If YOU Can't Write an Adventure, Why Should I?

[Desdichado]

Should other companies EXPECT me to do this work?

"Should" notwithstanding, apparently most of them actually do.

To understand my point, you'd have to agree with me that it takes more expertise to write an adventure than it does a campaign supplement. If we can agree on that, then I submit that companies that don't publish adventures are doing so for a reason, and one of them is lack of expertise.

And I don't and won't. I don't think they're at all correllated.

I'm sure one of them is economics too, but I think that's fallacious in the big scheme of things.

Huh? How so?

Since we can bounce around all day by saying "my opinion" -- by all means please point out popular game lines that have no adventure support for them.

GURPS. Exalted. Vampire. Star Wars.

All of them (in fact, almost every game line except for D&D and CoC) have very little to no adventure support. CoC is unusual in having entire campaigns as its most prominent source material, and D&D is unusual in having a high degree of modules/adventures published for it.

You seem to be trying to say that publishing adventures is the rule rather than the exception, but in my experience, the exact opposite is true.

 

[talien]

Huh? How so?

This is the old "talking about a game vs. playing it" argument. So for example, there are a lot of people talking about how popular a game is, but I often find they can't find other folks to play with, or a GM to host. You can, in theory, play with as few as one player but as many as will fit in the room with the GM. You cannot play without a GM.

So while GMs are in the minority, they are a very important lynchpin of a gaming group. More importantly, they are often a distinct personality type, usually but not always the organizer of the gaming event. They are hub people, the people that virtual marketers drool over because they influence others. In the role-playing instance, this role is codified -- they literally determine life and death in a game.

Sourcebooks can be used by anybody. If I play a character from Coruscant, I probably want the Coruscant book. If my GM is hosting a game in Coruscant, he probably wants the book too. So we both need it.

As a player, I don't need an adventure set in Coruscant, only the GM does. Simple math, right? If we assume four players per 1 GM, which would a company rather sell, five copies of a setting book or one copy of an adventure per five people?

BUT.

Putting an adventure in Coruscant may well trigger the interest in Coruscant. If that adventure spawns other adventures on that planet, my GM may then feel inclined to buy the sourcebook -- the other players may feel the same. If there are maps of ships from Coruscant in other supplements, I may want to buy those too. Music from Coruscant? Video from Coruscant? Miniatures from Coruscant? I know have an excuse to buy all that stuff.

In the short term, sure, one adventure only sells to one person. In reality, it selling an EXPERIENCE, and that experience is an intricate web of products that can make more for the company in the long-term.

You can see this happening with D&D minis, wherein DMs become mad completists, determined to get the exact quantities of monsters listed in a module. I know I did this -- I went out and bought monsters for everything the PCs might encounter, and the adventure acted as a shopping list of sorts. Adventure in a haunted house? I buy the haunted house tiles from Paizo. Attacked by two otyughs? I scour the D&D mini singles to buy it. I shudder to look at what it REALLY cost me when I consider how much I bought to complement the adventure, but it could easily be over a hundred bucks.

Adventures tie all the other gaming media together.

GURPS. Exalted. Vampire. Star Wars.

All of them (in fact, almost every game line except for D&D and CoC) have very little to no adventure support.

GURPS: Pyramid does an excellent job of supporting GURPS with scenarios. I've used quite a few of them for other games.

Star Wars had great heaping piles of adventures when it was first produced for the d6 system. I'm not familiar enough with the current d20 system iteration to know how much support it has received. I believe there was a Star Wars magazine for RPG support as well, but I think that's since been discontinued.

I'm not familiar enough with the Exalted line, but I think you're right, a popular game line without support in that case. Vampire is questionable, because there are adventures published for it, but they tend to be published as narrative arcs rather than specific adventures. There's also the generic Storyteller system which mucks with that a bit, because I think there are scenarios that could be used for Vampire but aren't specifically for Vampire games.

