I'm a lapsed aficionado of Dungeon magazine. I was an avid reader during 3.5, but when the magazine went online only with the advent of 4e, my habit lapsed. I don't like reading text on a computer screen, and the online Dungeon just didn't do it for me. For a while I tried to fiddle with settings and get the content readable on my kindle, but pdf formatting put paid to that.
So Dungeon sort of fell by the wayside, a victim of distaste for the distribution model and a lack of free time. Apart from the RPGA version of Tomb of Horrors, I don't think I've read a non-Scales of War adventure in over a year now, and that wasn't looking like changing any time soon.
At least, until yesterday.
In yesterday's Dungeon editorial, Steven Winter indicated that the basics of 4e adventure design were open to experimentation; that:
What we're really interested in exploring is adventure style and presentation. People love to categorize things, and we're no different. There's no standard classification system for adventures, but they tend to be discussed in terms of opposites: linear vs. branching; event-driven vs. location-driven; sandbox vs. shadowbox; scripted vs. open-ended; framework vs. in-depth.
For quite a while, we've emphasized event-driven, scripted adventures presented in detail. That's partly because 4th Edition is a detail-oriented game, and the form of adventures frequently mirrors the form of the game. But that shouldn't limit what we do.
So we intend to experiment a bit with adventures. That applies to theme, structure, and presentation. We might do a few with a wide-open structure that include no preplanned encounters; a few that link across months; a few based around unusual maps; maybe even a few where the goal is to avoid combat rather than to seek it out; and perhaps some that are suitable for a wide range of levels or tiers.
Hot damn!
You may recall that there was a thread on ENworld (and perhaps other places) a number of months back where Chris Tulach asked 4e fans to comment on the good and bad of 4e adventure design. This editorial certainly suggests that they listened to the responses.
For the first time in a very long time, I'm genuinely curious and excited about adventures that will be turning up in coming months. If, like Dead by Dawn, we start to see adventures that play with genre conventions and different idea about adventure construction and pacing, Dungeon may well earn a spot on my subscription list again.
From what I've seen of Dungeon adventures, they never got my attention. I'm sure they'd be nice to use if you just want to play a quick game with minimal preparation, but I'd much rather play in my own world with my own stories, so I only look to published adventures for inspiration. If they're changing things up to make the adventures more adaptable, maybe I'll check it out and be inspired too!
ReplyDeleteI've never really viewed published adventures as being set in stone so, as Winter said, an adventure set in City X by the river can easily be transposed into City Y in my homebrew.
ReplyDeleteIt's rare that the setting for a published adventure is so tight that it can't easily be moved. Adventure paths might be more difficult, as demonstrated by the fact that I have yet to come up with a place in Eberron to set Scales of War without significantly altering it.
But what excites me about this is not that the settings might be more adaptable, but that the adventure structure might be different. A move away from the "plot hook leads to dungeon leads to encounter with BBEG" scheme might go a long way to neuter the prevalent "4e is a tactical boardgame" criticism.
I can't wait. In fact, I want to pitch a few ideas of my own that go outside the box so to speak.
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