What makes a published adventure great?

[Quickleaf]

In my mind all the content stuff described so far helps define a GOOD adventure, whether or not it is published.

If we're talking about GREAT *published* adventures, then in addition to meeting the requirements for a GOOD adventure, I think usability/adaptability and convenience are the defining features. D&D varies a lot from table to table, and an adventure which can adapt to different play styles is on its way to being great. Also, if I'm turning to a published adventure rather than my own it's probably to save time (unless it's a classic D&D adventure, in which case it's for nostalgia); so I need an outline or flowchart of events, an index or table of contents, call-outs pointing where the PCs might go into uncharted territory and how to handle it, some guidelines on scaling the adventure for party size/level/composition, clear maps, useful player handouts, etc.

 

[delericho]

Number one thing is that it actually saves time compared with writing your own. If an adventure says "read the whole thing thoroughly before use" anywhere, it probably fails this test.

Depends how good the adventure actually is. Creating your own adventure is pretty quick. Creating a good adventure for your own use... that's a much greater undertaking.

Requiring that a published adventure be usable without the requirement to read it before use is likely to kill any hope of it being worth using.

 

[Dwimmerlied]

Requiring that a published adventure be usable without the requirement to read it before use is likely to kill any hope of it being worth using.

Just an idea, perhaps they could design it to be run episodically. I think it might be possible to include only enough information for roughly the four encounters likely to be played in a given session, with a little advice on winging it at certain forking points, or including some pointers if derailing is likely to happen.

 

[pemerton]

When I "use" an adventure, what I take from it is usually a map, one or more story elements, and perhaps hints of a situation.

So for me, a memorable adventure should have a good map, evocative story elements, and compelling situations. Stats and the like are, for me, secondary; I can work out stats easily enough myself (and have done a lot of system conversion of adventures over my GMing career).

One published adventure that I used in this way (converted to Rolemaster) was OA7: Test of the Samurai. I don't remember much about the maps in this one, but it had evocative story elements - a bansihsed celestial bureaucrat who, having thereby lost his immortality, takes steps to regain it by turning all the atmosphere of the world into a subtance that only he can breathe but that is poisonous to everyoen else; a snake cult; a peachling girl who rides through the Momoben Forest on tigers; etc - and suggested some interesting situations, such as travelling to the plane of the animal kings to get help from the king of birds (a phoenix) whose subjects are being poisoned by the changes in the atmosphere.

If I was to make a general criticism of WotC (and for that matter TSR) modules, it would be that they don't do enough on the "compelling situations" front: they introduce evocative story elements, but don't make the effort to come up with ideas where that story element actually feeds into dramatic conflicts involving the PCs. For instance, Speaker in Dreams has the interesting idea of the Baron of the town being under the influence of a shadowy evil being - in the module it is mind control by a mind flayer; in the version of that module that I ran, it was the ordinary influence of an evil advisor. But the module doesn't take any steps to bring this to the forefront of the action. When I ran (my version of) that adventure, I (i) grounded it in prior events that had brought the PCs into conflict with the advisor, and (ii) brought events to a climax by having the baron, quite sincerely, invite the PCs to a dinner at which not just he but his evil advisor was present.

That's what I consider a compelling situation: the players have to decide whether they will confront the advisor, or try to stay friendly with the baron, or somehow (as my players ultimately did) try to achieve both. Without this sort of situation, the most evocative story elements are still just window-dressing.

I don't subscribe to DDI, but an adventure in the free numbers of Dungeon that came out at the start of 4e - Heathen - did have a compelling (if somewhat predictable) situation at its core: the PCs go on a mission to learn the fate of a paladin who went missing on his mission to fight an evil cult, and

Spoiler

discover that the paladin has fallen, and become the leader of the cult. They then have to choose whether simply to kill him, or rather to try and rescue and redeem him.

That's the sort of thing that I think helps make for a memorable adventure.

 

[delericho]

Just an idea, perhaps they could design it to be run episodically.

That's an interesting idea. It's perhaps worth noting that both "Red Hand of Doom" and "Shackled City" did something in this vein - RHoD had five discrete chapters that each took place in a different location, while "Shackled City" was a compilation of 11 Dungeon adventures (plus a 'missing' twelth chapter), and so had a built-in episode structure.

I think it might be possible to include only enough information for roughly the four encounters likely to be played in a given session,

My sessions are 3 hours long, so those "four encounters likely to be played" are actually three encounters. So adopting as rigid an episode structure as you suggest would make an adventure significantly worse for me than not having such a built-in structure. And since published adventures are already the most niche of niche products, they really do need to maintain maximum usefulness.

