D&D General What makes a good Adventure

[Parmandur]

You know what makes a good adventure?
Good players.

Maybe the real Adventure was the friends we made along the way, after all

 

[GMMichael]

A good adventure is one that you can run several times and never have it play anywhere close to the same way twice. Non-sequentiality, loops, different possible enemy moves, mazes and confusion - all of these elements and more can help meet this goal. Jacquays it to hell, in other words.

Oh, and the adventure has to have enough rooms/encouters/etc. to make the non-sequentiality and loops etc. matter. A ten-room dungeon simply can't be big enough to fulfill this function.

What's the difference between this and several adventures that happen to have a few characters and/or locations in common?

I want:

1. A general area described. Depending on the scope it could be a region, a town, or castle. Not in great detail, but with general locations, adventure hooks and ideas. Major NPCs, factions, and forces at work described, but not detail. Not much story baggage.
2. Discrete detailed encounters. These should include expected level ranges (and suggestions on how to revise the level / challenge), scenarios packed with interesting and engaging information, and options for combat and/or social and/or exploration as needed.
3. Adventure ideas. A series of suggestions and ideas how these different encounters might link up. Suggestions on how an different resolutions of different encounters might affect other encounters.

I don't quite see how these elements fall into place. They describe how I write sessions (not adventures) as a GM, but they're too nebulous to make an adventure - especially for a novice GM. Without "story baggage," there's not a lot of detail to add to the encounters. Encounters just become Place Where Ogres Are Standing, The Tricky Door Built by a Nameless Gnome, and the Forest. If one then gives me an "3. adventure idea," for example, "the PCs might navigate the forest in order to find the Tricky Door which, if undefeated, reveals the Place Where Ogres Are Standing off to the left," my response is, "you didn't put a lot of thought into this, did you?"

I could see, depending on scale, that these could even be broken out into several books / pamphlets. Either initially or through expansions.

Yup. Let's see if Lanefan agrees.

What do think makes a good adventure. What do you want?

I want a multi-path, nitty-gritty-detailed railroad. But none of this wall-of-text garbage. I want it cross-referenced with an easy visual layout - a picture is worth a thousand words. Or: hyperlinked with ToolTips/EncounterTips. Otherwise I'll write something myself.

 

[Emerikol]

I think the way some of you have used the term Adventure is pretty broad. So I will go with the flow...

1. There are "encounters (both social and combat)" that just evolve from the setting. This is inevitable if you have a great set of NPCs and an immersive well designed world.
2. There are "dungeons (castles, houses, sewers, caverns, etc..)" where the group will focus for a few sessions or more. This is not a railroad. You can have a lot of opportunities for these types of things in a sandbox.

For encounters: All I can say is the more interesting you make your world and the more you establish relationships that connect the NPCs and ultimately the PCs, the more easily it will be to have these happen successfully and they be fun. Players like to find letters, papers, etc... where bad guys are up to something. It's often cool to give them enough to wet their appetite without giving them everything. This can feed into and from dungeons.

For dungeons:
1. Pick a motif. Vengeance, Rescue, Exploration, etc... Provide some motivation.
2. Figure out who the builders where and how its being used now. If it's really old you could think about intervening generations of inhabitants. Just have a feel. You don't have to do a ton but it helps to know some things.
3. Draw the dungeon to suit the builders. Change the dungeon to suit the current inhabitants. Leave evidence of the builders.
4. Provide a good mix of traps, puzzles, and combat encounters.
5. Play the monsters as smart as they are. Create the monster close order action drills ahead of time so when the party does something unexpected you aren't tempted to have the monsters adjust too easily. This devotion to fairness will be appreciated by the players.
6. In combat, make tactics matter, For traps, make skill use matter. Never take into account the skills of the players. Think of the skills of the builders or current inhabitants. That way PCs with high skills will be rewarded for having them and those without won't have the world adjusting so the skill looks as though it was never needed.

 

[delericho]

For me, it depends what it's sold as. If they're selling an adventure for me to add to my campaign, what I'm mostly looking for is something I can slot in easily - a fairly tight location and relatively little outside impact.

If, however, they're selling a "campaign in a box", like most of the recent WotC adventures, then I expect just that. In that case I pretty much don't care about adapting it to my setting - I'll use the one provided. And in that case I do want the compelling story, the interesting plots, and so on. (In this case I also don't care about the ability to pull bits of the adventure out and use them separately. I have loads of other adventures I can do that with.)

I don't particularly have a preference between these - both have value to me in different situations. But what I want is for the adventure to do really well at the thing it tells me it is.

(Actually, a case in point: "Storm King's Thunder" is a really good setting guide to a big chunk of the Realms, wrapped around a fairly middling adventure. Since it's sold as an adventure, I therefore rate it as "middling". The other stuff that it does can't make up for that.)

 

[Lanefan]

What's the difference between this and several adventures that happen to have a few characters and/or locations in common?

Scale.

The question asked in the OP referenced "adventure" in the singular, where what you're speaking of is more like a campaign.

Taking the same general principles up to the multi-adventure campaign scale is a worthwhile endeavour, to be sure; but the replayability issue isn't nearly as front-and-centre as replaying a whole campaign is far less common than is replaying a single adventure.