Fundamentals of Adventure Design

[hogarth]

Can you come up with a concrete example of a published adventure where the maps and stat blocks are of little use after you strip away the canned plot?

It's a bit awkward discussing the proposition "Real-life adventures are bad, and as proof here's a hypothetical adventure that's bad".

Sure. Bastion of Broken Souls. It has a bunch of adventure-specific monsters and adventure-specific modified NPCs and the maps are stupid out of context of that adventure.

According to the review in another thread, the monsters are:

• A demon-thing ("Cathezar")
• A death slaad rogue
• Some druids
• A night hag and some golems
• Some solars and a titan
• Some demons
• Some half-dragons
• Some Positive Energy Plane creatures
• A dragon with a demon for a heart

So which of those stat blocks are useless if you try to remove them from the plot but are otherwise good?

[OgreBattle]

I've got a question, what's the best way to deal with exploring an actual dungeon with traps, treasure, monsters and so on? For a murderhobo dungeoncrawl hexgrid exploration kind of game.

Do you have your players add stuff to grid paper? Do actual locations matter or is it kind of abstracted? I have a hard time figuring out when rolling perception checks to see the funny trap tiles and athletics to jump over things adds to enjoyment/atmosphere vs being tedious.

[K]

Can you come up with a concrete example of a published adventure where the maps and stat blocks are of little use after you strip away the canned plot?

It's a bit awkward discussing the proposition "Real-life adventures are bad, and as proof here's a hypothetical adventure that's bad".

Sure. Bastion of Broken Souls. It has a bunch of adventure-specific monsters and adventure-specific modified NPCs and the maps are stupid out of context of that adventure.

According to the review in another thread, the monsters are:

• A demon-thing ("Cathezar")
• A death slaad rogue
• Some druids
• A night hag and some golems
• Some solars and a titan
• Some demons
• Some half-dragons
• Some Positive Energy Plane creatures
• A dragon with a demon for a heart

None of the character background material can be used for anything other than this adventure. The NPCs are just not developed enough to be useful for creating new adventures.

Certainly, some of the stat-blocks can be cannibalized, but I don't actually care about that. There are MMs full of stat blocks that I already don't use, so ten or twenty more in an adventure don't add any value to my gaming.

Creating a memorable character with an interesting concept is the work I'd like to offload to an adventure. Stat blocks are just grunt work that anyone can produce.

[hogarth]

Creating a memorable character with an interesting concept is the work I'd like to offload to an adventure. Stat blocks are just grunt work that anyone can produce.

That makes sense, but it has almost nothing to do with having a pre-chosen plot. In my experience, lame writers make lame characters (plot or no plot).

[Laertes]

Creating a memorable character with an interesting concept is the work I'd like to offload to an adventure. Stat blocks are just grunt work that anyone can produce.

Interestingly, I see it exactly the other way around. Creating stat blocks is grunt work and I hate grunt work. It's what I'd like to offload to someone else. Creating memorable characters within interesting concepts is the fun bit, and therefore the bit I want to do myself.

[violence in the media]

I've got a question, what's the best way to deal with exploring an actual dungeon with traps, treasure, monsters and so on? For a murderhobo dungeoncrawl hexgrid exploration kind of game.

Do you have your players add stuff to grid paper? Do actual locations matter or is it kind of abstracted? I have a hard time figuring out when rolling perception checks to see the funny trap tiles and athletics to jump over things adds to enjoyment/atmosphere vs being tedious.

I've been having the same issue lately, but the problem has expanded to monster encounters that the PCs are going to steamroll as well.

[Antariuk]

I've got a question, what's the best way to deal with exploring an actual dungeon with traps, treasure, monsters and so on? For a murderhobo dungeoncrawl hexgrid exploration kind of game.

Do you have your players add stuff to grid paper? Do actual locations matter or is it kind of abstracted? I have a hard time figuring out when rolling perception checks to see the funny trap tiles and athletics to jump over things adds to enjoyment/atmosphere vs being tedious.

I like to let the players draw both their own map and the battlemap, if an encounter or a puzzle room happens, because it eases my workload and gives them something to do. Corrections are only necessary of some major features are wrong, otherwise I don't bother.

Regarding skill checks, I reduce dice rolling to the few traps/features/ambushes where it really matters, or where failure would have a real impact on the whole crawl (alarms set off, or chain reaction traps), otherwise I let them auto-detect hazards and they get to tell me how they circumvent them. If they get to roll stuff, I mostly use 10 ft-intervals if the room is big enough and allow re-rolls if the first roll had distance penalties.

But I know your concerns, I had the exact same ones when I started GM'ing my first dungeon. It helps to generate a random dungeon online and let an imaginary party roll their way through it (if I am the rogue, how would I do this?), at least it helped me.

[K]

Creating a memorable character with an interesting concept is the work I'd like to offload to an adventure. Stat blocks are just grunt work that anyone can produce.

That makes sense, but it has almost nothing to do with having a pre-chosen plot. In my experience, lame writers make lame characters (plot or no plot).

It has everything to do with a pre-chosen plot.

