wotc intro adventures conflict with their own advice

[buddhafrog]

need to spread the XP before giving it to the OP again - so i'm doing it here. Your OP is spot-on! It is not a trivial point either. How encounters/campaigns/PC choices are presented is critical for new players. Its so true, and relatively simple, its quite stunning that this is not the way it is presented.

 

[Wik]

Thanks Buddhafrog, and everyone else who's commented on this.

A few thoughts on why this may be:

First, D&D is one of the few companies out there that actually release an "introductory" adventure with their main product. Most companies do not include an adventure in their product - of the games on my shelf, only two contain an adventure (Savage World and Warhammer Fantasy 2e) and I would call neither of them "introductory".

I believe this is partly due to page count - D&D often has three books forming a "core" while most other RPGs are expected to contain everything in one core book (often with additional splats that expand upon the content). This means that it is harder to find space for an adventure - especially because many non-D&D RPGs are implicitly aimed towards experienced gamers. A lot of non D&D RPGs instead put some page space towards introductory fiction (Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and WFRP2E all spring to mind), which is perhaps a better way to introduce experienced gamers to the key concepts of your setting.

D&D, however, has the space for an introductory adventure. Yet I believe there is a culture among the designers that perhaps the introductory adventure is a low priority - after all, the game line is large enough that there will be a "Starter Set" released with the main game that will serve as a better introduction for neophyte players.

Couple this with the fact that the ruleset is still probably being tweaked and redesigned while the adventure is being written, and you wind up with something that is inevitably cobbled together. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that whoever wrote the introductory adventure for 4e did it on a time crunch and fully intended for it to serve as a few simple combat encounters, and not as an "adventure" per se.

Many non D&D games seem to release their introductory adventure with the GM screen. While I'm not sure this is a good practice either (how do newbie GMs know to pick up the screen?) I suppose it's an okay compromise. And, from what I've seen of them, these intro adventures are actually pretty good at what they set out to do - much more so than TSR/WOTC equivalents.

For what it's worth, the only D&D intro adventure I think was any good was the one in the 1e DMG. And the 2e DMG's intent of being just a rulebook (with all adventures and advice being found in Dungeon and Dragon mags) was a bad, if understandable, call.

 

[Wik]

Also, to be clear - there are many great adventures out there for D&D. And many of them follow the written advice in the DMG... including adventures for 4e (The Slaying Stone, as mentioned upthread, is a pretty good example).

This thread is about introductory adventures that come with the included ruleset. The ones that spring to mind:

BECMI
* Keep on the Borderlands (came in the red box)
* Bargle's Dungeon (in the Red Box DMG)
* The tower adventure (Moldvay Basic)
* The dungeon that came with the 90s "Black Box" set (can't remember any details)
1E
* The ruined monastery (One floor was sort of detailed, DM fills in the rest)
3E
* Whatever the hell came with the DMG (Don't remember, I may be misremembering)
4E
* The White Dragon/Kobold Hall adventure.
* Keep on the Shadowfell probably doesn't count - as it is a self-contained adventure.

 

[ArcaneSpringboard]

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.

I think the key is to have a handful of difficult but meaningful choices that the PCs have to make. Which the adventure then needs to somehow account for later on.

It's a railroad, but with sidings.

 

[Riastlin]

I guess I just always looked at the DMG "adventure" as an intro to the combat system rather than as an adventure per se. I think the other thing to consider, particularly for an "intro adventure" in a core book is that while not every group is heavy into roleplay and story, pretty much every group does enjoy combat. Making the included adventure combat heavy then becomes a bit of a safe choice -- at least for new players.
Experienced groups are likely to ignore the included adventure (except maybe to use it as a quick primer).

The bigger problem for me though comes with the standalone adventures like KotS. KotS is pretty much a terrible adventure as implemented (though I think it could be made into a good adventure with some work). The problem with this is approach is that the standalone adventures are, in my opinion, a lot more likely to be used by even experienced groups. Every DM occasionally runs into a time crunch for instance. Where I think WotC often fails is that they seem to spend a lot time trying to come up with a story for the dungeon, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but then don't provide a story for the characters in the adventure. The problem here is that while the dungeon's story might be interesting, its often going to be the case that the PCs will not discover that story.

Take Sir Keegan for instance. IIRC (don't have the adventure here at work ), there's a pretty decent chance that the PCs will never discover his true story -- even if they engage him in the SC if the DM runs the adventure entirely as written. To truly have a good chance of delivering that story, the DM needs to find a way to provide flashbacks (the DM who ran it for me had ghosts sprinkled throughout the Keep reliving their last moments). The actual encounter as written though deals more with getting the PCs to convince Keegan that they are good than with Keegan's story itself.

