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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6232149" data-attributes="member: 22424">A lot of these are tricky to answer - it's hard to define what exactly it is, but "I know it when I see it".That said, I'm inclined to think that the difference between a good adventure and a bad one boils down to meaningful choices. That is, it should be possible for the PCs to approach the adventure in many different ways and have the choices they make cause the adventure to play out very differently.So, there should be multiple routes through the encounters in the adventure, including skipping some encounters entirely. There should be multiple ways to deal with those encounters: fighting, diplomacy, stealth...The other important thing, that is less important (IMO) that meaningful choice, but is still vital is that the adventure itself must be of interest. There should be an interesting setting and/or interesting villains and/or and interesting story... sort of. That last one, in particular, is a risk, because it can conflict with the need to have choices, so the designers should probably provide, at most, the outline for a story which the PCs can then proceed to thoroughly derail.I agree, though not actually for the same reason. Too many of them are sorely lacking in meaningful choices for my taste. And even the 'good' ones too often provide the illusion of choice only.Indeed, even many of the 'good' Pathfinder adventure path volumes have a nasty habit of offering the choice between A, B, and C... only for it to turn out that the PCs eventually have to tackle all three, so they're really only choosing the order in which they tackle things.What I don't like about your approach is that it leaves too much for the DM to do. If I'm using a pre-gen adventure, it's because I don't have time to put something together myself. I don't want it to leave lots of stuff undefined - I want to read the adventure and be good to go.Given the sheer number and breadth of adventures that are available, I don't think I need any individual adventure to adapt very far in level range - if I have 8th level PCs, I'll just pick and adventure to suit.Again, I'm inclined to disagree. Ideally, there would be scope for a great many adventures, both setting specific and setting independent, and DMs could choose accordingly. I don't see any need for adventures by default to be usable by everyone.(Having said that, there are very solid commercial reasons for WotC and others to only produce setting independent adventures - specifically, that doing so maximises the potential customer base. But that's a commercial consideration; I'm not sure it's a factor in adventure quality.)</blockquote>

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