The "standard" adventure only writes up characters to serve that plot. They are almost always written to exist for one battle or plot point, usually revolving around one gimmick or trait and little else (ever notice how many NPC mages in canned adventures take Craft Potion?). The writers don't work up backstory for that character or detail any motivation beyond info regarding that specific adventure.

I could certainly write up and expand on a character to make it usable outside of a pre-made adventure, but the benefit of using other people's adventures is supposed to be that you get things that you wouldn't make yourself. I just don't get that if I do most of the work in adapting it.

The real tragedy is that making these standard NPCs doesn't need to be done. Considering the amount of page space wasted on unnecessary detail that PCs will never see in most adventures, a writer co0uld easily just use the same word-count to make reusable NPCs and maps.

[K]

Creating a memorable character with an interesting concept is the work I'd like to offload to an adventure. Stat blocks are just grunt work that anyone can produce.

Interestingly, I see it exactly the other way around. Creating stat blocks is grunt work and I hate grunt work. It's what I'd like to offload to someone else. Creating memorable characters within interesting concepts is the fun bit, and therefore the bit I want to do myself.

In the best of all worlds, we both get our wish.

A good stat-block should be reflect the concept. This means that if someone describes a wizard as "the finest battle mage in the land," that wizard really should not have spent all his feats on magic item crafting instead of battle or battle-magic feats.

[Stubbazubba]

I've got a question, what's the best way to deal with exploring an actual dungeon with traps, treasure, monsters and so on? For a murderhobo dungeoncrawl hexgrid exploration kind of game.

Do you have your players add stuff to grid paper? Do actual locations matter or is it kind of abstracted? I have a hard time figuring out when rolling perception checks to see the funny trap tiles and athletics to jump over things adds to enjoyment/atmosphere vs being tedious.

I don't know if it's totally on-point, but it's at least somewhat related: The Angry DM has an interesting take on skill checks that IMX works to reduce the tedious nature of things.

[Laertes]

Creating a memorable character with an interesting concept is the work I'd like to offload to an adventure. Stat blocks are just grunt work that anyone can produce.

Interestingly, I see it exactly the other way around. Creating stat blocks is grunt work and I hate grunt work. It's what I'd like to offload to someone else. Creating memorable characters within interesting concepts is the fun bit, and therefore the bit I want to do myself.

In the best of all worlds, we both get our wish.

A good stat-block should be reflect the concept. This means that if someone describes a wizard as "the finest battle mage in the land," that wizard really should not have spent all his feats on magic item crafting instead of battle or battle-magic feats.

The "finest battle mage in all the land" is an archetype and can be built as a self-contained thing, ready to be plonked in wherever you need it. Building that mage is simply grunt work. You're right that they need to have their stat block built to reflect that concept, but if two different lands have finest battle mages then they will probably look fairly similar. It's a cookie cutter NPC not unlike "orc with spear."

By contrast, a character whose concept is "was being groomed to be the finest battle mage in the land but due to dynastic circumstances was unexpectedly made king, and is a dutiful enough person to have let their magic studies slide in order to focus on being a competent king; and since their land naturally produces lots of Gems Of Brilliant Cold and has several famous Shrines of Ghost Summoning then they've taken an ice/necromancy magician build which would be suboptimal elsewhere but here is the best use of available resources" cannot be so easily lifted from one adventure and put into another. That's a shame because that's the sort of NPC which makes games fun and which players will remember. That's the sort of NPC I mean when I say "memorable and with an interesting concept."

Since the bulk of my work should be focusing on the latter sort of NPC, I want someone else to make my "orc with spear" statblocks for me.

[silva]

Agree with Laertes. "The finest battle mage in the land" is an innocuous concept.

"The finest battle mage in the land, who happens to hide his magic out of shame for comitting an unspeakable atrocity in his past"

...is better, because you get an immediate kicker for the player and GM to use in adventures - finding out his past, facing the atrocity and its consequences, and trying to correct it (or just accept it).

[K]

"Orc with spear" is not even worthy of putting in an adventure. It's a waste of page space to put something so poorly concepted into an adventure when you could use the same page space for a memorable character with the appropriate stats for that that specific concept.

[Antariuk]

"Orc with spear" is not even worthy of putting in an adventure. It's a waste of page space to put something so poorly concepted into an adventure when you could use the same page space for a memorable character with the appropriate stats for that that specific concept.

If your adventure takes place in Orc-Land, I think it's perfectly reasonable to have grunts with spears - in the background. Benefit is you only need one statblock for all of them and it makes the special orcs even more memorable in contrast. But I'd agree that you shouldn't focus on cookie cutter critters.

[Laertes]

EDIT: Thinking about it, I think I agree with your earlier point, K: In a perfect world we'd both get our way. Ideally every NPC in every book is quirky and unusual and interesting, and also their maths works and they're able to do their schtick effectively.

I'm simply tired of having to stat up orcs with spears because game authors consider it to be unimportant. My time is more valuable than theirs; that's why they're spending months on something that will take me hours to enjoy. If a game author can use up some page count to do the low-grade grunt work for me, I'd consider that a fair thing to pay for.