All of this is all well and good for an experienced DM who has the time to modify the adventure to suit his needs, but for new DM's, or DM's who are pressed for time, the adventure ends up falling flat. Its a shame really, because I'm sure that there are plenty of people at WotC who run amazing adventures and campaigns, they just haven't seemed to be able to actually write them for publication yet.

 

[ourchair]

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, for example, or the new Gamma World adventure (there's some nice GM advice, and then the sample adventure ignores a good chunk of it).

I understand why this might be done - to ensure that a limited page count is put to best use, that the designers think fun encounters are the most important part of the game, and so on - but it seems to me a case of "do as I say, not as I do".

In other words, new players reading all this handy advice (and I do believe the 4e DMG to be one of the best DMGs ever written) then get shown a sample adventure "written by the pros". Not really having any idea what is "proper" gaming, which would you follow?

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, but they at least had non-linear exploration options (and also allowed the GM to expand upon the dungeon, even going so far as to provide advice on how to do so). I don't recall the 3e intro adventure, and I know there wasn't one for 2e (in my mind, a mistake).

In my mind, the intro adventure should have contained:

1. Three encounters - one easy one with a few minions, one "average strength" one that could be made easier if the PCs took advantage of a "trick", and one "hard" encounter, possibly against an elite boss. One of these encounters should contain a trap that a character with thievery can bypass (and maybe even use to his advantage!).
2. A Skill Challenge.
3. Light Exploration.
4. Possibility for expansion.
5. The ability to come at encounters from different angles due to PC choices (and maybe even ways for the PCs to catch enemies by surprise through clever play!).
6. A riddle or a puzzle.

These, by the way, are all things suggested in the DMG's advice. And for those worried about page count, the Draconomicon offers mini-adventures like this, and they take up a relatively small page count ("the ruins of Castle Korvald", a level 5th adventure, takes 8 pages, and this number could easily be reduced by maybe a page or two with some clever editing).

It's a general opinion on these boards that, regardless of your views on 4e (I happen to like the basic gist of the system but am annoyed by a few quirks of gameplay), the adventures are generally the weakest link. So the fact that the intro adventures are weak should come as no surprise. However, I've always been of the opinion that an intro adventure really needs to showcase your game and display how the game should ideally be run - and it has to do so in an easy to run fashion to allow beginners to run it.

And the recent intro adventures fail in that regard.

My two cents, of course.

Great topic and I've found that glaring as well.

I kind of look at it differently, I think the WotC designers who write the adventures assume that newbie DMs are super-capable of retooling the adventures they've written.

You get an inkling of that sensibility in the Dungeon Delve book, in which each adventure is given notes on how to expand it to a full-length adventure, but they're all 'encounter additions' that don't really explain how to make sense of how they fit in from a narrative perspective.

In other published adventures, they say you can customize or tweak these things but they pretty much leave you to your own devices on how to do that. So in a sense, they don't really contradict their own advice so much as they kind of shrug their shoulders and assume that people can figure it all out.

I think this is kind of symptomatic of the product and editing philosophy during the Heinsoo/pre-Mearls days, when the first set of products basically avoided spelling out fluff components so that players and DMs were free to make sense of everything on their own and visualize the campaign and characters any way they see fit.

Unfortunately, newbie DMs like me who came to 4th Edition also felt like we weren't being handheld enough because of that. I completely appreciate that in 4th Edition we aren't beholden to fluff that rigidly informs how the game is designed and the game world is played.

That means most of the stuff we got from WotC, becomes really grind-spammed and flavor-deficient when taken at face value, . Power source books before Primal Power look like ancient README files from DOS-era game patches, and adventures played out of the book as is, assume the adventurers are going to monotonously grind their way through 4-6 hours of combat.

So my theory is that adventures don't contradict the advice of 'say yes' and 'don't railroad' so much as designers couldn't be bothered to provide the tools to do that, thinking that its the DM himself or herself that would know how best to say yes and not railroad, since after all, it won't be THEM that's at the table.

 

[Farnsworth]

I have to disagree with the OP. I think Keep on the Shadowfell is a great first adventure, and the only item in the OP's list that it doesn't include is a riddle/puzzle.

From a role playing perspective, they let you know who all the major NPC's & Villans are as well as tips on how to play them/personality notes. Aside from that the best you can do in an adventure is list out the combat encounters. Adventures are sort of like Frankensteins Monster, you bought the bone & body of the adventure but as the DM you have to give it life. If there is something you don't like, change it.

