What you want in a module

[rounser]

If you could buy a campaign world and then purchase a series of linked adventures

I think that there's a difference between a series of linked adventures and a true campaign, and it's one that is partially decided by the format of "all in one book" versus "sequel modules".

For example, sequel modules such as the Adventure Path series almost demand railroading from one to the next because of the way they're presented (as stand-alone modules). An entire campaign in one book allows for a different approach that doesn't have to allow for people who lack part of the campaign.

that would require little more than personalization to your PC's how many of you would be interested in that sort of thing?

Me, but I've already said that.

are there a significant number of GM's who would like their creativity minimized and their execution emphasized?

It appears that you're implying that high detail products kill creativity. I would counter that by saying that sometimes you just want to play, and sod campaign preparation and all the time it demands. On top of that, I would say that if you want to get creative with a big module with a high level of detail, there's always scope for that - you just change what's been written until it's to your liking, or add new material to it. There doesn't have to be skeletal or missing parts to it to do that.

It seems to be RPG publisher culture to leave significant work for the DM to do when it comes to creating a campaign - often even individual adventures leave gaping holes or a low amount of detail on an important campaign area (for instance, the village of Rastor in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, which serves as a launchpad into the temple for PCs and gets a single page of detail. It would have been nice not to have to flesh it out in order to run the campaign with the level of detail I want to run).

I think that this is something that has to change in order for the hobby to reach a wider audience - I'd assume that, just occasionally, a lot of DMs don't want to spend hours filling in campaign detail, but would rather be able to run something "off the shelf" that doesn't require "finishing off". I'd rather fill in the holes in my own material than someone else's - there's more than enough to keep me occupied doing that - and I'd like to have the option to abstain from doing so.

The hobby already demands an significant investment of time from players, and especially DMs if they want to run an above average game. High quality, detailed, published, finished campaigns would serve to cut that time spent on preparation down to an option, rather than almost a demand. I think that's not only good for DMs who would rather spend money on campaign preparation than time, but also would increase the popularity of D&D as a whole, opening it up to an audience who would rather play than prepare.

 

[Larry Fitz]

Just so as were on the same page here, a book of say 180-280 pages, that would need to be purchased in conjunction with a Campaign setting, taking characters from level 1 to whatever (for argument's sake let's say 12) with cross referenced adventure grid so that the PC's could proceed in a non-linear fashion, but still allowing for the DM to make the various adventures challenging no matter what order they proceeded in. It would include detailed maps of specific ares involved in the adventures as well as full sets of random encounters for the various environs traveled through by the PC's. This is a product you would want?

I ask not to be facetious or to denigrate anyone's DMing style. I'm more interested from the point of view of a creator of gaming products.

 

[rounser]

Just so as were on the same page here, a book of say 180-280 pages, that would need to be purchased in conjunction with a Campaign setting, taking characters from level 1 to whatever (for argument's sake let's say 12) with cross referenced adventure grid so that the PC's could proceed in a non-linear fashion, but still allowing for the DM to make the various adventures challenging no matter what order they proceeded in. It would include detailed maps of specific ares involved in the adventures as well as full sets of random encounters for the various environs traveled through by the PC's. This is a product you would want?

Yes, something like that - status quo areas and non-linearity is something with the DMG talks about, but rarely do you see the resources for carrying it out published, without requiring either significantly more fleshing out or freeform DMing. This is why I hold the recently published, detail-heavy city books in esteem - they save a lot of work in making a city which is more than just a skeleton of sparse detail.

Such a product could even be just a "DM's playground", with no story arc, but an area the size of, say, a village or two and environs, including dungeons, wilderness lairs, NPCs and urban areas detailed down to encounter level (i.e. traps, monsters, treasure, NPCs with personalities, individual buildings and what the shops sell), plus mini-adventures with hooks that can be sprung in the area at DM discretion and involve those NPCs and locations.

At least a small area of the campaign could come to life for PCs to explore without the DM needing to wink and nudge that he hasn't populated that dungeon yet, so please don't go there just yet, or having to make it up on the fly. Presumably you could overlay whatever adventures with plots or story arcs over those foundations, which is where DMs seem to enjoy spending their time the most (besides worldbuilding or making maps, it seems).

Perhaps I'm just jaded with seeing published campaigns which are almost exclusively based around episodic railroading or megadungeons. Occasionally you see glimpses of another way in products like In Search of Adventure (which featured adventure redundancy depending on which path the PCs took), the Night Below (which had above-ground environs which were almost detailed enough to let the PCs roam where they chose and find interesting things to do) or Ruins of Adventure (which was based on a semi-non-linear CRPG, and therefore allowed for a lot more player choice of what to do next than your average P&P module), but I don't think these angles have been pursued more than at a token level.

 

[Psion]

You offer some great advice, but I was wondering if you could expand on your comment about putting challenges in parallel. Can you give a couple of examples to help clarify a bit?

Okay. A simple fact is that most encounters in D&D are intended to be cakewalks, at least when considered alone. But naturally, DMs and adventure writers will want to create challenges (be they combat, puzzles, negotiations, or what have you.) But if you really try to make these events challenging, there will be some chance that the players will fail to overcome the obstacle.

