wotc intro adventures conflict with their own advice

[Windjammer]

I think we all noticed this when 4e first came out. In the 4e DMG, there was a lot of advice on how to stage and run a good adventure. A lot of that advice amounted to simple concepts like "Don't railroad", "encourage PC choice", and all those other great nuggets that we hear every day on this website.

And yet? The first intro adventure in the DMG is a string of combat encounters, one after the other.

This happens a few more times - Keep on the Shadowfell ...

A lot of people are unaware of the genealogy of the 4E DMG. Huge junks were lifted (either by copy-paste or in compressed form) from another book Slavicsek and Baker had written earlier for D&D 3.5 - Dungeon Mastering for Dummies.

(This allegation is neither slander, as the authors admit as much in the re-publishing of that book for D&D 4E in 2008, nor is it meant to denigrate James Wyatt's valiant efforts when writing the 4E DMG under what I believe was extreme time pressure.)

See, at the time of that earlier book (2005) the "in house" idea of what a published adventure ought to look like was less monolithic than what it became in the years after. Compare Wyatt's own City of the Spider Queen with the closest anticipation of 4E module standards, The Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde, and you'll see that variety of "sources of fun" has been replaced by combat galore, and that intricate plot lines and multi faceted NPCs have given way to a two dimensional cast with no story to tell.

The end result is that the 4E DMG looks very odd when juxtaposed to 4E adventure "in house" design tenets, as explained here - make sure to read the comments, where I supplement the blog writer's points by actual quotes from sources.

 

[S'mon]

Yeah, it's kinda weird that the *good* stuff - the generally well-received stuff - was a cut & paste from a non-4e source, while the bad stuff - the much-derided stuff - was original to 4e.

 

[Shazman]

I wouldn't say weird. I would say "not surprisingly". Let's face it. In 4e, combat is king even if the combat is often pointless or seems to drag on forever.

 

[TerraDave]

The reason I bring it up is because this wasn't always the case with D&D. The famous 1e sample dungeon (the ruined monastery) wasn't a great adventure, but it had choices (and let the GM fill in blanks! Great idea!). Every BECMI intro I can think of was far from great,

What!?

Everyone not great? (and that gnome getting eaten zombies, not great!?!?!).

You can't think of one?

 

[TerraDave]

As for 4E, it is and was very encounter driven, and that clearly impacted those early adventures.

 

[pukunui]

My experience with WotC is that they have never followed their own advice when it comes to prepublished adventures. I can't actually remember what TSR's adventures were like (it's been too long), but my time GMing D&D 3.5 is still fairly fresh in my memory. And many of the official 3.5 adventures were just as bad as the 4e ones. I remember one adventure called The Scourge of the Howling Horde was meant to be an introductory 1st level adventure. Its premise, however, was simply: "some goblins are terrorizing a small town; go and kill them." We ran into trouble when my group wanted to actually talk to the goblins instead of just killing them.

Barrow of the Forgotten King was the worst of the ones I ran. It was literally a linear dungeon crawl, so it was basically just one "bottleneck encounter" after another, including some that were ridiculously overpowered and nearly amounted to a TPK on several occasions - such as an encounter with a "wounded" tomb spider that was like CR 8 and the PCs were all 3rd level. And there was supposed to be some time pressure (they were chasing some tomb robber guy), but the module's advice was: "If the PCs get stuck, just say that the BBEG is stuck up ahead as well, that way the PCs don't have to worry about losing him."

As for 4e: yeah, I remember when Keep on the Shadowfell first came out, a lot of people were complaining that it did a piss-poor job of "showcasing" the new system.


I never played WotC's previous iteration of the Star Wars RPG, but their one official adventure path for the Saga Edition game, Dawn of Defiance, is pretty railroady (although, to be honest, there's not a lot of Saga Edition encounter-building advice for them to ignore in the first place, and it is free, but still ...).



So yeah, not a big fan of WotC's adventure-building abilities. Definitely a case of "do as we say, not as we do." I have yet to see them put out an adventure that actually showcases the strengths of their rules and GMing advice rather than just ignoring them altogether.

 

[Votan]

I can't actually remember what TSR's adventures were like (it's been too long), but my time GMing D&D 3.5 is still fairly fresh in my memory.

Keep on the Borderlands was better than what you describe. It was derided for having way too many different creatures living too close together. But it did have rules for opponents interacting with each other to rally, bribing creatures, many forks to choose between, and actual intrigue back at the keep. Sure, you could ignore these things (and I did when I was younger) but the order of the caves was not fixed and there were definitely rules on the module evolving as the players interacted with it.

Not perfect but it was pre-AD&D.

 

[pukunui]

Keep on the Borderlands was better than what you describe.

I never played that one. Before my time. I got my start with AD&D 2e back in the early 90s. To be honest, I don't think I ever ran any of TSR's published adventures, which is probably why I can't remember them. LOL.

 

[DracoSuave]

Prepublished adventures are, by their very nature, railroady.

There's very few that aren't... Three Days to Kill is the most recent example of one that basicly said 'You have three days, do whatever, then at the end of those three days, do something at this spot, here's some gear, how you do all this is entirely up to you.'

There were a few of the BECMI adventures too that were simply 'Do as you will.' There was one of the X series that was simply 'map this area and don't get killed.'

That's a challenge with prepublished adventures tho: If you give too little of a narrative, it's not an adventure, but just a setting, and if you give too much of a narrative, it's a railroad.

The balance is hard to find, and varies from group to group. A lot of the advice on how to run a campaign or adventure involves the creativity of someone able to react to the players' actions. Unfortunately, printed words on paper do not have that same flexibility.

 

[Katana_Geldar]

As for a good adventure, the Tomb of Horrors superadventure is rather good in terms of story and puzzles, the poem in the furst adventure had my players puzzling over it for ages and managing to use it successfully to solve the puzzles.

I rather see it like islands, there are your big showpiece dungeons with gaps in between that the DM fills in. At the moment we're in one of those gaps and we don't go back to the scripted campaign until we hit level 11.