D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[EzekielRaiden]

“We have to do something! This is something, therefore we have to do this!!” Is the sort of knee-jerk stupidity that makes problems worse. Some things simply can’t be fixed.

Again, you keep talking about fixing it. We can't. That's not possible. I'm not saying it is, nobody is saying that.

Throwing up you hands and giving up is the knee-jerk reaction here. "We can find ways to make this better, we can look for stuff that helps even if it isn't a perfect solution" is not knee-jerk. It's the smart thing to do when you know there's a problem that is a serious impediment. Making things better, even if you can't make them perfect, is worth doing.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Again, you keep talking about fixing it. We can't. That's not possible. I'm not saying it is, nobody is saying that.

Throwing up you hands and giving up is the knee-jerk reaction here. "We can find ways to make this better, we can look for stuff that helps even if it isn't a perfect solution" is not knee-jerk. It's the smart thing to do when you know there's a problem that is a serious impediment. Making things better, even if you can't make them perfect, is worth doing.

You are talking about policing people’s behaviour, enforcing behaviours, even playstyles. So you are negatively affecting people’s freedom, and you are having to spend a lot of money on policing. Well done, you have created two problems negatively affecting a large number of people in you attempt to fix a problem that most people are managing to work around.

That’s another example of typical politician thinking. Sure, it would be nice if we could fix problems, but if there was an easy fix it would have been applied already. Most attempts to fix things end up making things worse.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Sure it’s a concern. Not much that can be done about it though. You can’t exactly ban all the horrible people from the internet!

You can create spaces with strong tools that filter out horrible people. You can also have internal protections and rules to deal with horriblenessbif it gets in. You can also have factors that help set up healthy community norms that encourage good behavior and punish bad behavior.

For example, look at Enworld! Are we not among the most polite, well reasoned, and civil groups the internet can create??

 

[Lanefan]

Now as to names... This was once a thread about using smaller adventures in place of huge campaign tombs. Traditionally smaller location based adventures have gotten a name based on the location "Keep on the Borderlands", "Place of the Silver Princess", "Lair of the Lamb" or "Caverns of Thracia" for example. These don't actually seem very evocative of what the characters are intended to do there though... The play style or setting goals of are absent here. Perhaps "Massacre on the Borderlands" or "Escape from the Lamb" would work better... but again the play style is not actually defined.

So if titles are helpful to evoke a feeling or ideas about play style ... they still don't seem that helpful.

Part of the problem is that titling an adventure accurately might give away information that players aren't supposed to know until things are well underway. Now some DMs might not care about this, but others will, thus the authors/editors kinda have to err on the side of caution.

I almost always have a "working name" for an adventure that gets used until the actual name comes out; and sometimes that working name ends up sticking.

For example, I recently ran a homebrew adventure with the working name "Pomfrey West Marches", as it involved a party exploring into some hills west of Pomfrey (a kingdom) with no idea what they'd find there other than - they hoped - camps of Orc raiders. Had I called it, say, "Giants of the Hills" or "Demon Cliffs" or "Dwarven Dead" that would hsve given info they didn't yet have as to what they'd maybe find there other than just Orcs.

As it turned out, there were Giants in the hills who had been backing and profiting off the raiders; but the West Marches name stuck.

(to answer why does an adventure need a name at all; two reasons: 1) it's the first thing the players will ask when starting their treasury record, so they know which adventure this treasury is from; and 2) I need it for recordkeeping purposes)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You are talking about policing people’s behaviour,

Nope.

enforcing behaviours,

Hell no.

even playstyles.

Absolutely not.

You're starting from a completely wrong reading of what I said.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Nope.


Hell no.


Absolutely not.

You're starting from a completely wrong reading of what I said.

How else would you deal with poor behaviour other than enforcement?

 

[Charlaquin]

Avatar changes do be throwing a girl off sometimes…

When I used to spend as much time on the Onyx Path forums as I now spend here, we had a The Changing of the Avatars thread in the off-topic forum so people who wanted could follow the thread. It wasn’t mandatory to post in the thread when you changed your avatar, but it was a much appreciated gesture. Not sure if such a thread would be as useful here, since it’s a larger community than the OP forums were, but might still be a worthy experiment.

Tagging @Helena Real @Ruin Explorer and @Lanefan since y’all gave the quotes post a ‘like’ and I figured you might be interested to know that I decided to start a thread like this in the Meta subforum. Here’s a link to it

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How else would you deal with poor behaviour other than enforcement?

Looking into the root causes. Informing DMs about different players' needs and desires, and how those things can be met or addressed without disruption to the group.* Providing well-crafted tools for a variety of gaming experiences, and actually useful advice on how, when, and (most importantly) whether to use any given tool for various tasks. Preparing players through better-structured introductions and explanations, building proper expectations and displaying the variety of approaches that might be taken, rather than enshrining any one perspective or preference and putting the DM on the spot to move away from that.

There are all sorts of ways you can change the underlying rules of the game so that they contribute to a more copacetic, cooperative, productive experience that don't involve one iota of "enforcement" of anything--in fact, many such tools are the exact antithesis of enforcement, by providing useful structures for doing things your own way, or for broadly-applicable (perhaps even universal) abstractions that mandate no particular playstyle but can be turned toward many, many different ends.

Rules are not the end-all, be-all. They cannot--ever--solve every problem. They cannot guarantee that what problems they address will be completely resolved. But just as a well-made sword, coupled with well-delivered instructions, makes it easier to fight than if you had just your bare fists, so too do well-made tools, with well-written instructions, make it easier to game than if you had just your bare wits.

*E.g. the work of Robin Laws, which AIUI is highly acclaimed.

 

[Hussar]

How else would you deal with poor behaviour other than enforcement?

Off the top of my head:

1. Ratings systems for dms. StartPlaying does this already where players are able to post reactions to dms and dms with higher positive ratings are listed higher when searching for a game.

2. Provide positive examples. Live play is a good thing here.

3. Providing actual advice in various venues to show good practices.

4. Provide multiple “teaching” adventure modules instead of just the starter set.

5. Provide advice sidebars and transparent explanations in products.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Looking into the root causes

The root cause is that people are horrible. Next.

Informing DMs about different players' needs and desires, and how those things can be met or addressed without disruption to the group.

You are assuming they care. And who is going to do the informing? And how are they going to know what people's desires are? And clearly, they would have to go with majority views, which means that the preferences of outliers, such as yourself, would be ignored. Who is going to pay the people doing the informing?

Providing well-crafted tools for a variety of gaming experiences,

Who is going to make the tools, and how are they going to be paid for?

There are all sorts of ways you can change the underlying rules of the game

How far can you change the rules before is ceases to be the same game? Is baseball the same game as cricket? People rejected 4e not because it was bad, but because it was not the game they had been playing. So you have changed the rules, no one wants to play your new game, the company goes bankrupt, and now no one can play. Well done, you have achieved TPK.