D&D 5E What kind of adventures might you buy?

What kinds of adventure products might you buy?

  • Single Adventure (multiple sessions)

    Votes: 31 51.7%
  • Side Track Adventure (single session)

    Votes: 15 25.0%
  • Multiple Related Adventures

    Votes: 9 15.0%
  • Multiple Related Side Tracks

    Votes: 5 8.3%

  • Poll closed .
Umm, single side trek, I guess? I mean, I want a lot of them, but not tied to any specific setting or theme. Just a lot of generic, short, brief, concise, lightweight, simple, concise adventures I can pull out of a hat whenever I need to. Preferably around 1 page per adventure, so I can understand it just by looking at it, without having to memorize a goddamn 300-page textbook.

Example: http://burnedfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Greg-Gillespie-_-The-Bastion-of-the-Boglings.pdf
 

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I've actually bought Tiamat (borrowed HotDQ from another DM), plus some 3e Single Adventures.

I'd be most interested in #3, but not as BIG as WotC's mega-plots.
Price of ink factors into session costs, too.
 

I was all set to answer "Single Adventure (multiple sessions of play)," because that's my preference. And then I saw this:

Assume all offerings are PDFs with B&W art and priced no higher than $10 for largest offering.

If I'm paying no more than $10 and receiving B&W art, I definitely do NOT want a multiple-session single adventure. That sounds to me like it's more on par with what I voted, "Side Track Adventure (single session of play). I expect higher production value (and a higher corresponding cost) in any multiple-session single adventure that I purchase. I'm not interesting in poor production quality in a product I will be spending a significant amount of time with. I'd buy it for a side track adventure, though.
 

I went with "multiple related adventures," and I'm a little surprised it's not a more common response. I like stuff along the lines of the old Al-Qadim sourceboxes, where there would be 5-10 short-ish adventures that all centered around a common theme or location. They could be run in sequence or individually, and could work together well but did not build off each other (you did not need to finish one to use another). That style has the greatest flexibility, in my opinion.
 

I was all set to answer "Single Adventure (multiple sessions of play)," because that's my preference. And then I saw this:



If I'm paying no more than $10 and receiving B&W art, I definitely do NOT want a multiple-session single adventure. That sounds to me like it's more on par with what I voted, "Side Track Adventure (single session of play). I expect higher production value (and a higher corresponding cost) in any multiple-session single adventure that I purchase. I'm not interesting in poor production quality in a product I will be spending a significant amount of time with. I'd buy it for a side track adventure, though.

Hm. Interesting. Even as a PDF you'd still expect to pay more for the multi-session adventure?
 

I wasn't clear. I flat out wouldn't purchase a multi-session adventure that came only as a black and white .pdf. If I am in the market for an adventure I'm going to be using for multiple sessions (something I will be looking at, reading, thumbing through, and generally relying on), I want great production quality. And I'm willing to pay more to get a high quality product. Black and white products aren't something I want to spend a significant amount of my time using. My preference is for a hard copy product with beautifully done full-color professional art. If a .pdf is included in the purchase price, great. It's handy to have both the hard copy and the .pdf, but the hard copy is what I'll most often go to.
 

It depends. I've purchased all those types for different reasons. I'm pretty busy running the AP's from WotC but am also running the AL adventures and bits and pieces out of the starter box and the AP's. I'm also running the classic mods.
 

Hiya!

I wasn't clear. I flat out wouldn't purchase a multi-session adventure that came only as a black and white .pdf. If I am in the market for an adventure I'm going to be using for multiple sessions (something I will be looking at, reading, thumbing through, and generally relying on), I want great production quality. And I'm willing to pay more to get a high quality product. Black and white products aren't something I want to spend a significant amount of my time using. My preference is for a hard copy product with beautifully done full-color professional art. If a .pdf is included in the purchase price, great. It's handy to have both the hard copy and the .pdf, but the hard copy is what I'll most often go to.

o_O ... Just goes to show you that the whole "different strokes for different folks" is alive and kicking! :D Time for some "blatant plagerism" (for emphasis):

Me? Complete opposite outlook than you.

"I won't purchase (or be loath to at the least) a multi-session adventure that comes only as full color print. If I am in the market for an adventure I'm going to be using for multiple sessions (something I will be looking at, reading, thumbing through, and generally relying on), I want great production quality. And I'm willing to pay more to get a high quality product. Full colour products aren't something I want to spend a significant amount of my time using. My preference is for a PDF product with beautifully done b/w and greyscale art. If a print is included in the purchase price, great. It's handy to have both the hard copy and the .pdf, but the print is what I'll be least likely to most often go to".

;)

I'm not sure if I'm picking this up from you or not...but...do you honestly think that you can't have a quality product that is b/w/greyscale? I think you and I also have a difference in opinion on "quality product". To me, having something full colour, with fancy boarders, coloured text on an image background (like 'parchment' or 'stone', etc), and artwork that frequently takes up a quarter or more of a page, with 'wrap around' text is the opposite of "quality RPG product" (notice I said RPG?). For me, a DM, I want easy to read (no colour ink or background), easy to follow (no/very little wrap around text), and most definitely no glossy pages necessary for all that colour, and easy to write in or otherwise mark up stuff in the adventure...hence my preference for PDF's.

