The Awesome Endurance of D&D's First Modules

[delericho]

They did learn from what had gone before but, in my opinion, they also introduced entirely new mistakes or missteps.

Indeed.

For instance, I always associate the term 'railroad' in the context of RPG adventures with Dragonlance. Maybe that's unfair but DL and I parted company after the first module. And when Ravenloft appeared it was as as uncomfortably incongruous to me and some of my peers as Eberron was to some players when it appeared.

The reason I generally bracket these two together is that they seem to mark a distinct shift in adventure design - from Ravenloft onwards we see more and more storytelling aspects appearing in adventures.

Now, storytelling in itself is no bad thing. And, indeed, I agree that Ravenloft is an excellent adventure. But what Ravenloft does is it pairs the lovingly-crafted and very detailed Big Bad with a very large and open area for PCs to more around in, and also the gimmick of the "fortune telling" (really a mechanism to change Strahd's motivation). Together, these work to ensure that this adventure will play out very differently for different groups, and indeed for the same group if they played it twice.

The big problems with this are (a) it is extremely hard to do well, and (b) it requires a lot of redundancy be built-in to the adventure (a typical run-through of Ravenloft will miss an awful lot of the rooms - quite different from the expectation of more modern adventures, where you'll hit almost everything).

Done poorly, or done without that redundancy, that storytelling runs the risk of degenerating into railroading. Which doesn't mean players won't have fun (a good railroad is probably more enjoyable to play than a bad sandbox), but it does negate one of the big strengths of RPGs (that players get to write their own story). And it is a structural weakness in the adventure, albeit one that will only become apparent if the PCs try to take a different turn - on a railroad that leads to a crash; in a car it's just a different path.

(Or, if you will, adding the redundancy of the "what if..." paths is like fitting airbags to a car. Hopefully, most customers will never have cause to know if they actually work or not, but the few who do will be very glad if you've made sure. Though, obviously, it's a whole other scale of things. )

The thing is, an awful lot of modern adventures, including 'good' modern adventures, fall into the trap of telling their story and not easily supporting variations. Consider "Red Hand of Doom", widely considered one of the very best from Wizards - it consists of five parts that basically have to be played in order, and most of those parts consists of a "5-room dungeon" that, by its nature, doesn't allow for much variation in approach. It's actually far more of a railroad than most of "Hoard of the Dragon Queen"! (Not that I'm claiming that the latter is a good adventure!)

I wonder if some of the popularity of the adventure path format is down to an attempt, if not a necessarily self-conscious one, by designers, to ask or hope that people will accept that a certain quantity of good quality adventure design is equivalent to a historically smaller quantity of what thirty years ago was considered fresh and novel in a way that is now impossible to recapture.

I'm not sure that's it. I think it may very well be simpler than that: time-stretched DMs looking to buy a pre-made campaign off the shelf that they can run without extensive modification.

And it's worth noting that of course the AP concept isn't exactly new, given the age of Dragonlance! (Arguments can also be made for the "Slavers" series and others, but I'd rather not get into those - I'm arguing that DL was a path, not that it was the first or was unique!)

(Of course, there have always been DMs who built their own 'path' of published adventures, perhaps running A1-4, T1-4, GDQ1-7 as their campaign, or similar. That's not much different from simply plucking a formal Adventure Path from the shelf, except that in the latter the connections are already present in the material to be used.)

Oh, and cynically: one simple reason for the popularity of APs is that it's much easier for Paizo to sell a subscription to a product made of six-issue paths than a product of unconnected monthly adventures. That way, people will pick up part one, set up a subscription to get the other five parts (for the convenience), and then hopefully stick with it long-term out of inertia.

 

[TerraDave]

That's an interesting point and probably has some merit, though I'm skeptical that that plays a big role because further attempts at refinement have usually failed. For me, adventures like 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors' and 'Expedition to Castle Ravenloft' show that even with a lot of time to reflect, and even with some very talented designers, it's not easy to improve on the originals. ....

But that's a fundamentally different exercise. To be developing the original piece, versus doing an inspired work. To rework the same piece in the moment, vs trying to "fix" it through a sequel, or some kind of director's cut. I could give lots of examples...but I have played Return to Temple of Elemental Evil, and the Hommlet moathouse part is ok, and it has been updated (Hommlet is bigger!) but it is in no way the polished gem that T1 one was. The attention to detail is not there. And again we know that Gygax used and developed it in his home game and had various winks to his actual players in the module. M Cook just sat down and wrote a big adventure. They did do play testing--famously high body count--but that was that.

