Mega-Adventures Vs. Normal Adventures

[Renshai]

What are your opinions on running Mega-Adventures (like Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and City of the Spider Queen) vs. shorter adventures (Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury...) ?

On one hand a mega-adventure is great because it offers you tons of campaign material and a fairly solid story line to follow throughout your game. It frees your time for setting and npc development and offers a view as to where the campaign will be headed.

On the other hand, shorter adventures tend to not focus your campaign around one threat or plot device. When running a series of shorter adventures your players don't get tired of facing the same threat (albeit in different forms).

Shorter adventures allow you to introduce fresh new ideas after each episode. The players don't feel rail roaded into fighting the same enemy and when the adventure is done they get a sense of accomplishment.

I ran Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil from beginning to just before the very end (the party finally gave up after dying so many times) and the players were really getting sick of facing Tharizdun's minions. They were starting to feel like they would never defeat Tharizdun's minions...

Anyway, I am getting ready to start a new campaign (after taking a couple of months off) and was just wondering how other gamers felt about the two different campaign styles.

Thanks,
Ren

 

[Tuerny]

Personally, I prefer shorter adventures.

Though I rarely run modules, I think that super-adventures cause things to be a bit too focused. I prefer characters to have the flexibility of pursuing numerous different plot threads at one time.

 

[Kershek]

When it comes to modules or super-adventures, I prefer super-adventures as long as they have enough variation to give each character class their day in the sun. In other words, it should include dungeon delving, city adventuring, wilderness encounters, political, social, and moral-testing situations, etc. I find that it can be a lot of work to tie modules together and still keep an overall story arc.

 

[Agamon]

Mega-adventures are they're own little campaigns, which might be great for some, but I don't like it. I prefer shorter adventurers that I can change and insert into my own campaign.

I find players start to get bored in the middle of the mega adventures when I've tried playing them. There's no reslolution and it starts to drag on and on. I've never managed to finish one that I've started.

 

[Crothian]

Short adventures. I do my own camaoignsa and don't like devoting 6 months of game time on one thing.

 

[Kershek]

Mega-adventures are they're own little campaigns, which might be great for some, but I don't like it. I prefer shorter adventurers that I can change and insert into my own campaign.

I find players start to get bored in the middle of the mega adventures when I've tried playing them. There's no reslolution and it starts to drag on and on. I've never managed to finish one that I've started.

If it were written properly, it should have sub-resolutions spread through it. After all, it's it's own campaign.

 

[Meds]

When it comes to modules or super-adventures, I prefer super-adventures as long as they have enough variation to give each character class their day in the sun. In other words, it should include dungeon delving, city adventuring, wilderness encounters, political, social, and moral-testing situations, etc. I find that it can be a lot of work to tie modules together and still keep an overall story arc.

Agreed. With limited DM preparation time, I'd much rather have a super-adventure that has all of these facets. The problem is that as yet no-one has really delivered, at least in d20 IMHO. I imagine that these are very difficult to write, and still be flexible enough to satisfy everyone.

For my money, Chaosium does this sort of thing very well for its Call of Cthulhu line:
"Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep", and
"Return to the Mountains of Madness"

In d20, of the products I've seen, Monte Cook's "The Banewarrens" comes closest.

 

[rounser]

If it were written properly, it should have sub-resolutions spread through it. After all, it's it's own campaign.

Exactly, though it's not really fair to criticise Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil on this basis, because it had to be based around the format of the original temple in order to deserve the title "Return", so it's understandable why it has that focus.

That said, I'd like to see less megadungeons, and more campaign adventures composed of wilderness "adventuring environments" to explore and sub-adventures of all kinds (urban, dungeon, wilderness, planar) tied into an overall story arc.

This sort of thing was tried with the Dragonlance Classics modules, but went straight to railroad hell. I think I know why, too - it was a world-spanning road trip around an undeviating story arc. Restrict the scope to a locality of say 100 x 100 miles of wilderness, and open up the story arc resolution, and it could theoretically be trumped. I ask: Surely the state of the art of adventure design has improved since then?

On the other hand, the reason why mega-adventures take the easy way out and mostly take place in a big dungeon has been touched upon by Ryan Dancey on the DND-L list in the past (emphasis mine):

> I would like to see a generic Campaign-syle adventure (preferrably in a
> boxed set) at least once a year.

That we will not do.

First, boxed sets cost too much. One reason TSR foundered and nearly died
was that it didn't price it's products correctly; boxed sets in some cases
lost the company money with each sale because nobody had the guts to put a
"real" SRP on them. Things like the PlaneScape box, for example, should
have had SRPs in the $80 range.

You will see more products like the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords, a thick book
with maps and other material bound in.

Second, those products take too long to design. Handling character
development from really low levels to really high levels is incredibly
tricky. Our data tells us that most people who play D&D restart their games
about every six months. So we're going to be designing products with an eye
towards that time frame as the logical maximum amount of time we can expect
anyone to stick with a product. Something that would take a whole year to
play through won't be fully used by many consumers.

Third, there are only so many "big ideas", and they often don't come on a
schedule. When we get a really great proposal for something epic, we'll put
a product on the schedule. But we're not going to task the designers will
creating something like that in the absence of great inspiration.

I don't really buy the data argument. For starters, every mega-adventure ever released by TSR, almost without exception (Dead Gods might have been by hearsay, never seen the product) has been a megadungeon, and as most gamers know, they tend to get dull, dull, dull after the initial enthusiasm begins to dwindle. They (Undermountain, Night Below, Greyhawk Ruins, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil etc. etc.) are not representative of the possibilities campaign adventures offer as a whole.

Dungeon crawling seems like a good idea in huge doses - in reality, most groups need a change of pace after a while. (For example, almost every group I've heard of online and off who attempted Night Below found the first book with it's overland mini-adventures and spot dungeons a heck of a lot of fun, and saw the campaign dwindle by the second book, which is where the megadungeon began, and with it, the tedium. I don't think this is a coincidence in the least.)

I don't really buy the "too hard to design" argument either. Restrict the scope of the campaign to an area (maybe an island or two) and designers won't have to resort to the forced railroading imposed by dungeon walls.

It will be interesting to see who picks up this particular gauntlet, if WotC isn't willing to.

 

[Nightfall]

While I loved the mega adventure Necropolis, I think I favor something more like Serpent in the Fold, mainly BECAUSE it can be a little easier to plan around. That said, I LOVE Necropolis man! Scott, you rock and so does the Temple of Set!

 

[ced1106]

On the other hand, shorter adventures tend to not focus your campaign around one threat or plot device.

Ah, you'd be surprised. I'm assuming we're talking published adventures, and, with most of them being "save the town from the bad guys", it's not difficult to make the adventure villain a low-ranking subordinate of some overall high-level bad guy. Once the PCs are of high enough level, then they go after the archvillain, blah, blah, blah. The oft-mentioned "Serpent in the Fold" is an excellent example of how several unrelated scenes and short adventures can be tied together with a mcguffin.

Smaller adventures also have an advantage in that you can pick and choose which to use in the overall campaign. That's only a minor advantage, since a GM shouldn't have any problem editing away or adding material to a mega-adventure.


Cedric.
aka. Washu! ^O^