D&D General How do you know an adventure is "good" just from reading it?

[Teemu]

I love the idea that if everyone followed that advice, they would stop making adventures because they wouldn't sell until long after they're released.

To be fair, if the large majority of a company's adventures are good, their reputation alone will guarantee sales as consumers can trust that they'll get their money's worth!

 

[Micah Sweet]

To be fair, if the large majority of a company's adventures are good, their reputation alone will guarantee sales as consumers can trust that they'll get their money's worth!

You can't seriously think the majority of WotC's adventures are "good"?

 

[Teemu]

You can't seriously think the majority of WotC's adventures are "good"?

That's not my point. You said that if everyone waited a year, companies wouldn't be able to make enough money. That may be true, but if a company produced quality products or services over and over again, consumers would trust them and give them money.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's not my point. You said that if everyone waited a year, companies wouldn't be able to make enough money. That may be true, but if a company produced quality products or services over and over again, consumers would trust them and give them money.

Sure. All a company has to do is produce consistently quality product. Not impossible, I'll grant, but not WotC.

 

[Lanefan]

If I'm standing in FLGS and perusing an adventure, the criteria that will make me purchase the book are laughingly superficial:

• Thematic art, especially of NPC's. They are the most important part of the adventure for me.
• Clear maps at all scales. The adventure locale should have one of the best pieces of art in the game, with all key locations marked. Give me good maps, and I can hold the adventure together.
• More than one inspired location or encounter. Flicking through, you can usually spot the encounters that have received the lion's share of the writer(s)' attention. What I want is a "Huh, that's cool" moment.
• An actual finale, and some indication that the writer(s) have considered different paths to it.

With those signals, I can usually have fun with an adventure. Tick those boxes and you might have a sale. The actual qualities of the adventure, its coherence, its accomodation of the PC's actions, its pacing, and its surprises and its thrills, are almost impossible to judge from a quick read-through, so I've stopped trying.

I can live without the big set-piece finale in every adventure, if for no other reason than it just gets too player-side predictable both in and out of character after a while, but the rest of your points are sound.

That said, I look more for scene and setting art - what do the PCs see if-when they look around - rather than depictions of NPCs.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

I can live without the big set-piece finale in every adventure, if for no other reason than it just gets too player-side predictable both in and out of character after a while, but the rest of your points are sound.

That said, I look more for scene and setting art - what do the PCs see if-when they look around - rather than depictions of NPCs.

Hmm, interesting. I make an effort to make my finales predictable. I want the PCs plotting, preparing, and bringing their A game (although ideally pressured and running somewhat low on resources as well). Of course, I make the finales crushingly difficult to compensate.

 

[Lanefan]

Hmm, interesting. I make an effort to make my finales predictable. I want the PCs plotting, preparing, and bringing their A game (although ideally pressured and running somewhat low on resources as well). Of course, I make the finales crushingly difficult to compensate.

I guess I want to mix it up more. Sometimes the "boss battle" might come very early in an adventure but nobody realizes it until later (e.g they randomly happen to meet and defeat the BBEG in the third room of 40 but only clue in that that was the BBEG when they get to the throne room and there's nobody there); sometimes there's no "boss" involved (e.g. it's an exploration adventure or a dungeon full of randomly-generated occupants); sometimes the "boss" is a paper tiger and (though the players/PCs don't realize it) the real boss battle comes sooner, to get through the elite guards; and so on.

Predictability can be nice, but it gets boring after a while.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I guess I want to mix it up more. Sometimes the "boss battle" might come very early in an adventure but nobody realizes it until later (e.g they randomly happen to meet and defeat the BBEG in the third room of 40 but only clue in that that was the BBEG when they get to the throne room and there's nobody there);

Hello Ravenloft!

 

[Nightfly]

Hooks are the specific things that get PCs involved. They matter for like 5 minutes in most adventures.

I've got to call you out for exaggerating for comic effect here. More literally, do you mean to say that they only matter for the first session? Or the first hour?

You might be right, but I have indeed lost interest in a campaign in the first session, and even the first hour. I expect I'm not alone in that. If I don't get something to sink my teeth into right off the bat, I assume things will continue to be generic and bland.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I've got to call you out for exaggerating for comic effect here. More literally, do you mean to say that they only matter for the first session? Or the first hour?

Yes it can be that long but often it really is just the first five minutes, like literally what convinces your PCs to be involved - and it's often something incredibly shallow and brief. A lot of relatively well-regarded or even classic adventures have extremely simplistic hooks.

And maybe that's fine - but given how easy hooks are to come up with, I'd never see them as an important part of a pre-written adventure. Usually a DM can come up with better ones on the spot, let alone with pre-planning.

There are some adventures for some RPGs which have much deeper and more complex hooks, but generally speaking in D&D that isn't really "a thing" not even with 3PP adventures. Occasionally one PC will have some sort of deeper involvement or something, but it's usually very shallow even then.

I find cheap/generic hooks (which are the ones which most pre-written adventures have) are a part of what makes an adventure seem generic and bland. I've seen adventures praised for their hooks when their hooks were absolutely the most simplistic and generic collection of hooks you could think of, something that could easily have been in some 1990s DM/Storyteller book as a generic list.