 

[howandwhy99]

what accounts for this enduring popularity?

• Designer fame
• Popularity of D&D at the time including size of fan base
• Popularity of the module at its release
• Amount of modules already available when released
• In some respect, "first to the scene effect" means being remembered more than who followed
• Advertising, they published some modules in the 100,000s before knowing their popularity
• Word of Mouth, the more who played and enjoyed a module the more staying power
• and yes, design excellence

Gary had a wide mix of talents and ability. He was not only creative, but he was also good at game design - a mentally strenuous mathematical exercise. Early D&D modules were game designs first and foremost and Gary had as much talent for creating them as anyone ever has. Unlike today's story-based designs where the players must either create or follow the plot of an "adventure", Gary designed D&D modules like he designed wargame modules. Most of his modules were either for tournaments - timed team competitions - or were components to be added to the overall campaign map of the standard long game.

In terms of design this means mazes. Try and draw a maze on grid paper. I think every D&D DM has tried to do this at one point or another. It's a fundamental requirement of game prep. Then scrutinize closely one of Gary's maps. He was an expert at his craft and it doesn't come easily.

I think it's easy to snub everything that ever occurred before today as bad by calling it nostalgia. But for those willing to search for quality it can be found by changing one's perspective from the current time and place to the one in the world you're exploring.

 

[SirAntoine]

The adventures endure because they are better than anything that has come since.

 

[Celebrim]

The reason I generally bracket these two together is that they seem to mark a distinct shift in adventure design - from Ravenloft onwards we see more and more storytelling aspects appearing in adventures.

The first obviously shifts in how modules are written in the TSR cannon are probably 'X2: Castle Amber' and 'UK1: Beyond the Crystal Cave'. Ravenloft in a lot of ways could be considered, "Return to Castle Amber", in the sense that it revisits the concepts of that module and enlarges on them. But of the early story modules, nothing I know of compares to UK1 in terms of its modernity. And in terms of development as a story, the first modern adventure path is probably Hickman's earlier work, I3, I4, and I5 - collectively called "Desert of Desolation". Gygax's own adventure path in GDQ is definitely intended as an adventure path, but its almost entirely site driven. U1, U2, U3 in my opinion represents an intermediate stage in the growth, with the first module U1 being very modern, but U2 and U3 intending to be story driven but implemented very much like an entry from the G series and as such in my opinion end up falling flat. Desert of Desolation on the other hand takes that site driven format and goes with it in the same direction UK1 did, trying to make the players participants in the completion of a highly literary story that began long before them. It's I3-I5 that in my opinion lead directly to the DL series.

I'm actually a big fan of the DL series, but I do see where it goes wrong and why we've never really been able to write a better story format game and share it. The big problem with AP designs is that the are focused very highly on writing about what the PC's do and handling it, with a very narrow range of assumptions regarding PC behavior. Often there are huge disconnects on the part of designer between what he prepares for and what he expects players to do and what players operating without his knowledge will infer from a scene or will find logical. Ideally you would focus not on PC behavior, which the GM can't control, but on NPC behavior and motives - which the GM can. But the big problem there that I don't think anyone has overcame is that PC's actions can influence NPC behavior and motives beyond the point where you can reasonably infer what the current game state is at any given time. Real DMs deal with this by creating the material on the fly either in session or between it (or usually both), but there seems to be no easy way to share that material and the normal methodology of story telling doesn't provide good examples.

I think DL dealt with that better than is commonly realized, but the actual advice they give you about staying on the rails is generally bad. DL gives you an enormous amount of useful setting information, excellent structure for making a story in that setting, and great literary structure to its reoccurring bad guys. But it makes the mistake of thinking that the job of an adventure module writer is to tell the story that is going to happen during the adventure, instead of enabling people to make their own stories. The biggest flaw of the DL modules is that they usually give very bad advice on how to railroad. I think they play really well with a skilled group of players, unique PC's, and a DM willing to enable the PC's to shape the story in unexpected directions. But the flaw that no one has yet found the solution to is telling DM's how to lay new rails as opposed to yanking the train back on the expected one.

