The more I think on it, and I know this greatly differs from what people have come to expect in recent years, but to me a TTRPG with no adventure modules is like booting up a video game and finding out the devs didnโt make any levels. Like I wanted to play this but I guess weโll have to wait until someone in the group, who may have never played the game before, spends a not-insignificant amount of their free time in the level-editor throwing something together for us to play.
This contributes significantly to "DM Burnout."
This ended up on r/curatedtumblr where it is plainly apparent that nobody knows what the hell "adventure module" means. Which is once again D&D5e warping the entire artform by publishing nothing but modules that are strictly railroaded scripts and so making everyone think that "adventure module" exclusively means "a strictly railroaded script."
I'm gonna have to make a big post at some point explaining what an "adventure module" is.. once again flabbergasting how often and how hard I have to go to bat for extremely foundational elements of this hobby
my personal stance has slowly become 'oh god we need games to have proper adventure modules so people will know how to play'. The dearth of material or advice for how to run even middle-market systems makes running them a pain in the ass.
The best TTRPGs in the world are nothing if the developers cannot include proper example materials on how a game is constructed and run, which is what good adventure modules are.
Yeah, this is kind of a weakness of TTRPGs as a medium, they require a lot of manual player input to work correctly, and yet very many TTRPGs do not actually tell you how this specific TTRPG is supposed to be played. They tell you a bunch of mechanics and stats, but they do not tell you how these mechanics are supposed to be approached or applied. And this leads to people playing that game wrong, and having a worse experience for it.
the thing is even if your game doesnโt work with a traditional dungeon-crawl style capital M Module (which was a concern for a lot of reddit commenters), itโs still helpful to have a setting document or an adventure hook or something that tells people what kinds of things might happen in a game
I haven't personally *run* many non-dungeon-crawl games, and part of that is definitely due to a lack of pre-created "modules". Like, its great to give the tools & guidelines on how to build scenarios / adventures / sessions... but not providing any pre-built ones is a big roadblock!
(It is an OSR dungeon crawler, but honestly, props to Mausritter, yet again: that tiny core rulebook includes not only the rules & charts to create your own hexcrawl setting and adventure sites, but a fully pre-built & playable one of each.)
Yeah many people just plain do not know that an adventure module can be something other than a completely linear script you follow.
Hereโs a very old, very classic adventure module for classic D&D from my dadโs attic.
It has a map of the dungeon (as you will see, it is not a linear series of fights, itโs a complex location the party explores. That line drawn in pencil tracks the way the party happened to go when this was played, not the way theyโre โsupposed to go.โ)
And it has a full fleshed out description of the rooms and different interesting and interactable things within the rooms. It has pre-statted monsters, traps, etc.. The party explores it and tries to get out alive with as much treasure as they can carry. You can also weave this into an ongoing campaign or a โstoryโ - itโs โmodular,โ thatโs the point of a "module." When I ran this for my groupโs rotating-DM AD&D campaign, the party was hired to rescue three children who were kidnapped by goblins. The goblins had one, but the other two escaped and got lost in the not-goblin-controlled parts of the dungeon, requiring the party to explore every inch of it to find them.
Of course, this kind of module cannot be used for a โplottedโ D&D campaign, because it is designed to quickly kill unwary characters. But if youโre wanting your PCs to have plot armor, you really should not be playing any edition of D&D. Itโs not designed for plotted stories, itโs designed to be a game where shit happens that you then tell stories about later.
The party in our group did suffer some pretty severely bad injuries, but no deaths, because theyโre a group of competent, capable, and careful mercenaries.
โBut thatโs a dungeon crawler, modules like that donโt work for non-dungeon-crawler games!โ
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, an extremely non-dungeon-crawler game, has modules very much like this. In Eureka, the party doesnโt delve into dungeons, they talk to people, look for clues, and solve mysteries.
So, Eureka modules provide a โTruthโ for the GMโs eyes only which lists exactly what happened that resulted in there being a mystery to solve, a โhookโ for why the PCs would have gotten involved in trying to solve the mystery, and a set of relevant locations, often with maps. (The locations may be connected on a larger city/town/area maps but usually travel between the important locations is abstracted.)
The locations are given full descriptions, various points of interest that might be relevant to the investigation, info for the GM about what the PCs will find if they inspect those things properly, etc. They also include NPCs with visual and personality descriptions, lists of what information the NPC knows about the mystery, and how they might react to certain actions from the PCs.
Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG is even less comparable to a dungeon-crawler than Eureka. Itโs a interpersonal politics sitcom-y comedy game where a Drow Mistress and her pathetic minions try to keep up appearances in a cutthroat society where the social expectations are arcane, byzantine, and very high stakes. Reputation is everything.
Something will go wrong in the palace, and the party will have to hide that it is going wrong and act like everything is fine while impressing the neighbors.
A module for Silk & Dagger comes with a particular problem thatโs going to happen in the palace and when and where in the palace it will happen, as well as a guest arriving and/or some other social obligation. It includes visual and personality descriptions for the NPCs, and how they will react to certain actions by the PCs.
