Why are modules no longer popular

[Desdichado]

I really have no interest in modules -- they almost invariably fall prey to one of two problems; either they are nothing more than "collections of rooms" with stuff in them for you to interact with, or they are tightly scripted screenplays from wannabe fiction writers, and are unsuitable for actual play. As a DM I have no use for them, because I can come up with some bare bones and wing it and get a better result, and as a player I have no use for them because I hate being railroaded into the script that the module writers envisioned.

That's not unique to 3e though; it's always been that way for me.

 

[jester47]

Re: Not quite an adventure/module ...

Hmm, but such a product is no longer an adventure. Instead, it's more like a "locations" book, perhaps even closer to a "setting sourcebook" (such as, for instance, Green Ronin's Freeport hardcover). I agree, though, that such a product could sell -- only, labelling it an adventure would not be quite accurate.

Actually you are right. they would be like mini-sourcebooks. One way to turn them into adventure sourcebooks is to put plots in the back (not just hooks but entire plots and monster placement and what they are doing etc. etc.) One half raw source, the other several event based adventures that would go with the source. I think that would sell. A lot.

Aaron.

 

[Black Omega]

So far the best use I've gotten from any book was the L5R Mimura village book. Plenty of places and NPC's and hooks for adventures. But then in over a year I've only used one 'module' and that was only for two weeks.

 

[FDP Mike]

The Relevance of Adventures

Glyfair, you hit the catch-22 squarely on the noggin with regard to the problem publishers face with adventures. Portability/adaptibility vs. setting specific: lean too much either way, and, yes, a publisher potentially loses a significant segment of customers. Necromancer's success, I believe, lies in how its adventures negotiate this catch-22 (i.e., primarily dungeon crawls with little truly specific setting information) -- but also in its rather well established fan base, which it captured early, held on to, and increased. The catch-22 is also an issue that we stay highly conscious of at FDP, though we tend to lean toward a bit more setting detail than Necromancer, I think.

Despite this catch-22, and despite the now incredibly varied D&D games and gamers out there (many of them sufficiently armed with a plethora of rules extensions from an abundance of d20 products), I would argue that adventures still have relevance . . . and that their relevance may increase.

True, in the past, only TSR (and WotC) published material for D&D, and so adventures represented an opportunity, as johnsemlak notes, to expand the game. Their importance and their ability to generate a kind of common D&D experience among players and DMs thus definitely contributed to their significant place in D&D history.

Today, of course, the field stretches farther and wider than maybe anyone ever anticipated. The current trend focusses upon The Crunch -- i.e., tools that DMs (and players) can manipulate as they see fit to build adventures that best suit their style and their players. Published adventures do not immediately present themselves as having The Crunch, so perhaps they suffer in consumers' eyes. Unlike the supposed halcyon days of ToEE and GDQ and ToH, adventures are small, small fish in a sea teeming with more recognizable species such as campaign settings, class books, race books, rules extensions, and so forth. Adventures today cannot possibly reach the level of common experience granted their ancestors; moreover, expansion of the game occurs through those other, bigger fish that I just mentioned.

The solution involves a little Darwinism: adapt or die. One means of adapting relates directly to the whole genius of the OGL: adventures can take advantage of a wide array of rules extensions for several types of situations (for instance, Bastion Press' Alchemy & Herbalism or FFG's Seafarer's Handbook), which, I think, can certainly fuel creativity and originality. Another means of adapting becomes revising somewhat the very notion of what constitutes an adventure product -- in relation to the sorts of (d20) products that garner the most attention (again, those bigger fish from my previous paragraph). Necromancer Games' The Vault of Larin Karr sets a good example: a dungeon crawl adventure contained within what amounts to a ready made valley setting of a few villages and several interconnecting plots between different NPCs. Think of all The Crunch you get in such a product: villages, NPCs, a wealth of locations, a small section of the Underdark, and so forth. In the future, then, as we hit a kind of supersaturation point of crunch-based products, adventures -- the good ones, the ones that adapt and innovate -- might get a second look . . . because of the variety of "crunch" they offer.

I have to disagree strongly with Joshua, then. Such a view of adventures is awfully reductive. Granted, some adventures do amount to nothing more than a series of rooms or force a specific plot upon the players (and the DM), and those are the poorly written, poorly designed adventures. The good adventures do not fall prey to such traps, likely because they rely upon a strong, engaging story and a design that accounts for player choice. (These are also adventures that probably saw some decent playtesting.) In any event, Joshua's view of adventures also discounts their current and ongoing evolution.

So, adventures can and do have relevance by better meeting the needs and expectations of the d20 consumer. Two of FDP's adventures this year will approach the "mega-" variety but also include much more than "just" an adventure. Gates of Oblivion will give you a small planar setting, for instance; [As of Yet Untitled] will provide a detailed coastal town, elven town, and "underdark" aquatic setting. Both adventures will be using OGC from other companies' products, and both will contribute new OGC (templates, PrCs, magic items, spells, rules, and more). Certainly, all of this Crunch will mean little if the stories themselves do not capture the imagination, but I think good stories are a hallmark of FDP adventures. In any event, these two adventures are just examples of what's in the works at FDP. I'm sure that other people can think of adventures already available that do similar things. (In fact, one could look to Monte Cook's "event books" as an innovation upon the adventure format . . . .)

I like to trust in two possibilities with adventures: one, that they can give us good stories; two, that DMs are creative and flexible enough to find ways to adapt published adventures to their campaigns if they are inspired to do so. Criticizing an adventure for being "useless" because it needs to be (heavily) adapted to a certain setting or campaign might be valid in some cases. Treating this situation as a universal "problem" with adventures, however, sort of cuts one off from the wealth and innovation that adventures do provide when done well.

