Why Official D&D Adventures Are Bad Products
And how to make better D&D 5e adventures yourself
Because D&D adventures are manuals, not prose.
The official D&D adventures are bad products, and it is puzzling to me why this opinion isn’t more commonly expressed (though that might be a matter of my personal YouTube and/or Reddit selection). Simply put: products aimed at aiding the DM, should aid the DM, and as many DMs as possible at that. How the official Dungeons and Dragons are written, is not helpful or efficient at all. Dungeon Masters are a rare breed as it is, and to discourage potential DMs with 250 page tomes that could and should be condensed to about a tenth, is bad practice. Official D&D Adventures are bad because they are…
- Filled with unnecessary lore dumps
- Setting specific
- Not written like manuals
Official adventures are bad because they waste your time
D&D Adventures don’t need the lore-dump
To sum it up: official D&D adventures are supposed to be a tool, a mechanical guidance to help DMs. So the adventure guide has to start off with the most important information, and unwrap from there. It’s how classically trained journalists write. The headline contains the most important news. The first paragraph tells you all you need to know. From there, the latter paragraphs work backwards and reveal more detail.
But what do the writers of Wizards of the Coast do? They start off with thirty pages of specific lore, connected to a specific setting (I’ll cover this later), and they claim this is required reading material before any preparation can be made. This is not just bad design, it’s simply false, a lie that doesn’t benefit (potential) DMs at all. You do not need the entire political history and cultural workings of the giantfolk to run the adventure. I don’t care about the third son of some giant king who has a hidden feud with a local clan. You want to know why? I don’t even know who the bad guy is, or what the story is going to be. And perhaps most annoying of all: there is a good chance it might not even be applicable to my world and setting.
Official D&D adventures are set in Faerun, so you figure it out
One of my other biggest gripes is how Faerun-centric most of the official content is. I understand that Wizards of the Coast want to add depth to their texts, they want to create nuance and add complexity. But their solution is to fully bake their products in the setting of Faerun. And the only way for you as a DM to get rid of it, is to manually remove it, causing more unnecessary work. Seeing as 55 percent of DMs run some type of homebrew world (survey by SlyFlourish), Wizards of the Coast choose to saddle up half of their audience with unnecessary work.
Just in case someone wants to claim that it isn’t a lot of work to remove lore and fit the adventure into your own world: stop lying. Rarely can you simply exchange bits of lore for you own. Certain elements match one-to-one, but then other elements clash and you either have to…
- Rewrite how your world works
- Think of some reason why – during this adventure – your world behaves differently
- Rewrite the adventure
There are ways of adding depth to a pre-written adventure without resorting to pre-written worlds. And DMs should expect as much from an official product with a hefty price tag.
Official D&D adventures should be manuals, not prose
This might sound nitpicky, but it just bugs me that official adventure modules are often written as (partly) prose. Sorry, dear Wizards of the Coast writers. If you want to write prose, write a novel. You’re writing manuals for DMs to run an adventure, so stick with the essentials. Imagine this:
“Heavy thumping and rumbling sounds, rythmically interceded by a metallic clanking. And amongst that auditory bouquet, a constant sloshing caused by water and clothing, mixed with detergent. As you stare into the foam covered porthole, you smile, happy with your purchase. Welcome, dear customer, to the manual of your laundry machine.“
This might either seem silly or funny to you, but the D&D 5e version of Curse of Strahd starts off in the same manner. I understand what the writers are going for. They want to immerse the DM, give them a sense of the setting. But they make a fatal mistake: just because I have the adventure module in my hands, doesn’t mean I’m invested. If they want to create a section especially to give a sense of the setting and to create a certain vibe, that’s totally fine. Create it, place it somewhere after the essentials have been covered, and keep it within that section.
Of course the descriptive ‘read aloud texts’ can be as colorful as a writer wants them to be. But all the text surrounding it, is functional. Remember: these books are supposed to be manuals. When someone asks you how to make a pancake, you don’t describe them the frothy sloshing of milk and the cracking sounds of eggshells. You list ingredients and delineate the creation process.
