There’s a discussion in the TT forums about the end of Paizo’s run on Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, and it’s currently drifted towards the topic of published adventures in general.
“Adventures don’t sell” seems to the party line that many publishers toe, but I don’t think this tells the whole story.
Good adventures seem to sell just fine — along with Dungeon itself, Paizo’s Shackled City hardcover has apparently done very well. Ditto with the entire line of Dungeon Crawl Classics from Goodman Games. So-so adventures, unsurprisingly, don’t do so hot (and there are a lot of those) — but clearly somebody must be buying the good ones.
So how about it: Do you buy adventures for any of the systems that you GM?
How important is it to you that RPG publishers provide adventures for their games? Do you buy the shitty ones too, just to have the material? Why do you think the “Adventures don’t sell” mantra is out there?
I buy, and run, published adventures/campaigns for Call of Cthulhu.
In fact, I’m not even a big fan of the system as far as mechanics etc go; I only run it because there are published scenarios that I want to run.
But that’s a special case; those are some good, interesting scenarios, and in the genre of mystery/investigation/plot-heavy, which I’m to begin with horrible at planning well myself (I tend to run more character-focused games otherwise, and a dungeon/quest-type scenario I could whip up no problem if I really wanted to).
Other systems, not so much; not with any regularity. There are scenarios/campaigns that I would buy and run for the sake of that specific product, not because I need something to run. (If the Enemy Within campaign in its entirety was republished, for example, I would snap it up in a heartbeat, not to mention have a reason to buy WFRP–is anyone from GR listening? :-))
So yeah, good adventures sell to me, and I imagine they also sell to others (and I like how the great classics become something we all have in common as a topic of anecdotes and discussion, eg in the CoC case Masks of Nyarlathotep et al).
In the local D&D group (which I’m no longer part of), we did/do use exclusively modules, because they provide what we wanted out of that game–balanced, fun combats and challenges, mainly–and because it saved a lot of time for the busy DM.
It’s been said (I don’t recall where and by whom) that adventures don’t sell, but systems sell better if there are adventures available. I used modules a lot more when I was a young’un, certainly, so I can see the logic behind that.
I’m not great at original ideas, at least coming up with enough to run every week. Using published adventures is an excellent way to have a jumping off point, something to build on.
That said, I think the Dungeon magazine adventures have been fantastic. Our group is currently playing the Age of Worms adventure path, and we are well into our second year with this campaign.
“seems to the party line that many publishers toe”
The expression is “tow the line,” not “toe the line.” “Towing the line” means to basically enforce the status quo, while “toeing the line” implies that one is doing everything short of actually going against it.
Sorry, one of my (many) pet peeves…
Back on topic, no, I don’t. But I’d like to. Sadly, over the last few months I’ve been picking up odd issues of Dungeon to try to start getting into their adventures, and then this news comes up. Good grief.
Traditionally, the idea of using a pre-made adventure just seemed like cheating to me… I’m starting to see how it could be a big help sometimes, though.
I use the heck out of retail adventures, even if the end product isn’t the same as was originally published.
I think part of the “adventures don’t sell” perception arises from the somewhat poor adventures that came out when D&D 3.0 was first published. Examples: Forge of Fury‘s famous fatal footbridge (fall and die); and an adventure I can’t remember the name of, where a massive dragon was placed in a room with only 10’ corridors to and from it.
Adventures can sell; Goodman Games is built on them, and I’ve seen those AEG pamphlet adventures everywhere. I think “adventures don’t sell” is used as an excuse by publishers who don’t know how to write them.
I do buy published adventures. Even if I don’t use them, I can usually find something in them worth the price, and they’re great for pick-up games and one-shots. While I’m currently running two games that don’t use published adventures, my next campaign “on deck” is exclusively running Freeport published adventures.
Several years ago, I ran a 7th Sea campaign. At the time, I didn’t use any of the published adventures. Last year, I revisited 7th Sea by running a campaign exclusively using published adventures. Both campaigns played very differently, but both were a lot of fun!
I love Call of Cthulhu, and 99% of the adventures I’ve run are published scenarios.
I think the “adventures don’t sell” mantra is based on the presumption that, out of a playing group of 6 gamers, all 6 are likely to buy a corebook, 3 or 4 would probably buy a splatbook, and only 1 or 2 would buy an adventure (numbers mine). [This model doesn’t hold up for PDFs, as one gamer is likely to purchase a PDF and share the file with his friends. Illegality aside, the PDF market enables one to make pirated copies that are just as good as the originals, as opposed to the “bad photocopied-and-stapled” versions of the ’80s].
d20 adventures in particular also have the problem of levels. A GM is less likely to pick up a low-level adventure if he’s running a mid-level campaign.
As a side note, I’ve often heard from some gamers that they prefer supplements to adventures due to their continued utility. That isn’t really an issue for publishers, as they don’t get more money based on how many times a product is used.
Walt C
P.S. Maybe we should list our favorite top 10 published adventures and/or top 5 published campaigns?
