D&D General Orcs on Stairs (When Adventures Are Incomplete)

[Lyxen]

Also, re: "well they won't be back in the fight so it doesn't matter" seems disingenuous to me. Sure, they probably won't be back that fight, but no group is going to be impressed with a DM who doesn't even know how high up they are, and can't tell them that, and just wants to hand-wave the PC getting back up to them. It's an almost guaranteed way to damage trust in the DM. And for what? So a paid adventure writer can be lazy? Jeez.

All the more because what is exactly the intent of the writer here ? To have a situation that one-shots PC ? And even if it does not one-shot them, to guarantee that they won't enjoy the fight and most likely the evening because they won't be able to get back in the fight ?

Without going into the "module writers write for the writing, not the playing" which I don't fully agree with especially in D&D modules, it seems like it's at least on the "It looks cool to describe so it should be fun" side of things rather than "the players will enjoy this".

 

[Ruin Explorer]

An example I've actually DMed: an adventure where the PCs are following a hidden forest path to the enemy's hideout; it's the only way in. The author writes the track-through-the-woods piece, then later writes the hideout piece - and in the hideout includes description of horses and wagons used to supply the place but doesn't go back and note that said horses and wagons would have left obvious tracks and marks on the path! (never mind the path would have had to be made wider and smoother to accomodate their passage)

That last bit is the sort of thing that just really ticks me off, personally.

It's like a lot of people who write adventures, professionals who get published even, don't actually imagine this as all happening in a world, they just create a few places and sort of weld them together with no regard for how they'd actually work. Which can cause a lot of "faux-mysteries", which intrigue players but honestly tend to waste time and are rarely fun to run with or spin from (though not never).

All the more because what is exactly the intent of the writer here ? To have a situation that one-shots PC ? And even if it does not one-shot them, to guarantee that they won't enjoy the fight and most likely the evening because they won't be able to get back in the fight ?

Good question. I suspect from the laziness of "uhhh high enough to kill you, however high that needs to be" this was just not thought through at all.

Re: fun, yeah it seems like a lot of adventurer writers forget that bit, especially those trying to "tell a story". There was a 5E WotC adventure a while back that one DM I play with ran, where basically it seemed like the adventure called on the DM to "run a cutscene" whilst deprotagonizing the PCs and stopping them acting so they could watch the cutscene and let the baddies get away. But the whole thing made no sense - it wasn't even some fun villain speech, it was just written as if the PCs would just stand there, jaws on the floor. The same adventure also had some enemies who only worked if you didn't know 5E rules, too, I forget exactly what, sadly, only that it involved or horses or magic horses in some way, but became clear whoever wrote that encounter didn't actually grasp 5E fully.

Man I wish I could remember the adventure, it had a whole lot of bad writing in it. I know we were 7th level.

 

[Lyxen]

Re: fun, yeah it seems like a lot of adventurer writers forget that bit, especially those trying to "tell a story". There was a 5E WotC adventure a while back that one DM I play with ran, where basically it seemed like the adventure called on the DM to "run a cutscene" whilst deprotagonizing the PCs and stopping them acting so they could watch the cutscene and let the baddies get away. But the whole thing made no sense - it wasn't even some fun villain speech, it was just written as if the PCs would just stand there, jaws on the floor.

OK, if this is "writers write for the writing", then I agree with you, although I call it more the "writing to make cool scenes", and indeed totally forgetting that the characters might be doing something else (of course, they can totally be railroaded, so who cares) and the players might not enjoy it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

OK, if this is "writers write for the writing", then I agree with you, although I call it more the "writing to make cool scenes", and indeed totally forgetting that the characters might be doing something else (of course, they can totally be railroaded, so who cares) and the players might not enjoy it.

Yeah this is the thing. A guy from White Wolf who I may have mentioned earlier (or not, not sure) pointed out that it was a real issue that a lot of the adventure/campaign writers for World of Darkness wrote cool stories - for the NPCs - and the PCs were just sort of there to watch.

Shadowrun has this issue too, particularly with the Harlequin stuff, where the PCs are basically just there to "oooh" and "ahhh" at the NPCs doing stuff a lot of the time.

It's not limited to professionals of course - one of the first DMs I played with went to great lengths to paralyze the entire party so we could essentially watch a cutscene of a "badass" NPC appearing out of nowhere and killing the badguy we'd spent a lengthy adventure tracking down (that's also how one of World of Warcraft's most important raids essentially ends!).

