D&D 5E One of the biggest problems with WoTC's vision of published adventures

[Sacrosanct]

.. I feel that a lot of the comments here show little attempt made to explain or explore why the old modules were better, and instead just list the differences from modern modules and end with 'and that was better'..

For me, I feel they are better because they gave you the ingredients and general plot hook, but left it up to you to flesh out the details while you were actually playing the game. The new adventures? It reads more like a story with predetermined player actions and resolutions than an adventure. Right now I'm combining the two: Horror on the Hill and SKT, into the same adventure. prepping the HotH part is way easier than SKT. There is less reading on my part for the same amount of actual game time spent, and I'm finding myself tweaking, adding, and modifying things in HotH with ease. Contrasting that with SKT, and it feels like if I change anything, I have to change A LOT of things because it's already predetermined for you what's all going on and happening between the key players. I can add a rival hobgoblin faction into HotH in minutes. If I want to do that in SKT, I have to do a lot of work to incorporate them because of how much it impacts everything else.

When players decide to do something you hadn't thought of, I find it much easier to ad lib things in old school adventures than I do in these modern campaigns.

 

[robus]

Hmm - I'm not sure I'm looking for an IKEA adventure with no instruction manual on how to assemble it But more like the "storyboard" version of the adventure rather than a finished movie.

Perhaps I'm realizing that I need to extract the skeleton from these adventures and run that - referring back to the book when they enter a dungeon - but otherwise leaving it to my imagination as to what the world looks like and how the NPCs behave.

 

[The_Gneech]

The constant call for small modules baffles me.
First, because the difference between the big adventures and several collected small ones is pretty much presentation. Storm Kings's Thunder is pretty munch twelve or so separate dungeons loosely collected. Princes of the Apocalypse was 13. You can run them independent. The difference is you don't need to invent a connective adventure stringing the dungeons together (and it costs a fraction of the price of a eight small 32-page adventures).

Second, the decision to stop doing small folio adventures was partially based on feedback from stores, who didn't like them as they were harder to sell, being less visible when stored sideways on shelves. I've seen this with Pathfinder: it's impossible to flip though Player Companion and modules in a store and finding a particular one is a pain.
Heck, speaking of Pathfinder, even they've cut back on small one-off modules in favour of just APs. Pathfinder is the adventure company with a hugely dedicate fan base and even they can't get fans to reliably care about small modules.
They just don't sell well.

For my part, the desire for mega-adventures and APs baffles me. I want small bits of content I can easily put into whatever my campaign happens to be doing, without having to sort through the chaff of a big book for the wheat of the one dungeon I intend to use, and without having to sever all the connections it may have to the rest of the module it's in.

I understand it completely from a business perspective. For WotC/Paizo it's way more efficient to sell a lot of copies of a few things instead of a few copies of a lot of things. But here's the deal with that: as a consumer, I don't care what the vendor wants, and I'm under no obligation to do so. I want the product I want. Whether or not they want to or will produce it, doesn't alter what my preferences are.

-The Gneech

 

[hawkeyefan]

Interesting point. I'm one of those who complained that LMoP left DMs hanging too much because the adventure gave so much detail and then suddenly nothing. It was like having a crutch that got yanked away on a regular basis leaving the DM to wing it (or fall down as often happened to me )

The idea of a "skeleton" adventure is quite interesting, though I'm not sure how it would work exactly, but the idea that you're given a structure that you flesh out rather than one that's entirely fleshed out (except it isn't, because players) feels like it would be much more interesting, flexible and fun to run.

Does anyone know if there's any example of this that's been published?

Lots of the old AD&D or 2nd Edition era adventures are like this. Or have parts that are.

I recently ran "Dead Gods" a 2E Planescape adventure by Monte Cook, and it was pretty great to see how loose a lot of the sections were. For example, part of the adventure involves the PCs traveling through the Demonweb Pits to the Vault of the Drow on Oerth. Once inside the vault, the situation is described...the city is in the midst of a civil war, the main area is held by one faction, the main gates are under siege by the opposing faction, and the upper vault area where all the noble houses are is on lockdown.

The PCs have to make their way through the upper vault, down into the city, and then through the city to the main gate. Ther person they are seeking is a drow warrior that is among the commanders of the faction besieging the city.

No specific encounters for this task are given. Just the situation and enough material for the DM to come up with ideas on his own, or let the players decide how to approach it. A journey through a drow city torn apart by civil war? You could spend weeks on it, or a session....totally up to the players and DM.

Lots of the old adventures were like that. They gave a set up and then left the specific sequence of events up to the gaming group.

