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

[Retreater]

I have my preferences in tone and content, but I have some general, "quality of life" suggestions to improve adventures.

Better structure. Don't bury the plot in an intro and later don't remind us of the importance.
Separate Player's Guides (possibly in PDF) for the campaigns with pertinent character creation guides.
Pull out relevant details from the wall of text to make bullet points of key details.
It's okay to reprint small sections of rulebooks when they are exceptionally important to the adventure (using the example of "see poisons in the DMG.") Having it right there in the adventure would save a lot of work.
Also, I'm good with having "at a glance" abbreviated monster stat blocks reproduced in the adventure.

If these changes end up making 1-14 mega campaigns too big to produce, I am completely okay with a linked series of connected books that cover fewer levels ... like Curse of Strahd I (Levels 1-5) & Curse of Strahd II (Levels 6-10), etc.

 

[Chaosmancer]

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.

Right, and I agree. Build in reasons for their not to be a TPK in some of the fights. Maybe when fighting the Cult of Fire in Princes of the Apocalypse, they plan on sacrificing you in a ritual. Or trade you to the Earth Cult who wants miners (maybe even with a little inter-cult tension that they hope you are more trouble for them, so the fire cult can rise to more prominence). Tell us what happens when the players can't finish off an area, or a boss actually escapes. Do they come back? Where do they run to?

No one wants the adventure to just stop, so writing in ways for the DM to easily keep things moving is a huge boon. Because it helps prevent the scramble of a DM just making up a reason on the spot, which can feel bad for players and DMs who realize they are fudging the results to keep the players alive and working to win.

Well, if I get through to anybody, then I just want to bang the drum that first and foremost, your book is a tool. Yes, nice typesetting, engaging text, and attractive art are part of it. But there's a reason actual reference books have copious superscripts, footnotes, insets, and references in the text. Those things make the book easier to use. The experience of your adventure happens at the table, and bad organization and jumbled layout do far more to harm a game than an attractive, color picture of a drow warmaiden that only the DM sees does to help it.

I ran Temple of Elemental Evil in 5e for years, and it's kind of shocking how we've regressed in some ways. I've seen modern adventures that have no readable text for the dungeon rooms, the first paragraph containing far too much compromising information to just be read out loud, meaning I have to scan 3 paragraphs (most of it not useful) to tease an ad-hoc description out. If Gary Gygax did a better job organizing a text than you did, you need to get religion or something. It's really freaking boring read, and there aren't a lot of pictures. But, you know what, the map key is easy to read, and the room descriptions largely are fine. I threw crap together in the Air Node on the fly (party ended up there WAY too early) with the chickenscratch Gygax (or Mentzer?) left for me more easily than I do running some modern WotC adventures with beautiful plates and paragraphs of prose.

I don't know what to say to people who say they can't include references, insets, tables, and the like in order to "have more room for content." This to me is like saying you didn't put seats in the car in order to make more room for the stereo equipment.

Agree.

I cannot tell you how many times a DM (one in particular who is still learning) has stopped us to read the text, only to read to far or read a detail that we aren't supposed to know, and then have to back track, telling us we aren't supposed to know that.

And then they reread it in silence, because they don't want to risk reading information early, and we are left sitting there waiting while they read the book.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To poke at Mines some more, yeah, that first bit could be designed far better. It is one of the few bits of the Mine I got to play (con game) and that ambush and the subsequent walk through the woods is simply brutal for low level characters and new players. And nearly every online discussion of it I have ever seen has at some point mentioned that the ambush is far too deadly for level 1 characters.


I do wonder, thinking about an earlier post, if this is part of the problem of these adventures being written "by DnD players for DnD players". Like, as useful as having the stats for a goblin in the adventure would be, a DnD player knows not only does the table likely have access to the Monster Manual to look it up, but they also will feel slighted for purchasing something that includes information they already have.

It is an interesting thought

 

[the Jester]

2. Some of printed maps are hard to read. Either lighten up on the dark colors, or white grid lines if you go dark.

Seriously, this is a huge issue for me in some of the published adventures. If the maps in an adventure are hard to use, that makes it about 80% less likely that I will ever bother to run it, and that's 75% of the reason I bought the damn thing. While they were boring looking and less pretty, the maps in Undermountain were perfectly usable- and I'll take "looks boring but usable" over "pretty but useless" any day when it comes to maps.

Not that there's not a middle ground; there absolutely is- but WotC keeps dropping the ball on this one, and it drives me nuts.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

Um, what you're talking about here is exactly what fail forward means. I know a number of people confuse fail forward with some kind of success at a cost, but, while they can be used together they're different. Fail forward means that you can fail, but that failure doesn't end the game -- there's still a path forward. The original approach may be completely foreclosed, or you may now have a huge consequence to deal with in addition, or the situation may change so that the original goal is not longer possible and you have to deal with that fallout, but that's exactly what fail forward means.

 

[Haffrung]

It will never cease to baffle me how asking for adventures to be better prompts some people to tell you how worthless your opinion and desires are, and how you should feel bad for having them.

