Possible different types of adventures.

[WillieW]

Two words: Willie Walsh.

More than two words: The problem isn't the content, it's the way it's executed. It seems like everybody's interested in being "old school," except than when old school was the only school, being new, innovative, or simply awesome was what was interesting. Nowadays it seems like "old school" means tossing people at a collection of encounters wrapped in a dungeon and dressed up with a bare minimum of backstory and plot.

Give me intriguing dungeon dressing. Give me back story, mystery, and hints I can use to tantalize the players. Use some of the great encounter design vs. player type advice in DMG2. Give me a new way of approaching the adventure, politics, real consequences for failure... heck, real possibility of failure. Stop spoon-feeding me. Build an encounter that's level -6 and make it FUN. Build an encounter that's level +10 and make IT fun. Erase that skill challenge's series of dice rolls and turn it an event. Something we can actually PLAY.

This isn't a 4e vs. 3e thing. I love 4e. It's not about DDI or not DDI. Great adventures aren't about the ruleset or the crunch; they're about the creativity. Stop phoning it in.

(PS: Whatever did happen to Willie?)

Authors are given guidelines as to how to prepare a scenario and a total number of words in which to create the adventure. In later versions of D&D, they're actively discouraged from giving much emphasis to background and told to concentrate on in-dungeon challenges. So I guess that and the emphasis on stat blocks and minis kind of displaced the older specimens of the scenario that many people found entertaining.

 

[Glyfair]

In later versions of D&D, they're actively discouraged from giving much emphasis to background and told to concentrate on in-dungeon challenges.

From a practical standpoint, the more focus on "background" in an adventure, the less likely I am going to be able to use it for a campaign. I will usakky be able to fit a very small area in my campaign (a town and a dungeon, for example). When the module starts referring to detail larger bits, it becomes more work to use it and fit it in my campaign, and thus less likely to use it.

In general, if an adventure is set in a specific campaign world, I will only use it in that campaign world or maybe in a campaign that is very close to it.

So I guess that and the emphasis on stat blocks and minis kind of displaced the older specimens of the scenario that many people found entertaining.

Runequest has always had large statblocks, compared to D&D, and the adventures never suffered from that issue.

Why did Runequest have this? Well, the "levelling" wasn't as significant as in D&D. The biggest jump was when the party started to be able to get "Healing 6" (the ability to put limbs back in place...before that characters would be regularly maimed, often by themselves). Otherwise, let's glance at the first RQ adventure.

Apple Lane

Two and a half adventures in a smallish module book (not quite as small as concurrent TSR adventures, but larger type). You had a generic "go through a rite of passage to adult" event, which was barely an adventure. You had a "protect the pawnshop from the bandits" adventure which played out many different ways every time I ran it. Then you had a dungeon crawl to the Rainbow Mounds, which also had lots of variety because of the various factions in the dungeon.

It was the personalities, and interaction with them that gave the adventures depth. They weren't necessarily deep. One group in the dungeon just wanted the arm of their "god" back, but that gave all sorts of motivation from a sentence or two.