Is The Temple of Elemental Evil a well-designed adventure module?

[DragonLancer]

For its time yes. Under 3.X it needs some serious tweaking, but it still holds.

Yes.

 

[Arnwyn]

No. Village of Hommlet wastes too much space on describing mundane inhabitants of little interest (as opposed to Keep on the Borderlands, whose inhabitants are all interesting and more-or-less relevant to actual play), whereas the Temple itself suffers from too many rooms with "six gnolls, 120 sp and three moldy spears" ("cabinet contents" game design) - there are some well designed and imaginative encounters in there, but not enough to save it. The lowest level doesn't work well either, and the Iuz-St. Cuthbert showdown is an epitome of bad design (I will have to recheck this - I may be misremembering something). This leaves us the moathouse, basically (Nulb is such a non-entity that it doesn't merit discussion). The moathouse starts out really good (the surface level is a very well designed tactical scenario) but the dungeons, again, are deeply flawed. Except the giant crayfish, of course.

No, for all the above reasons.

As well, the complete lack of detail in the elemental nodes are enough for me to consign this a "no" vote.

(Not saying that this adventure isn't hella fun, though. But it's not "well-designed" in my eyes.)

 

[ThirdWizard]

Interesting. I was thinking that Hommlet's description was the best designed part.

But, I've never played it, and I've never run it, so I'll withhold voting or oppinionating much further.

 

[Endur]

I voted yes. A couple of comments why ...

1) T1, Hommlet, is one of the first villages published. Perhaps the first village published. They went for a different approach than B2 the Keep on the Borderlans (was Keep written first? Hommlet first?).

2) The combined T1-T4 was released many years later. (3 years? 5 years?) The later release resulted in somewhat haphazard editing of T2-T4.

The elemental nodes are basically treated as wilderness areas, although the map sizes are a bit too small for being a wilderness area.

 

[Jolly Giant]

Too much dungeon crawling and too much hack'n'slash for my taste. :\

 

[Vigilance]

No, for all the above reasons.

As well, the complete lack of detail in the elemental nodes are enough for me to consign this a "no" vote.

(Not saying that this adventure isn't hella fun, though. But it's not "well-designed" in my eyes.)

Wow.

So fun isnt enough for an adventure to be well designed? And here I thought adventure modules for role playing games were meant to be forms of entertainment, not deep, brooding philosophical ponderings in "the forge" of ideas.

Chuck

 

[SWBaxter]

2) The combined T1-T4 was released many years later. (3 years? 5 years?) The later release resulted in somewhat haphazard editing of T2-T4.

Six years later (1985 for the big book, T1 was 1979). Note that T2-T4 didn't exist as separate published entities, so any haphazardness is almost certainly a function of the writing rather than the editing.

At the time, my reaction to T1-4 was "it took six years to get me THIS pile of... stuff?!" I'd run T1 multiple times and written my own sequels by that point, so maybe the actual Temple was just disappointing because I felt it was no better than what I'd already done. It just struck me as a mishmash of a dungeon crawl, rather than a confrontation with a secret cult looking to take over the region.

Much later, when I played the ToEE computer game (2003), I found the dungeon itself was decent enough, taken in isolation it's not that badly designed. Still not that fond of the whole package, though.

Judging whether something is well-designed is kind of hard, because you first have to sit down and work out what the design criteria are then see if the product meets those criteria. T1-4 strikes me as such a Frankenstein product that it's hard for me to list what the design goals were. I think T1 is decently designed as a starting village with hidden evil nearby, and I'll grudgingly grant that the ToEE itself is an OK dungeon crawl, but the parts don't really mesh to create a coherent whole, IMHO.

 

[tylerthehobo]

One of the best ever, in that it trained a DM how to use the info it provided - here's a town, make it live. Sure, some of the qualms about copyediting above may be true, but the fact of the matter is that it is the language and layout that makes it what it is - a dense, hook-filled campaign. Brilliant stuff. E.G.G. is the rockstar of us all.

 

[Infiniti2000]

So fun isnt enough for an adventure to be well designed?

Maybe, maybe not, but 'fun' is strictly NOT part of the OP's question. If you answer the OP's question, fun is not even a factor.

In that regards, the ToEE deserves a firm No.

It sucks for design. When I ran RttToEE, I tried many many times to reference parts of the ToEE that I had forgotten and it was a major pita.

 

[Vigilance]

Maybe, maybe not, but 'fun' is strictly NOT part of the OP's question. If you answer the OP's question, fun is not even a factor.

In that regards, the ToEE deserves a firm No.

It sucks for design. When I ran RttToEE, I tried many many times to reference parts of the ToEE that I had forgotten and it was a major pita.

I disagree. I think fun modules are well-designed.

I think since modules are forms of entertainment, fun is the ONLY design criteria. If an adventure is monty haul, hack n slash, munchkiny and railroady and any other "bad design" catchphrase you want to throw at it but entertains, it is well designed.

Chuck