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What do you want in a published adventure? / Adventure design best practices?
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<blockquote data-quote="LordEntrails" data-source="post: 7157520" data-attributes="member: 6804070"><p>An adventure doesn't. Most <em>published</em> adventures should. Remember, DMs who are comfortable with running sandbox/open world campaigns are not the target for most published adventures.</p><p></p><p>Though I have to say my basis for that opinion is purely conjecture with minimal empirical evidence and only a limited amount of relevant anecdotes. IMO, those of us on this forum and in this discussion are not the target audience for most published adventures.</p><p></p><p>"Linear" is a charged word, and maybe not what I was thinking of with that statement. To me, Bone Hill was still a pretty linear adventure (note that is has been a few decades since I last played or read it). Yes it has options for the PC's, and various closed loops, but it is still Do A, Do B, etc. It's just that there are many ways to accomplish A and B. And I too thought it was well designed.</p><p></p><p>I still think the target audience for most published adventures (80+% ?) is for those DMs that are; inexperienced, not comfortable with improvisation, or don't have or want to take the time to create their own adventures. Therefore published adventures should be easy to run.</p><p></p><p>For instance, I like PotA, but it is not easy to run. Unless you completely railroad the party along a proscribed path, then it's not a good adventure. But, if you run it open, then it's a good adventure (path) but the module organization is difficult and it requires a great deal of DM prep to run it well. To me, it's not a good "published adventure" and is much closer to a campaign setting or plot.</p><p></p><p>(Then again, part of that goes back to my feelings that an adventure should be something that takes a level or 3 to accomplish, and a campaign is something that takes 10, 15, or 20 levels to accomplish.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="LordEntrails, post: 7157520, member: 6804070"] An adventure doesn't. Most [I]published[/I] adventures should. Remember, DMs who are comfortable with running sandbox/open world campaigns are not the target for most published adventures. Though I have to say my basis for that opinion is purely conjecture with minimal empirical evidence and only a limited amount of relevant anecdotes. IMO, those of us on this forum and in this discussion are not the target audience for most published adventures. "Linear" is a charged word, and maybe not what I was thinking of with that statement. To me, Bone Hill was still a pretty linear adventure (note that is has been a few decades since I last played or read it). Yes it has options for the PC's, and various closed loops, but it is still Do A, Do B, etc. It's just that there are many ways to accomplish A and B. And I too thought it was well designed. I still think the target audience for most published adventures (80+% ?) is for those DMs that are; inexperienced, not comfortable with improvisation, or don't have or want to take the time to create their own adventures. Therefore published adventures should be easy to run. For instance, I like PotA, but it is not easy to run. Unless you completely railroad the party along a proscribed path, then it's not a good adventure. But, if you run it open, then it's a good adventure (path) but the module organization is difficult and it requires a great deal of DM prep to run it well. To me, it's not a good "published adventure" and is much closer to a campaign setting or plot. (Then again, part of that goes back to my feelings that an adventure should be something that takes a level or 3 to accomplish, and a campaign is something that takes 10, 15, or 20 levels to accomplish.) [/QUOTE]
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