MerricB
Eternal Optimist
I'm splitting this off from the discussion in its original thread because this is a topic interesting to me - and likely others - and would otherwise be easily missed. We'd just been discussing the structure of the original 3E "Adventure Path" - beginning with The Sunless Citadel and ending with Lord of the Iron Fortress. I'd mentioned that the some of the adventures were utterly stand-alone, while others had hints and links to the threats to come...
The answer to that question - and it's one I've spent a bit of time thinking about - is "no".
However, it's a fascinating question, and worth delving into further.
Out of the Abyss is basically two adventures. The first half is "Escape from the Underdark", the second half is "Stop the Demon Lords". As such, the first half is a selection of locations and situations to explore, always hoping that the next stop will be the way home. One of my major problems with OotA is that the first half doesn't have an ending except "the DM gets tired and wants to move things along". (Or, for the really dedicated DMs, the adventure runs out of material).
The second half of OotA is "Defeat the Demon Lords" and is a major quest structure with a lot of subquests. Find A. This leads to B. That requires you to find C, D & E. Once you've got the components, you fight F, and the adventure ends.
The superficial similarity that "you find out about the threat in the first half and fight it in the second half" falls down quite a bit when you realise that the Sunken City path doesn't present the threat as a threat. Rather, it's just tales about long-ago evils; there's no idea that they may be relevant until they suddenly appear in later adventures. The players in OotA, however, are being shown that something's very wrong in the Underdark - again and again and again.
One of the unusual features of OotA is that, unlike most adventure paths (that aren't set all in the same city) is that you have a chance to revisit the locations you visited in the first half, to see how things went there... though this isn't a major part of the adventure, alas. (Is there an adventure that uses this as a major feature? I'm minded of the high concept behind "The Ark" in Doctor Who, however disappointingly it may be realised...)
The structure of the Sunless Citadel path reminds me most of the structure of many late-1E and 2E campaigns: one where the DM would throw together a bunch of unrelated published adventures because they looked fun. Certainly, this is a style that I've played in and employed (many times), with a few adventures hinting it at a later threat, because the DM has looked ahead and seen what the later adventures will hold. The design is "standalone first, connections later" rather than what later became standard through Paizo's Adventure Paths. Each adventure is very much an island onto itself - you can pick up any adventure and happily run it without caring what came before. Although it's possible to pick up a Paizo AP adventure and run it alone, you do feel the fact that the other adventures are missing.
So, when I ran my original 3E campaign, we started with The Sunless Citadel, moved through the next couple of adventures, and then wandered off into adventures of my own design - only coming back for a dip into Deep Horizon. And I'm not even sure it was the same campaign... for most of the last 16 years, I've been running 2 (or 3) campaigns, sometimes on a weekly basis. And Deep Horizon happily didn't reference anything else in the other adventures.
Now, let's have a look at Paizo's Adventure Paths, and the problem they're now experiencing. The problem isn't that they're bad or repetitive (although both could be true), but rather that the periodical release of the adventures - plus the underlying system - causes them to be relatively linear in form. One of the features I encountered when running 3E (over many, many sessions) is that two or three levels gained makes the monsters that were a challenge at the original level now utterly under-powered at the new levels. This is quite unlike how most of 5E plays - it takes a lot longer for monsters to become nonthreatening.
So this has a particular effect on adventure design: each section of an adventure must be set for a particular narrow set of levels. Once you exceed those levels, you need to proceed to the next section lest things get dull. When you add the adventure paths being published as six chunks, the adventure thus has a straight line pointing in the way to proceed.
Now consider the Wizards adventures. Of them, only one could be published as a Paizo Adventure Path - and that's the Tyranny of Dragons duology. (Even that does interesting things with the form, but it is the most linear and could be broken into more chunks if necessary).
Every other adventure presents an adventure environment. SKT comes closest to the Paizo form - but could you imagine Paizo printing an AP installment where you only use 1/5th of the adventure and ignore the other parts? That's the structure of the Giant Strongholds in SKT. Strahd and Princes are major sandboxes, only really presentable in a single-volume form, and OotA goes major sandbox in the first half, before wandering into a more traditional quest structure (while still allowing the DM and players the ability to go sandboxing if they really feel like it...)
The "bounded accuracy" of 5E makes these sandbox/environment adventures far more interesting than in 3E; the various locations stay relevant for a larger range of levels.
