D&D 5E Why does WotC put obviously bad or illogical elements in their adventures?

[Majoru Oakheart]

But, pointing out the complete failure to provide an explanation for this very incongruous setup makes me an unfun DM, I guess. I'll let my players know, they'll be disappointed in me.

I'm confused. I never said any of that was fun or unfun. You ran what was written in the adventure. It sounds like fun.

Just like it would be fun to walk up to a door with 2 Hill Giants guarding it and Tug says, "We guard throne room!" Cog follows with, "Where your escort?"

Then having the PCs come up with some lies to get past the door, rolling a deception check and then getting past them while laughing at how easy it is to fool the stupid Hill Giants as a bit of a light moment before the epic battle that is coming up.

It might NOT be fun if those doors are guarded by elite, power increased Storm Giant guards who are smart and won't allow any excuses to get through and the only way past would be to battle them. They might do so much damage that the PCs might not survive the combats that come after it.

Though, that absolutely would make the most sense and would be the most "logical" thing to happen.

But my point is that the most obvious thing to happen isn't always the most fun thing to happen(sometimes it is). Plus, I'm 99.9% certain no one in my group will even care that there are Hill Giants there (especially when they see there are a bunch of other giants visiting right now). Even if they ask (on the bizarre, off chance that they do), I can come up with a reason that makes enough sense to pass muster on a moments notice (a couple of them have already been said in the thread. My favorite one being that they showed up as emissaries but no one respected them enough to talk to them and they were getting annoying so they were ordered to guard a door that doesn't normally get guarded just to get them out of the way and they were stupid enough to listen to everyone).

They'll only be "on screen" for a couple of minutes at most, either way. It isn't long enough for their backstory to really matter to the adventure.

 

[cmad1977]

Why wouldn't Hill Giants be tasked with the menial and meaningless job of guarding a door? The other giants certainly don't want to share the room with them.
Stinky.


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[billd91]

It might NOT be fun if those doors are guarded by elite, power increased Storm Giant guards who are smart and won't allow any excuses to get through and the only way past would be to battle them. They might do so much damage that the PCs might not survive the combats that come after it.

Though, that absolutely would make the most sense and would be the most "logical" thing to happen.

But my point is that the most obvious thing to happen isn't always the most fun thing to happen(sometimes it is).

I think this is actually hitting on a core aspect of RPG fun. Usually the quirk element that gets introduced come from the players, but in others, it comes from adventure writing. It might be more 'logical' for the guards to be elite storm giants, but I think it is most likely going to be more fun for the players if it's a couple of hill giants. It opens up more opportunities to try new and different gambits other than bringing the A-game combat. It offers a welcome change as well as, by this point, highlights how powerful the PCs have become, giving the players a chance to revel in it should they choose to do so. And that's the logic of adventure design.

 

[Hussar]

I was going to write something pithy, but, there's not much point. Go back and reread what [MENTION=5143]Majoru Oakheart[/MENTION] and [MENTION=3400]billd91[/MENTION] just wrote and you're golden.

 

[dropbear8mybaby]

I think this is actually hitting on a core aspect of RPG fun. Usually the quirk element that gets introduced come from the players, but in others, it comes from adventure writing. It might be more 'logical' for the guards to be elite storm giants, but I think it is most likely going to be more fun for the players if it's a couple of hill giants. It opens up more opportunities to try new and different gambits other than bringing the A-game combat. It offers a welcome change as well as, by this point, highlights how powerful the PCs have become, giving the players a chance to revel in it should they choose to do so. And that's the logic of adventure design.

And more often, it's the quirk element that makes players not even attempt roleplay or creativity, and just steam-roll through things. One of my players has expertise in persuasion and yet, for some strange reason, just flat-out kills anything that gets in his way. The hill giants? Yeah, he'd just kill them if they tried to stop him.

But a couple of storm giants? Hell, even he might try to do something more creative than rolling initiative to get past them.

 

[LordEntrails]

Bad form.

Huh?

 

[robus]

I think this is actually hitting on a core aspect of RPG fun. Usually the quirk element that gets introduced come from the players, but in others, it comes from adventure writing. It might be more 'logical' for the guards to be elite storm giants, but I think it is most likely going to be more fun for the players if it's a couple of hill giants. It opens up more opportunities to try new and different gambits other than bringing the A-game combat. It offers a welcome change as well as, by this point, highlights how powerful the PCs have become, giving the players a chance to revel in it should they choose to do so. And that's the logic of adventure design.

Sure - I guess perhaps [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] and I have players that do pay very close attention to the surrounding circumstances leading up to encounters. And try to spot deeper meanings (the scenarios I've heard my players discuss are quite enlightening!) so perhaps that's the root of our trouble. We've got players that are actually trying to understand the world they're adventuring in and that means if things don't make sense then there's a deeper meaning that they're missing and that leads to unnecessary confusion.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Sure - I guess perhaps [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] and I have players that do pay very close attention to the surrounding circumstances leading up to encounters. And try to spot deeper meanings (the scenarios I've heard my players discuss are quite enlightening!) so perhaps that's the root of our trouble. We've got players that are actually trying to understand the world they're adventuring in and that means if things don't make sense then there's a deeper meaning that they're missing and that leads to unnecessary confusion.

