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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6206995" data-attributes="member: 22424">I'm afraid I tend to give Amazon reviews of D&D material about the same weight as the photons used to display them on my screen. That is, almost none.And the same applies to "reviews" from 3e fans interested in whipping 4e.The problem is that describing at as "a largely linear string of battles" is pretty accurate, and it's also an example of bad adventure design.Incidentally, I read a blog post some time ago (sadly, I forget where) that actually talked about level design in FPS video games over time. And there, too, the author noted that the levels had become much more linear in time - that in early games there were far more paths through the dungeon (and, in particular, many more loops), where in more modern games, it tended to be "fight 1, fight 2, cutscene, fight 3, fight 4, cutscene..."The feeling was that because so much time and effort went into detailing each bit of the game (in D&D, each encounter, in the FPS, each cutscene), and because you wanted the player to get the best possible bang for his buck, you wanted to ensure he saw as much of the material as possible. And, in both cases, the best way to do that is a railroad - force them down a path taking in everything, and they're sure to see everything!(But it's important to note that that only applied to a certain type of video game - obviously, there has also been a rise in "open world" games to which that of course doesn't apply.)This is true, and it's also a weakness in adventure design - that too often we have a whole lot of dressing around an adventure that is really "murder hobos go door-to-door peddling a swift death". It actually really helps some adventures stand out significantly - all they need is some reason not to do this. ("Sunless Citadel" has a tiny nod to this - sure, you could just go kill the kobolds and then go kill the goblins, or vice versa... but there is at least the option of allying with one against the other.)Also... a lot of adventures give PCs one goal, or at best give the PCs a main goal and then some secondary goals... that they then complete while pursuing the main goal, almost by accident. (That is, the main goal is "stop the orcs", with the second goal "save my daughter"... and in the course of killing the orcs the PCs find the daughter being held in the orcish larder.) A better approach, IMO, would be to give the PCs several mostly-unconnected goals to pursue in the adventure, allowing them to set their own priorities. (Or, even better, several mutually exclusive goals, so that they have to choose whether it's most important to them to "restore prosperity to the village" or gain "fortune and glory".) But that would take more work, and more space, to achieve.Indeed. And that's equally true of just about every 3e adventure, and a great many Pathfinder adventures also. I was actually somewhat shocked when I read "Sword of Valor" (the second part of the latest PF Adventure Path), when it noted that many NPCs could, at least in theory, be redeemed from their evil ways.Ideally, I would like publishers to at least consider four distinct approaches to each encounter: fight, evade (by sneaking past, or similar), corrupt (that is, negotiate passage, or even ally with the NPCs), and deceive (the old classic of wearing Stormtrooper armour, or similar). Obviously, I understand that space considerations means they won't be able to do everything every time, and of course even those don't cover every approach anyway, but it really would be good to at least see some different approaches considered.Yep.</blockquote>

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