I am fascinated by the process of designing adventures to be published and used by others.
There are many, many factors to consider. I came up with three – which I posted on Twitter – then M.T. Black offered some more.
The three I posted:
- You want to present a path through the adventure
- You want enough detail so the players can go beyond that (or take alternative routes)
- You want to keep down the word count!
Quite obviously, doing the first two well makes it harder to keep the word count down.
You might think, “Well, in the digital age, there is no physical limit on how many words a product can contain”, but it is not just about physical limits. Using more words means it is harder to remember everything or find the one thing you need during a session. There are good reasons I start twitching when an encounter’s description goes over a page and start getting worried when it takes more than two pages to describe.
M.T. offered these additional factors that (I presume) he thinks about when designing:
- Creating an adventure specific enough in setting to be interesting, but broad enough that DMs find it easy to include in their campaign
- Finding the “golden mean” between combat, social, and exploration encounters
- Providing guidance for running the adventure for different level characters
Yes, all of these provide more ways of increasing your word count and can make the result unwieldy!
I very much enjoy the opening sections of Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. There is a richness to that part of the adventure.
It includes several encounters that are not related to the story – and which the players might not see – that you can spin off into further adventures. It is an aspect of design I very much enjoy: A relatively small number of words can inspire adventures or campaign arcs!
Obviously, you do not want to overdo it, but I believe that concentrating too much on the place an encounter has within the storyline and only covering can cause issues.
Here are some things to consider:
- What purpose does this encounter have within the storyline, and how does it advance it?
- What do the inhabitants normally do? What are their goals? How do they want to achieve those goals?
You need the first to run the encounter as-is. It also helps the DM understand it within the context of the storyline.
The second helps groups who take alternative paths, or wish to expand the scenario.
Without the second, you get that strange feature common in computer games where something exists ONLY for the characters and waits frozen in time until they appear. You do not need to do this for every minor encounter – sometimes, a goblin only exists for the challenge of the moment – but having some idea of goals and plans allows the DM to improvise better if necessary.
Improvisation works best from a base of knowledge!
It is in that second part that I think the Avernus section of Descent into Avernus does not work as well. I feel that a bit too many of the encounters pay attention only to their purpose in the plot, and do not give enough instruction to the DM about their place in the larger world. (I am thus very fascinated by Justin Alexander’s attempt to Remix Avernus).
Note too there is a difference between an adventure written for publication and one you wrote to use at your own table. As author you would be intimately familiar with all the moving parts and under currents of story inherent, while also you’d want to make notes on mechanics and options to minimise book lookup time at the table. Other DMs, reading your adventure as published, don’t have that deeper familiarity and so all the words to do with mechanics and contingencies simply get in the way of that understanding — and also the very process of prepping that assists that DM in getting closer with the product and understanding it.
So .. if you have an adventure you’ve written and played (incl. testing) .. then you need to excuse words you feel are helpful.
If you want to keep Bryce happy though, you better make sure the foundation is sufficiently seeded with evocative language so even a no-prep DM has enough to wing it.
This is really why designing adventures never gets old. It is always possible to use fewer words better. Each project you improve slightly, sometimes significantly, but the challenge of writing better always remains.
I would say there are even more serious problems with the Avernus adventure.
It makes too many assumptions about what characters would and wouldn’t do, and they almost never make sense. Our DM had to railroad us so blatantly so often to get the story moving. Otherwise our characters (and we, as players) would never do the things the adventure assumes what players will do.
Another thing, the adventure seems to miss how the play style changes in different tiers of D&D game play. During the first part (and the first tier of character levels) of the adventure you’re heroic investigators that do a lot of combat and get into lots of action. The second part tho, Avernus is filled to the brim with adversaries you cannot possibly defeat (because they are all too powerful) and all of them are potentially hostile. Adventure does nothing to communicate that these NPCs are to be reasoned with, which discourages the players to look more into them. Then again this is a staple of a horror or a social intrigue type of game, which is better suited towards lower levels of play. When you’re level 8-10, you want to act heroic, with all the power you gained. Alas, you feel too weak and powerless in the presence of these entities, it’s frustrating.