D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[Parmandur]

so we would have a different number now if they had taken a different module in the playtest?

Not necessarily: theybhave a decade of solid playtesting goijg now, and the balance hasn't been shifted.

 

[Charlaquin]

You can still do epic whilst making a campaign by stringing modules together. You just need to have an arc plot simmering away in the background (see: Babylon 5).

You can, but if you package that as a giant hardcover adventure path, you set players up to end up leaving that arc plot incomplete. If you just sell those adventures as separate modules, DMs can pick and choose which ones to run when, and string them together with an arc plot of their own devising, or not, as suits their own groups’ needs and interests.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm afraid there is, Lanefan.

With everyone's investment gone, no one has any enthusiasm to continue playing. Especially when the experience up to that point hasn't exactly been great. That's the kicker with all this "it has to be REAL risk!" thing. When the risk actually lands? Many folk just lose the ability to stay engaged. Without that engagement, the game dies.

This is a pretty individual thing. Lots of players struggle to maintain enthusiasm for the game when their character dies, but many others don’t. Including character death as a possibility and including resurrection magic as a safety net is a pretty solid default, and groups can choose to run death-free campaigns or house-ban resurrection spells as they like.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm afraid there is, Lanefan.

With everyone's investment gone, no one has any enthusiasm to continue playing.

Well, in theory at least the GM and the player of the Rogue do.

And, you're conflating enthusiasm to continue playing (at all) with enthusiasm to continue playing (the character just deceased). IME players who consistently exhibit the former, and thus are willing to pick themselves up and keep at it when things go bad, are what I want (and is also what I want to be, as a player).

Especially when the experience up to that point hasn't exactly been great. That's the kicker with all this "it has to be REAL risk!" thing. When the risk actually lands? Many folk just lose the ability to stay engaged. Without that engagement, the game dies.

Hot take: players who give up like that just because they lose a character or three probably aren't worth keeping.

Why's that? Because if that's how they think, it's a huge red flag that if-when things go sour for their characters in the future, it's going to be a headache. I've had players like that; the key word there being the past-tense "had".

That said, as time goes on grows ever harder to blame these players for feeling this way; given the ongoing (and awful) trend that encourages players to think their characters are bigger and more important than the campaign, rather than the opposite.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, in theory at least the GM and the player of the Rogue do.

And, you're conflating enthusiasm to continue playing (at all) with enthusiasm to continue playing (the character just deceased). IME players who consistently exhibit the former, and thus are willing to pick themselves up and keep at it when things go bad, are what I want (and is also what I want to be, as a player).

Hot take: players who give up like that just because they lose a character or three probably aren't worth keeping.

Why's that? Because if that's how they think, it's a huge red flag that if-when things go sour for their characters in the future, it's going to be a headache. I've had players like that; the key word there being the past-tense "had".

That said, as time goes on grows ever harder to blame these players for feeling this way; given the ongoing (and awful) trend that encourages players to think their characters are bigger and more important than the campaign, rather than the opposite.

I am one of those players. As I already said. Do you mean to assert that absolutely everyone is such a problem? That would seem to be more than just painting with a broad brush.

 

[Lanefan]

I am one of those players. As I already said. Do you mean to assert that absolutely everyone is such a problem? That would seem to be more than just painting with a broad brush.

I can only go by what I've experienced, both as DM and player.

An early, and IME impressively reliable, sign of whether a player will turn out to be a problem player or a good player is how they handle the churn and inevitable character turnover of low-level play.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You can, but if you package that as a giant hardcover adventure path, you set players up to end up leaving that arc plot incomplete. If you just sell those adventures as separate modules, DMs can pick and choose which ones to run when, and string them together with an arc plot of their own devising, or not, as suits their own groups’ needs and interests.

I wasn’t talking about WotC (although it is pretty much what they do with their adventure paths). It’s how you do it as a DM - string modules together to make a campaign, adding an arc plot.

We know that WotC can’t print individual modules because printing costs are too high to sell at a profit. It doesn’t mean they are not aware that the current situation with regards to printing and distribution is far from ideal.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

An early, and IME impressively reliable, sign of whether a player will turn out to be a problem player or a good player is how they handle the churn and inevitable character turnover of low-level play.

Which direction did you find the link to be, though?

Because I have seen a link here too, but the link I've seen is that players who don't care if their character dies at all, in a modern D&D game (rather than an OSR like DCC), are usually problem players, because they:

A) Tend not to roleplay, and tend to metagame very heavily.

B) Don't play well with players who do RP, or don't metagame, even pulling faces or the like.

C) They are by far the most likely players to engage "outright dumb[expletive]ery", like murdering NPCs, stealing for no good reason, backstabbing the party (usually also for no reason, playing "Chaotic Stupid" and "Lawful Stupid" characters.

D) They're also weirdly a lot more likely to be pulling their phone out and messing around on it - even watching videos and trying to show them to others - I think because they're kind of stimulation-seeking or something.

E) Absolutely the most likely to argue pointless rules with me as the DM. Maybe not ones about whether they die or not, but definitely ones that nobody needs to argue about.

If I'd only seen one guy like this, I'd put it down to "that guy" but I've seen multiple.

Also, hard against any suggestion that players who care are a problem, I've played with two players who burst into tears when their character got killed (as adults!), and both of them are actually really good players in pretty much all levels - reliable, cooperative with the party, thoughtful, good RPers, don't

This is very specific though - it's not the case, for example with CoC. With CoC, what I've seen is far less of a link, basically none - I've seen players who would pretty much be in tears if their PC died in D&D or a similar game, who are absolutely fine, even think it's a little funny if it's CoC, because with CoC, that's part of what you signed up for. With modern D&D, it isn't. You say "inevitable churn and character turnover", but that's simply not "a thing" in 5E RAW/RAI. It's not a game where that's inevitable or even particularly likely. Nor does 5E offer any particular support for that play-mode. On the contrary in fact, I'd say 5E was a little too rules-heavy really work well for that. You want something with fewer choices and less conceptual investment. I'd actually say all versions of D&D from 2E onwards are bad vehicles for "low-level churn". There's just too much effort and specificity in designing a character.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Id suggest doing the same as the AiME line's aventure books: pick a region, fill it with a bunch of small adventures with an optional overarching theme you can use to weave (or not) a full campaing but is usually asumed as disparate quests.

 

[overgeeked]

To be fair, if so many DMs struggle with the full adventuring day, maybe it shouldn’t be the default assumption. There are good reasons to use the attrition model, but if the player base resists it so strongly, maybe it isn’t worth fighting them about it.

Exactly. Switching power balance, resource attrition, etc to center the encounter rather than the adventuring day would be fantastic.