CoC is unusual in having entire campaigns as its most prominent source material, and D&D is unusual in having a high degree of modules/adventures published for it.

You seem to be trying to say that publishing adventures is the rule rather than the exception, but in my experience, the exact opposite is true.

I dunno, I think two highly popular game lines, with one of them being the biggest RPG line, are hardly aberrations.

 

[roguerouge]

I think it very much depends on what TYPE of adventure we're talking about here: the adventure path, the module, or the encounter.

The encounter (such as the smallest of the Dungeon magazine adventures) is the ultimate in plug-and-play and the easiest to alter to the ongoing campaign's needs. The closer this genre comes to the classical unities of time and place, the better it fits into more worlds. Isolation of locale and detailing a handful of NPCs very well are the virtues of this genre.

The adventure path requires little in the way of re-jiggering, as the entire appeal of the adventure path is that it IS the campaign. What little tweaking that occurs is to taste than to fit into a pre-existing narrative. Comprehensiveness and scope (detailed settings and a large number of sketched NPCs) are virtues in this form.

The mid-sized module, then, is the problem child. It tells a bigger story than the encounter and often includes a starter town or sizable hook. So, it's big enough to require alteration to fit into a campaign, yet not large enough to BE the campaign.

So, you have to write the module in a special way.

One approach is to have a loose string of modules in a well-detailed setting (such as Hollow's Last Hope, The Crown of the Kobold King, and Carnival of Tears). This marries the virtues of 1 thoroughly explored setting of the encounter genre with the expanded scope of the adventure path: you know a town or an area well, rather than a world or a house.

Another approach is the odd-ball setting: the desert adventure, the arctic north adventure, the lost island exploration. These can be more easily plugged into more campaigns as the DM simply has to plug them into areas of the map that the PCs haven't yet explored.

There's other approaches, but I have work on my plate.

 

[tzor]

I'm really, really suspicious of game companies who produce volumes of material about their setting but very few adventures/scenarios for it.

Writing adventures is different from writing rules and rule supplements. Whether or not the economics supports the idea, writing adventures requires a serial mind set. The mind set was more popular in the early editions of the game when the rules were more or less what were printed in the hard copy edition and there was no major overriding scenario to drive supplements with. Because it is a serial mind set it needs to be designed so that one can easily read and run with it. It needs to be specific but flexible. In fact writing a good adventure that anyone can use isn’t as easy as you might think and is actually harder than writing a good rule set. That is because if a rule is good it will be good for everyone, but if an adventure is good for you it might not be good for someone else.

You almost need three teams at work in the idea game system. The first designs the rules and runs test adventures to unit test the rules. (You also need other test environments but this is not the point of my argument.) The second describes those rules to be intuitively obvious to the casual gamer and game master. The third describes and creates adventures from these rules and from the basic test adventures. (I mentioned the other test environments? You also need the assembly test where the adventures written by team 3 and the rules written by team 2 are played by a separate group of testers and reviewed by quality assurance.) This is, frankly, way too expensive for the casual gaming company.

The simple result is that if you have any system where there are good adventures, the rules will probably be horrid. (Is my love of the old Lankhmar adventures showing?)

 

[Desdichado]

talien; now I see what you're saying; the adventure sells poorly but is the gateway into further purchases.

Hmm...

That sounds reasonable enough, but is it true, or is it just an armchair strategy? I guess that's the real nub here; is there any data to support the idea that a consumer with an adventure is likely to buy (and stimulated buys among the rest of this group) further product as a direct result of that adventure? I doubt any such data exists. It may be right or it may not be, but we can't speak intelligently about it either way without a fair amount of market research to back it up. All we can say is that adventures themselves don't sell well; we've got plenty of indicators that that is true.

