Genre Police: The Adventure Begins

Since I went full professional as a GM in 2020, not including any planning time, I’ve been at actual tables running games with players for a rough total of 2,544 hours. That’s approximately 106 days of non-stop roleplaying if I laid it back to back.

In this time, I’ve only picked up and run two published adventures, both of them short. Those accounts for roughly 79 hours of time. Which is like 3 days worth of that previous figure – under 5%. So I’ve never really felt the need to look acutely at the idea of published adventurers. I tend to rate them by what gameable content I can strip off them and use in my own games. Even if I consider the narrative of an adventure pretty good, I’m not likely to visit it again.

But recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Call Of Cthulhu and honestly, they’ve drawn me in and I want to run them. This and an interesting short comments discussion with The Gaming Gang’s Jeff McAleer has made me go back and re-examine the idea of the published adventure as a concept.

So What Is My Problem?

Well, I guess I just giving players a wider experience than I feel most published adventures provide. The focus on a particular narrative plays against my style which is to offer a wide range of options and then follow players down whatever rabbit hole they try. I’d prefer a book full of NPCs and locations my players can wander around and disturb to a picked out path. And this is where I think my disatisfaction with Wizards content in particular has started to grow.

I feel that rather than having a short adventure in every product, they’d be better products if that page count was spent on fleshing out things to explore, rules to interact with and people to meet. I consider fully one third of both Spelljammer & Planescape slipcases to be a complete waste of pages.

I voiced this opinion on a video that Mr. McAleer put out reviewing Planescape and his reply got me thinking. He posited that it’s important to have an adventure in a setting book because people want to be able to pick up a setting and be able to have a way to navigate it, see what it is about. Before I put words into his mouth, this was a very short couple of comments and he never said that either of the adventures in these books achieved that aim or were any good. But as someone who is known for fair and impartial product reviews, I found his defence of the concept intriguing.

And I thought – actually, I’ve done this. I read The Children Of Fear to understand how Call Of Cthulhu could work as a longer form game beyond a sanity-destroying one-shot. I read through Werewolf: The Apocalypse adventures when I was younger in order to understand how to layer the spiritual stuff into the ‘Werewolf superheroes punch bodyhorrors’ parts of the game. I’ve read through adventures to get to grips with a particular culture, or metaplot or way of implementing certain new rules in a game. And it made me realise that despite my hatred of adventures taking up page space, they might serve a deeper purpose.

We’ve talked about reading RPGs as text to interpreting a game before. But in doing so, we’ve maybe overlooked the most obvious part of that – the narratives the game is trying to hand us right out the bat.

‘Reading’ An Adventure Whilst…. Reading An Adventure

If we’ve come to the rodeo enough times, what we are doing when we are reading through an adventure is not just reading. We’re actually doing lot of things. We can break it down as follows.

• Following How A Narrative Breaks Down: This involves actually following the plot, how it hangs together, how players move from scene to scene, chapter to chapter.
• Looking At Mechanics: Checking if we understand all the ‘Game’ parts of it and seeing how they might be new or reinterpreted.
• Imagining the scenes: We’re ‘trying on’ NPC and seeing how we’d portray them, imagining how we’d run specific moments, how they might play out at the table. We might even be thinking ‘this player would love that part’.
• Editing Our ‘Directors Cut’: We’re also providing a judge of how this might not fit a group or style of play and ‘remixing’ it. You might be thinking about elements you’d change, cut or add in order to make it fit together better for your sense of it.
• Looking For Plug-Ins: We’re looking at how seamlessly this fits into our existing experience. Is this a contained campaign that I have to play through completely? Is there a way I drop it in without too much problem to something that exists? Is there huge infodumps for the players? Will it alter a the game world with its conclusion? Is that a good thing?
• Learning & Digesting New Concepts: I think this is the one I had done automatically and had therefore missed it on first consideration. We’re taking in stuff about how parts of the setting fit together, how rules and concepts interact with the game. An Adventure becomes a way for the game to let us actually live in the setting, see how the world moves. It’s teaching us.

When we break it down like this, there’s actually a ton of reasons for an adventure to be in a product. It’s not just about breaking it apart for pieces, or running it like it is – there’s a element of learning the craft through it.

Every time we think about how a world works or how we’d change an adventure to fit our group – even if we never actually run that specific adventure – we’re making decisions about how we GM. We’re making stylistic choices and understanding things about ourselves and what our group might like. We are understanding new ways of delivering content.

My GMing has diversified since reading those Call Of Cthuhlu adventures because I’m thinking about new ways to run EVERY game I run, not just those adventures. So I guess I’m saying if you want to get better at GMing, reading adventures and working out which parts you Might use is as useful an exercise as a pilot running a simulator flight. So read more adventures.

Just maybe not the Planescape one. It’s terrible.

Next time, I’m going to continue looking deeper at adventures, how we can effectively judge if players would enjoy them, how we make changes, how we should process them. How we can get the most out of them. See you then!

Creative Commons credit: Critical Role – The Dungeon Master by Estylon.