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View Full Version : Published adventures too short?



Milo v3
2016-08-23, 01:07 AM
Paizo's Adventure Paths seem pretty long.

Khedrac
2016-08-23, 03:50 AM
Err, just saying "published adventures" is way too vague for us to know what you are talking about.

Just looking at D&D:
3.5's hardback adventures are fairly meaty, but shorter than one would expect form the format as they tend to allow for options and variations and re-use.
3.0's adventures continued the style of earlier adventures where were usually relatively compact, but not what I would call short.
Magazine adventures are usually short - because they have to fit multiple adventures into less space than one standalone product adventure.
2nd Ed's boxed set adventures greatly expanded the single adventures, but in many ways were similar to the 3.5 hardbacks for scope.
1st Ed and BECMI and the 2nd Ed single shots - mainly much the same as 3.0's single stand-alone adventures.
Many products contain adventure hooks or encounter ideas - they are not full adventures.

And that's just D&D.
Looking further abroad the Middle Earth adventures ICE produced for Rolemaster and MERP did not look short.
Apple Lane for Runequest was a couple of shortish adventures published together - net result similar of the D&D stand-alones.

Etc.

So, please could you explain further what you are talking about and what you mean by" too short" so we can then respond properly. At this point I don't know if I will agree or disagree.

Edit: I don't actually know what EotE refers to which is probably my problem.

Yora
2016-08-23, 06:25 AM
Many of the published adventures I've seen recently are more in the old module tradition, being relatively compact dungeons that provide content for one session and meant to be dropped into existing campaigns. Some others, like Qelong or Better than any Man are small sandboxes and easily can end up being short campaigns over 6 sessions or so.

Eldan
2016-08-23, 06:39 AM
My group spent four evenings on Death in Freeport, which is only a few pages. But then, I improvised a lot around the story. The good ones usually describe a location and a few NPCs, so you have a basis to include some social aspects, maybe some investigation, or just some sightseeing.

DigoDragon
2016-08-23, 07:28 AM
I have a bunch of the D&D 3.5 published adventures from Goodman Games and their length varies. Some are pretty short and can be covered in a few hours, but others are pretty involved and could take a couple sessions to get through.

Pugwampy
2016-08-23, 06:53 PM
I prefer short 1 session adventures adding flavour to an existing campaign .
It can be a great foundation to build upon .

The black dragon DND 2004 basic game dungeon which is about 4 sessions of gaming literally became the centre of my campaign which extended to 14 sessions .

The adventurers kept returning to it long after the dragon was killed and I kept adding more dungeons and intrigue . At the end it became their home base .