NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 5108520" data-attributes="member: 6779">Heyas Rodney! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> You're a brave, brave man. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> 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 FORMATCount me in the anti-delve camp here. I strongly dislike the delve format, for many reasons.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">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.'"</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">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.</li> </ol>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 PHILOSOPHYPlease 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 PROBLEMThis 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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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