No adventure appeals to everyone. I personally love adventures with little/no plot, because it allows me to make up my own, tailored to the party that's going to run in it. They don't make for good reading, however. Adventures with detailed plots make for great reading, but unless the play group likes (or at least tolerates) being being railroaded, it's not going to play out nearly as well.
D&D General How do you know an adventure is "good" just from reading it?
Ruin Explorer
Legend
All of this is spot-on. I particularly want to hear from people who didn't like an adventure why they didn't, because that's usually the most revealing stuff. Sometimes it's thematic peccadillos but those are easy enough to ignore. Usually it's real flaws that "reviews" completely ignore (or even seem to intentionally obfuscate!).
None of this really matters that much.
That's almost a list of how DMs trick themselves into running very badly-written adventures. Almost every non-specialist adventure can be adapted easily enough. Set pieces rarely matter in the long-run. Hooks almost never do, and most adventures written to have "good stories" for the DM are absolutely atrocious adventures because they're written to be read not run.
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Ruin Explorer
Legend
You can totally can tell with experience, and what accidentally pointing to there is one of the classic problems, but not the one you think.
A lot of adventures, particularly WotC adventures, are not really written to be run. They're written to be read.
This has been an on/off problem with WotC adventures since 3E. So they "read great". But that's a RED FLAG. Obviously an incomprehensible adventure is also a RED FLAG, but one which reads super-smooth when reading it through, not when reading a synopsis? It's probably not going to run that all that well. There are some WotC ones where they barely have synopses, or the synopses miss out vital plot points - that's a very bad sign that adventure is designed to be read not run.
And likewise, many adventures which aren't a lot of fun to read, but are logical and well-explained and where everything makes sense, even if they told you the "big twist" immediately and you didn't have any fun reading the adventure are extremely well-designed and work well in practice.
So it's not that you can't know. You can know. You just have to pay attention to what you're reading, and look at it critically - is this designed to be run, or just to be read?
Arcane Library is probably the best/easiest example of "designed to be run, not to be read" stuff. Almost all her adventures run superbly. Almost none of them are exciting to read - though imagining how they might play out for your group can be exciting.
EDIT - Let me add couple of specific things for me:
1) Green flag if the adventure doesn't REQUIRE me to take a ton of notes to even run it. It's fine if I want to expand an adventure, or to note how I'm going to run some section - totally cool. But a lot of badly-written adventures, particularly a lot of WotC ones, are written in such a way that, in order to run them, you basically have to read them through once taking notes the whole way, then maybe read them again with the notes, and it's like - I shouldn't have to do that. There's a problem if I have to do that.
2) Super RED FLAG if the adventure-writer doesn't understand the game's own mechanics. Rare but not unheard-of with WotC adventures, sadly common in 3PP adventures and a lot of adventures written for non-D&D stuff. Weirdly was less common in the 1990s, in my experience. I get very suspicious about the design of the entire adventure if I find a couple of places where the writer just doesn't understand basic rules or wants to fudge them in really weird PC-harming ways or to push an encounter to play out in a specific way. Double-super-red-flag if there was already a way to do that in the normal rules.
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Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
How does a hook differ from the story?
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Hooks are the specific things that get PCs involved. They matter for like 5 minutes in most adventures.
M_Natas
Hero
My first criteria is: How easy does it look to run?I always wonder and am curious - what are people's criteria for whether an adventure is "good" or "bad"?
For me, my assessment might be different depending on whether I have an idealized or actual play-group I'm considering running an adventure for. For an actual group - it'll depend on the group of course. For the "ideal" play-group, I guess I'm looking for a good set of combat, role-play, puzzle/trap encounters. Maybe faction play.
An example. I have read White Plume Mountain a couple of times, and played in it once (until my wizard blew a fireball in a 15x15 room (AD&D) that we were standing in at the time. TPK, and also the end of that campaign as the DM moved away soon after.
) I read it and thought it was a fun funhouse dungeon. But I read it with the "ideal" group in mind. When I ran it for a specific group - for that group there were too many traps and puzzles, and not enough role play - and what role-play there was didn't actually make sense (like... why are these people here in this dungeon?!?)
So to my point, White Plume might be a fun dungeon to read; but in play with a real group - it didn't go very well. I didn't catch that the NPCs really had no reasons to be in the dungeon; which led to strange NPC interactions.
What are your criteria for quality when you first read through an adventure?
(no need to defend White Plume, it's still one of my favorites as a read. If I was to run it again, depending on the group it might require so much modification it wouldn't be worth it probably)
Like, I buy published adventures to save myself time and and energy y not having yo homebrew stuff ... and than I start reading most adventures and am Like: running this would feel like homework. Even reading this feels like homework.
This is my first consideration.
Than I try to imagine if the adventure would be fun to play as a DM and for the players.
Like ... Stormwreck Isle worked for me and Light of Xyarxis. I can imagine my self running these two adventures. But so far everything else just feels like to much work in comparions to running a homebrew campaign for me
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
By story I mean that there is clear, logical connection between plot elements with the story flowing from intial hook to the big challenge (Dungeon Worlds fronts are great for this).
Hooks are the things that allow PCs to link to and particiapte in the story
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aco175
Legend
I like things that are easy to modify where needed. I tend to homebrew elements and like modules that do not need a lot of change to fit in my campaign. Last campaign started with forge of fury and ended with against the giants. I placed them in the Phandalin region and added some minor quests to get the PCs to 3rd level to start FoF. I made some maps and such to get the PCs to the new location and it ran fine. The giants part was not as good. I think mostly the 5e rewrite in the Yawning Portal book did not happen and the whole adventure was trying to put 1e design in the 5e world.
I've often heard the Hook brings you back. I ain't tellin' you no lie.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
On that you can rely.