Let's say you have three encounters you want to put into your game: a puzzle, a combat, and a negotiation. Let's say there is a real chance that the players won't overcome all of these challenges. Say 10%.

Now, if you require that the PCs overcome all three challenges to beat the adventure, the chance of them outright failing to meet their goals in the story are pretty significant, close to thrity percent. (27.1% to be exact). You should brace yourself for the very real possibility that the players will fail to meet the objective of the adventure. (Now that isn't a fate worse than death if you plan for the possibility of failure, another thing that many adventures fail to do. BID.)

On the other hand, if you set up the situation where succeeding in any one of those three is sufficient, and the players having failed at one my try another, you aren't so likely to trounce the players. The chance of failing the adventure goes down (drastically, like .1%) despite the fact that each encounter contained a modicum of challenge. In fact, you can safely play with more challenging single encounters if you arrange them in parallel.

 

[Walter_J]

Yes, something like that - status quo areas and non-linearity is something with the DMG talks about, but rarely do you see the resources for carrying it out published, without requiring either significantly more fleshing out or freeform DMing. This is why I hold the recently published, detail-heavy city books in esteem - they save a lot of work in making a city which is more than just a skeleton of sparse detail.

Such a product could even be just a "DM's playground", with no story arc, but an area the size of, say, a village or two and environs, including dungeons, wilderness lairs, NPCs and urban areas detailed down to encounter level (i.e. traps, monsters, treasure, NPCs with personalities, individual buildings and what the shops sell), plus mini-adventures with hooks that can be sprung in the area at DM discretion and involve those NPCs and locations.

At least a small area of the campaign could come to life for PCs to explore without the DM needing to wink and nudge that he hasn't populated that dungeon yet, so please don't go there just yet, or having to make it up on the fly. Presumably you could overlay whatever adventures with plots or story arcs over those foundations, which is where DMs seem to enjoy spending their time the most (besides worldbuilding or making maps, it seems).

Perhaps I'm just jaded with seeing published campaigns which are almost exclusively based around episodic railroading or megadungeons. Occasionally you see glimpses of another way in products like In Search of Adventure (which featured adventure redundancy depending on which path the PCs took), the Night Below (which had above-ground environs which were almost detailed enough to let the PCs roam where they chose and find interesting things to do) or Ruins of Adventure (which was based on a semi-non-linear CRPG, and therefore allowed for a lot more player choice of what to do next than your average P&P module), but I don't think these angles have been pursued more than at a token level.

Check out NRP's Realms of Althoria "Portal to Adventure" and "Guide to Adventure" product lines. A Guide to Adventure covers, say, the equivalent of a 30 mile hex detailed on a 1 mile per hex level. The Guide covers communities, NPCs, adventure sites, lairs, etc... And also provide rumors, optional story lines that can be used to link things together, NPC motivations etc... For the adventure sites, an optional encounter chart is included to help GM's scale/customize encounters if they don't prefer a total "status quo" approach, or they can simply let the encounters stand as is. NPCs have their own motivations and agenda, wether or not the PC encounter them giving the GM the opportunity to play "behind the scenes" if they desire and really bring the setting to life.

A Portal to Adventure focuses, in general, on an adventure site which can be used stand alone or plugged into to an appropriate Guide to Adventure.

All told the products are very "modular" allowing GM's to expand and link together where they choose without having to buy products that they'll never use, or won't use in the immediate future.

There are paragraphs at the top and bottom of each page our web-site that explain the various features of our products. And please feel free to drop me a line or catch me on these message boards if you have any questions. I'm also in the process of setting up our own ezboard Forums. They exist and are functional, but are not quite as organized as I want them to be at the moment.
Good gaming!
Walter

 

[adndgamer]

I want hack n slash in a game! A good ol' dungeon crawl complete with deadly traps and riddles and magic items.

 

[Piratecat]

Anyone else? Interesting thread.

 

[Chaldfont]

Electronic Support!

I love it when publishers put extras on the web. But I still have not seen the most useful yet: a tab-delimited text file of combat stats for all monsters and NPCs. I can import this into excel and print sections out. Or I can print each on index cards for use during combat.

I would also like to see more player handouts like maps, pictures, notes and such--I love giving something to my players to jumpstart their imagination.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I want hack n slash in a game! A good ol' dungeon crawl complete with deadly traps and riddles and magic items.

You need to get Prisioners of the Maze then. It seems perfect for a tourney style game but inserting it into an individual campaign seems a little more difficult due to the far ranging feach of not only trying to assassinate a king, but the special abilitites that the pregenerated characters have that need to be emulated as well.

 

[Setanta]

I love it when publishers put extras on the web. But I still have not seen the most useful yet: a tab-delimited text file of combat stats for all monsters and NPCs. I can import this into excel and print sections out. Or I can print each on index cards for use during combat.

I would like to see a publisher go the extra step and offer NPC and unique monster stats in an electronic format that's easily importable into PCGen/DMF/RPM as part of a web enhancement.