D&D 5E How Wotc can improve the adventure books.

[Chaosmancer]

c) There need to be meaningful consequences for failure, and failure should be something other than a TPK. In a storybook adventure, might mean you don't get some dope & epic magic armor, IDK. I know what you're thinking, "I can handle all kinds of stuff!" But newbie DMs can't, and storybook campaigns should give some guidance. For example, "If the party somehow loses the dragon egg, Lord Chuckwagon will be very cross with them and not send any Veterans with them to help face evil, mutated flumpf terrorizing the village." Most adventures I've seen don't really picture failure in terms other than You Have Died, Adventure Stops Here.

There are a few ideas here that I'm agreeing with, but this one takes the cake as being one of the most important things I've seen.

I've never run an adventure module myself, but I've played in a few games that did, and the "crap, I don't know what to do now" problem is huge. Part of that can't be avoided. Players are going to go left, and there is nothing you can do about that. But, including enough npc motivation and basic pathing (if you fail to do X, Y is the likely result) would be a huge boon.

The more I think about it, a flowchart of the adventure actually does sound like a monumentally useful tool. In addition to helping see failure points (oh, our entire plot revolves around the players successfully finding clue X) it a tool that can help prevent SNAFUs by the DM. I remember hearing a horror story once of a DM allowing some random NPC to get killed by the players, only to find out a few months later that that NPC was vital to the plot of the second half of the Module.

Just getting an idea of "they should do this, then that, then one of these two thing which leads to this fight" can really help a DM conceptualize the adventure in a way that can really help.

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Use encounters that mix monster types. 95% of the encounters in recent books seem exclusively focused on what's narratively appropriate, not on what makes an interesting encounter. I don't want to fight 4 duergar for the tenth time this dungeon - let me fight creatures individually at first to learn how they work, then start mixing and matching foes so I have to adapt to their new way of fighting, and make my own.

Nearly every fight in modern adventures seems to fall into one of two camps - a single large monster, or 3-10 of the same monster. I recently took a look at an old 4th Edition adventure, and in that nearly every encounter had at least 3 different minion roles (lurkers, skirmishers, artillery, brutes, etc.), making each fight notably different to the one before. 5e may have committed to boring monster design, but it can still make the encounters interesting with just a little more effort.

I never noticed that before as a player, but as soon as you said it... yeah, that is something that happens all the time in modules. Fighting "large group of X" for the third time is a drag, you need to have a unique element or configuration to each fight, to keep the tactical interest I think.

 

[robus]

The more I think about it, a flowchart of the adventure actually does sound like a monumentally useful tool. In addition to helping see failure points (oh, our entire plot revolves around the players successfully finding clue X) it a tool that can help prevent SNAFUs by the DM.

I want to think that WotC does this internally, but I fear they don’t. Seems pretty bloody obvious.

 

[pogre]

I love collections of smaller adventures. For my WFRP campaign I'm using Rough Nights & Hard Days and Ubersreik Adventures. They have a way you can connect the adventures in a campaign if you choose, but they really are collections of self-contained adventures. Combining these with a few adventure seeds from the starter box has made for a very enjoyable, organic campaign experience.

Tales from the Yawning Portal was great, but I would like to see a collection of original adventures in this style. I know you can strip chapters out of a lot of the adventure books, and I have, but I have to put in some work to do this. Even a book of lairs would be a welcome addition for me.

 

[R_J_K75]

I remember hearing a horror story once of a DM allowing some random NPC to get killed by the players, only to find out a few months later that that NPC was vital to the plot of the second half of the Module.

Im pretty sure the first recommendation in every published module Ive ever read was...if youre the DM you should read the ENTIRE adventure before running it. Now I'll admit I'll usually read an adventure I plan on running first to familiarize myself with the entirety of it, then re-read it as we play through if I need to.

 

[Umbran]

2. The maps are fine, get better glasses.

Mod Note:

Hm. Not really funny. Certainly not constructive. So... kind of insultingly dismissive?

You honestly thought this was a good response? Go and think again, and treat folks better next time.

(Says the moderator who has had choice words about font size choices, especially in indices....)

 

[MichaelSomething]

Maybe WOTC should study some adventures like The Scarlet Citadel or War of the Burning Sky? I don't hear people complaining about those!

 

[fearsomepirate]

There are a few ideas here that I'm agreeing with, but this one takes the cake as being one of the most important things I've seen.

I've never run an adventure module myself, but I've played in a few games that did, and the "crap, I don't know what to do now" problem is huge. Part of that can't be avoided. Players are going to go left, and there is nothing you can do about that. But, including enough npc motivation and basic pathing (if you fail to do X, Y is the likely result) would be a huge boon.

Note that what I'm talking about is very different than "failing forward." Think about the last action or adventure movie you ever saw. What do you know, right away, at the beginning? The sneering villain is not going to win. But lots of other bad stuff might happen. The hero might die in the end. Maybe he loses the love of his life. Maybe his dog dies while saving him from an alien. Maybe his vintage necktie collection gets Hawaiian Punch spattered all over it, rendering it worthless.

Look, the reality is that if I spend $50 on this storybook campaign, you can be damn well sure that we're going to enjoy its content! In Out of the Abyss "and they were never heard from again, and the demon lords ate the world" is really not a satisfying outcome to checking out some troubles in the myconids' garden. So, starting on page 1, one thing you can be pretty sure of is that we will somehow get to the final battle, or reasonably close to it. Even in the event of a TPK while fighting the raging Stone Giant in Gracklstugh, c'mon, that's incredibly anticlimactic, we're gonna come back with a new party somehow.

Consequently, to have something other than You Died (Reload/New Game) suspense, meaningful failure conditions have to be built into the various chapters. Don't leave it to a newbie DM to figure out what to do if the party makes a brief raid into the Gray Ghosts' hideout, but chickens out and goes back to the inn to sleep for a couple days after their first big fight. Spell it out: the Gray Ghosts abandon their hideout, spirit away the dragon egg to where it can't ever be found again, and the party's failure results in them being unwelcome in Gracklstugh. Give a few points about what this failure means for the rest of the adventure.

 

[The Myopic Sniper]

This was not in the RPG field, but I had an editor tell me "Millennials (TM) hate indexes."

You know how a portion of D&D fandom freaked out about the "wasted pages" of names in the Appendix of Xanathar's Guide? Apparently, there is a slice of a lot of markets who think that indexes are some kind of conspiracy to bulk up the book at the expense of other content.

 

[Haffrung]

Maybe WOTC should study some adventures like The Scarlet Citadel or War of the Burning Sky? I don't hear people complaining about those!

Or even study earlier WotC adventures, like the Red Hand of Doom.

 

[R_J_K75]

This was not in the RPG field, but I had an editor tell me "Millennials (TM) hate indexes."

You know how a portion of D&D fandom freaked out about the "wasted pages" of names in the Appendix of Xanathar's Guide? Apparently, there is a slice of a lot of markets who think that indexes are some kind of conspiracy to bulk up the book at the expense of other content.

Id prefer a well constructed 10 pg index then the ones in the core books. I find it hard to believe that all Millenials hate indexes, Im not doubting an editor told you that just question the science behind it. Even in electronic with a search function they still come in handy.

I wasnt too keen on the pages of names in XGtE at first but I have used it on occassion.