As for the sources you quote; Pyramid may indeed support GURPS via adventures, but can you just walk into a store and buy Pyramid? I can't recall ever seeing it, and in the days when I hung out with GURPS players, I didn't know anyone who did either. They bought sourcebooks, which were basically setting books, and that was that. Star Wars hasn't been supported by adventures in years, and I wouldn't call any of the World of Darkness campaign materials that I read "adventures" even in the loosest sense. I'm not privvy to sales details, but I've never heard anything to suggest that Cthulhu was a real high power seller, or that it sold well even relative to GURPS, World of Darkness, etc. And D&D's success compared to the competition still defies explanation; all kinds of ideas have been thrown out, but none really convincingly. I'm still going with the "network externalities" as the single biggest contribution, combined with the inertia of more casual players.

I think looking at the success of D&D vs. the more modest success of CoC and saying that the presence of adventures is the cause of that success is a bit of the tail wagging the dog.

:shrug: In any case; I continue to buy settings that don't have adventures; in fact, I greatly prefer setting that comes without adventures, because I find adventure design relatively easy and not time intensive. To me, adventures are not a good investiture of resources for a company trying to sell a setting. Most of my favorite settings do not have adventures, or if they do, I ignore them (Iron Kingdoms and Freeport are different; I bought the Witchfire Trilogy and the Freeport Trilogy at a time when those were the only products available for the setting; if the settings had come first, I would have ignored the adventures.) So clearly I disagree with the premise of your thread, and at the end of the day, that's really all I'm saying.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Final Fantasy Zero is definately taking an "adventures first!" priority.

The idea is that you download and play the adventure, and then the things that make an appearance in the adventure, you recombine for your own use at home, however you want.

Or you just download the adventure AS the sourcebook.

It's actually striking me as easier to write, and it'll help alleviate INFOSPLAT, while keeping people hooked on what is groovy about the game.

 

[talien]

Mike Pondsmith has a whole presentation on this very topic, although it's more about MMORPGs than RPGs. The issues are the same though: developers find creating world content more creatively fulfilling than adventures/quests, which is often viewed as the "grunt work." This actually gets even harder to motivate creators when the adventures are higher power levels, which require even more balancing on the part of the author.

 

[Qualidar]

Well I, for one, prefer to have adventures. I just picked up the Soloman Kane RPG, and I wouldn't have had it not had the promisse of the adventure campaign bundled in. I'm just too busy to do this stuff on my own. I really dug Northern Crown, but the fact that I had to write my own stuff for it really removes it as a a viable game for anything other than a 1-shot.

I don't need to have them supported for the rest of eternity: give me 5 or 6 adventures in a game system and I'm happy. I would gladly jump from Northern Crown to Solomon Kane to Damnation Decade to Dawning Star if they had a short campaign setup each, and after that they can sell me their next game with the new campaign.

 

[Arnwyn]

So I understand the time constraint. What I don't understand is why that leads to a preference for published adventures; to me, it takes more time and effort to run a published adventure well than it does to crib a few maps and statblocks and write up my own material to connect them.

For your understanding:

It takes far less time for me to read and adapt a published adventure than it does for me to create one on my own. By orders of magnitude. (Which is how the time constraint leads to a preference for published adventures.)

That sounds reasonable enough, but is it true, or is it just an armchair strategy? I guess that's the real nub here; is there any data to support the idea that a consumer with an adventure is likely to buy (and stimulated buys among the rest of this group) further product as a direct result of that adventure? I doubt any such data exists. It may be right or it may not be, but we can't speak intelligently about it either way without a fair amount of market research to back it up. All we can say is that adventures themselves don't sell well; we've got plenty of indicators that that is true.

Paizo is the only example I can think of where the above strategy has been proven to work.

 

[Desdichado]

For your understanding:

It takes far less time for me to read and adapt a published adventure than it does for me to create one on my own. By orders of magnitude. (Which is how the time constraint leads to a preference for published adventures.)

I understand that, what I don't understand is why. The exact opposite is true for me. By orders of magnitude. It's actually even worse for using a published setting, but I still like published settings to rifle through for ideas I can steal for my homebrews.