What to do about official D&D adventures?
Stop buying official, stick with homebrew
Since the official D&D fifth edition adventures are bad manuals, my advice is to not buy them, at all. I’ve been DMing for only four years, but not once has an official adventure actually helped me in my DMing process (other official products are terrible at this as well, but that’s another story). All the time spent reading an entire tome about one specific adventure, could be spent on creating one yourself. In my case, learning how an adventure works takes up way more time than just creating something myself. And my personal creation is more dynamic; I can create a rough outline and determine the details depending on what the players do.
This doesn’t mean that you have to create everything yourself, for ever and always. There are unofficial adventures published on various sites that have an excellent and mechanical structure, with clean readability. Usually these only cost a couple of bucks. And best case scenario: a publisher of unofficial D&D adventures might even have one free sample so you can see how they write and structure things. But whatever you do, I strongly advice you to turn away from Wizards of the Coast when it comes to (fifth edition) adventures.
Make D&D adventures yourself, it’s not that hard
Making D&D adventures: pitch and threat
So what should Wizards of the Coast do when creating their D&D adventures? Or better yet: how can you create these adventures yourself in a fairly simple manner? If you want a full guide, read about my simple and free process for D&D 5e adventure creation here. But I’ll give some basic tips in this article as well.
For starters, begin with the most important part. What is the main goal or threat of the adventure? Often these are two separate issues. Saving the princess is the goal. The dragon that kidnapped her is the threat. A good way of displaying this information would be to create an elevator pitch, followed by an explanation of the threat that caused the trouble. “The princess of Hillsburgh has mysteriously disappeared, and she is to be wed next week to the prince of Burghshill to form a political alliance. Can the heroes find the princess in time for the wedding?“
A clear elevator pitch that uses one statement and one question, that is all the DM needs to get going. Follow it up by an explanation of the threat (I usually do this underneath a separate heading): “The princess has been kidnapped by a dragon, summoned by the rivalling kingdom named Moundborough, who want to prevent the marriage from happening.“
Now the aspiring DM has a clear understanding of what is going on, in a global sense. And they didn’t need to read my stupid prose about “cold bitter winds” or my thirty page lore dump about ‘giant etymology’.
How to make D&D 5e adventures better, step two
There is a clear setup and clear end goal. The logical second step is to divulge one extra layer of information, just like classically trained journalists used to do. If you ask me, I say the logical next step is a basic outline of events/scenes because it fills in the gap between ‘setup’ and ‘end goal’. I would give each scene a functional name, and follow it up with a couple of sentences that explain what should happen within the scene. How you structure this heavily depends on how you structure the adventure, the routes that can be taken by the players. Try to create a list of events at the highest level of abstraction, meaning: if a scene can be resolved in many ways, write that the players must resolve it, without going into the details. Then follow up with the next logical scene.
If diverging paths lead to vastly difference scenes, write these scenes (to the highest level of abstraction possible). If the events cannot be placed in a linear order, create sections with non-linear events. There isn’t one correct way to write an outline, but you must keep in mind that it should serve as a guidance for the DM. “These events are basically what’s going to happen.” The goal is not to railroad players, the goal is to create a flow of events that the players can interact with. Even if it’s just an assortment of fifteen possible events, of which the players can easily skip half; now you at least have a list of things going on.
Filling in adventure details
Final thoughts about adventure modules
There are a million ways to do anything, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who enjoy the official adventure modules. And of course a segment of the D&D audience enjoys the lore dumps and the prose. I’m not saying that the prose and lore shouldn’t exist. What I’m getting at, is the fact that adventures are to a DM like recipes are to a cook. Especially new DMs need all the help they can get, so instead of forcing them to read 250 pages for starters, we can make content more accessible, more legible. And in my opinion, Wizards of the Coast should be leading the charge in better content creation, though they have their reasons for not doing so. But that’s a topic worthy of its own article.
