Why D&D is slowly cutting its own throat.

[diaglo]

Gotta be careful there, though. Is that because only that smallnumber of modules are good, or because the same "usual suspects" keep answering those questions with their personal favorites? Considering that the number of really active posters around here isn't that large, it may well be the latter, so that data is biased by the sample selection.

i know i answer the same for all of those requests.

B1, B2, etc....

unless they specifically ask for 2000ed or 3.11ed for Workgroups adventures only (w/o conversions)

 

[The Shaman]

Showing off the tricks their character can do is part of experiencing the adventure. If I (when I am a player, and not a DM), wanted to gaze in wonder at the excitement of the scenario, I'd be reading a book. Players want to do stuff, and they should. Its the point of the game in many ways.

With all due respect, Storm Raven, you're misrepresenting my opinion.

It's the difference between, "I'll attack the demon with my sword!" and "Lessee, with Power Attack I can reduce my BAB by 8 and still hit AC 23, and with the cleric's buffs I can do 2d10+42 damage." It's about stripping away mechanics and making the action its own reward.

As I said, I'm not the core consumer of a game like D&D anymore, a game which specifically and deliberately rewards metagame thinking and character twinking. When I first learned to play the game, a fighter was a fighter was a fighter, and yet somehow we managed to have great fun with no more options available to use than what selection of weapons and armor to use - if you wanted to be truly bold, you might make a Dex-based instead of a Str-based fighter so that you could be an archer instead of a melee machine. My sense of wonder in fantasy roleplay is more than satisfied by taking on the role of a wizard or warrior without layering on so much complexity that character mechanics become an end to themselves.

 

[Greatwyrm]

The value of anything, IP or otherwise, is what the market will pay for it. It really doesn't matter how good adventures are if people aren't buying them. I think the current marketing of fluff, more novels and some in the crunch books, is a pretty good arrangement right now. Plenty of people buy novels even if they don't play D&D.

As a side note, in 15 years of GMing, I've run 2 published adventures.

 

[diaglo]

As a side note, in 15 years of GMing, I've run 2 published adventures.

refereeing since the 70's ... i've never run a published adventure.

i have however used them. stripped them down, messed them around and fit them into the campaign.

 

[Storm Raven]

It's the difference between, "I'll attack the demon with my sword!" and "Lessee, with Power Attack I can reduce my BAB by 8 and still hit AC 23, and with the cleric's buffs I can do 2d10+42 damage." It's about stripping away mechanics and making the action its own reward.

Yes. One is rote, and the other requires thought.

As I said, I'm not the core consumer of a game like D&D anymore, a game which specifically and deliberately rewards metagame thinking and character twinking.

Like most games.

When I first learned to play the game, a fighter was a fighter was a fighter, and yet somehow we managed to have great fun with no more options available to use than what selection of weapons and armor to use - if you wanted to be truly bold, you might make a Dex-based instead of a Str-based fighter so that you could be an archer instead of a melee machine. My sense of wonder in fantasy roleplay is more than satisfied by taking on the role of a wizard or warrior without layering on so much complexity that character mechanics become an end to themselves.

And this was fine and dandy when D&D was just about the only kid on the block. But as the market expanded, people began to chose other options as they became availabale, eroding D&D's market dominance (never eliminating it, but losing market share isn't fun). Most people want to be able to customize their character more than "I'm the fighter with the longsword, not the battleaxe".

In point of fact, TSR saw this too. That's why, for example, the original Unearthed Arcana was basically a bunch of character options. And the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide gave rules for skills (non-weapon proficiencies), and so on. Heck, the original supplements were about introducing new character options like the paladin, rogue, and ranger.

 

[buzz]

Right. About one year.

Do you mean the lifespan of each edition was one year? I would consider the "lifespan" is the length of time between each edition. GW1e came out in 1978; "Legion of Gold" came out three years later. Assuming that TSR was essentially "supporting" the various editions until each one's successor was released, the average GW edition saw a couple of adventures in its first year, and then nothing for the next 6-8. How is that solid support?

I mean, if you started playing WFRP1 last year, you'd probably be amazed at all the sourcebooks and adventures you had avaiable to buy. But if you started back when it was originally released, you'd probably be a bit ticked that you weren't seeing more than about one release a year over the course of 20 years.

No, I don't suppose that you do.

There's no reason to be uncivil.

Ok, how? By buying hundreds of PDF's in order to get a feel for what is good? Then going down to kinkos and spending $0.50 or $1.00 per page (or whatever it is) to get a good printout? That's economical?

Who is telling you to buy hundreds of PDFs?

More to the point, you think that nearly 50% of the modules produced for third edition are good?

No, you're conflating numbers here. I just guesstimated about 100 modules released for D&D/d20 in its first year. Limiting yourself to just that first year, you could easily find five modules of quality. The Freeport series alone would probably count for half of those, and Penumbra, Necromancer, and WotC could fill out the rest. Then, looking at each successive year, taking into consideration print, PDF, and Dungeon, I have absolute confidence that you could find at least five that are as good as anything released for 1e.

Honestly, I'm not sure if the same experiment would have worked back in the 1e days. There were only 5-10 modules total the first few years of 1e's existence (and most all of them were high-level; there was jack squat from TSR for levels 1-5 back when I started; Village of Hommlet was about it, and look how many years it took them to finally release the rest of that series).

