There’s recently been a bit of discussion, prompted by this video of Matt Colville, about making up a campaign based on a lot of shorter published adventures. And some people are lamenting that people won’t do it today since they don’t know that short adventures exist. Because Wizards of the Coast only publish long adventures.

In fact, they do publish short adventures. Just not (for the most part), as physical releases, except in compilations. Why don’t they? It sadly comes down to economic realities.

But, by a strange quirk of the market, there are now more short adventures being published for Dungeons & Dragons than at any point in the past. Why? Well, it’s because of the DM’s Guild. I haven’t been keeping track with my Adventure List as much these days (there’s a lot of manual intervention needed), but believe me, there are a LOT of adventures available.

However, this argument has so many levels of déjà vu in it for me. I’ve been around social media for a long, long time. And the form of the argument goes like this:

“When I started the game there was X, and we used it to play, and it was fantastic. But now players don’t know X exists, and the game is awful! They don’t know what they’re missing out on!”

So, for this argument, the “X” is “short adventures”.

But I’ve seen more than a few old school types who think that any published adventure is anathema. DMs should make up their own!

And the argument has also been used for “hexcrawls”, “sandbox games”, and “domain rules”.

Sigh.

Do you know what the majority of D&D DMs are doing? They’re ignoring everything that gets published and just running games. You look at the numbers sold of the Player’s Handbook and DMG, and then compare them to any adventure. Guess what wins by a huge amount?

I’ve seen lots and lots of complaints about how the DMG doesn’t teach DMs to design and run adventures. There’s truth there, but you’ve still got record number of people learning and playing the game. When you look at the greater population of the D&D community, most started in the past 10 years. They’ve only known 5E.

(I’m pretty sure about those figures, but I can’t back them up just at the moment. Perhaps one of my friends will post a link to confirm it).

One of the things I find hilarious about the complaint is that making a campaign out of short, published adventures is exactly what Wizards of the Coast did with Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Here are a bunch of nautical themed adventures, and you can run them one after another! No overall plot; just the tale of a wandering party of adventurers getting into scrapes.

I should also say that my homebrew Greyhawk campaigns also function in this manner. I find adventures I like and weave them together and occasionally create my own material as well when I feel inspired. I don’t just run long published adventures.

As I mention before, it’s very rare to find short adventures on shop shelves today in any more than compiled form. The reason, sad to say, is economics. They’re relatively more expensive to make than longer adventures, they don’t sell as well, and 32-page adventures in particular display extremely poorly. (They don’t have spines). So, while I have many, many of the old AD&D adventures, they’re not really feasible these days, at least to sell in brick-and-mortar stores.

I do buy a few short adventures from time to time in printed form, but they’re Print-On-Demand. (And then, most likely, I can’t find them on my shelves!)

While I’ve mostly been mocking the concerns of the Doom and Gloomers here, there is one aspect that is worth of consideration. And that’s the loss of memory and history.

There’s a lot of lore about how the game was played over the last 50 years, but not all of it was explained or recorded. So, when someone says, “You don’t run domain play” (that is, ruling kingdoms), many people today will say “I don’t know how to”. And that’s the sort of lore that is easily lost.

Especially because while AD&D and early D&D was saying “Domain play is great!”, they weren’t actually helping DMs run it. It took until the Companion rules for a fullish set of domain rules to enter an official book – that’s in 1984, ten years after the game debuted. But those disappeared as the game moved on.

(There’s a problem with domain play; it’s only interesting to a small subset of people playing D&D. And they might not even like the official rules.)

I’m quite pleased to see a resurgence in people trying to explain other methods of playing D&D. Hexcrawls, sandbox campaigns, and so on and so forth. They’re actually getting blog posts, videos, and published products. Even Kobold Press has a book on running hexcrawls. Well part of one – Book of Hexcrawl: Part One. While many of these books really suffer from bad writing – or One True Wayism – that they exist mean that the lore is circulating again.