Gotta go!


Take care,
Mike

P.S. tf360, I think you are exactly right on both points. It's also why we do see situations now such as Mystic Eye doing adventures for FFG's Dragonstar setting. Other such deals are cropping up, too.

 

[Desdichado]

Sure, it's reductive, and it's also based on past experience perhaps more than current experiences. I've read all three Witchfire modules, and played the first one, though, and those are very highly regarded adventures, and I still feel they fall prey to both foibles at various times throughout the process. In addition, they also face the problem you identify of being quite campaign specific. What then, is the secret to their success?

I think my point, even beyond the reductive "binning" I tend to do of modules, is that not only have modules evolved, but I think gaming as a whole has evolved. In the years of 2e, lots of gamers were attracted out of D&D (I know I certainly was, as was literally everyone I game with now) and in many cases they went to games that were White Wolf or GURPS style. White Wolf and GURSPS publish, to the best of my knowledge, no adventures, and relatively little crunch too, for that matter.

I think this has had an impact on the gaming population, even for those who didn't migrate to those kind of games systems. More and more gamers aren't wanting the old modules type of experience, they want to do that on their own, and they want a lot of tools around to make it easy to do on their own. In my opinion, this is actually a good thing for gaming: if GMs are tailoring their games to their players instead of just "running them through a module" like we used to get, the end result is more happy gamers.

 

[MerricB]

One thing about modules I miss from the early D&D days was the way modules introduced loads of new things into the D&D game. Just offhand, I can think of:

Drow (introduced in G1-2-3)
The Underdark (introduced in D1-2)
Tharizdun (WG4)
Ravenloft (I6)
Tons of Artifacts in S4
The Known World map in X1, plus all the dinosaurs.

Back then, Modules were a primary instrument of expanding the D&D game, and developing the D&D settings WoG and the Known World.

Another trouble is if you keep introducing new elements, then all of a sudden the campaign world becomes overcomplex. Introducing the drow was good, but if every module introduces a major new race... eep!

Cheers!

 

[rounser]

Hmm, but such a product is no longer an adventure. Instead, it's more like a "locations" book, perhaps even closer to a "setting sourcebook" (such as, for instance, Green Ronin's Freeport hardcover). I agree, though, that such a product could sell -- only, labelling it an adventure would not be quite accurate.

Yep, and most setting sourcebooks provide too much high level detail and not enough low level stuff. I've argued in the past that the high level stuff should be left to the DM to create, and that the designers should be doing the verisimilitude heavy lifting of designing encounters and low level detail.

Look at the Shadowdale book in the 2nd ed box set of Forgotten Realms. It details stuff down to the level of individual farms, it's a DM's playground. You could impose whatever political or magical struggles you wanted over that framework. I think publishers are stuck in a rut of traditional thinking that something is either a plotted adventure, or a high-level birds-eye-view sourcebook, and that's why you don't see many products of the type I'm referring to. I think Creative Mountain Games' Locus - Jalston is the sort of thing I'm referring to.

The very notion of an "adventure" involves some sort of quest -- i.e., a story, a plot, an end goal or climax. A book of locations, while an excellent idea, simply would not really fulfill the role of an adventure. Now that I think of it, another Necromancer Games product comes close to what you describe, jester47, though the product is technically an adventure: The Vault of Larin Karr.

You can pack a location to the brim with adventure without imposing a heavy-handed overplot. A sphinx's lair in the cliffs, the denizen of which picks off town fishermen who don't answer it's riddles correctly. The town guard being in league with the wererats in the sewers....their lair being a dungeon that the product actually details down to encounter level. You don't need to impose goals for a DM's playground - they're intrinsic in the setting, and can be left to the DM to impose his own campaign plot on the place.

Controversially, I'd also suggest not bothering to name the place - it's just one more thing to have to ignore when the DM plonks it down in their world.. That's leaving the fun stuff like naming and plotting to the DM, instead of to the designer, IMO. Of course, I can see why designers love naming "generic" cities for marketing and feelings-of-ownership reasons, and stamping their own high-level-political-and-setting-detail all over it, but it just seems counterproductive to me...that's the sort of thing DMs love to do too, and they'll have to rip out such "helpful" foliage before they can grow their own, unless they're sticklers for canon.

 

[Sir Edgar]

Rounser, I've always enjoyed reading your posts. I'm surprised you didn't run for ENnie judge. I would have voted for you.

Anyhow, I don't see whole lot of modules out there that are worth buying. At the same time, because the module market is so small it doesn't encourage publishers to go into it. So, I guess that's what you'd call a catch-22 situation. If more people bought modules, then perhaps better products would come out. Let's all go out and buy some modules!

I like the idea of location-based modules. I think that would work out really great for a lot of DMs.

 

[rounser]

Thanks, Sir Edgar.

 

[Frostmarrow]

For the 1st ed Oriental Adventures there was a module called Mad Monkey or something. The title referred to a special fighting style - the mad monkey style. I always thought that this was an interesting premise for an adventure. (I never played or read that adventure I only heard about it.) The trick was that characters could learn the mad monkey style if they were so inclined. Basically it was just a collection of unarmed attacks with evocative names.

You have probably already reached the same conclusion I did. This format is great for introducing PrCs! However in the Mad Monkey the reward (getting to learn the style) was a built in surprise. The players didn't know they could expect to be taught a martial arts style. What if the PrC presented in the module is advertised clearly on the cover and last page?

For example: Seeking the Loremasters of Keth. A module for 4 players levels 8-11. Presents a unique opportunity to join the enlightened fold of the Loremasters.