Largely, this is self-inflicted in my case, because I've been presenting those kinds of worlds for awhile now. I layer on meaning over multiple arcs so that when a reveal happens, it's always been there, just not obvious. I also layer in lots of different things so I can adapt and make even sudden changes appear as if the rational has always been there. This comes from building a deep world with almost every NPC or major player not having a pre-written plot, but instead having a motivation and a set of goals. That way, no matter what happens, they react in a consistent fashion. Finding those motivations and goals is a big part of predicting what the bad guys are doing/going to do and stopping them. But, and, again, I'm dealing with SKT only here as the first module I've run in a decade, I find that this module just has things happen to the players that are out of the blue and has them react to it. I find, more than halfway through, that the core concept and many of the set pieces are good, but that I'd completely restructure the entire thing if I were to attempt it again because it has some glaring holes (the hill giants, btw, are nettlesome, not glaring). For one, the actual bad guys don't make an appearance until most of the way through the game. Boo. There should have been some color encounter early on where the players run into them, and learn to hate them, so that the emotional payoff in a later scene isn't 'weird cultists are the bad guys? Fine, whatever, let's kill them" it's "I KNEW it was those bastards, I have a bone to pick with them!"

SKT, instead, seems to just hide information until they give it to the players to start the next bit. Except for the Shrine of the All Father Oracle, though, there the players have to have been paying some decent attention and then guess which questions will result in the information they need to continue. Blargh. Works if they do, doesn't if they don't. My players, who usually close attention, fumbled here because of the lack of sufficient foreshadowing. They kept asking questions about things that had happened in the modules that didn't go with the main plot because they assumed that since it was impactful to them, it was important. But that's how my games run, and I failed to account for the change at the one point in the module where it doesn't just hand out the next job to do and the needed information to do it.

I picked up SKT because my group had an out-of-game major change and we switched to Roll20 instead of face to face for awhile. SKT had pretty maps and all of the fixings supposedly done and we were all learning the new interface so it seemed a good bet, especially since I had a change in duties at work and had less time for prep during the transition. But it's, so far, turned out to be more work as I get deeper into the game to change it into something that isn't just a string of connected combat encounters. The maps are pretty, though.

 

[LordEntrails]

So there has been a huge amount of discussion in this thread. And I think it's pretty clear (though not agreed upon) why some people feel that many (especially SKT) adventures have poor design elements.

As has been exampled here, and in other threads discussing adventure design, there is no universally accepted approach to correctly designing an adventure. Therefore no adventure will be without issues, at least to a portion of the population.

So what solutions does a gamer have? Isn't the answer to that question actually more important, because it is more useful, than asking why there are bad elements?

I see two;
1) Discuss adventure element design (like this thread). This is useful in two ways that I see; a) so that DM's can understand the limitations of any published adventure, and b) so that designers can contemplate the trade-offs of of adventure design and make informed decisions
2) Understand that not every adventure will be designed/written in a specific DM's preferred method/style/etc and that decision to prepare or run an adventure should be made with that foresight. This implies that a DM research an adventure before they select it. It also means that in order for that research to be effective, other DM's have to provide critical and useful information on such. i.e. product reviews (notice how this ties int point 1b?).

So, imo, if you want better adventures published in general, and you want better adventures for your own use/group, take it as your own responsibility to do research, and relate your experience (after you run the adventure) with the community through product reviews.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/productforums.php

If you had read the reviews here on ENWorld before you chose this adventure, would you have still picked it? If you have run it, and you don't agree with the reviews or the 67.5% rating, then why haven't you added your voice and vote to the reviews?

 

[Demetrios1453]

So there has been a huge amount of discussion in this thread. And I think it's pretty clear (though not agreed upon) why some people feel that many (especially SKT) adventures have poor design elements.

As has been exampled here, and in other threads discussing adventure design, there is no universally accepted approach to correctly designing an adventure. Therefore no adventure will be without issues, at least to a portion of the population.

So what solutions does a gamer have? Isn't the answer to that question actually more important, because it is more useful, than asking why there are bad elements?

I see two;
1) Discuss adventure element design (like this thread). This is useful in two ways that I see; a) so that DM's can understand the limitations of any published adventure, and b) so that designers can contemplate the trade-offs of of adventure design and make informed decisions
2) Understand that not every adventure will be designed/written in a specific DM's preferred method/style/etc and that decision to prepare or run an adventure should be made with that foresight. This implies that a DM research an adventure before they select it. It also means that in order for that research to be effective, other DM's have to provide critical and useful information on such. i.e. product reviews (notice how this ties int point 1b?).

So, imo, if you want better adventures published in general, and you want better adventures for your own use/group, take it as your own responsibility to do research, and relate your experience (after you run the adventure) with the community through product reviews.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/productforums.php

If you had read the reviews here on ENWorld before you chose this adventure, would you have still picked it? If you have run it, and you don't agree with the reviews or the 67.5% rating, then why haven't you added your voice and vote to the reviews?

There is also a still active thread "Enhancing Storm King's Thunder" with advice on running and modifying SKT that is full of good suggestions.

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