Roadblocks in adventure design

[Fenes]

One of the true curses of the professional adventure writer is that you do need to put some heft into the adventures you write, so that the customers get value for money, but there are times when it is detrimental to the end product. Especially in an Adventure Path where there's a necessity to give out a certain amount of XP by its end.

Cut the combats down, increase the XP for completing the real objective. Focus on the objective, and allow lots of ways to bypass combat altogether.

I don't run published adventures because they simply have far, far too much combat, and not enough plot and intrigue, and interesting non-combat scenes.

Dungeons that are "alive", as in not populated by static undead/constructs, should be doable in one go, without rest, or it'll feel contrived anyway no matter what you do - unless you turn it into a real siege.

 

[Umbran]

Can you think of other adventures which have been derailed by inappropriate elements or things that just didn't quite make sense when you came to run them?

Most of them, really, that have multiple combat encounters in close proximity to each other.

Take Kobold Hall in the DMG - several rooms of combat encounters, and not a single sound barrier between them. Critters in the second room should hear a fight in the first, and should respond...

 

[Irda Ranger]

Cut the combats down, increase the XP for completing the real objective. Focus on the objective, and allow lots of ways to bypass combat altogether.

This. It's bad design to primarily grant XP for killing monsters when what you really want is to save the city. You should get full XP for just convincing the cult to exit the dungeon by the fastest means necessary if that's what it takes to accomplish the goal.

I don't run published adventures because they simply have far, far too much combat, and not enough plot and intrigue, and interesting non-combat scenes.

Also, this. These are the elements that really set "living DM" RPGs apart from computer-based RPGs like Final Fantasy or World of Warcraft. It's easier to write (and run) an adventure that's just a string of combats loosely tied together by story, but it's not the kind of adventure that people talk about years later.

Dungeons that are "alive", as in not populated by static undead/constructs, should be doable in one go, without rest, or it'll feel contrived anyway no matter what you do - unless you turn it into a real siege.

Eh, sometimes. "Doable in one go" is not always necessary as long as there are places the PCs can plausibly hole up and rest without being discovered. The PCs can then be The Ghosts in the Darkness, raiding the camps, wreaking some havoc and retreating before overwhelming force can be brought to bear. Like Bruenor in Mithril Hall while it was still controlled by the Duergar.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I actually really like the idea of adding a time factor to the dungeon crawl such that the PCs have to penetrate to the bad guy's lair before the bad guy escapes.

I'm envisioning this with a Western theme ("That no good varmit done holed up in the woods. Get 'im before he escapes across the Rio Grande where we ain't got jurisdiction."), but of course it can also work in a standard D&D world.

Another option might be the seige that someone mentioned. PCs have to lay seige to the bad guy's complex, and the bad guy keeps throwing more and more troops at the PCs in an effort to slow them down (or kill them). Eventually the bad guy and any remaining flunkies get desperate and attempt to break out of the complex, and the PCs must stop him.

This gives a reason for the PCs not to dawdle, yet also a reason for them to stick with it rather than retreating to rest up.

The DM would have to carefully take into account the resources available to the party -- in 4e terms, primarily healing surges and daily powers. Maybe the PCs learn of a storeroom inside the bad guy's complex that has a stock of healing potions, so it becomes a priority for them to seize control of that location (both for their own uses and to prevent the bad guys from using the potions). Or maybe there is a special magical shrine in the complex that allows you to recharge your daily powers, so the PCs have to find out where it is, and judge whether it's worth fighting their way to that location, or whether they should just make do without their dailies.

 

[wedgeski]

Perhaps the original idea of dungeon levels wasn't wrong after all!