For me, I feel they are better because they gave you the ingredients and general plot hook, but left it up to you to flesh out the details while you were actually playing the game. The new adventures? It reads more like a story with predetermined player actions and resolutions than an adventure. Right now I'm combining the two: Horror on the Hill and SKT, into the same adventure. prepping the HotH part is way easier than SKT. There is less reading on my part for the same amount of actual game time spent, and I'm finding myself tweaking, adding, and modifying things in HotH with ease. Contrasting that with SKT, and it feels like if I change anything, I have to change A LOT of things because it's already predetermined for you what's all going on and happening between the key players. I can add a rival hobgoblin faction into HotH in minutes. If I want to do that in SKT, I have to do a lot of work to incorporate them because of how much it impacts everything else.

When players decide to do something you hadn't thought of, I find it much easier to ad lib things in old school adventures than I do in these modern campaigns.

I think the 5E approach is a middle ground. The 1E- 2E approach was generally loose, and then 3E- 4E adventures generally consisted of pretty tightly plotted sequence of events.

I find 5E to be a nice mix of the two, provided I am willing to basically toss out everything in the books if need be and just improv, and then lean on the books only when needed. I find that kind of approach best for me, and I think 5E is a good match for me because of that. For others who prefer one method or the other, it may not work so well.

 

[robus]

snip

I'm coming to a similar conclusion. I feel much more comfortable when I'm reacting to the players actions rather than trying to mesh what they're doing with the details in the adventure - that's a source of pretty endless friction and frustration.

 

[Jester David]

I got the 20 from the same wiki page that listed all of the adventures, and they were all from 2008 to 2010.

Could you name them then?
Honestly, I can only think of <20 published adventures for the entire duration of 4e, let alone just the first two years. Unless we're including Dungeon.

And you're misunderstanding the point. I'm not talking about page count. I'm talking about level range, and have been since my OP. All of those listed are only for a very narrow range of levels, which is what I've been saying is what I'd like to see.

So you'd be happy with a 256-page adventure with five levels of adventure?

The listed adventures all feature a narrow level range because the products are small. The two go hand-in-hand.

So yeah, it's not accurate to say that 3e only had "some" of these adventures, and this has been going on for 15 years, as he said. The numbers don't lie.

But you're giving a list of adventures published over a span of eight years including small encounters published on the website (likely content cut for space) and small experimental products quickly abandoned (Fantastic Locations series).

If WotC felt they could make more money making small adventure they would.

For my part, the desire for mega-adventures and APs baffles me. I want small bits of content I can easily put into whatever my campaign happens to be doing, without having to sort through the chaff of a big book for the wheat of the one dungeon I intend to use, and without having to sever all the connections it may have to the rest of the module it's in.

Larger mega-adventures are desirable for a couple reasons.
One, they're a full campaign. If you're busy or don't know how to write adventures, it's months of gameplay.

Two, they're a story. You can enjoy them just by reading. You "play" the adventure twice that way: once in your head as you guess what the party will do, and again at the table when they invariably do something else.
Even if you can play, you can engage in the hobby by buying the same adventures.

Third, you can pillage them for content: dungeons, locations, NPCs, monster stats, or simply ideas. It's not any harder to mentally cut away text in a module; it's arguably just as easy as adding the story necessary to connect a story-less module to a campaign. If I can add a slavers module or the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief to my game I can add the hunting lodge from Hoard of the Dragon Queen or the hill giant lodge from SKT.

Fourth, from a brand standpoint, larger stories are easier to coordinate events across multiple types of media: the video games, miniatures, comics, board games, novels, etc. So a fan of one is incentivized to look for other products.
This also creates a sustained shared dialogue. Everyone in the community is talking about the same thing at the same time, and can share stories of their experience with the adventure.

I understand it completely from a business perspective. For WotC/Paizo it's way more efficient to sell a lot of copies of a few things instead of a few copies of a lot of things. But here's the deal with that: as a consumer, I don't care what the vendor wants, and I'm under no obligation to do so. I want the product I want. Whether or not they want to or will produce it, doesn't alter what my preferences are.

And I'd like a boxed set with a sturdy cardboard box, a cloth map, and several large books for a price similar to what I remember paying in high school.

WotC is a business, not a charity. If they did whatever we wanted without concern for efficiency and what would sell they'd go out of business and the D&D brand would vanish, joining the ranks of forgotten Hasbro brands like Visionaries, MASK, Inhumanites, Glo Friends, and so many more.

And the thing is, it's not just WotC, it's retailers. They talked with several store owners who complained that the small adventures are harder to sell because they're invisible when stored on shelves.
Plus the classical modules with their loose covers, maps, and such tended to be shrinkwrapped. Which made it impossible to flip through the product in the store. You have to buy sight unseen.

 

[The_Gneech]

And I'd like a boxed set with a sturdy cardboard box, a cloth map, and several large books for a price similar to what I remember paying in high school.