These are games which are about three very very different kinds of characters and situations, and yet they all benefit from having adventure modules.
TL;DR, a "module" for a TTRPG does not have to be and was not always a scripted linear plot of events. D&D5e modules being scripted plots has erased the idea that any other kind of "module" ever existed or COULD ever exist. But they did and do.
2 hyper-specific gripes:
IMO the "module" was a misstep in the development of dungeon crawl games--we'd have been much better off with a "How To Start A Megadungeon" book than with, say, Keep On The Borderlands.
published adventures have been Mostly Railroading since at least the 90s. This is one of those things that is more the fault of Dragonlance and Illusionism: The Game (by which I mean OWoD) than it is of 5e.
I disagree. Not every TTRPG campaign has to be a huge extended multi-year campaign, and a โhow to make your ownโ is just a โhere you have to make your own instead of being able to just plug-and-play something.โ This still drops the job of game designer on the GM.
I donโt like long huge campaigns and megadungeons. I like dungeons. In any RPG I play, I want the adventure to be wrapped up within 3-12 sessions, then we either play something else, or play a new 3-12-session adventure/dungeon as a sequel to the first one. This is a โcampaignโ structure that adventure modules like the ones described above are perfect for, and itโs something that people should know is an option.
Secondly, while itโs true D&D modules have mostly been very railroady since Dragonlance, not all published modules since Dragonlance have been D&D modules. And even if every single published module for any TTRPG for the past 30 years had been a complete railroad script, considering how obviously poorly this kind of โstorytellerโ structure fits with the actual rules of D&D and the games descended from it, it is still more than worth bringing back the more old school โsandboxโ format and letting people know it exists.
No, I absolutely disagree. Level Designer and Game Designer are different jobs and dungeon (or megadungeon) design is Level Design not Game Design. The ideal state of the industry is that for most games most GMs are making their own adventures for most of their sessions.
Like, I'm not saying published modules shouldn't exist for dungeon crawl games here, I'm just saying that Megadungeons were Lost Technology for decades because A Certain Ex-JW Moron couldn't be bothered to write "How I Made Castle Greyhawk" and decided to publish some "mini-dungeons" instead.
Also, the point of my "gripe #2" was "this is a D&D Problem, not a 5e Problem". That's all. Honestly, the swipe at OWoD and the incredibly negative effects that its "yeah our game sucks but instead of fixing it we're just gonna tell you to lie about the dice whenever they do something you don't like" approach to game design had on the medium for an extended period of time was just kind of an Attack of Opportunity
So the ideal state of the industry is that Game Designers design games, and there are no Level Designers and that job is instead just offloaded onto people who don't get paid to do it?
Yes. Creating worlds and stuff to do in them is what makes GMing into Creative Expression and not just Being A Substitute Computer.
There is a third thing a GM can be, and that is a player playing a game from the other side of the GM screen.
I've interacted with so many DMs who always talk about how "creative" DMing is and how they have so many characters and stories always coming out of their heads. Each time I hear this about DMing, I think "guess I'm not a DM at heart" and go to quit. Then I go to play as a player and think "boy I wish I was refereeing the rules and enjoying the lore-distribution process." DMing is not, at base, writing and "Creative Expression." It's refereeing the rules and representing the actions of the world through those rules. And that's awesome. Modules are awesome.
I'm the reverse: I love doing that kind of creative and design work. For a long time I simply accepted that the role of DM required a special kind of dedicated and creative person- because I enjoyed that extra work! I accepted the unbalanced workload because I thought that it was necessary or good for it to be like that, and that I was uniquely suited for it. I like throwing myself into sprawling and obsessive creativity. I can enjoy painting or writing for hours on end, so why can't I enjoy doing session prep for hours as well? Then I started feeling the burnout, because DM'ing requires a fairly rapid turnaround. The pleasant experience of losing myself in a grand creative work became a grind to create more content before the next session- in addition to my real life obligations. I resented my Players because they didn't put the same effort back into the game. Unlike the artistic time sinks I focused on before, I had collaborators, and they weren't good ones. It felt like a group project where only I was doing the work, and if I wanted to ease off and just be another player at the table, the game fell apart like a wet burrito. (Not all of this was my players' fault- but also there was an expectation. A subtle pressure to perform to a certain standard or we just... wouldn't play. As the person most interested and in love with ttrpgs, I was the one who had to entice the group, prove to them that my games were worth the weekend time-slot.) It was an unpleasant, unbalanced dynamic, one that I think is common and encouraged by the 5th edition ecosystem. I run Modules these days. Players can show up with characters they rolled up in two minutes and I'm happy to meet them at the level of engagement they're at- because the game no longer sucks if I do that. I'm no longer playing pulling quadruple duty as game designer, level designer, world-builder, player, therapist, writer, and referee. I can just actually enjoy the games we're playing together. I still do design my own game systems, mechanics and adventures, but that's because I like doing those things, not because I have to. I've been getting rave reviews for my latest campaign- and I'm having just as much fun running it, which is something I haven't felt for a long time.
