(Not your adventure, specifically. Sorry.)
‘Tis the season of the Grinch and the airing of grievances, and I’m in the mood to complain. I’m likely preaching to the choir here, but I had too much fun making the featured image not to follow through. Look, I haven’t published any adventures and am not an authority on their design. This is intended as casual criticism of pervasive design flaws.
1. Linearity & Restricted Agency
I see agency as the defining feature of role-playing games as a medium—and thus the artificial restriction of player agency as the cardinal sin of adventure design. Such restrictions may be obvious, such as linear adventure sites or scenario structures, predetermined outcomes, or bottlenecks (specific conditions that must be met for the adventure to proceed). Other restrictions are more subtle: writing a “combat encounter,” for example, preempts the players’ ability to approach that encounter in a non-combative way.
Don’t Prep Plots from The Alexandrian features strong, actionable advice. Yes, some good linear or restrictive adventures exist, but I’d argue those adventures succeed in spite of their linearity or restrictiveness, not because of it. Sailors on the Starless Sea may be an exception, funneling characters towards a setpiece finale spectacular enough, perhaps, to justify its linearity.
2. A Lack of Information
I have to consciously resist the urge to link Chris McDowall’s ICI Doctrine in all my posts. Here’s the bit that’s relevant to this point: “Players cannot make a proper choice unless they have enough information!” Some adventures feature devastating consequences and fantastic boons in spades—without any indication of whether a particular interaction will yield one or the other.
In such adventures, any form of interaction presents a massive gamble, and play devolves into the role-playing game equivalent of Snakes & Ladders. Players soon learn that the only way to win is not to play, and they avoid all unnecessary interaction with the adventure environment. (Of course, a degree of randomness and unpredictability can be fun—everything in moderation, and all that).
3. A Lack of Interactivity
Adventures should consist of more than odd set decoration and amusing tableaus. The Goblin Punch Dungeon Checklist makes a good starting point. Yes, players can make their own fun to some degree. Too often, though, after reading an encounter or room key, I struggle to imagine players reacting in any other way than saying, “Oh, neat,” and moving on.
4. Non-Person Characters
At the bare minimum, to justify their inclusion in the adventure, each character should have a desire. Brief notes on personality and mannerisms go a long way, and a secret is even better. Too often while reading adventures, I think this character could have been a scroll. Please give your characters something to do other than supply one specific piece of information. Check out Zelda-Style NPC Personalities from To Distant Lands.
5. Genericism
Imagination is too great a gift to be wasted. Arranging straight-from-the-book monsters and treasure in a cave just doesn’t cut it anymore. Gygax published The Keep on the Borderlands 45 years ago, and yet a steady stream of inferior orcs-in-a-hole adventures issues forth.
Through Ultan’s Door by Ben Laurence and The Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luka Rejec are two works that display exceptional imagination.
6. Arbitrariness
That said, it’s important to retain some attachment to reality, something to help players feel grounded and orient themselves in fiction. Unconstrained weirdness for weirdness’ sake, a sort of Mad Libs-style free association with no guiding principles or internal logic can be alienating and tedious in its own way.
7. Non-Encounters
“1d3 giant spiders” is not an encounter; it’s a monster name with number appearing. This Encounter Checklist is perhaps my favorite Prismatic Wasteland post. With resources as thorough and thoughtful as this freely available, there’s no excuse for writing half-baked encounters.
8. A Lack of Time Pressure
Random encounters provide time pressure during dungeon delves, but too often I find that otherwise great adventures lack a “clock” outside of the dungeon. This issue becomes compounded when the dungeon lies near or within a town; there’s nothing discouraging players from making a series of very brief and cautious forays, retreating to safety at the first hint of risk.
9. Sparsity
Empty rooms serve a purpose (or several), but it’s always disappointing to read a thirty-room dungeon with five rooms’ worth of ideas. From Goblin Punch:
Cut away all the parts that aren’t awesome. It’s better to have a small, excellent dungeon [than] it is to have a bloated, generic megadungeon. […] Be aggressive in your deletions. Remember that amputated content can go back into your slush pile.
10. Misapportioned Treasure
I saved this for last because it’s a relatively minor problem and more a matter of taste than many of the items above. That said, in experience-for-gold systems, too little treasure can cause frustration, while too much can make levels feel unearned. I can’t recall any specific mathematical advice off the top of my head, but I’d expect it’s out there.
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