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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9120815" data-attributes="member: 18">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.</blockquote>

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