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

[Nightfly]

Let me mention a specific hook that I love.

In the Pathfinder adventure path The Curse of the Crimson Throne, the party is brought together by a mysterious fortune-teller whose son was murdered by an especially evil local crime lord. Each PC has also been wronged by that crime lord in whatever manner the player chooses; selecting why your character wants to see him dead is an important part of character creation, and what you choose even gives some mechanical benefits in the Pathfinder system. So at the very outset, the party has a deeply personal mission in common to drive them forward and bind them together.

The crime lord is a bit of a McGuffin, but he serves his purpose: the common cause can force a lawful good paladin and a chaotic evil rogue to put aside their differences and work together for a common goal. By the time that goal is reached, everyone has learned to trust each other and fight together against the greater evil. Later, when end-of-the-world stuff starts to go down, all the players are a lot more invested than they probably would have been if they'd just met in a tavern and hired to kill some rats.

Now THAT is a hook. And having run all six adventures in Curse all the way through to the end for a party, I promise you it mattered for more than five minutes. Getting off on the right foot matters.

 

[Reynard]

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.

Worst hook in recent memory: Avernus. I actually like that module and ran it to good effect, but the built in hook is a skunk's corpse.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

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.

I think hooks can be of deeper meaning in an adventure. Maybe in most it doesn't mean much. But for example in Wild Beyond hte Witchlight (currently a player) the "stolen thing" that the villains had from each character plays through the game for at least the first 50-60% of it - and can drive a lot of the action/fiction

 

[Li Shenron]

I always wonder and am curious - what are people's criteria for whether an adventure is "good" or "bad"?

Very simple and yet complicated question... I must say that my perspective has likely changed over the course of 30 years of RPGing. Consider also that since 5e the only long-term campaign I've been running is a family game that is mostly seasonal (i.e. played a lot more during summer and winter vacations than during school periods) and therefore is more like a series of adventures, different from my ideal campaign (sandbox with a "web" of interconnected quests around one or more epic storylines).

There's definitely a difference between content and presentation values.

---

As for content, my main concerns are the story and the challenges.

I have always had troubles writing stories that truly surprise the players, offer enough intrigues and twists to keep them on their toes, without feeling artificial or using too many cliches. It is hard to tell, but if the story gives me somewhat feelings of surprise as I read it, then there's a chance it will do the same to my players. Even when not particularly surprising, a story can still be great thanks to other elements, such as evoking particular atmospheres, feelings and emotions. It is obviously subjective.

I am generally much better at designing challenges, but still an adventure has good value for me when it comes up with specific ideas that haven't come to my mind before: it doesn't matter to which pillar of the game it applies to, it could be a particular combat scenario with non-obvious elements, locations for explorations with unusual features that require special considerations, and so on... it could even be a mini-game or ad-hoc rule that makes the adventure different from others (e.g. Tomb of Annihilation's countdown - not saying this one is specifically good, I know many hated it and I haven't played the adventure myself, it's just an example of an adventure-specific rule that is meant to differentiate it from others). In terms of content I don't really care much for new monsters or magic items.

I like adventures to be fully designed, by the way. I hate the old "here's a blank room for you to fill with whatever you want" idea. Because if I want something different, it's just the same work to swap an existing room content with my own, but at least I can choose.

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As for presentation, this is nowadays more important to me than before, mainly because I don't really want to spend the same amount of time in preparations that I used to in the past. I want as much work done for me by the adventure designers. Summaries are greatly appreciated, and this may include any of the following:

• adventure synopsis: 1-2 pages maximum to summarize the whole thing for me
• chapter recaps and/or introductions: same idea on a smaller scale, when the adventure is meant to last longer
• players' short "read-aloud" sections for each location: very useful for me, as it takes off the pressure of remembering or having to check ahead during play
• quick tables for NPCs (not stats, just things such as motivations, purposes, attitudes, allegiances etc.)

The absolute dream published adventure for me would be one that I don't need to prepare for but that I could just read on the fly as we play. It's not gonna happen, but at least these kinds of summaries can help me prepare more quickly.

Even though I am a great fan of DIY stuff, I'd rather the adventure come with maps, possibly easy to photocopy so that I can show a blank version to the player while keeping my own DM's version with all the hidden stuff and notes marked by me on it. With regards to maps, also temporal maps of events (as in cause-effects charts) are also appreciated, but only if the result is handy to use.

If the adventure comes with unique stats, even though I said I don't particularly need new monsters and items but generally I can expect at least unique NPCs, then I prefer the layout to keep all stats at the end of the book, or even better in an easy-to-photocopy format (e.g. one column or page per NPC) so that I can make them into separate sheets instead of looking back and forth.

Art is only a bonus, even though I usually have high demands for arts in manuals and supplements, that's mainly for long-term inspiration, and also just because it encourages me to read those books more, and learn them better or find more ideas. But in adventures I absolutely do not require it, even a zero-art published adventure is ok for me at this point (not counting maps, those are tools and not just art).

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Final words.

Nowadays I am actually quite positive on the idea that almost every adventure can be a good adventure. When it's not, I rather think the reasons are more likely with the DM and the players as well, either not being in the right gaming spirit when they play it. Maybe someone at the table starts being bored or annoyed by something specific or even just 'bad rolls', blames the adventure and starts playing/running the game lousily, instead of participating in the collective effort to make it work. And when one starts to do that, they are likely to drag the others into the same negative mood.

