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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9323415" data-attributes="member: 7045072">I generally like Colville, his joy at playing RPGs and his knowledge of older systems make him (and Chris Perkins - largely same reason) my favorite contemporary design guys. What he's saying here is also think largely correct.Especially:  A) Playtesting is importantB) Shorter, largely location based adventure "modules" do let you move things around and insert what you like.C) There are marketing reasons for large companies to make campaign sized adventure paths.D) Yes! The material conditions of play, session length and campaign length, are important and are different now -- at least for most people.  I think a lot of this comes from online play, and it's fine, but we do have to adapt to it. I talked about it a couple of years ago in the context of older games (where it also matters).[URL unfurl="true"]https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2021/06/classic-vs-past.html[/URL]The things I wonder about though are:A) I distrust any argument from "You have to modify every adventure to make it right for your table".  I think there's truth to this of course ... but it's too often an excuse for incomplete product. A good adventure, especially one I pay for, should get as close as possible to being ready to run. This is not easy, but it's a big part of what designers should aim for. WotC has generally not been good at it.B) Good adventure length is dependent on style of play.  Example 5 room dungeons are not great for classic style procedural dungeon crawls.  Giant adventure paths work far better for the contemporary traditional (the /WoTC/Perkins/Coleville style).  I don't necessarily buy that the length is the key feature of this - I think design style also matters, and I'm not what exactly Coleville is suggesting as optimal. He's going back to nostalgia a bit here - and I don't know his preferred style of game is the best for location based adventures. C) Castle Amber is not exactly a quick adventure...D) There are plenty of short and medium length "modules" - not sure about for the 5E scene, it's not my space so I don't know - but in OSR/Post-OSR space there's a lot.  It is hard to find the good ones though - DTRPG is not good at at - 10ft Pole is ummm particular... and there's no real impetus for good reviewing culture. I think asking around is good ... but where to ask? Not sure how Adventure Lookup works though. It's a rough problem.Always glad to see this kind of content from Coleville though, it makes me hopeful about the "indie" or "indieish" part of the Contemporary Traditional RPG scene.</blockquote>

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