The PC's can come at the adventure a lot of different ways. Perhaps they want to work hard to discover who the spy in Winterhaven is. Let them come up with a plan, and implement it into the adventure. Perhaps they can catch the traitor before he springs his trap, making the encounter much easier. You could reduce the number of undead the traitor is able to raise to fight them because the PC's forced her hand.

During the skill challenge with Sir Keegan I have a lot of good stuff planned for my group. If they do well, he may bestow a gift (magic item) to one or more of them, or he may knight them, and in later adventures he may have spoken with other souls in the afterlife giving the PC's a little advantage in future ghost oriented skill challenges. I'm thinking about inserting the ghosts of his slain family as well to add some more flavor to the keep.

The possibilities are limitless, but by its nature an written adventure is limited. The tips in the DMG are for continuing game continuity when the players throw you a curve ball, and they always throw curve balls.

 

[Riastlin]

I have to disagree with the OP. I think Keep on the Shadowfell is a great first adventure, and the only item in the OP's list that it doesn't include is a riddle/puzzle.

From a role playing perspective, they let you know who all the major NPC's & Villans are as well as tips on how to play them/personality notes. Aside from that the best you can do in an adventure is list out the combat encounters. Adventures are sort of like Frankensteins Monster, you bought the bone & body of the adventure but as the DM you have to give it life. If there is something you don't like, change it.

The PC's can come at the adventure a lot of different ways. Perhaps they want to work hard to discover who the spy in Winterhaven is. Let them come up with a plan, and implement it into the adventure. Perhaps they can catch the traitor before he springs his trap, making the encounter much easier. You could reduce the number of undead the traitor is able to raise to fight them because the PC's forced her hand.

During the skill challenge with Sir Keegan I have a lot of good stuff planned for my group. If they do well, he may bestow a gift (magic item) to one or more of them, or he may knight them, and in later adventures he may have spoken with other souls in the afterlife giving the PC's a little advantage in future ghost oriented skill challenges. I'm thinking about inserting the ghosts of his slain family as well to add some more flavor to the keep.

The possibilities are limitless, but by its nature an written adventure is limited. The tips in the DMG are for continuing game continuity when the players throw you a curve ball, and they always throw curve balls.

The point though is not that the adventure cannot be made into a great first level adventure, but rather that it requires a decent amount of work on the part of the DM to do so. I could argue that pretty much any written adventure can be turned into a great adventure. Heck, even Kobold Hall, which is about as much on rails as an adventure can get, can be made interesting with enough work.

The point is, the published adventures should come ready to go with interesting possibilities. There should be more than one way to enter into the Keep. The flashbacks of ghosts reliving their final moments (like my DM had) should have been written into the module -- or at least some sort of evidence should have been there. Placing the ghosts was a brilliant move on my DM's part as it created a mystery to the place that wouldn't be there as written. All of this is well and good for those of us who are experienced. The problem is though that if you are completely new to the world of D&D, the idea of changing what this "professional" did is going to seem somewhat alien. An experienced DM could take "The heroes enter a dungeon and come out with loot after defeating a dragon" and turn it into a great adventure. Somebody new to D&D could not though. (and yes I realize that example is an extreme example)

In other words, published adventures should be fun and exciting as written while still affording the DM the opportunity to tailor it to his particular campaign.

 

[Katana_Geldar]

Yes, but a lot of newbie players don't even know they have options. You usually have to get some sort of conficence with the system first before you feel the urge to explore. It's why I keep new players on leashes, they need to understand how characters work before they can built their own character, and they need to understand how the basics of combat work before they can be creative.

I see no problem with first timers, players and DM, running Keep on the Shadowfell as it's written with a little creatively as you go along...and then discussing it as a group where you want to go and the sorts of games you wish to play. You need to start somewhere.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

I have to disagree with the OP. I think Keep on the Shadowfell is a great first adventure, and the only item in the OP's list that it doesn't include is a riddle/puzzle.

Actually, KotS does have a room with a riddle:

Spoiler

Area 6, the Hidden Armory. The PCs can find a plaque, where a spirit poses a riddle. If the PCs get it right, they get an extra suit of armor.

I'd also say area 7, the Skeletal Legion, has a puzzlish riddle:

Spoiler

How do you stop the endless tide of skeletal minions? You have to read the inscription of the altar to Bahamut and interpret its meaning.

I think KotS gets a lot of unfair treatment. Yes, yes, it could definitely be improved, and I have several ideas on doing just that. But the adventure went perfectly fine for our group (although, admittedly, I did skip over a few of the final encounters because I couldn't wait to get to the fight with Kalarel ).