Funny that the fanbase doesn't seem to feel that way.

I would not presume to speak for the entirety of the fanbase. Even the breadth of the ENWorld community is but a tiny slicce of the gaming populace.

I can speak for myself, however, and I found plenty of good adventures. I have also borne witness to other gamers who feel similarly. I enjoyed running Sunless Citadel and In the Belly of the Beast, am having fun running CotSQ, and have found many adventures in Dungeon and in the Penumbra line to at least read very well. The Necromancer products that I've been playing through have also been a blast.

Do you know how many 3rd edition modules I've seen glowing reviews for?

Has every single 3e module been reviewed? If they had, should I really be assuming that you've read them all? Are fan-written reviews the be-all, end-all? Does it matter that I've seen glowing reviews for many adventures? Does this assertion really mean anything?

When modules arrive at the game stores and book stores, I pick them up and flip through them, and almost every time I find nothing of interest.

Does flipping through a product really count as a valid assessment?

(Heck, at least they're not shrink-wrapped like the 1e modules were. Buying those was a total crapshoot.)

Why can't you accept that though something may be good that it might also have flaws?

Why can't you aknowledge that maybe there are good modules out there, but you just don't happen to like them? That it's entirely possible that your tastes may have essentially fossilized, and thus no new product is going to live up to the memories you have of seminal adventures you played 20 years ago when D&D was taking the world by storm?

The simple fact is that there is tons of adventure support for 3e; far more options than were available when I started playing. The assertion that "Yeah, but none of them are classics like Shrine of Tamoachan" is meaningless becasue a) we won't know what will become a classic until a decade or two passes, and 2) opinions are subjective. There are plenty of people who found those classic adventures dull and contrived. E.g., given a choice, I'd take Tide of Years over Tomb of Horrors any day.

Face it, nostalgia plays a huge part in your argument. One day, people will be hanging out in the ENWorld cyberspace nexus saying things like "Dude, Meepo! I loved Meepo! Man, I miss those old Adventure Path modules..." and "Shackled City was a classic!"

 

[Umbran]

I have to side with Erik and Phil here; from their perspective, and mine, "can't do the work" and "could do the work, but won't" is pretty much the same thing: In the end, no product is forthcoming.

It isn't the same thing if you need to deal with why the product is not forthcoming.

The proposed theory was that you don't see much fluff product because fluff is particularly difficult to write. I am merley suggesting that this theory may not represent reality. You may not see much good fluff because the market cannot support much of it, and therefore there's little incentive publishers can offer to prospective authors.

In regards to the setting search (which a friend of mine and I contributed to): Wizards only found 11 people out of 11,000 that they considered worth their time.

Perhaps, but maybe that doesn't mean quite what you may think it does.

Think about the limitations of time, manpower, and money in processing submissions. About the fact that due to market realities, no matter how many good submissions they got, only one was likely to see print. About the fact that WotC has some very particular things they need in their products to get their desired profit margins. About the fact that the contestants had to try to squeeze entire worlds (meaning 200+ page documents) of fluff down into a single page...

Quite honestly, this all suggests very little about the overall quality of the fluff the 10,989 folks could write. When there are many competetors, losing doesn't neccessarily mean you aren't good.

It is more akin to the Human Resources world - in jobs that garner many submissions, rejection can come not because of your qualifications (or lack thereof), but because you chose the wrong font size on the resume, or the HR person had a headache for a while.

To turn this around - in the end, WotC only found one that was worth their time. But some of the other 10 have been worth other publisher's time, and met with decent reviews, no? So it isn't like the other 10 were bad, either, even though they "weren't worth WotC's time". How can you be so sure that so many other submissions would not have ended up of similar quality? Given, of course, that 90% of everything is crud, and that many feel that the one that did make the cut still wasn't worth the time...

 

[buzz]

It's the difference between, "I'll attack the demon with my sword!" and "Lessee, with Power Attack I can reduce my BAB by 8 and still hit AC 23, and with the cleric's buffs I can do 2d10+42 damage." It's about stripping away mechanics and making the action its own reward.

This is a player issue, not a system issue. Powergaming/Munchkinism has existed since the dawn of RPGs.

 

[rogueattorney]

You need to include the Role-Aides and Judges' Guild adventures in your count.

Both did more source books than actual adventures.

Mayfair's Role Aids did 26 adventures from 1983-1993. These were "generic" adventures (as in, it's "not" AD&D, nod, nod, wink, wink, please don't sue us, Oh, I guess you sued us anyway, we might as well win the suit and then keep doing what we're doing, so there.)

By inexact count, JG did about 20 adventures for AD&D or OD&D through 1981 (about 12 for OD&D and 8 for AD&D) and then about a half dozen "generic" adventures in the last couple years before closing shop.

There were also a number of "generic" modules by Creations Unlimited and others who didn't have enough distribution to even enter into the discussion as they weren't generally available to a wide range of gamers.

So if you add the AD&D1 modules, the D&D modules produced AD&D1's lifetime, all the Judges Guild modules, and all the Mayfair modules, even those produced after AD&D1 was finished, then you arive at close to 200 adventures.

R.A.

 

[Storm Raven]

Who is telling you to buy hundreds of PDFs?

Has anyone else noticed that Celebrum's criticism seems to have morphed from "there aren't enough adventures for 3e" into "there are so many adventures for 3e that I would have to wade through hundreds of PDFs to find the one's I like".