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Ydars wrote:

Great thread LFK!

I have bought alot of WoTC published adventures, but always feel they start with an interesting premise and then degenerate into a pretty mindless dungeon-crawl e.g. Speaker in Dreams. That could have been a wonderful adventure if it had had a greater depth of story. The problem with all modern published adventures is that the NPCs are pretty cardboard for me. Talking of cardboard, the production values of adventures has always been the lowest versus other products. This said, the big campaigns like Mysteries of the Moonsea and others were better. Yet I have to confess, despite owning almost all the WoTC adventures, I have never actually RUN any of them, despite DMing all through the 3.5E period.

I do have some 3rd party adventures, from Necromancer and FFG, and I feel they are very inferior to WoTC products and some are very short. Their production values (layout and artwork) tend to be pretty ordinary and the stories are sometimes so lame. I only have three from the early part of 3E release and so can't comment on the later releases. I know Necromancer came out with some great stuff latterly.

I was very surprised to discover this about most 3.5 E published adventures, since many 1e adventures were great (though just as many really weren't), if a little screwball, but it turns out that from a financial viewpoint, adventures aren't very profitable for WoTC and hence they don't spend much time on them; they simply don't sell that well (I have heard this repeated by industry insiders on the EN World boards many times; don't know if it is true).

I suppose the problem is, as this thread has exposed, alot of people create their own unique settings and adventures, and so many people don't actually buy adventures because they can't convert them. I must confess that I don't really understand why adventures don't sell.

LFK wrote:

I wanted to throw a bit more into this thread since I think my late-night "post before you forget" idea is a little thin.

In the last 6 months or so I've come to realize that I'm not actually that great at writing adventures. I can be, but I don't have the time to devote to making *great* adventures, or even entirely good adventures. Passible, I suppose.

Part of this came from prepping my 4e campaign, going back through old notes and whatnot and realizing that good stories were in there, good settings, but the adventures themselves were kinda on the bad side. This mingled with experiences as a player where we ran through a few pre-written adventures amidst the usual homebrew and I started to wise on to the fact that hombrew does not inherently equal good, and began to feel that Homebrew has been set up by the community as a kind of Holy Grail of "real D&D".

On the other side from that was coming to the boards and seeing people talk about Temple of Elemental Evil, Keep on the Borderlands, Undermountain, and other iconic adventures that have effectively entered the communal language of "what D&D is" but they're all adventures that I've never played.

Last little factor is that any given pre-written adventure probably won't be any worse than what I would probably write, and still saves me a lot of time.

In that regard this topic really isn't about "who's pre-ordering" as it is about general feelings towards the pre-written campaigns: who's planning on getting them and for what purpose, what are the pros and cons of pre-builts, and is it a good idea that WotC is trying to shape the GSL for the express purpose of encouraging more adventure writing?

The thing you have to understand about published adventures is that for every fantastic adventure that WotC or any one else publishes, there are probably nine others that kind of suck in comparison. This is nothing new or unique to adventures either, the same goes for novels, movies, games, and any other creative material.

The thing about the "Iconic" adventures is that they've been around long enough to distinguish themselves from the other 9 out of 10 that get chucked in the back of the closet and sealed away with the most powerful magics at the DM's disposal. The Iconic adventures on the other hand have proven that they were not only fun the first time, but that they could be fun a second time, and a third time, and so on. This is an extremely rare quality.

This doesn't mean that you can't have fun with the other 9 out of 10. On the contrary, someone somewhere thought it was a good idea and you might too; it just doesn't measure up in terms of replayability.

The other thing is that the DM running the adventure has a great deal to do with the fun involved. The first time I did Undermountain as a player, the adventure sucked, royally. The thing you have to understand is that, as written, Undermountain is basically empty (while this isn't true of most adventures it was a major factor in this case). Undermountain was written with a great deal of leeway for the DM, which is a good thing unless the DM opts not to do anything with it (like mine did).

The audience is another key component. On several occasions I've shooed away my players after an adventure that I though was kind of lame but it turns out that my wife enjoyed it (it's the same with the others, but I don't get as many opportunities to interview them about it). The thing is that they are all different and have different ideas about what is and isn't fun. What's important is that they keep coming back.

As for your own adventures being lackluster, I've also noticed the same thing with my own adventures. Sometimes I'll run one that is just…awesome; most of the time my adventures can be classified as "meh". Let me clue you in on a little secret:

ALL DUNGEON MASTERS SUCK!

I'd wager that this statement is true about 90% of the time. People say "a good DM…" and finish with their own values but the fact of the matter is that no human being can be a good DM all of the time. Human beings are fallible, horribly inconstant beings.

The good news is that DMing is a skill not. Like any other skill, talent only takes you so far, the rest is practice and patience. If you think there is room for you to improve (and you had better, this is the only thing I can think of that is true of everyone at all times) the solution is really quite simple. You only have to do two things: First, ask your players questions (what did you like; what didn't you like; et cetera). Second, listen to what they say. You don't have to implement all of their suggestions, but it is important to understand what they consider fun. The real trick is playing to that information without compromising what makes it fun for you.

The important thing to remember is that any time you add a source of creativity and independent thought to the table you are also adding another variable to whether or not the adventure is a good adventure. In the end, it doesn't matter a great deal whether it's your own adventure or someone elses. If it turns out to be fun, great; if not, then you need to figure out why and correct the problem in the future.

Sorry about dropping an essay on you. For the record I intend to purchase H1-H3, whether I end up using them or not. I like having access to other people's work. I believe it's helpful to me to see other people's approaches to what is fundamentally the same problem.

Galadare wrote:

The thing you have to understand about published adventures is that for every fantastic adventure that WotC or any one else publishes, there are probably nine others that kind of suck in comparison. This is nothing new or unique to adventures either, the same goes for novels, movies, games, and any other creative material.

...

This doesn't mean that you can't have fun with the other 9 out of 10. On the contrary, someone somewhere thought it was a good idea and you might too; it just doesn't measure up in terms of replayability.

Good post. I bolded the key terms there. The thing is, those 9 that kind of suck in comparison to the fantastic adventures are still probably better than anything I could every come up with. They may not be "iconic" adventures, but they're all time-savers. And if they are relatively cheap and easy to follow, then I'm sold.

As an example, back in the day we played through B9-Castle Caldwell and Beyond (its currently my avatar on TOS :D ). If I remember correctly, it had about 5 adventures in it. From what I can gather, it is not a very well thought-of module. But we had a good time with it, and my DM didn't have to do a heck of a lot to run it. Surely its not an iconic adventure, but it was plenty good enough.

If between H1-H3, P1-P3, and E1-E3 we get one iconic adventure, and 8 "serviceable" ones, I'll be a happy guy. That's not to say I wouldn't welcome more than one fantastic module...