge lasted three rounds, and the outcome depended on the number of successes the party as a whole attained, then it is in the party's interest to have all characters roll, since they could all contribute successes. If the party exceeds the required number of successes, then they gain some advantage, while if they fall short, they pay some cost for failure. The margin of success or failure could determine different results.
7) Accountability. There is a section for credits, but on the whole, it appears the persons credited do their jobs poorly, if at all. Why do these people have jobs? In theory, I purchase an adventure to save me the time of creating it myself, but when I find myself spending dozens of hours de-lamifying the adventure as published, why did I give up my cash? It would take me fewer hours to create an adventure from scratch, and it would be a much better experience for the players and myself. There are a lot of people without jobs, why can it possibly be that someone is collecting an hourly wage putting out such crap? If it a gardner, a maid, or a carpet layer did as poor a job as most adventure production teams, I would be giving them negative reviews on Angie's List, and I wouldn't hire them again. Why should I give you guys a pass?
I sell a lot of D&D books, but with the exception of introductory adventures, the rest just sit on the shelf. It's gotten to the point that I only bring enough copies of an published adventure to sell to the few completists, but no more, and I don't worry about re-stocking them.
Smeelbo
knightofround
First Post
This thread is great, even though I've only read the first 5 pages.
I haven't read too much of the 4E adventure path because I didn't want to spoil the story just in-case I participated in it. However I can re-emphasize points already made in this thread.
1. Variety is key. I think a big reason why WotC adventures are so unpopular is that they are all so vanilla. I'm sure that many people out there enjoy the PoL heavy combat grindfest, and that's great. But you need more ideas, you need try new stuff instead of recycling old stuff that worked. You need one-shot modules, and you also need mega-adventures that cover an entire tier. With the 3E and 4E paths you try to do both, and end up doing both poorly.
2. Ditch the delve in the printed edition. Focus on making the story better, the NPCs better, descriptive text better, the enemy tactics better. WotC adventures tend to be very heavy on the stat blocks and sheer quantity of encounters, rather than quality.
3. Market the author. Open up Dungeon to fan submissions, and ask for specific themes. Use that as a tool to fish for freelancers. You can get a lot of really good content that with very little cost. I want Monte Cooks, I want Keith Bakers, I don't want a generic project built by an editor from a couple different authors.
4. More text, less dead space. Again, cut out the stat blocks. Cut out the artwork. I would much, much rather purchase an incredibly well-fleshed out module with brilliant ideas, characters, and combat situations, than have pretty maps, pictures, and handouts. Focus more on encounter quality and less on encounter quantity. Make fights dynamic depending upon the player's previous decisions, use terrain, use tactics, provide noncombat solutions, use waves of attackers...etc etc
5. Open up to the fan base. Use the DDI to Wikify or make a forum each product, so players can submit additional material. Use it to showcase additional material that didn't make the cut in the editing. Provide stat block chunks organized by product so people who like the delve can print them out as need. All this will increase subscription to DDI, which is really the only advantage WotC adventures have over 3PP adventures now. And it gets you folks extra revenue.
Find writers that are willing to participate with the community. My favorite WotC adventure module was Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, not so much because of the adventure itself...but because it had a very strong community behind it. Those fan submissions gave the module a TON of added value at 0 extra cost to the publisher. Some of the stuff the fans put out is absolutely crazy; full edition conversions, "hard modes" or "easy modes" of encounters, updated material from WotC supplements produced *after* the adventure was published, updated material from official errata, beautiful handouts, alternate ways to run NPCs, alternate endings, alternate storylines, the whole works.
Grow your product by growing the community!
I haven't read too much of the 4E adventure path because I didn't want to spoil the story just in-case I participated in it. However I can re-emphasize points already made in this thread.
1. Variety is key. I think a big reason why WotC adventures are so unpopular is that they are all so vanilla. I'm sure that many people out there enjoy the PoL heavy combat grindfest, and that's great. But you need more ideas, you need try new stuff instead of recycling old stuff that worked. You need one-shot modules, and you also need mega-adventures that cover an entire tier. With the 3E and 4E paths you try to do both, and end up doing both poorly.
2. Ditch the delve in the printed edition. Focus on making the story better, the NPCs better, descriptive text better, the enemy tactics better. WotC adventures tend to be very heavy on the stat blocks and sheer quantity of encounters, rather than quality.
3. Market the author. Open up Dungeon to fan submissions, and ask for specific themes. Use that as a tool to fish for freelancers. You can get a lot of really good content that with very little cost. I want Monte Cooks, I want Keith Bakers, I don't want a generic project built by an editor from a couple different authors.
4. More text, less dead space. Again, cut out the stat blocks. Cut out the artwork. I would much, much rather purchase an incredibly well-fleshed out module with brilliant ideas, characters, and combat situations, than have pretty maps, pictures, and handouts. Focus more on encounter quality and less on encounter quantity. Make fights dynamic depending upon the player's previous decisions, use terrain, use tactics, provide noncombat solutions, use waves of attackers...etc etc
5. Open up to the fan base. Use the DDI to Wikify or make a forum each product, so players can submit additional material. Use it to showcase additional material that didn't make the cut in the editing. Provide stat block chunks organized by product so people who like the delve can print them out as need. All this will increase subscription to DDI, which is really the only advantage WotC adventures have over 3PP adventures now. And it gets you folks extra revenue.
