[RPG Theory] What is an Adventure?

[kiznit]

How would you characterize or define one? Specifically regarding role-playing gaming, obviously.

What elements are important to you? Exploration? Uncovered motivations? Surprises? Adversity? Your character challenged on a personal level? A moral one? A tactical one?

I realize there's no single answer, and you may want a different kind of adventure tomorrow than the one you played yesterday, but I'm wondering if we can nail down the "primary ingredients" of what makes a great and compelling adventure.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Depends on how you want to define it.

I've been toying around with pacing a lot recently, so the first thing that comes to my head is: an adventure is the time in between down times.

So, while on an adventure, you can't replenish your supplies (be that rations or healing surges or whatever).

So, an adventure is the period in which you are in danger, while trying to accomplish some goal.

What specifically happens on the way to that goal isn't as important as the fact that, while trying to get to that goal, the characters don't get a reprieve. They can't set their own pace. If they want to achieve that goal, they need to go do it, or it will not be done.

But that's kind of a mechanical way to define it.

You could perhaps more broadly say that adventure = danger.

 

[kiznit]

That an interesting way to think about it.

I think it's the right approach to define an adventure by the fact that it requires a definite arc - a hook to get you started, some sense of urgency, and (at least at first) some idea of the accomplishment required that means it's over - I'm not sure I'd specifically say that the PCs shouldn't get some sort of reprieve or refreshment of resources during an adventure (after all, in 4e you replenish healing surges every day and an adventure might certainly take place over the course of several), but there's definitely something to the idea that an adventure certainly challenges players to evaluate the urgency of their goals in comparison to taking any down-time.

So Ingredient 1 of an adventure might well be some sort of time pressure.

 

[nedjer]

How would you characterize or define one? Specifically regarding role-playing gaming, obviously.

What elements are important to you? Exploration? Uncovered motivations? Surprises? Adversity? Your character challenged on a personal level? A moral one? A tactical one?

I realize there's no single answer, and you may want a different kind of adventure tomorrow than the one you played yesterday, but I'm wondering if we can nail down the "primary ingredients" of what makes a great and compelling adventure.

Put all of those in the same cauldron, add spices and loads of chillis, then heat. Serve with tequila.

 

[Doug McCrae]

A series of encounters, connected together by location or plot.

 

[xechnao]

I perceive the adventure as a product of an action and story reaction. So if you mix action and story you get the substance of adventure in which story moves action and action moves story. Stories though have to follow the natural cycle humans generally assume and presume so an adventure lives and dies by its story.

 

[Gilladian]

I think of "an adventure" as being whatever the PCs are focused on at the moment; so, when they pick a goal, the adventure begins. When they conclude that they have reached the goal, or they abandon it, the adventure ends.

Adventures may CONTAIN plot, danger, time pressure, action, story, etc... but all that is subsumed by the player driven nature of the event.

In my campaign, adventures overlap, blend, and may contain other adventures. In some ways, they are plot, but in other ways, they're both less and more. Some adventures move the campaign forward, others are mere "filler" (not that they're less fun, they're just not critical to the campaign's goals, if it has any).

 

[Umbran]

What elements are important to you? Exploration? Uncovered motivations? Surprises? Adversity? Your character challenged on a personal level? A moral one? A tactical one?

What elements are within an adventure is going to vary so wildly depending on the group and game's genre that it isn't very telling.

"An adventure" is to me some period of play that seems to have something like a beginning, a middle, and an end. It may or may not sit in the context of a larger dramatic structure with it's own beginning, middle, and end. You probably have some goals the PCs are attempting to accomplish, and at the end you can tell whether they have or have not accomplished them.

 

[Ariosto]

In D&D, I think it started out meaning "an undertaking or enterprise of a hazardous nature". It was something the players planned.

Later, it tended more to mean "an unusual, stirring experience, often of a romantic nature". It became identified with something planned by a scenario designer.

In the first usage, the bounds of "an adventure" might simply be characters departing for, and returning from, the dungeons or wilderness. The key point being pointed to was that experience points were scored (which depended on getting treasure back to base). There might be a rule that one could advance no more than a single level per "adventure" -- but that one might get in more than a single adventure per session of play!

Here's some advice on building scenarios from RuneQuest (1978):

An adventure area, whether it be section of forest, cave, old ruin, river, etc., should provide the Player with the following opportunities.
1. Experience in the use of most of his skills.
2. The opportunity to obtain treasure to pay for further training.
3. The chance to die in the pursuit of the above.
4. An enjoyable time while doing all of the above.

The focus in the early days of FRP was on what might be termed "site-based adventures". The referee mapped an environment and stocked it with peril and plunder, and the players' adventure was exploration of and confrontation with what was there.

That tends to run directly into and intermix with the "character-based adventure", in which the key map is one of relationships among characters. Players discover that "terrain" of conflicting values and goals by analogy with investigating the mazes of dungeon passages.

An "event-based adventure" takes on more clearly the structure of a sequence of
events linked by a plot. It can end up branching into a fairly complicated map, but the presence of the "arrow of time" tends significantly to limit back-tracking and other re-use of elements.

The very best scenarios, I suspect, combine features of all those kinds.

 

[kiznit]

What elements are within an adventure is going to vary so wildly depending on the group and game's genre that it isn't very telling.

Oh I fully recognize that but I think there's still great value in asking - I'm very hopeful that people will point out aspects of what makes an "adventure" that I've never thought of or seen articulated.

I guess I'm also looking for some potential insight into the player-DM spectrum of pro-active vs. reactive adventuring, there have been some good discussions about such of late. Given the huge and vast array of possible answers to "what makes an adventure great" (and I know that that's a different question and one that's already been asked a billion times anyway) I found myself wondering if framed a little more abstractly and fundamentally, "what makes an adventure", it sort of encourages answering the question from the other direction.



Some groups sit down and say "hey, let's play such-and-such adventure", whether that's a published module or an idea kicking around the DM's brain ("A fight for the crown!" "Start off as slaves and win your freedom!" "Kobolds have taken your baby!"), while other groups sit down and just say, "hey, let's make some characters and muck around in this cool setting". Both groups invariably end up going on adventures. GOING ON ADVENTURES is pretty much the de-facto, well, reason that we're all playing roleplaying games, for the most part.

All that being said, adventures aren't usually very specifically defined in most roleplaying games. Which is fine, they don't need to be, and in fact doing so somewhat limits the potential of the game.