When Adventure Designers Cheat

[Psion]

I think its falsity is born out by the fact that what some people on this thread are calling good adventure design, others are calling bad.

That both adventures are actually occurring suggest just the opposite.

It's just that some players have different standards for what they find enjoyable in a game.

 

[Crothian]

It's just that some players have different standards for what they find enjoyable in a game.

I also it might matter on how they were exposed to it. A DM of good quality can make things seem mystical and new. While one that players have no trust in will be seen as abusing the rules and trying to screw of the players.

 

[Celebrim]

This is a good sword to get from beating three trolls which are probably the equivalent of Hill Giants with extreme daylight vulnerability.

I have no idea what the encounter level of the trolls are any more than I have any idea what level the characters were. I also have no idea what the exact stats of the swords were. Suffice to say that given the challenges which the DM intended to present the group, the reward was reasonable. Looking at the rest of the story, the 'DM' was front loading a little to make up for the paucity of reward (sans one artifact of dubious utility) from the next nine or ten challenges.

Of course, this a little bit absurd. I'm not trying to suggest JRRT was trying to conform to gamist notions of good story design. I'm simply trying to show that a story along the lines of the one Tolkein wrote is easier to simulate within the D&D framework than you are suggesting. There are questions about whether it would be as fun to play as to read, but I think a quality game master could make it so.

This is where we have different views about what constitutes 3E D&D. The DMG is called a Core Rulebook, and it has rules for encounter design and treasure by level. Of course, one can house-rule these away, as one can Rule Zero anything else.

You do realize that there are alot of things written into the core rulebook which are not rules, right? There are alot of things that a potential DM needs to know about running a game that aren't actually rules. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone assert that the guidelines and suggestions for encounter design are hard and fast rules. This is the first time I've heard anyone suggest that if you deviate from some supposed rules for encounter design that you are no longer playing D&D.

You do realize that by the standard you suggest here, WotC itself has never published a module for 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons. There isn't a single module out there that follows hard and fast rules for encounter design. Every one of them presents encounters over a wide range of Encounter levels. Consider the Roper in 'Sunless Citadel' as just one famous example. Every one of them fails to offer a definate award after each encounter much less one always scaled exactly to the particular encounter. All of them bend and break the guidelines... errr 'rules' as written. So are you suggesting that they aren't actually D&D modules?

I think some of Monte Cook's work (to pick on a well-known author whom I happen to like) shows that D&D can be made into a pretty fun play experience

I'm not aware of any of Monte Cook's works that exactly follows the guidelines... errr 'rules' in the DMG. For example, it wouldn't be at all hard to prove that Monte ignores Table 3-3 'Treasure Values per Encounter' and Table 3-5 'Treasure' and instead relies on his own sense of what he needs to provide globally over the course of the entire adventure rather than tieing rewards to a particular encounter. Or, if what he does is following the 'rules', the rules on encounter design are so loosely written as to allow virtually all the sorts of things you claim that they prohibit, which sorta suggests that maybe they are only guidelines after all.

What exactly are you suggesting is a rule? Perhaps if you could give me some page numbers and paragraphs I could understand were you are coming from, but reading just what you wrote it seems to descend into absurdity in a hurry. You not only seem to be treating things I consider guidelines as hard and fast rules, but you seem to be considering the extrapolations and conclusions you've drawn from those 'rules' to be hard and fast rules as well. Or in other words, you seem to be saying, "If people don't play the game exactly how I play it, they aren't playing it right." This is one of the most egregious sorts of rules lawyering I've ever seen, because you aren't only trying to enforce 'the rules as written' but what is apparantly your own understanding of 'the spirt of the rules'.

 

[Vigilance]

I find is annoying that it's held up as one of the best adventures 1e has to offer. I appreciate many 1e adventures, but this is not one of them.

I appreciate that folks have different tastes, so you not liking it doesn't bother me. I personally wouldn't hold it up as one of the 10 best 1e modules but it was incredibly fun to run and provided a LOT of hooks for campaign play.

For my 1e Greyhawk game, for example, those three unique weapons (easily the best thing about the module imo) showed up again and again in the campaign.

There's not a single 3e module I can name that has provided that kind of experience, with a piece of the module resonating again and again through the campaign because it's just that cool.

So sure, different people have different tastes and I accept that.

My issue is that so many younger gamers just completely dismiss any module from an earlier era that has a different play style than the current WOTC/3e standard, I hear all the time that "such and such classic module isn't good".

In fact it was a similar comment that prompted me to respond here.

Chuck

 

[Victim]

Of course, what counts as "increasing the fun of the module" depends upon the expectations of the player group.

Exactly. I tend not use divine intervention, epic stuff, artifacts, readily available wishes and the like. Sure you can justify whatever "cheat" you have in the adventure, but since I think the source is BS too, that's not helping sell it to me.

The way I see things, Wish is more "OMG, archmage altering reality at great cost" and less "Monkey-Paw thing you find screwing you." Clerics and stuff are the agencies of divine invention - and even direct invention wouldn't be foolproof since I prefer more limited and falliable gods. And the epic rules aren't good enough to justify their use (which is why I don't mind weaker gods, since there aren't going to be groups of 40th level guys running around smoking them ).

Sure, some guy could in theory slap permanent dimensional lockdowns over an entire complex, but it's not really reasonable for him to do so. And characters could try to take down his wards - although that might not be reasonable either.

