Adventures can be hard to write. It’s ironic really. I mean if you’re a regular DM you prepare an adventure just about every weekend or so. We write them all the time…well, sort of. Usually when we prepare for a home campaign those adventures are nothing more than a rough skeleton of a plot, kept together with the sinews of a few select resources—stat blocks, minis, tiles, and sticky-sprouted rulebooks. We troubleshoot or ad lib quite a bit while we go, and react to actions of our players in ways that will resonate with them while being guided by our own internal sense of where the plot can reasonably go. In our weekly games few of us rarely even approach the rigor of a published adventure.
DMs are so use to this freeform approach to running a game often it’s difficult or even unsatisfying to run a published adventure. After all, most published adventures make assumptions about the character’s actions, and while those assumptions strive to be reasonable, thrown-together convention gamers and even long-time friends often bring their own idioms to the table that can take the reasonable and bend it like a pretzel.
Paizo’s Kingmaker is worth checking out. Its hexcrawl structure makes both the neo and the grognard in me smile.
As a good friend of mine is fond of saying, PC stands for plot corruptor.
But while it is easy to blame the players and their pesky corrupting characters, I think our published adventures and their structure are partially to blame. Many D&D adventures are written with a very specific story in mind. H1 Keep on the Shadowfell assumes that you will eventually uncover the machinations of Kalarel and stop him. It’s not unreasonable, but I think the rather linear nature of the plot turned make some expert users grumble, not realizing that the simplicity of the plot is there to help new users get up to speed on D&D and 4e concepts. There are other things they grumble about as well, but I think the initial dismay about the first 4e adventure had to do with its relative simplicity.
But even most Paizo adventures, much lauded for their quality and story, are often rather linear and limiting. Council of Thieves Part 1: The Bastards of Erebus assumes:
“…the PCs seek out the base and confront the Bastards of Erabus—with the defeat of the bandits, the PCs and their allies take their first step toward becoming the heroes of the city.”
I don’t want to seem overly critical here. I don’t think the assumption is crazy, or railroading in the way that say DL1 Dragons of Despair was, but like many Paizo adventures it features a strong plot. The choices the players make tend to be very small, often discrete, and tactical in nature. But even Paizo realizes their structure often excludes players from making big choices—and players do like to make big choices. The Hexcrawl format of the Kingmaker path seems to come from this realization. I don’t know this for certain, mind you, but those folks over at Paizo are wicked smart, and do a great deal of reflection on RPG deign. We don’t always agree, but I do admire their savvy.
In many ways I think the limitations to published adventures are for few reasons. I think there has been a desire among RPG designers to create the next evolution in adventure design. I think the delve format is a great example, the map folio adventures of 4e is also one, Paizo’s Kingmaker is yet another. But the RPG fan is a member of a proud culture. The long-term RPG gamers tend to enjoy the forms they are used to. They are experts at those forms, and when you are an expert it’s often hard to accept the uncertainty of being a beginner again.
This phenomenon is the secret behind the acceptance of 3e D&D and the amount of backlash there was/is for the 4e rules. By the time 3e came around, the number of D&D buyers and players and reached its nadir. People didn’t mind learning a new system because they’d stopped playing the old one. 4e, on the other hand, seemed more akin to that awkward kid with the strange new clothing that shows up to a party. To many, the response was, “who the hell are you, and what the fuck are you wearing.” Now this is a scary thing for the RPG designer. It makes you afraid at times to push forward new innovation, because familiar forms are so important to the majority of the buyer/player base (including your fellow designers). I know this. I’ve been on both sides of this fence. It’s very hard to leap.
And this is especially true when you consider the D&D reader, the guys who only play the game in their mind while they are reading the books. They rarely or never grace a game table. These folks don’t have the benefit of trial and error that RPG players do, so they cling on to the familiar and shun the new.
Secondly, the adventure is limited by its current medium—printed books. Books have a linear nature which is hard to get around. This is one of the reasons that I am very disappointed by the C&D against Masterplan. Now I know the reasons why. I don’t agree with them, but I do understand that Wizards wants to keep its game information as closed as possible. They have fallen into the trap that a closed system retains buying users. I believe they’re mistaken.
The irony is that the conveniences of having compendium material within Masterplan is not the reason that program is awesome. Masterplan, more than any other product out there revolutionizes adventure format. Its organization and modular structure allow us to create, organize, and present adventures on a scale most of us never dreamed of…and it does it easily.