Ditto Carolina above. Published adventures can be great to incorporate (even partially) into a larger campaign or to provide ideas to a GM who’s challenged on the imagination side of things.
I am currently running the Shackled City, and I’ve just subscribed to Paizo’s new Pathfinder line arriving midsummer. I’ve not checked out any of the Goodman Games products yet, but I plan to do so soon.
Part of the conception that publishers have about adventures not selling is the amount of work that has to go into writing an adventure. For the input of effort, and the return on it, it might not seem worthwhile.
When I write an adventure personally for myself, I don’t bother to write down every little thing that I’ve got in my head. I write down the markers that will trigger the information in my head when I need it. When I write for someone else to run, I have to fill in so much more detail that may or may not be necessary when the person comes to running it. It always feels a like a lot more work than writing anything else is.
The art of writing out a complete adventure can differ greatly as well. There are many different paths you can go down. Do you outline the skeleton of it? Do you give a full and complete accounting, with little room for change? Do you include rules and rolls in the adventure, or let the game master determine what is appropriate where? Do you provide full detailed maps? Do you do art of the NPC’s, or just descriptions? How do you set up the general framework? These are all things that will depend upon the system and style of play, but each has to be considered with each adventure written.
I typically do not buy adventures. For campaigns I run, I come up with all my own material. I find the publish material rarely matches what I have in mind for my campaigns, and to go through and tweak it to fit, seems like more work than to write it myself.
Also, published adventures are often written for the middle ground party. So sometimes its a good fit, and some times it doesn’t fit my group.
Lastly, one of the parts about being a GM that I take great pride in, is to write my own adventures. I like the challenge of coming up with an idea and then developing it into a whole session. I like the challenge of making my next session at least as good as the last. To me that is one of my favorite parts of being a GM, so using published adventures is like taking something away from my GMing time.
There are published adventures which I have run, and several I have enjoyed, and I don’t knock anyone who runs published adventures, but I find that it just does not fit with my GMing style.
There is one exception though. I have always run Paranoia adventures, and almost never write them. There is something about the old West End published adventures, that were priceless. That is a game where I have never felt that I could do a better job writing an adventure than running the published one.
I always feel compelled to write my own adventures and thought that buying adventures was “copping out” and not living up to some creative standard of GMing. Upon reflection, not only is that silly because there are really good adventures out there, I never actually wrote all the games I thought I would so I never got to try a lot of new systems nor (more importantly) game as much as I wanted to. My loss.
I would think that RPG publishers would want as low a barrier to entry to their games as possible and the shortest road to the game table is a rulebook AND adventure. Even if book-for-book adventures sell less than rulebooks or other supplements, the more people play a game, the more people are going to buy it. Plus, it makes it easier for new gamers and helps old gamers quickly try out new systems.
(First TT post! – Hi everyone!)
Caveat: I’m a game publisher specializing in adventures and I’m on the top of the charts in my category (M&M Superlink) at both YourGamesNow and RPGNow, so clearly I think adventures can sell. More specifically, I think adventures are important.
The aversion that some big publishers have towards providing adventures always amazed me. I would say the same thing as Walt C: the assumption is that only GMs will buy adventures, which is a fraction of the whole gaming market, so adventures will make less money.
But adventures are the lifeblood of gaming. If you are sitting at the table and playing there is an adventure involved, either homegrown or published (or someone is winging it).
What does that tell you? That game publishers are more interested in products that sell instead of products that encourage the hobby?
Want gaming to flourish? Provide good adventures so it is easier to run a game. Hardcore/career GMs do not generally need published adventures (even if they sometimes use them), but there are _a lot_ of other potential GMs who might just sit down and actually run a game if they had a solid adventure to start with. As Skyla said, reduce the barrier to entry.
And if you want to talk sales, good adventures -> better game sessions -> more gamers -> more sales of rule books. You might not sell lots of adventures (my experience to the contrary) but you will sell more of everything else because of those slim adventure sales.
If people don’t play and just sit around and read books and stat characters that never get used, the hobby becomes just a stupid mental exercise. Sales might still look great, but the hobby will have lost.
I don’t use published adventures because of price, For the same cost of a few adventure books that I might run once each at best, I can get a core rule book that is all I need to play or run a game numerous times.
They are just not a good investment of my limited funds, and I think that is true for most gamers.
I dont buy adventures very often except when I am first GMing a new game system. I like to see what the game creators see as viable adventures for the system.
I think the one thing Paizo is doing better than other companies is to provide support for the adventure. The forums are obviously a big boon, as are the ‘free’ extras, such as the online maps and handouts.
If you look at SCAP, the other adventure paths, or even RttTOEE, it is the fact that so many other GMs are running the same scenario and are willing to share ideas and experiences that makes it easier and more fun to run.
I don’t buy them. I may look up play examples on the internet for a new game, but that’s it.
Two additional points worth mentioning:
1. In addition to adventures really appealing only to GMs, GMs are more likely to buy a splatbook (which also appeals to players) than an adventure.