 

[Lanefan]

So 4e's way of handling magic in general went like this. You had powers specifically designed for in-combat purposes. There were utility powers that might have combat or out-of-combat uses, but were generally short in duration.

Then you had Rituals, which is where all the non-combat magical effects were placed; these took a long time to cast and were generally useless in a situation like the "Orcs on Stairs".

4e didn't have a lot of effects devoted to exploration, social interaction, or "narrative elements", as I like to call them. The design team thought that all of this was best handled with group skill challenges. So the idea of having a profession, building a base, investing in a mercantile enterprise, what have you, was largely vestigial- the adventure was front and center.

This sounds weird at first, but if you think about it, such things had become more and more vestigial over the editions- in the 2e era, most groups didn't care about establishing a keep and gathering followers, they just wanted more adventures!

Which seems odd, given all the setting releases in 2e (with, one assumes, an expectation that tables were going to interact with and explore those settings); and even more odd given the release of Birthright whose main focus is base-profession-honour-etc.

Most DM's didn't even allow Leadership in the 3e era, and books about building strongholds and the like didn't sell very well.

DMs not allowing Leadership in 3e is a new one on me. Pretty much every character of any note I had in 3e took Leadership at the first opportunity!

So in 4e, they had the thought that, if players don't really want this, then we won't bother devoting much effort to it. This, of course, led to older gamers turning up their noses at 4e, and I admit, even I got frustrated with it, when I tried to convert White Plume Mountain to 4e. It just didn't work!

So while you could have short range teleport powers, like the Eladrin being able to teleport 30' once an encounter, being able to bounce over long distances wasn't a thing.

Given your explanation and another just above, it seems they did in fact take Teleport out of 4e, where Teleport is defined as a spell that a) I can cast Right Now to get myself out of (or into!) trouble Right Now, and b) allows me to go anywhere in the world provided I'm familiar with the arrival point i.e. no portal required.

And, since "magic effects" were locked off from the Martial power source, just about anyone could teleport after awhile except the poor Fighter and Rogue. The Ranger got a few powers because they were partly Primal- I recall my Ranger had a daily utility that let him create a temporary portal on one side of the battlefield, and another adjacent to him, and both he and his allies could use it to blip from one location to the other for the battle.

This part doesn't bother me as much - magic is for magicians, not warriors.

 

[Lanefan]

All the more because what is exactly the intent of the writer here ? To have a situation that one-shots PC ? And even if it does not one-shot them, to guarantee that they won't enjoy the fight and most likely the evening because they won't be able to get back in the fight ?

Without going into the "module writers write for the writing, not the playing" which I don't fully agree with especially in D&D modules, it seems like it's at least on the "It looks cool to describe so it should be fun" side of things rather than "the players will enjoy this".

To be fair, adventure modules really ought to be written with the DM's needs in mind rather than the players' needs; as it's the DM who has to interact with said modules in order to run them.

If a module writer has "will the players enjoy this?" as a top-of-mind thought while writing, despite all good intentions that's probably going to lead to a bad adventure. The author can't know all the situations the module will be used in, and ideally should instead be thinking "how can I best and most succinctly explain to the DM what is intended here?" and leave it up to the DM to make it fun for that table.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If a module writer has "will the players enjoy this?" as a top-of-mind thought while writing, despite all good intentions that's probably going to lead to a bad adventure.

Hard disagree and you offer no justification for this claim. You seriously need to offer a detailed justification for a claim that utterly wild. Especially the "probably".

It's easy to write adventures and keep player enjoyment in mind, even when writing generically.

The author can't know all the situations the module will be used in, and ideally should instead be thinking "how can I best and most succinctly explain to the DM what is intended here?" and leave it up to the DM to make it fun for that table.

Nope.

If the module is designed without even considering whether it will actually be fun, the odds of it being a completely pointless snoozefest (as many published modules are), go up by like 1000%, for the very simple and obvious reason that it was designed thoughtlessly and without any conception of real-world usage. It's the equivalent of designing an area in an open-world videogame without making any effort to make it playable or interesting. People absolutely do that - for sure - and the results are dire. Really bad. Yeah, you can't know the exact situations, but you can know the broad likely parameters, and as an experienced D&D DM, unless you're a terrible DM who isn't fun (which I doubt), you can guess what players are likely to enjoy, and what they're not.