One of the reasons I've been so excited about the 5E adventures is because they're trying new things in their form, something aided by their presentation as single hardcover adventures. They don't all appeal to everyone, but there are new things being tried, and we're seeing a lot of exploration of the possibilities of adventure design and presentation.
Cheers!
The answer to that question - and it's one I've spent a bit of time thinking about - is "no".
However, it's a fascinating question, and worth delving into further.
Out of the Abyss is basically two adventures. The first half is "Escape from the Underdark", the second half is "Stop the Demon Lords". As such, the first half is a selection of locations and situations to explore, always hoping that the next stop will be the way home. One of my major problems with OotA is that the first half doesn't have an ending except "the DM gets tired and wants to move things along". (Or, for the really dedicated DMs, the adventure runs out of material).
The second half of OotA is "Defeat the Demon Lords" and is a major quest structure with a lot of subquests. Find A. This leads to B. That requires you to find C, D & E. Once you've got the components, you fight F, and the adventure ends.
The superficial similarity that "you find out about the threat in the first half and fight it in the second half" falls down quite a bit when you realise that the Sunken City path doesn't present the threat as a threat. Rather, it's just tales about long-ago evils; there's no idea that they may be relevant until they suddenly appear in later adventures. The players in OotA, however, are being shown that something's very wrong in the Underdark - again and again and again.
One of the unusual features of OotA is that, unlike most adventure paths (that aren't set all in the same city) is that you have a chance to revisit the locations you visited in the first half, to see how things went there... though this isn't a major part of the adventure, alas. (Is there an adventure that uses this as a major feature? I'm minded of the high concept behind "The Ark" in Doctor Who, however disappointingly it may be realised...)
The structure of the Sunless Citadel path reminds me most of the structure of many late-1E and 2E campaigns: one where the DM would throw together a bunch of unrelated published adventures because they looked fun. Certainly, this is a style that I've played in and employed (many times), with a few adventures hinting it at a later threat, because the DM has looked ahead and seen what the later adventures will hold. The design is "standalone first, connections later" rather than what later became standard through Paizo's Adventure Paths. Each adventure is very much an island onto itself - you can pick up any adventure and happily run it without caring what came before. Although it's possible to pick up a Paizo AP adventure and run it alone, you do feel the fact that the other adventures are missing.
So, when I ran my original 3E campaign, we started with The Sunless Citadel, moved through the next couple of adventures, and then wandered off into adventures of my own design - only coming back for a dip into Deep Horizon. And I'm not even sure it was the same campaign... for most of the last 16 years, I've been running 2 (or 3) campaigns, sometimes on a weekly basis. And Deep Horizon happily didn't reference anything else in the other adventures.
Now, let's have a look at Paizo's Adventure Paths, and the problem they're now experiencing. The problem isn't that they're bad or repetitive (although both could be true), but rather that the periodical release of the adventures - plus the underlying system - causes them to be relatively linear in form. One of the features I encountered when running 3E (over many, many sessions) is that two or three levels gained makes the monsters that were a challenge at the original level now utterly under-powered at the new levels. This is quite unlike how most of 5E plays - it takes a lot longer for monsters to become nonthreatening.
So this has a particular effect on adventure design: each section of an adventure must be set for a particular narrow set of levels. Once you exceed those levels, you need to proceed to the next section lest things get dull. When you add the adventure paths being published as six chunks, the adventure thus has a straight line pointing in the way to proceed.
Now consider the Wizards adventures. Of them, only one could be published as a Paizo Adventure Path - and that's the Tyranny of Dragons duology. (Even that does interesting things with the form, but it is the most linear and could be broken into more chunks if necessary).
Every other adventure presents an adventure environment. SKT comes closest to the Paizo form - but could you imagine Paizo printing an AP installment where you only use 1/5th of the adventure and ignore the other parts? That's the structure of the Giant Strongholds in SKT. Strahd and Princes are major sandboxes, only really presentable in a single-volume form, and OotA goes major sandbox in the first half, before wandering into a more traditional quest structure (while still allowing the DM and players the ability to go sandboxing if they really feel like it...)
The "bounded accuracy" of 5E makes these sandbox/environment adventures far more interesting than in 3E; the various locations stay relevant for a larger range of levels.
One of the reasons I've been so excited about the 5E adventures is because they're trying new things in their form, something aided by their presentation as single hardcover adventures. They don't all appeal to everyone, but there are new things being tried, and we're seeing a lot of exploration of the possibilities of adventure design and presentation.
Cheers!