Find writers that are willing to participate with the community. My favorite WotC adventure module was Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, not so much because of the adventure itself...but because it had a very strong community behind it. Those fan submissions gave the module a TON of added value at 0 extra cost to the publisher. Some of the stuff the fans put out is absolutely crazy; full edition conversions, "hard modes" or "easy modes" of encounters, updated material from WotC supplements produced *after* the adventure was published, updated material from official errata, beautiful handouts, alternate ways to run NPCs, alternate endings, alternate storylines, the whole works.
Grow your product by growing the community!
Last edited:
Freakohollik
First Post
I realize I'm late to the thread, and I don't know if this has been said already, but the adventures need to be more unique and memorable.
A few years back, Dungeon printed a list of what it considered to be the 30 greatest adventures of all time. I'll mention a few and why they were great.
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks - It's a wrecked spaceship. All kinds of crazy futuristic items and monsters.
Tomb of Horrors - Clever traps. Entirely about the players figuring out how to cautiously advance rather than grinding through combats.
City of Skulls - A rescue mission into a prison. The adventure does a great job setting up the situation so that you'll need to use stealth and roleplaying.
Assassins Knot - A murder mystery, but if the PCs ask too many questions, the villains will take notice and the PCs will be in a bad situation.
All those adventures have a hook. Something exciting. Something unique that made them memorable. From what I've seen of the 4e modules they all tend to be, "go to ruin/hole in the ground, kill hordes of something".
A few years back, Dungeon printed a list of what it considered to be the 30 greatest adventures of all time. I'll mention a few and why they were great.
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks - It's a wrecked spaceship. All kinds of crazy futuristic items and monsters.
Tomb of Horrors - Clever traps. Entirely about the players figuring out how to cautiously advance rather than grinding through combats.
City of Skulls - A rescue mission into a prison. The adventure does a great job setting up the situation so that you'll need to use stealth and roleplaying.
Assassins Knot - A murder mystery, but if the PCs ask too many questions, the villains will take notice and the PCs will be in a bad situation.
All those adventures have a hook. Something exciting. Something unique that made them memorable. From what I've seen of the 4e modules they all tend to be, "go to ruin/hole in the ground, kill hordes of something".
I had to pick this out for emphasis because this is the number 1 problem with skill challenges. PCs shouldn't be forced to roll because they don't want to roll otherwise. That's just completely dumb on multiple levels, especially because every failure punishes the entire party far too much. It would be like having 3 rolls in combat decide the entire fight, which is just not something that should happen in 4th edition.
... and that's two adventure modules right there that I consider to be among the worst. I cannot comment on the other two, since I haven't read or run them, but I have a suspicion, I would not rate them high, either.
Considering the latest WotC module releases (Hammerfast, Slaying Stone), I guess, they're already on the right track.
nedjer
Adventurer
Tomb of Horrors - the best and the worst. So railroady it's got tracks, but the panic in the blood, flood door room is stuck with me to this day.
Zaran
Adventurer
Here are things I've noticed:
1. Magic item drops are too few when compared to the recommended.
2. The modules are WAY too long. I would rather there be 10 encounters that are detailed out with map posters and such than 30 encounters that are designed to take the PCs through 4 levels. If there were 10 encounters and a bunch of non-combat situations that would be even better. I think if you want to make the modules bigger than divide up the adventure into chapters so the PCs can rest and train up between them and have new goals to give the game more variety.
3. If you make it so you module covers less levels, the GM won't have to railroad the PCs as much because they won't accidently wander into a fight that's too high because they skipped something. So I guess this would be "Too much railroading built in"
4. I have run into a couple of modules where the final battle is just a little too high level or is coupled with some outside effect that makes it extremely difficult. Especially when the encounters before are almost as difficult and the PCs had to use a few dailies. I think if the modules were designed with the recommended encounter levels that the DMG advises this wouldn't be an issue.
1. Magic item drops are too few when compared to the recommended.
2. The modules are WAY too long. I would rather there be 10 encounters that are detailed out with map posters and such than 30 encounters that are designed to take the PCs through 4 levels. If there were 10 encounters and a bunch of non-combat situations that would be even better. I think if you want to make the modules bigger than divide up the adventure into chapters so the PCs can rest and train up between them and have new goals to give the game more variety.
3. If you make it so you module covers less levels, the GM won't have to railroad the PCs as much because they won't accidently wander into a fight that's too high because they skipped something. So I guess this would be "Too much railroading built in"
4. I have run into a couple of modules where the final battle is just a little too high level or is coupled with some outside effect that makes it extremely difficult. Especially when the encounters before are almost as difficult and the PCs had to use a few dailies. I think if the modules were designed with the recommended encounter levels that the DMG advises this wouldn't be an issue.
Pseudopsyche
First Post
Agreed. These products are my default recommendations for beginning DMs or DMs otherwise looking for 1st-level adventures, not Chaos Scar or Scales of War or Keep on the Shadowfell. They're noticeably more open-ended, more concise, and have strong hooks.
I really have one suggestion: Make 'em shorter (which appears to be at least somewhat happening). I'm kind of thinking of the 1E "Against The Giants" or the like where they were actually multiple "modules" originally. "Decent" lead to "Vault" lead to "Demonweb". While player advancement happens faster in 4E, some of the modules cover IMO WAY too much ground.
Sure I could split and take, but I also want more maps.
Sure I could split and take, but I also want more maps.
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