So, they should by all means split the adventure into segments (episodes, chapters, whatever), but they need to stay away from assuming that a group will have sessions of X hours and will therefore get through Y encounters - that's just an assumption too far.

with a little advice on winging it at certain forking points, or including some pointers if derailing is likely to happen.

Those are good ideas. And, actually, they're good ideas regardless of whether the adventure adopts an episode structure or not.

 

[howandwhy99]

Published or otherwise what makes a great adventure is when we the players play awesomely in it. Now the material in the game can lack understanding of what makes games good, which usually is a mark of a poor game scenario, but the adventure itself can be awesome because of what we do with it. Plus, a good referee can actually fix a lousy adventure before converting it to the game rules and then implementing it into play. It depends on how good that person actually is with understanding well designed game material though. That ability doesn't necessarily make them a good Referee, but the skills overlap a good bit.

How can that be? Well, think of how folks can be remarkably good at playing games, but aren't necessarily good at designing them. You don't have to be a Chess Master to design a good game nor is a great game designer even only very good at playing ...but as I said, a lot of the same skills come up. Specifically for a Referee of a D&D game it's similar, though it isn't about one's playing ability, but their refereeing ability. As D&D is really a puzzle game the difference here is in how capable the person is at relating the puzzle behind the screen and operating as the players attempt and create changes. Clarifying with the players is key, so is being objective and making solid judgment calls about the puzzle itself. However, just because the Referee holds the hidden blueprints of the puzzle doesn't mean he or she may actually know the different solutions to it. That's actually what the players are mastering - not the game's design, but it's operation. Anyways, being a good D&D ref usually means being able to design and run games well. Again, there's a good bit of cross over.

 

[Libramarian]

Depends how good the adventure actually is. Creating your own adventure is pretty quick. Creating a good adventure for your own use... that's a much greater undertaking.

Requiring that a published adventure be usable without the requirement to read it before use is likely to kill any hope of it being worth using.

What I have in mind for an adventure that wouldn't need to be read very thoroughly before use is a sandboxy adventure where each of the individual encounters are capable of being run off the page without prior study. So maybe you would read a page or two of introduction/background, and then read the rest as you go along in whatever order the PCs encounter it. I have run classic 1e modules this way and it generally works well. I would consider them very good adventures, maybe not great, but certainly worth using. I can envision a truly great adventure that looks like this, if the encounters are all brilliant.

The one module that didn't work well when I tried to run it this lazily was C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, because some of the room descriptions in that dungeon are very long and they play out differently depending on which entrance the PCs come in. But it still worked OK, it was just kind of clunky.

 

[Hussar]

I tend to look at B4 The Lost City as the high water mark of a good module.

This is a module that really has everything. You've got very interesting puzzles - the spinning elevator thingie with buttons is very cool, three competing factions that the PC's can join which will change how the rest of the module plays out, depending on which they join, verticality, which is something many dungeons lack, and a pretty compelling overall story.

You could expand it to a mini-campaign without too much difficulty as well.

For me, if you want to see what a great module looks like, that's where I'd start.

 

[Blackbrrd]

First, some digressions

Red Hand of Doom was a great adventure in my opinion. It did a lot of things very well:
- Every decision mattered for the big city attack towards the end of the module.
- Multiple interesting locations, so little railroading.
- Very easy to run as a DM for a 128 page module
- Lots of content, more than you would expect for a 128 page module
- Interesting set-piece battles
- Really easy to modify to taste

It is probably the best module I have ever run.

I am going to run Reavers of Harkenworld (4e module) which after reading it looks like a bad replica of Red Hand of Doom. It feels a lot less open-ended than RHoD, and has way too much focus on the encounters. Instead of being and adventure with encounters, it's an adventure of encounters.

The thing that Reavers of Harkenworld has going for it is the basic premise of the adventure is solid and open-ended. I will probably modify it quite heavily according to the PC's actions and use the NPC stats and so on.

I am also going to run Madness at Gardmoore Abbey which looks to have a relatively involved backstory and quite a lot of interesting details. I do think that the basic premise of the module is weak, but it does have some NPC's that are quite well detailed.

What I dislike the most about the adventure is the use of DM-PC's. I just can't stand them. It's one of the things that made me stop running War of the Burning Sky. I think adding DM-PC's to an adventure group really adds to the rail-roading factor and a lot of modules makes it relatively awkward to write them out of the story - or include them in some other way.

Conclusions
I think [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] really hits the nail on the head with his comment regarding what makes a module great - the usability/adaptability and convenience you gain by using it.

I think that something from object oriented programming thought process can be used here. Have simple modules that are easy to understand that make up the complex system (adventure), instead of one big complex adventure. This is one of the basic reasons I think adventures like Red Hand of Doom gained so much success.