DL did however spawn a ton of modules in the 2e era that learned exactly the wrong lesson, dropping DL's strengths, and adopting its weaknesses as if those weaknesses where the strengths.

Very likely the main problem here is one of cost, but I see other flawed assumptions holding people back as well. For example, unlike DL which explicitly advices you against making the game your own, or even early Hickman with his limited railroading, Gygaxian or Judges Guild modules do very much allow for groups to make their own stories. A lot of people seem to believe that this proves that "that's the way to do things", especially those burned by bad railroading. But Gygaxian don't actually empower the GM to make a story in anyway. All they are actually doing is not explicitly getting in the way. But since they don't generally have any elements that make for a story, any story that shows up can't be blamed on the module but is just a testimony to the skill of the GM rather than the writer. I really think Hickman's early work in "Desert of Desolation" was on the right path, and DL1 in a lot of ways looks like it. But the later flashes of brilliance in the design - like the 'martyrdom' bonus for a PC dying in battle at the Tower of the High Clerist - just aren't consistently there. And as much as you can criticize DL, I'm not sure anyone has ever advanced the art of module design significantly past that point in the many years since then. Age of Worms and Savage Tide for me showed flashes of just utter brilliance, but were marred in many ways.

I've got hope though. One of these days, someone is going to put it all together - something that is to adventure modules what say Sandman is to comic books.

Now, storytelling in itself is no bad thing. And, indeed, I agree that Ravenloft is an excellent adventure. But what Ravenloft does is it pairs the lovingly-crafted and very detailed Big Bad with a very large and open area for PCs to more around in, and also the gimmick of the "fortune telling" (really a mechanism to change Strahd's motivation). Together, these work to ensure that this adventure will play out very differently for different groups, and indeed for the same group if they played it twice.

Ravenloft gets something most adventures since then haven't - in an RPG, map = story. The Ravenloft map remains to this day the best map of an adventure ever. My only complaint is that wilderness map isn't up to the same quality, creating a 'Small World' that I'm not hugely fond of.

(Or, if you will, adding the redundancy of the "what if..." paths is like fitting airbags to a car. Hopefully, most customers will never have cause to know if they actually work or not, but the few who do will be very glad if you've made sure. Though, obviously, it's a whole other scale of things. )

Back in the 90's Shadow Run tried to adopt the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' design to some of its modules. I never played them, but reading them was very interesting in terms of the layout and the detail they were trying to provide to GMs.

Consider "Red Hand of Doom", widely considered one of the very best from Wizards - it consists of five parts that basically have to be played in order, and most of those parts consists of a "5-room dungeon" that, by its nature, doesn't allow for much variation in approach. It's actually far more of a railroad than most of "Hoard of the Dragon Queen"! (Not that I'm claiming that the latter is a good adventure!)]

I wasn't impressed by "Red Hand of Doom". The over all structure of, "Save kingdom from invading army", I liked. But compared to again - Dragon Lance - the deftness with which they played that out and the range of mini-games used to establish "No really, you are at war and you are making a difference", was lacking.

 

[delericho]

This is an outstanding post, and I wish I could XP it twice.

The first obviously shifts in how modules are written in the TSR cannon are probably 'X2: Castle Amber' and 'UK1: Beyond the Crystal Cave'.

I especially liked the callout to UK1 - those modules do seem to get overlooked quite readily.

I wasn't impressed by "Red Hand of Doom".

At the time, I thought it was spectacular. And provided the group don't try to skip the rails, I can see it working really well indeed.

But revisiting it some time later, the flaws do become that much more apparent. I'm not sure it really deserves to be on a "Best of..." list - I do wonder if it scores highly for reputation as much as for analysis of its actual properties.

 

[SirAntoine]

One key is for the writer to have the freedom and the respect to establish what is true for the setting and the adventure scenario. Gygax could do both.

 

[Parmandur]

As somebody who started with 3.x (the group was kind muddling between 3 and 3.5 on application), the only modules people had been exposed to were older edition ones; for 3.x the DMs were making all the material from scratch, with callouts to old modules they knew.

I was barely aware that WOTC was publishing new adventures.

So, I'd say raw familiarity is a big, big component, partly arising from a large number of DMs realizing they don't need premade adventures at all.