That has to be in your mind, otherwise you end up writing an onanistic adventure which pleases you, the writer, but was not written to be played, just read by a DM.

This is a major and common flaw of adventure writers, as this thread discusses. Your line of thinking here is basically a big part of why so many published adventures are so bad, and why some standouts are remarkably reliably good (because they did think about how players would respond).

To be fair, adventure modules really ought to be written with the DM's needs in mind rather than the players' needs; as it's the DM who has to interact with said modules in order to run them.

That's totally different from "let's ignore whether stuff is likely to be fun". You write so the DM can run the adventure, that doesn't require you to stop thinking about how players are likely to react. Indeed, if you're not thinking about how players will react/respond/enjoy/dislike stuff, please don't write and publish adventures! Or put a health warning on them, like "This is for the DM, your players might well think it's terrible, I don't give two shakes of a lamb's tail!". All the worst adventures I've ever read/run/played were written by people who didn't think about or care about how players would react, and all the ones which I see as "ol' reliable" or the like have at least some consideration of that, and make allowances for it.

 

[James Gasik]

Which seems odd, given all the setting releases in 2e (with, one assumes, an expectation that tables were going to interact with and explore those settings); and even more odd given the release of Birthright whose main focus is base-profession-honour-etc.

DMs not allowing Leadership in 3e is a new one on me. Pretty much every character of any note I had in 3e took Leadership at the first opportunity!

Given your explanation and another just above, it seems they did in fact take Teleport out of 4e, where Teleport is defined as a spell that a) I can cast Right Now to get myself out of (or into!) trouble Right Now, and b) allows me to go anywhere in the world provided I'm familiar with the arrival point i.e. no portal required.

This part doesn't bother me as much - magic is for magicians, not warriors.

Birthright should have been way more popular than it was. But...I never found one group that was interested in the premise, in fact, one guy I know rather dismissively said "it's just a big setup to justify PvP". : (

The issue with Leadership was it could be very busted- giving someone a second player character, even if 2 levels behind, could lead to shenanigans. Or not. It was very DM-dependent.

I don't really agree with taking away the idea of building a nation or a fighting force or a guild or a church or a wizard's school from the game, but at the same time, I know I saw, and I have heard at least anecdotal evidence, that many players wanted more adventure and less bean counting and making the campaign their own. Don't know why, but it's something 5e really needs, IMO.

As for magic is for magic-wielders...here's why this bothers me. When every class in the game but 2 or 3 is locked out of certain kinds of mechanics because "non-magic", but the "magic" classes can get their hands on mechanics the "non-magic" guys use, that's a bit weird.

And yes, you can play a hybrid character who has some magic, but it always feels like the magic guys get the better end of this deal.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I have mixed feelings on this subject. I mean, I absolutely agree that there are many spots in adventures that could offer much better it for DMs, I've never had a problem with it myself. I long, long ago chose to just change things when I find anything that I don't like. I do this so quickly that I don't usually remember there even being something I didn't like in the adventure (there's stuff I don't like in every adventure, so I'm used to it).

In the OP example, because I like to challenge and excite players rather than the (IMO boring), "You fall and die." I would probably have had anyone who fell off the edge roll to catch the edge, and if they missed, roll to catch another one further down, while taking damage, until they either died from enough damage, or saved themselves. (Usually the latter). Heck, even if they took enough damage to go unconscious, I'd probably make it possible for someone else to save them: "Their body is stuck between two rocks, two-hundred feet down" (someone climb down and get them).

I probably wouldn't even remember later that the adventure had any "problems".

(This is probably why I like Hoard of the Dragon Queen, et al: It was fine. My game was fun.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As for magic is for magic-wielders...here's why this bothers me. When every class in the game but 2 or 3 is locked out of certain kinds of mechanics because "non-magic", but the "magic" classes can get their hands on mechanics the "non-magic" guys use, that's a bit weird.

It's just straight-up bad legacy design. It could easily be solved by locking people who were full spellcasters out of some melee/ranged combat mechanics, if they insist on it working that way. A more sensible approach would just be less power for spellcasters and fewer spells which circumvented or were straight-up-better than other methods. It's not a problem you really see manifesting in any game except D&D and relatively close relatives, because virtually all other games don't let casters get as "out of control", or where they do, they also let non-casters do really wild stuff.