You might have noticed I didn't mention balance. Nowadays I don't even care about it that much, when it is intended as the supposed level of challenges. I don't care because I think way too many gamers are fixated with the idea that the game should have the exact level of difficulty at all times, to make players believe they can fail and be punished (by death usually) but ultimately make sure they will win "unless they do something stupid" (trite expression that means nothing to me). I don't care if some parts of the adventure are too easy and others are too hard, for me this is just part of the variety of the game. I trust that my smart and good-spirited players can figure out how to solve challenges and beat encounters, or maybe sometimes not being able to (which is also part of the variety of the game); otherwise they can trust me as a DM to not let them pay too much when something turns out to be effectively a bit too hard or even impossible (as long as I don't throw them into a "Kobayashi Maru", even impossible challenges have a place in the game sometimes). On the long term, I want my players one day to look back at our games and think "that adventure was easy and relaxing, but that other one was a hard as hell, and that other one we just didn't make it, but we had fun nonetheless" rather than think "we had 50 years of gaming together, all perfectly balanced by the book". Incidentally, it's the same reason why I do NOT want all adventures to give the same focus to all pillars. Variety and diversity for me are much bigger values to me than asserting control and predictability.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

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.

To be sure I DO vary things up. A finale might be a summoned horror, construct, or trained beast rather than the erstwhile BBEG, for example. (Cult leader unexpectedly sacrifices himself to call forth eldritch horror is a classic). Or even a horde of tough minions attacking in front a of a weak but charismatic villain who can't actually fight. I just tend to telegraph the presence of a coming finale and place them in semi-predictable locations rather than having the toughest fight occur in an unexpected barracks or off room. It's easier and IMO more effective to dramatize that way amongst other things.

Fighting through the dungeon only to realize that the throne room is empty because the BBEG was actually some unknown you killed without realizing it four rooms back would be a bit of a letdown for me, personally. YMMV

 

[amethal]

Packaged adventures (modules, APs, etc.) are a lot like that. The fun in D&D (and this is a D&D thread) is that players are unpredictable. An adventure that is absolutely great for one set of players can be mediocre or so-so for another set of players. To give you a good example, I have run Pharaoh (I3) more times than I can count. For various reasons, it is generally a good adventure, despite the railroad-y beginning. And yet, there have been groups that it just didn't work for, no matter how well I tried to adjust to their shenanigans. It happens. Sometimes it's because the players just managed to breeze through it due to a combination of luck and inspired choices, other times it's because they pretty much wandered off and did their own thing. Eh....

But I am hard-pressed to think of any adventure, no matter how good, that I've run multiple times that always produced a similar playthrough.

Yeah, I've made the most innocuous-looking generalisations about how D&D games go, only to be shot down by somebody who insisted they never played that way.

I once criticised a wilderness encounter with 40 Wights in a published (3rd edition) D&D adventure for 10th level characters, on the basis that the characters will be mounted (or even flying), and will either avoid it completely or feel compelled to kill all the wights in a tedious grind of fireballs / arrows / tactical withdrawals, whilst the monsters can't actually get close enough to pose any threat at all.

Only to be informed by somebody that he'd never bought a horse in umpteen years of playing D&D, and the encounter was perfectly fine.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Why wights not have mounts? And longbows?

 

[amethal]

Why wights not have mounts? And longbows?

They were straight out of the Monster Manual.

 

[Voadam]

Let me mention a specific hook that I love.

In the Pathfinder adventure path The Curse of the Crimson Throne, the party is brought together by a mysterious fortune-teller whose son was murdered by an especially evil local crime lord. Each PC has also been wronged by that crime lord in whatever manner the player chooses; selecting why your character wants to see him dead is an important part of character creation, and what you choose even gives some mechanical benefits in the Pathfinder system. So at the very outset, the party has a deeply personal mission in common to drive them forward and bind them together.

The crime lord is a bit of a McGuffin, but he serves his purpose: the common cause can force a lawful good paladin and a chaotic evil rogue to put aside their differences and work together for a common goal. By the time that goal is reached, everyone has learned to trust each other and fight together against the greater evil. Later, when end-of-the-world stuff starts to go down, all the players are a lot more invested than they probably would have been if they'd just met in a tavern and hired to kill some rats.

Now THAT is a hook. And having run all six adventures in Curse all the way through to the end for a party, I promise you it mattered for more than five minutes. Getting off on the right foot matters.

My favorite was from the Carrion Crown AP

I pitched the campaign to the group as "I regret to inform you of the death of Dr. Lorimorr Jones, noted Professor of Archaeology at Lepidstadt University. Per the terms of his will you are requested as a pallbearer and are named as a beneficiary in his will. The funeral will be held in the town of Ravengro, just North of the old not-at-all haunted prison that burned down fifty years ago. You are invited to stay at the Jones estate - Jessica Jones"

I asked the group to make characters with a connection to Jones in mind and used those backgrounds they came up with to create a web of connections to places and NPCs in the first two modules.

The group dove into it with a former LE Chelaxian warlord now longtime CG butler manservant of Dr. Jones, the Klingon style orc secretary who made sure nobody interrupted the professor's day without an appointment, his on and off again adventurer archaelogist girlfriend, his young mentee professor of archaeology with a crackpot theory about ancient fantasy Egyptian aliens and a love interest for his daughter, his bayou gravedigger assistant, and a rival professional archaeologist.