It’s not perfect. I could use better interface design, and it may have a tad too many bells and whistles, but for something some morlock cooked up in his cave, it’s fantastic. It does nothing to change the play of the RPG, but gives us better tools and interfaces to design decision trees (like the ones that rule the interesting storytelling in Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins) while at the same time sandboxing our adventures using some of the same tools used by computer game designers.
The thing I find most fascinating is the strange fact that computer-game-like level design, like the ones presented in Masterplan, is more akin to how we naturally design our home campaigns than any paper or PDF module can be. That is truly weird…and somewhat ironic.
Often a C&D is not just about one product but about curtailing future similar products. I’m sure WotC can live with what MasterPlan was doing, the same way they lived with the old Excel-based character generators. Their strategy to fight competitor tools has been pretty smart – they release so much info/new stuff that even an army of volunteers has trouble keeping up. Brilliant, until a singe smart guy figures out they can suck DDI into their tool… and even worse when another guy figures out they can take that software’s library and just share it / manipulate it / etc.
The threat becomes too great. All that WotC works for becomes really endangered. The only option is really to get the word out that this isn’t acceptable. Unfortunately, lawyers are correct that any attempt to be “soft” (aka “nice”) ends up weakening any future potential court battle. So, they have to stay quiet and can’t say things like “Hey, we love MP, let’s work together on something else.” You can do that, but only in a very careful and separate way from the C&D. And, it is very likely MP has no real desire to work with WotC in a way that both parties would like. So, here we are.
WotC is right to do what they have done. I would sure prefer that they work with MP, but business realities are real. I do hope this situation underscores that WotC needs to develop Adventure Tools and that it needs to have the kind of cross-DDI integration (monsters, encounters, plot/story, terrain, maps, etc.) that MP employs.
As for adventure design, I think adventure publishers often miss a big part of what purchasers look for. Some are looking for a run-as-is adventure, and that sure is nice (I hate rough DM-should-finish-them adventures). But, a large number are looking for the adventure to give them ideas and be something they can alter to fit their needs. The perfect adventure for me is a great adventure on its own but be filled with interesting bits both mechanically and lore/campaign wise. The AD&D Desert of Desolation series is one of my gold standards – you can’t help but want to use many of the encounter bits over and over again in other adventures. It is filled with awesome ideas. Many of the Greyhawk classic adventures are filled with fantastic lore that a DM loves to collect and include. Maur Castle is a good example. A great adventure with nothing new mechanically and no lore misses a big demographic. Strip away meaningful story/RP and you have a real failure even if combats are decent (I’m looking at the early 4E adventures here).
While I don’t currently have a home game to really stretch my DM muscles using Masterplan (MP) I have been using it to run my weekly D&D Encounters sessions. I have to say that inputting the published adventure into MP has helped me adapt to Plot Corrupter/Crushers actions because everything is at my fingertips. Need a bit of info from a previous part of the adventure, there it is in the Encyclopedia. Updated statblocks (yes there are errors in the printed mod), done. Adjusting the table for 4 or 6 player tables instead of the standard 5 assumed in the mod, easy.
Even more interesting is the plot holes and inconsistencies that have turned up. MP really makes you think about how everything interrelates and is not tied to the linear nature of print. It is the best thing ever (until someone makes something better ).
I look forward to ver. 9 when it comes out.
You have hit the bulls-eye. I have found that no matter how well written a purchased module is, it is never flexible enough and leaves our group a little put off. On the flip side my own custom stuff is, by those standards, very poorly written yet always seems to have a strong positive response from the group.
Now I know why.
As for WOTC and the C&D on Masterplan, they have missed a golden opportunity.
In the paper “Why Authors are Giving Books Away on the Internet” By John Hilton III and David Wiley, a very strong point is made that supports the idea that readily accessible free information, promotes visibility and by extension brings stronger support and more purchases. We want to promote our hobby and see it grow. Why not let tools like Masterplan make it easy for me to do quick, rich adventures. I already own all the books, and because I have used the information from my DDI subscription in Masterplan, my group is buying more books!
As an example I have 2 new players. Because it was easy to have flexible customized scenarios in Masterplan that excited them on their first time through, they got excited about the game! They are now buying minis, dice and books.
Growth in the hobby, what a concept.