2. Published adventures run the risk of being purchased and read by players. While this can lead to rampant metagaming, the more common problem in my experience is a GM announcing (or even starting to run) a published adventure, only for a player to say “umm, I already read through this.” (This is a big problem in gaming groups with multiple GMs).
I still buy the occasional published adventure, but it’s never to use as an actual adventure, but rather to use for inspiration and to “borrow” ideas for my own campaigns. I’m relatively sure a lot of DMs use them for this same purpose, and I know for a fact that plenty of DMs still actually run published adventures; I was a player in one just two weeks ago. I don’t think there’s any chance of them fading away anytime soon.
I have been using published adventures from Dungeon Magazine for the past 3 years or so, when I started DMing again. I’ve got an incredibly busy schedule, so anything that cut down on prep time was a godsend. Even though I didn’t use most of the adventures as written, I was able to modify several of them in a short amount of time to fit with story line of the campaign. There were also plenty of adventures that I didn’t run from the magazine, but I still was able to glean encounters and stat blocks from them.
Other than that, I haven’t purchased modules in a long long time. Now that Dungeon Magazine (as we know it) is not going to be an option, I may look into other material.
i don’t buy them. i didn’t even subscribe to dungeon, except for a period of one year back in the 90’s. i do own a healthy collection of old AD&D modules, which i occassionally mine for ideas.
I do sometimes buy adventures. In particular, if I really like a game system or setting, but I’m having problems coming up with good ideas for actual game sessions, I find pre-printed adventures to be useful. Not just because I can run the adventure, but because the adventure gives me a very concrete idea of how the game’s designer expects his game to be played. So I may not run the adventure, but it acts as useful inspiration. Similarly, I’ll frequently buy adventures (ideally discounted or used) for game system I have no intention of running just to extract inspiration.
I make heavy use of published adventures. Back in my AD&D days, I ran many of the TSR modules. I have been a Dungeon subscriber since issue #1. When I stopped playing AD&D, I continued to make use of AD&D modules in other games.
One reason I think there is a perception that modules don’t sell is that generally only one copy of a module is sold to any given playgroup, whereas source books often sell multiple copies to a playgroup. People may also speculatively purchase source books more often than modules (buying a splatbook because it might be usefull in the future vs. buying a module because I’m going to run it right now).
Frank
I think the days of the ‘one-shot’ are over. In that sense, adventures dont sell very well.
But well-written campaigns (a series of linked adventures) are always good sellers. The campaign has to be well-written, but if it is, a ‘campaign-in-a-box’ is much more useful for players now.
I buy many published adventures. I need them for the same reason many have said here: I’m not the creative type, so coming up with a whole adventure by myself is too much like hard work.
Once I’ve read through the adventure, though, and have a head full of plot and setting, I *do* modify the heck out of it; changing scenes, reworking the plot, swapping characters, tweaking stats, etc. The adventure I actually run is much changed from the adventure as published.
However, I am not the publisher’s friend with regard to buying these adventures: I don’t buy them at the published price. I will trawl through second-hand shelves, reduced-to-sell bins, and old magazines, where I pay a fraction of the original price. The adventures are just as good, for my purposes, when they are five or fifteen years old. I plan to modify them beyond recognition anyway.
This seems to be part of the problem (and I freely admit that, by not buying the adventures at the price set by the publisher, I’m part of the problem). Other types of books — the “crunchy” books, like core rules, expansions, and splatbooks — need to be mostly consistent with everything else the group plays with, so they tend to buy relatively current books at the published price. Those books tend to get a lot of re-use, and are mainly used as-is (house rules notwithstanding), so the value received is clear. The price matches the perceived value.
Adventure modules are only for use by the GM, and for those GMs that plan to significantly re-work the body of the adventure, the fact that the statistics are way out of date doesn’t really matter — they plan to tweak and re-write the stats anyway. The price, though probably fair considering the creative quality and effort, doesn’t meet the perceived value.
Thus, the fraction of income seen by the publisher for purchased adventures is miniscule compared to the more crunchy books.
> michael said, “I think the days of the ‘one-shot’ are over.”
I certainly hope the one-shot isn’t dead, and if it is, that’s not good for our hobby and we should all actively try to resurrect it. Sure, I like working on my campaign, but if the cultural norm has become that running a single game means writing a long, complex plot with an atlas of maps and encylopedia of cultures, then quite frankly there are going to be fewer games and fewer new GMs. Not everyone with an interest in GMing has the time or desire to write a campaign and if they think that they’re signing up for 15 games by default, they might not even run the first one. So, I’m all for encouraging the one-shot and by extension, I hope publishers continue publishing (good) adventures, one-shot or otherwise.
On one-shots as gateway drugs, I wish every RPG came with a one-shot adventure expressly designed to showcase what’s awesome about the game. Some do, some don’t and some come with an intro adventure that just plain sucks, or that doesn’t work as a pitch for continuing to play the game.
That pitch aspect is important to me right now because my group is considering using that approach to choosing our next game. If every game on our list of potentials had a pitch-oriented one-shot, that’d make things pretty simple.