There’s an element of RPG hobbyists who, like hardcore videogamers who admonish other players to “get good,” feel that GMing games should be difficult. Who take pride in the toil it took them to achieve their hard-won expertise.

They learned how to memorize dozens of locations and NPCs, study and annotate adventures, prepare notes and cheat sheets, scan walls of text for key information, make much of the game up on the fly, and otherwise overcome the deficiencies of published adventures. So why should publishers cater to people who don’t want to do the work? What kind of accomplishment would GMing be if any gamer new to hobby could readily and easily run a published adventure?

 

[R_J_K75]

I cannot tell you how many times a DM (one in particular who is still learning) has stopped us to read the text, only to read to far or read a detail that we aren't supposed to know, and then have to back track, telling us we aren't supposed to know that.

And then they reread it in silence, because they don't want to risk reading information early, and we are left sitting there waiting while they read the book.

Im OK with a DM learning on the job, as long as they make an effort to prepare. If WotC can do a better job to help things along with an adventure designed for all levels of DMs all the better.

 

[Ovinomancer]

There’s an element of RPG hobbyists who, like hardcore videogamers who admonish other players to “get good,” feel that GMing games should be difficult. Who take pride in the toil it took them to achieve their hard-won expertise.

They learned how to memorize dozens of locations and NPCs, study and annotate adventures, scan walls of text for key information, make much of the game up on the fly, and otherwise overcome the deficiencies of published adventures. So why should publishers cater to people who don’t want to do the work? What kind of accomplishment would GMing be if any gamer new to hobby could readily and easily run a published adventure?

While put harshly, I think there's a kernel of truth here -- largely because I used to think that, and largely for the reasons you cite. I was indoctrinated into this mode of thinking by my first GMs, who, when I tried to run for them, brutally abused me because I hadn't thought of all the ways. It was enough that I stopped playing for fear of starting a new group as a GM (hard to start a new group as a player) and because I didn't like the very similar atmosphere at my LGS. So, large multi-year gap, and I retained a lot of that thinking when I did start back up. It really wasn't until the last five or so years that I've come to realize how much I was punishing myself trying to achieve a pointless expectation and started to look at how I run, why I run, and what's really needed. So, yeah, this resonates with me.

 

[Retreater]

There’s an element of RPG hobbyists who, like hardcore videogamers who admonish other players to “get good,” feel that GMing games should be difficult. Who take pride in the toil it took them to achieve their hard-won expertise.

They learned how to memorize dozens of locations and NPCs, study and annotate adventures, prepare notes and cheat sheets, scan walls of text for key information, make much of the game up on the fly, and otherwise overcome the deficiencies of published adventures. So why should publishers cater to people who don’t want to do the work? What kind of accomplishment would GMing be if any gamer new to hobby could readily and easily run a published adventure?

Because published adventures are meant to be an aid to new GMs or busy GMs?
If companies want to create world building guides, advice for crafting your own mysteries/hexcrawls/etc, and have "upper-tier GM" guidebooks, that's a fine, niche product. But that's not why most people get published adventures. We don't get them to design our own adventures, largely.

 

[Chaosmancer]

There’s an element of RPG hobbyists who, like hardcore videogamers who admonish other players to “get good,” feel that GMing games should be difficult. Who take pride in the toil it took them to achieve their hard-won expertise.

They learned how to memorize dozens of locations and NPCs, study and annotate adventures, prepare notes and cheat sheets, scan walls of text for key information, make much of the game up on the fly, and otherwise overcome the deficiencies of published adventures. So why should publishers cater to people who don’t want to do the work? What kind of accomplishment would GMing be if any gamer new to hobby could readily and easily run a published adventure?

Which... is just always an attitude that I don't get.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I heard somewhere that Paizo writes their modules to be read, not played, and that this has had deleterious effects on the hobby as a whole. Maybe that's true; I don't know. Here's an arbitrary example of what I'm talking about. From ToA:

3. Armory
The dwarves' enemies coveted the riches of Hrakhamar. To defend their trove, the dwarves stockpiled weapons and armor in this chamber. The firenewts haven't bothered most of it; they prefer their own weapons over heavier dwarven designs, and the dwarves' armor doesn't fit them.

This chamber includes six each of battleaxes, greataxes, mauls... If characters are led here by Sithi Vinecutter, she's willing to let the characters take one weapon apiece.

Zero lines of this text are for the players' ears. Here's how I'd rewrite it:

This simple room appears to be an armory. It is largely unadorned, save for geometric patterns engraved near the ceiling. Racks of stout, dwarven weapons line the walls, and there are some low benches near the center.

If the party passes a DC 13 group INT check, they will realize that these weapons are too uncomfortable and heavy for the firenewts. Any party member proficient in armorers' tools automatically knows this. If the party takes 10 minutes* to inspect the chamber they will find (list of weapons). If characters are led here by Sithi Vinecutter, she's willing to let the characters take one weapon apiece.

*10-minute "turns" need to come back to 5e. Keeps those wandering monsters showing up regularly.