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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8618427" data-attributes="member: 18">You don't have to hate hugging unicorns to be unimpressed with WotC's adventure output. I love hug-a-unicorn stuff and I'm still deeply unimpressed.I don't think that the tone of WotC adventures even has much to do with anything. WotC just isn't very good at writing campaign-length/adventure path material. They literally never have been. I struggle to think of a WotC AP that is more that more than mediocre, certainly in 4E/5E. They could be as edgy as hell, and about strangling unicorns, and they'd still not be very good.And the "large sandbox section with poor support!" is pretty common in WotC adventures, and I guess is part of what means they're not really APs. As is "a series of largely disconnected and incoherent adventures". Third parties seem to be a lot better at this. Obviously Paizo are better at this and I don't even like Pathfinder (1E or 2E).That's not to say WotC doesn't sometimes put out good adventures, but they are very much the exception and tend to be the short and mid-length ones, not the campaign-length ones.I don't think it's new, and I don't expect them to change, because I think it's management-level failure to recognise they're kind of crap at this, and that their products sell largely because they're part of a brand and well-advertised, and there's an inherent demand for pre-written adventures/campaigns, rather than because of them being particularly good. It's a bit like Abercrombie and Fitch, where one employee said they could put dog-poop on a baseball cap, spell out Abercrombie and Fitch with it, and it would sell. Not quite that extreme, but I suspect even the very worst 5E adventures have sold extremely well, simply because there's no real critical reviewing of this stuff, and customers just take what they're given. It is obviously difficult to critically review an AP before playing it, but most "reviews" early in the life of an AP/campaign adventure are glowing, even if ultimately consensus is that it wasn't very good, simply because the people who review this stuff are mostly fans, and mostly reviewing it in a vacuum in the best possible light (in some cases they don't even DM). And from my groups at least, most of the other DMs don't even look for reviews - they just automatically assume "WotC = doesn't suck". Or, they used to, anyway.</blockquote>

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