 

[pemerton]

It's just that some players have different standards for what they find enjoyable in a game.

I agree with this. I just think that it leads to playing different games: different action resolution mechanics (eg some use skill rolls to resolve social conflict, others talk it out between player and DM, others combine a bit of each), different reward mechanics (eg some give XPs only for overcoming challenges, some give XPs for playing in character, some give XPs for the overcoming of puzzles by players, even if the thinking is purely meta-game), different expectations about the correlation between character goals and player goals.

 

[pemerton]

My issue is that so many younger gamers just completely dismiss any module from an earlier era that has a different play style than the current WOTC/3e standard, I hear all the time that "such and such classic module isn't good".

This is consistent with my suggestion that the sort of play style supported by 1E and 3E are different, leading to different criteria for what counts as a good module for each system.

 

[pemerton]

Exactly. I tend not use divine intervention, epic stuff, artifacts, readily available wishes and the like. Sure you can justify whatever "cheat" you have in the adventure, but since I think the source is BS too, that's not helping sell it to me.

The way I see things, Wish is more "OMG, archmage altering reality at great cost" and less "Monkey-Paw thing you find screwing you." Clerics and stuff are the agencies of divine invention - and even direct invention wouldn't be foolproof since I prefer more limited and falliable gods.

If I've understood you correctly, the campaign style you are describing here is one of a reasonable degree of both mechanical and flavour austerity, in that magic and magical effects that occur are all explicable in terms of the rules, which are themselves the basis for the flavour of the campaign world. If this is right, then I can say I've certainly enjoyed refereeing games in this style.

Personally, while I think 3E mechanics are on the whole much more elegant than 1E, I think the 3E power level makes it a bit harder to achieve this sort of feel at high levels. For example, Bastion of Broken Souls, which is Wizards' poster-child pre-epic adventure, in my view doesn't really fit within this austere approach. I suspect that Arcana Unearthed might be better suited to it, or OGL Conan even more so.

 

[Psion]

This is consistent with my suggestion that the sort of play style supported by 1E and 3E are different, leading to different criteria for what counts as a good module for each system.

My response to this is obliquely a response to vig.

Though the styling of adventures evolved over editions, 1e era adventures (along with the DMG) set the groundwork for what an adventure should be. Fundamentally, I have been playing since 1e and still find my formative gaming influences telling.

But the thing is this: even within those constraints, there was room for dichotomous styles to evolve. Above Chuck sites White Plume Mountain as an example of the best 1e has to offer, and I rhetorically wince. Though I'd like to believe there is objective merit to my position, all I can really objectively put forth is that WPM (along with ToH) represents a style of adventure that I don't like.

What do I like? Well, I'd like to offer that my first longstanding DM was as likely to get his ideas from an issue of Thor or a Gene Wolfe novel as a module, as far as modules went, D1-2 and D3 and X1 are far more representative of what my style became than WPM or similar modules. In short, I found myself connecting more to modules that were more loosely defined scenarios and the GM was relied on to come up with events and NPC actions, rather than adventures like WPM with few actual NPCs and strictly defined situations.

 

[Vigilance]

This is consistent with my suggestion that the sort of play style supported by 1E and 3E are different, leading to different criteria for what counts as a good module for each system.

I agree that the two systems support different play styles to some degree (I think it's a fairly small degree) but what I'm mostly referring to are differences in player expectation.

For instance, I've noticed that players who began playing with 3e expect EVERYTHING to come from the rules. Any solution to a problem should come from a skill, a feat, a spell, a class ability, etc.

Older edition players didn't mind a module saying "you have a 1 in 6 chance of falling" and expected that they would be allowed to do something crazy and try to get around that, like making a rigging from rope and block and tackle.

Or like in Tomb of Horrors where there are just chances to DIE, rather arbitrarily. If you stick your trusty 10' pole into the Sphere of Annihilation, you have half a pole. If you stick your head in, you're GONE.

I ran that module at my FLGS a few years back for young 3e players and they literally gasped when that happened and started demanding saves. I almost thought I was going to have a riot on my hands... they were especially mad that their OUTRAGE over the encounter provoked nothing but laughter from me.

So sure, the games are a little different, mostly because 3e requires the GM to do less ad-libbing to fill in the gaps.

But imo the MUCH bigger difference is that players no longer feel the GM *should* be Oz behind the curtain, leaving that to the game designers. Even Monte has bemoaned this cultural shift in 3e a time or two.

I know the rules really well, but on the rare instance I encounter something I don't know the rule for, my impulse is to just say "this happens". I've had younger players reach for a book, look up stunned when I just rule and move on, and a rare few have even said "no, let's look for a rule".

One player said "what if we find a rule for it and it this is wrong" (this being my solution) and I said "then it won't work that way next time".

They'd rather stop the entire game than go off the edge into that scarrrrrrrrrry unmarked waters of making up as you go.

I'm not saying this "new player" is good or bad. Some young players I've met are some of the best players I've ever met and a few have been really annoying. But I'm certainly not the only one to notice a decided shift in player expectations among younger players, and noting something has changed is value-neutral.

So I think that's the difference in how many older modules are regarded. Designers used to not consider whether removing all teleportation, divination spells and (eventually equipment) was "fair" in Isle of the Ape. It just WAS, and you found a way to deal with it (other than complain to the GM).

Chuck