That said...what really cheeses my wheels is when a product it created in PDF/digital, and then the publisher basically treats that PDF as nothing more than a text file with pictures. *fume* If you are going to make a digital-only product using PDF, use the cool stuff in PDF's!!!. If you have a boarder or fancy background, put it on a layer I can turn off if/when I want to print. If you have art, put it on a layer that I can turn off or otherwise 'degrade' somehow for less ink-intinsive printing. Take the maps and give me options to print them in B/W, "line" B/W, "old skool blue", etc., and let me turn on/off important stuff on them like room numbers and secret doors/areas so I can print "player maps" if I need/want to. Most importantly, use links for important locations, monsters, spells, etc., and even put in links to stuff you (the publisher/writer) have on the web ("digital downloads" for sounds, music, or other useful/fun stuff). A linked Index is a must. But link a new monster to the write up for it. Link a numbered location on a map to that locations description or whatever. In short, take advantage of all the cool stuff you can do with a PDF that you can't with a printed product.

Anyway...1e modules FTW! (as far as what I think is the best quality product...I wish there were PDF's back when 1e was still 'new').

^_^

Paul L. Ming
 
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Hmm. As phrased, all four of the choices on offer might be equally likely or unlikely to catch my interest, all things being equal, and my preferences would be heavily weighted by entirely different factors.

So the things I would be considering:

1) Is it heavily dependent on connections to the author or publisher's pet setting? I'm almost certainly running a homebew setting or something in an already-established world, and I'm looking for something that's likely to be easy to drop in, or at least shoehorn with minimal effort. If I have to do a lot of reskinning or rewriting, it's not worth it to me.
2) Is it modular? Related to the above, my first preference is for material I can easily break bits off of and drop into my own existing games if I don't want to use the whole thing from beginning to end. If you're heavily wedded to an adventure path model that relies on a delicate machinery of interconnected events happening in the right order to make sense - well, honestly, that's probably what I'm already doing in my own campaign, and I don't need the added complication of yours too. :) Give me a box of cool bits that beg to be remixed, and I'll be salivating to get my hands on the next one.
2a) And this is tricky, but does it take care to avoid unfounded assumptions about the way I run games? Part of this is a vote against boxed text (which I dislike and never use, though others' MMV), and part of it a much less tangible thing about the way the text addresses the reader. My preferences are for lots of neutral if-then statements and suggestions to solve problems or address complications that may come up during play, over a lot of over-specificity that clashes with the way I actually set scenes or address players. This is sort of hard to describe in the abstract, only that it grates on me when it's off, and so maybe a good general note is that while flowery isn't always bad in your text prose, it's a spice that calls for sparing application.
3) Is it clever? This is really subjective, of course, but I surely don't need a published dungeon crawl; I can do that with a blank map (or just some graph paper and mapping dice, even) and a random monster table. Likewise, one more goblin raid or drow conspiracy will make me go, "Next." Give me something I didn't know I needed; give me cool ideas I can't wait to make use of. It doesn't have to be something that's never been done ever, or revolutionizes the concept of the RPG module; but something as deliciously twisted as the inbred ogre clans in Rise of the Runelords, or as off the wall as the Society of Brilliance in Out of the Abyss, will get me really quick to "Shut up and take my money."
4) Is it well designed and laid out? B&W is fine, but a layout by someone who seems to have never heard of white space, or not to understand or care enough about making eye-friendly choices in font and headers and fiddly bits, is not not not. Modern and slick, or old-school retro, both great, but show me you care enough to think (or hire a friend who can think) like a designer and publisher before you ask for my bread, or you'll have none of it.
5) Does it show signs of having been touched by an editor? This is a BIG one for me in deciding whether something is worth depleting my bank account. Maybe that editor is just you, because that's all you can afford, but if so I hope to the gods you own a Chicago Manual or your equivalent-of-choice and know your way around it (with the added caution that comes with knowing that your own work is that much harder to edit). Please don't ask me to pay for prose that makes me cringe. Please assure me you have been applying standards of punctuation, orthography, capitalization, and morphology that are consistent both internally and with an accepted standard for published prose. (Note that I am not talking about the dumb crap they get het up about on Grammarly; I am a card-carrying descriptivist, and hope you feel free to use passive voice and split verb phrases as much as they're called for. But I do hope you have enough sense of sprachgefühl to know how to string words together in a way that is pleasing rather than dull and painful, and enough technical learning to know when you've just committed a comma splice and why you probably shouldn't.)

So, yeah, those are my criteria. Easy, right? This is why I don't make polls.
 

Just curious, have you never bought & printed an adventure?
I'm not [MENTION=34804]EdL[/MENTION] but for my part, no I haven't; and I've no real intention of doing so.

A series of reasons for this:
- my printers tend to die off fast enough without yet more wear and tear
- I can't support my FLGS this way
- depending on variables like module length and amount of black space in the art etc. the cost of the ink might exceed the cost of the product being printed
- you'll probably want payment via paypal, which I refuse to use (my own choice, I know)

That said, print 'em off, bind 'em up and get 'em in my FLGS and I'm all in for good freestanding (i.e. non-path) adventures!

Lan-"preferably with maps on detached folding cardstock a la many 1e modules"-efan
 

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