D&D 5E Next generation adventure design

[Jester David]

I suspect this is more or less it - "adventures don't sell well... compared to player-focussed splatbooks (possibly with a side-order of power-creep)".

Quite possible. An adventure might not sell as well as a splatbook. But that doesn’t mean adventures might not generate profit. And, unlike splatbooks, adventures do not generate rules bloat.
Slatbooks age the line, adding option creep and power creep. They should be restrained. And if there are fewer splatbooks taking funds from wallets adventures might sell better.

And, honestly, it's not hard to see why: adventures are aimed at DMs while splatbooks are aimed at players (who outnumber them something like 4:1). And although not every player will be interested in a splatbook, neither will every DM be interested in an adventure - a great many DMs never use any published adventures, while those who do may well not buy this adventure.

The “four players for every DM” statistic never sat right with me. While there are many more players, not every player buys the books. Many players just show up and play.
Most groups seem to have a couple dedicated gamers who buy most of the books. Or the one diehard fan who buys everything. Quite often, that person tends to be the DM. The provider of the books.

Now, it should be noted that both Paizo and Goodman have shown that there is money to be made with adventures. Paizo, in particular, have built a very successful business around selling them. But it's not at all clear whether any adventure would do well enough for WotC to consider it worthwhile printing it. (Actually, I wouldn't be shocked to find that that's now true of any print product, since the DDI ripped the heart out of splatbook sales, but that's another question.)

The current DDI model has made it really hard to put out crunch dependant books. Adventures might sell a little better, as the content is less easily copied into online tools.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I might be alone in this, but I hate reading. Any adventure that starts by saying "Read hundreds of pages of boring description before running this" immediately loses me. If I had time to do that, I'd create my own adventure instead. Isn't the whole point to save time?

I like to run on-the-fly, but this is problematic with old adventure design.

One of the classic problems (especially with old Gygax modules) is that important details aren't specified up-front, but are hidden in the room descriptions. For example, in the Temple of Elemental Evil, a big aspect is the relationships of the various factions, and the possibility of wearing cultist uniforms to get through parts of the dungeon unmolested. But there's no chart showing the cults' relationships and what colors they wear (instead, we have pages and pages of backstory which I literally could not give a about). You have to read all the room descriptions and notice that the different factions wear particular uniforms. Why not tell me that at the beginning?

Ideally, an adventure should have a short blurb about how it's supposed to go (this is unnecessary for a dungeon), and a quick rundown of all the stuff the DM needs to know before running. Then the meat of the adventure should be very brief and easy to run on-the-fly. In my experience, a detail that the DM creates is better than a detail that the DM has to read and interpret.

Also, it should go without saying, but apparently adventure authors still don't get it: Stop using read-aloud text. And even if you do include it (presumably at the behest of some braindead executive), don't force the DM to use it by hiding details in it that aren't in the description.

The best-written D&D adventure I've ever seen is this (and that's kinda sad, because it could be better):

http://burnedfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Greg-Gillespie-_-The-Bastion-of-the-Boglings.pdf

 

[mlund]

One thing that I've come to appreciate is that a good adventure or adventure path should have an easy sliding scale of detail levels where they are still useful.

I love deeply involved adventurers / paths with colorful NPCs, Byzantine schemes, and lots of balls in the air that respect cause and effect, but that's not the level of investment everyone wants to put in to enjoy an adventure. Not everyone may your idea of a novella or soap opera running in the adventurer. Not every group wants to play "5 Whys" with the adventure. Likewise "kill monsters and take their stuff" isn't going to inspire groups that want more than a cardboard backdrop to explore. An excellent adventure product needs to work at a variety of levels, from "kick in the door" on up instead of trying to "teaching 'em a lesson" for not listening to every author imperative in the work.

An adventure product that's written and presented to allow "take what you want" layered complexity without making the game's continuity rest entirely on a ton of DM improvisation and hand-waving when players go "off script" is kind of the Holy Grail of adventurer design, IMO.

- Marty Lund

 

[delericho]

Quite possible. An adventure might not sell as well as a splatbook. But that doesn’t mean adventures might not generate profit. And, unlike splatbooks, adventures do not generate rules bloat.

All true. Remember, though, that it's not enough to "generate profit" - for WotC to publish it a book must generate enough profit. (It's worth noting, though, they a book need not generate that profit directly - if an adventure barely breaks even but instead causes those splatbooks to sell enough additional copies, that's good enough.)

The “four players for every DM” statistic never sat right with me. While there are many more players, not every player buys the books.

Indeed. But those four players represent the potential audience, which is bigger than the one DM that is the potential audience for adventures. And, as I noted, only a subset of DMs buy adventures at all, so that may well be a wash.

But, anyway... the common wisdom is that adventures don't sell as well as splatbooks. It's not hard to see an explanation. But that explanation may be wrong, and that common wisdom may likewise be wrong. I don't have access to sales figures, so I really don't know... and I would be surprised if either WotC or Paizo chose to enlighten us with the actual sales figures.

As a DM with sorely limited time available, I'm always glad to see good adventures being published, and try to make a point of supporting companies who do so (hence my Pathfinder AP subscription, despite never having played the game). So, if WotC were to focus more on adventures for 5e, and especially if they manage to turn around their current reputation as to the quality of those adventures, I will be delighted. And I don't particularly care about the format - although my slight preference is for print, I can live with PDF via DDI.

One thing, though: I would much rather see a small number of really good adventures than a larger number of bad, or even just indifferent, ones. I already have more crappy adventures than I will ever use, even if all I do for the rest of my days is run published adventures.