Sign me up for that as well!

WotC is a business, not a charity. If they did whatever we wanted without concern for efficiency and what would sell they'd go out of business and the D&D brand would vanish, joining the ranks of forgotten Hasbro brands like Visionaries, MASK, Inhumanites, Glo Friends, and so many more.

And the thing is, it's not just WotC, it's retailers. They talked with several store owners who complained that the small adventures are harder to sell because they're invisible when stored on shelves.
Plus the classical modules with their loose covers, maps, and such tended to be shrinkwrapped. Which made it impossible to flip through the product in the store. You have to buy sight unseen.

I think you may not be getting the message behind what I wrote. ^.^' All of that is irrelevant to me.

-The Gneech

 

[dave2008]

No, not solved. The campaigns are designed based on the assumption PCs are leveling as expected. If you super slow down the level rate in any of the existing campaigns, you'd have TPKs left and right before you ever got very far. Think about it, how well do you think a party of 5th level PCs would do in Tiamat's temple, assuming that they could even make it that far?

So yeah, I could slow down the level advancement, but then that would render all of the existing adventures unplayable. Which sort of defeats the point.

But now with multiple adventures available you can use the slower advancement with multiple adventures to weave together that old school feel. Use parts of each campaign to to be your smaller "modules" so you can extend the level requirements. I believe SKT has some advice on how to do this.

 

[lkj]

For what it's worth, I actually do use the 5e adventures as if they were a collection of small adventures of various levels. I'd enjoy running one start to finish, but we're too enmeshed in my homebrew game. And if I'm being honest, I'll probably never run one from start to finish.

So far in one game:
-- I have used the Temple and Fire Node from PotA as the hidden layer of a yugoloth "hag coven" based on a floating jungle island. The 'hags' were hiding something the party needed there. Just swapped out Vanifer for an arcanaloth and otherwise ran as is. Fight with Imix was pretty epic.
-- Currently using the Labyrinth and Maze sections of OotA as the lair of Baphomet under attack by Yeenoghu and his forces. The party is trying to get to an artifact at the center of the place before their rival does. They are trapped on a world which has big tears between it and the Abyss. Various demon princes have set up shop here, fighting to try to get access to the artifacts of a fallen island kingdom (long story)
-- Plan to use the Zuggtmoy section as another set piece for this.
--Plan to use various Demon Prince statistics as they encounter the various potentates (and presumably run away until they are much stronger)

In another game:
-- Party investigated elemental oddities (bits and pieces from PotA including Earth temple) on their way to investigate a strange alliance of chromatic dragon cults (general storyline of ToD)
-- Later, I handwaved the whole ToD storyline to indicate that they had been involved in thwarting an attempt to bring back Tiamat (cogs in a larger machine). I then slightly adapted various pieces of RoT as bounty hunting missions to track down cult leaders who had escaped with dragon masks. They'll be doing that for a bit.
-- Still haven't read Storm Kings Thunder. But I'm planning on throwing a whole Giant storyline into the mix, pulling bits and pieces to mix up their adventures.

Evil thoughts:
-- Going through CoS currently. Again, would love to run the whole thing. But most likely I'll pull out set pieces to run one-off horror themed games.

Anyway, treating the AP's as collections of shorter adventures has worked very well for me.

I totally understand it's not the same as the old modules.

But I'm in a sharing mood today!

AD

 

[hawkeyefan]

But now with multiple adventures available you can use the slower advancement with multiple adventures to weave together that old school feel. Use parts of each campaign to to be your smaller "modules" so you can extend the level requirements. I believe SKT has some advice on how to do this.

I don't have SKT yet, but I've certainly been doing this since I began my 5E campaign with Lost Mines. I've used bits from Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Princes of the Apocalypse, some old school adventures (Dead Gods, Anauroch, and a couple others), and my own material. Have a lot of stuff going on all at once....and I let the PCs kind of determine how much we focus on any story.

Currently, they've been pulled through the mists into Barovia, so everything's a bit on hold while they deal with that. But when they get back, they're going to have a lot to deal with....

I deal with the variety in a couple of ways. I totally got rid of the XP system in favor of a milestone type system years ago, so I don't really worth about XP budgets and the like. We also have two groups of PCs...one is high level and is made up of PCs my group had been playing since the AD&D days. The other group is of the new PCs made for 5E. So I have both groups handling different parts of the stories, based on what will work.

It's pretty crazy, and requires a bit of prep, but more brainstorming type prep than anything else. Not as much actual "work" as you would expect.

It's been working great for my group. But I can understand why it may not for everyone. I can understand why folks want short one off adventures that are more "modular" in nature. I do think the 5E adventures are designed with that in mind...yes they are connected by a theme, but it isn't hard to pull each apart and use the bits however you like.