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

[Micah Sweet]

I don't ever run adventures straight. The only factors that influence purchase for me are:

1. Does it have any interesting new mechanics (monsters, items, new subsystems)?

2. Is there any aspect of the adventure I can add to my own campaign (background detail, maps, NPCs, even the general concept)?

Story, organization, art, etc., are all far less important to me than those two questions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I write this stuff and I think it is usually too long. Paizo is particularly bad about it, because they know a large portion of their AP buys never run the adventures, they just read them. And that is fine. People like to read adventures. But these are also tools for use at the table and should be designed as such.

Sometimes you can't do both to your satisfaction. You'd clearly rather fall on the game side, but that is also personal opinion. Paizo wouldn't write for readers if it wasn't making them money, so there's clearly a market for it. A lot of the old 2e modules, while shorter, worked the same way.

 

[payn]

On the too much writin to read notion, I actually think many of these adventures are expansive enough to need it. That a lot of the proof is in the pudding on making these adventures great. I want the author to show as much love for it as I plan to put into it myself. I dont need to pay people to make maps and random tables, I can do that myself.

 

[Lanefan]

Dubious is subjective. I tend to see these kinds of statements as arguments for less material.

Not less material, just the use of fewer words to present said material.

Room 11:
20x20'. Doors exit to the south and east. 3 Goblins ( --- inline stats here, half a line of text --- ) are playing cards at a table unless alert to the PCs' presence. The table, five small chairs, a set of tattered playing cards, and 23 c.p. being used as stakes are the room's entire contents. The Goblins carry nothing of value.

Some modules would take half a page to present that material.

 

[billd91]

I'll add: Sometimes the adventure IS crap, but you fluke out and run it just right and your players do all the right things to make it awesome. Unfortunately, sometimes the adventure is quite good but you flub giving the right information at the right time to the right players and they don't engage with it (or sometimes you do fine but they don't engage with it through some fault of their own).

This is definitely a challenge of assuming that the proof must be in the pudding (or playing, as it were). The playing of a D&D adventure is a complex mélange of player factors and DM factors that it's a hard experience to replicate from one group to another. So while it may be a factor in how I would review a module, it's one of several.

But one thing I do think I need to consider isn't just the use of the rules, interesting hooks, interesting situation/story being presented, etc - I know I should always consider how much the adventure would take to prepare for me to actually run it. So I read the adventure with part of my mind thinking about "Oh, OK. Now how would I bring that to the table? Hmm, I'd want to rework that bit there. Add some notes here. Oh, I like that as-is..." And I use that to inform whether I'd recommend the adventure or not.

 

[TwoSix]

I just say "Published adventure? Must be bad."

It's a very simple criterion to apply.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

This is definitely a challenge of assuming that the proof must be in the pudding (or playing, as it were). The playing of a D&D adventure is a complex mélange of player factors and DM factors that it's a hard experience to replicate from one group to another. So while it may be a factor in how I would review a module, it's one of several.

But one thing I do think I need to consider isn't just the use of the rules, interesting hooks, interesting situation/story being presented, etc - I know I should always consider how much the adventure would take to prepare for me to actually run it. So I read the adventure with part of my mind thinking about "Oh, OK. Now how would I bring that to the table? Hmm, I'd want to rework that bit there. Add some notes here. Oh, I like that as-is..." And I use that to inform whether I'd recommend the adventure or not.

Absolutely.

One of the weakest parts of most published adventures is that they don't do enough (IMO) to help the DM to understand what TODAY'S SESSION might actually look like. It's certainly a big flaw in WotC's 5e Adventures. I would put forth that they are, in general, better stories than many adventures that have come before. Unfortunately, there is often little (to no) guidance on what to do at the table.

I have no problem with that myself, with 35 years of DMing. But I've been trying to teach my son to DM, and the above is BY FAR the thing that I have to spend the most time with him on. The adventures don't do that work.

IME, most 4e adventures were fairly poorly written (and terribly edited from what I recall) but the weren't all that hard to run. (Other than some boring fights that were slogs if you didn't alter the design of them, and skill challenges that were terrible if you ran them RAW). Now that I'm thinking about it, it was a completely different bag of problems.

My kingdom for a best-fit line between the two.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I just say "Published adventure? Must be bad."

It's a very simple criterion to apply.

That was my rule-of-thumb for my first 25 years running D&D! Looking back now, a lot of them weren't as bad as I thought. For example, when I first ran 3e, I tried running Sunlit Citadel (or maybe it was Forge of Fury) and I said, "This is why I don't run published adventures... these are terrible!". Both are widely considered good adventures. I've run them since, and they're not bad at all. I've also run a bunch of the classics, like Against the Giants, Hidden Shrine, and a few others, and they're okay, once you know how to do the trick of running published adventures.

I wouldn't say that it's less work to run published adventures than it is to make your own, though!

 

[payn]

I wouldn't say that it's less work to run published adventures than it is to make your own, though!

I think the error a lot of folks make is expecting that there is little to no work required to run a published adventure.

 

[Parmandur]

I think the error a lot of folks make is expecting that there is little to no work required to run a published adventure.

Yeah, a lot of Adventure reviews feel like reviews of a cookbook complaining that the pages didn't taste good or have a consistent texture when chewed.

A cookbook can be a great idea generator and save time, but cooking still is a process that takes work.