D&D 5E WotC Is Designing Adventures With Shorter Content Chunks

In a recent interview, WotC’s Jeremy Crawford talked about how WotC’s D&D design accommodates streaming and busier adult gamers by dividing adventures into shorter, bite-sized content. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/07/dds-lead-rule-designer-explains-why-actual-play-has-influenced-the-game “So you’ll notice that around the time we came out with the Essentials Kit and then continued on...

In a recent interview, WotC’s Jeremy Crawford talked about how WotC’s D&D design accommodates streaming and busier adult gamers by dividing adventures into shorter, bite-sized content.


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“So you’ll notice that around the time we came out with the Essentials Kit and then continued on with a lot of our adventure content — even when it’s a large, epic campaign, like last year’s Rime of the Frostmaiden —they’re much easier to divide up into digestible segments that where … if the DM wants to just read a part of this big book, or just run one of these little quests, we’re making that easier to do. Not only to make things less arduous for a brand new Dungeon Master, and with new groups of players coming to D&D for the first time, but also because of that format of play, also suits streamed games better.

“We know streamed games, with the exception of maybe Critical Role, tend to be shorter than a lot of [traditional] tabletop games. You know, in the old days and even today, a lot of people’s tabletop games [sessions] might range between three and four hours, although we’re seeing the average length go down — most streamed games are often sometimes as short as two hours, or even 90 minutes.”
 

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Dire Bare

Legend
At minimum, it would be nice to have one Dragon/Dungeon Magazine style adventure in new issues of Dragon+. Gives me a much better reason to actually look at that.

Right now it's just a product catalog, sometimes with a good interview (usually around when they announced a new product). Extremely big stepdown from the first magazines.

I'm not holding out for anything print though, economically almost no one can do that anymore.
While it occasionally has something of interest, I find Dragon+ to be a highly irritating publication.

They've been doing it for a while, so it must be working for them, but . . . it seems the content would be better served as web articles rather than bundled into one big advertorial.
 

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TheSword

Legend
It’s worth noting that the even dungeon magazine adventures wouldn’t be completed in 2-3 hours for the most part. Aside from the side treks. They were generally far more detailed than that with 5-8 encounters, and fairly detailed dungeons/locations or even multiple locations.

The kind of bite sized side quests could be. The problem is, that I aren’t really interested in a whole campaign of small bite. Sometimes I want something meatier to get my teeth into. Something a bit grander, a bit more epic.

I hope they get the balance right. I feel they did with Rime. Descent on the other hand was far too bitty for me, and suffered from a lack of continuity.
 

pogre

Legend
This makes sense - my online sessions are around two hours. Running the game online is more taxing for me.

My weekly in-person game still runs four hours. I have folks making some long drives and to play any less than four hours is not going to work. Running 4 hours in-person is easier than running 2 hours online for me.
 



BrassDragon

Adventurer
Supporter
Great idea.

While I am growing more and more detached from the direction taken by crunch books in 5e, I think adventure design is getting better.

My ideal as a DM would be to have adventures I don't even have to read in advance but could sort of "read along" while running the game itself, and discover the plot together with my players. Impossible? Maybe with traditional printed books, but the future might bring new innovative adventures formats.
There is some truly excellent design in the independent/OSR scene that gets close to this ideal. Two examples that come to mind are Winter's Daughter by Gavin Norman and The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford by Chance Dudinack.
 

Reynard

Legend
Yes, so in some ways it is better: more variety. If you paid the $3.75 cover price for the original run of Dungeon every month, that would be $9.30 now. You can find some very cool stuff on the DMsGuild at $9 a month.
I keep looking for a website or other source that curates stuff from the DMG since it is hard to figure out what is good or not.
 


tetrasodium

Legend
Supporter
Epic
This is probably a good change but rhime of the frostmaiden is pretty lacking.
* 5e was designed explicitly for no feats no magic items so the system starts coming apart at the seams with feats or magic items and goes into meltdown pretty quickly with both so rhime basically has no room to include magic items.

*the wealth available to players is so stunningly abhorrent that it drives into "have you tried not doing that thing your GM told you to stop doing" levels with its absence

*there is very little guidance for a gm to quicky grab a thing and get up to speed on all of the things they need to know to run it. Suddenly duergar because um.... well uh....flipflipflip stop the dragon by um... uhh... well.. this npc cant tell you anything either ohh.... you went with violence like the last time you met dueargar and there are..um wow... that's a lot of duergar.....

** the gm needs to be able to quickly grasp what's going on and figure out what future twists/plot foundations they will need to plan for later so they can avoid filling in the blanks with conflicting stiff. The adventure cant require the gm go through it taking notes like they are writing their doctoral thesis on it but frostmaiden is pretty much exactly that
*there is basically one town except its split ten ways to ensure all of the NPCs and places are pretty much one and done with no touchstones for players to immerse themselves in

These are not problems that are impossible to fix but 5e is designed in ways that exacerbate most them or damage the game if they aren't an issue &wotc has spent the last several years adamantly ignoring them as badwrongfun.
 
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