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I’ve been reading campaign reports from very early D&D and Tèkumel campaigns. Boy did they focus on dungeon crawling. Sure, the player-characters were more than attack/defense scores, but gameplay centered on descents into old, underground areas that the GM had already mapped out (or generated randomly).
There’s a reason that the term is Dungeon Master.
That’s why so many people who started writing for RPGs started with adventures. They wanted more dungeons (or temples, or what-have-you) to explore. Even today, that’s how most folks start: with an adventure.
But adventures are not the future.
If D&D (particularly classic D&D) makes up the bulk of your RPG experience, adventures are common and useful. But once you’ve played Star Wars games and superhero games and Cthulhu games and hard science fiction games, exploring another set of dusty stone corridors and rooms to slug at monsters soon feels limiting (as exciting and fun as it can be).
Players now want agency. They want to be true investigators, Jedi, Batman; not hired hands told to extract idol #5 from dungeon #38.
Is there a place for adventures? Absolutely. New GMs need them, and experienced GMs with little time need them.
However, there are already plenty of free adventures out there (here are 83 for D&D 4E). While there’s nothing wrong with writing one or two, especially for your own experience, how many do we need?
Adventures aren’t the future. Settings, scenarios, and mechanics are the future. As useful as an adventure can be as a platform, we need to move beyond it.
This is fantasy. Almost anything is possible, given the appropriate constraints–and we can define the constraints.
We don’t need more medieval European geegaws. We don’t need more ways to be Conan or Elric.
I want to play in worlds inspired by The Wheel of Time and Dune and Ringworld and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. (And to those of you poised to type “There already is an RPG for The Wheel of Time,” re-read what I just wrote.) I want to see those ideas spun off and incorporated into new worlds. I want to see Aes Sedai and Bene Tleilaxu and Pierson’s Puppeteers in other settings.
This is not variety for variety’s sake. If this hobby is about white guys in armor beating up vaguely European monsters, it’s going to appeal mostly to white, European guys. If we want this hobby to expand and be more fun and interesting, we need it to expand. Expansion doesn’t mean yet another tomb to explore; it means new ideas and worlds, and ways to interact with those worlds. It needs settings, scenarios, and mechanics.
Let adventures die. Let’s look up to new horizons and new universes.
I’m curious as to the difference between “adventure” and “scenario”. You seem to be talking entirely about dungeons.
What is a “scenario” as you see it?
@Mike, in my opinion, there’s a hierarchy of DMs tools. The most basic would be the adventure. That’s where you’re given a clear objective, obstacles along the way, and sometimes even the characters to run with it. Next would be a campaign, or scenario. That’s a series of adventures that lead to some big whopping villain at the end. After that, you have a campaign setting, like forgotten realms, dark sun, starjammer. It’s a complete “universe” that operates under the rules of a game system. All other books and things like it, like spells, tools and special items would fall somewhere beneath the adventure as tools, or flavor.
Am I about right?
tl;dr adventures = one-shots and scenarios = six weeks to six months of premade fun.
[...] Gamer Assembly Skip to content HomeAbout ← Adventures Should Die T.W.Wombat | December 30, 2011 · 4:25 pm ↓ Jump to [...]
@Mike Good question!
By my definition, a scenario is broader than an adventure. A scenario describes an environment with a few specific locations, a set of bad guys, and other relevant background details. The players can encounter and interact with these elements in any order.
The scenario doesn’t tell the GM where to put the bad guys on the map; it describes the bad guys’ goals, resources, and plans. The GM figures out what the bad guys actually do as the players interact with them.
For example, a scenario’s smaller than a setting like Neverwinter, but Neverwinter does have several scenarios within it.
I agree with most of this article as I have, as a GM changed my writing style from a linear “adventure” style to a broader form, encompassing a whole kingdom with rivalries and secret societies. now, instead of having the players follow a set path I let them find their way.
You didn’t mention it in the article but this kind of writing encourages a lot more role playing because the players are forced to have their characters interact with the people in the game world.
[...] while ago, I posted an article on the Gamer Assembly titled Adventures Should Die. I argued that traditional published adventures, with their mostly linear adventure paths, are [...]
Hey, saw your comment on Beyond the Black Gate!
In my mind, the difference between a module and an adventure is in two dimensions: intention and linearity. Adventures have a set goal, a progression, and the referee expects the PCs to proceed in a certain way. Modules are usually site-based areas to explore (either small or large). They could also be events (for example, a carnival coming to town) as long as those events are not a preset series of encounters. The important characteristic of modules is that they are modular and can be slotted into any setting (that is, after all, why they are called modules). They also can (and probably should) have multiple entrances and exits. I don’t think the number of sessions spent is a useful metric here: you could spend one session or ten sessions exploring a haunted castle, and doing one or the other doesn’t make it more or less adventure-like or module-like.
Many of the famous early modules for D&D were intended for tournament rather than campaign play. For example, the Slave Lords series or the Giants series. These are still quite nonlinear by today’s standards, and probably straddle the line between module and adventure, but they set expectations about how a module was supposed to work.
Another interesting dichotomy: it is often possible to “clear” or finish an adventure. A module is more likely to just evolve as players interact with it (in the hands of a skilled referee).
There are many old products that are true modules, such as L1 The Secret of Bone Hill. I blogged about L1 here:
http://untimately.blogspot.com/2011/11/l1-secret-of-bone-hill.html
In Bone Hill, there are some wilderness areas, some dungeon areas, and some town areas, but there is no adventure. It’s all just there to be interacted with. If you are curious, you can find the full text of Bone Hill here:
http://www.rpgarchive.com/index.php?page=adv1&advid=131
(I believe this is legal, as WotC made the whole adventure available for free to download several years ago.)
There are many early products like L1. One of the most famous is Keep on the Borderlands. There’s no preset story. There’s just a keep, a border town, some caves with hostile humanoids, and a few other details. How the PCs interact with these elements is totally up to the players. Maybe they make an alliance with the humanoids and attempt to plunder the keep.
Ahhh, modules! Good point, good term, and thanks for the long comment!