I’ve recently started DMing The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. I’m about four sessions in, and so far, it’s been fun. But it hasn’t been without its frustrations.
And actually, the more I think about it, the more I feel my frustrations with the adventure are not just limited to Witchlight specifically. There are general issues here that have dogged WotC adventures for some time, and because WotC adventures are, for many gamers, their gateway to adventure-writing, you see the same issues proliferating in other products.
I’m not entirely sure what the focus is for my frustration. It’s not just layout, or style, or adventure structure. It’s kind of a mixture of all three. I know the term information architecture is used in web design, and perhaps this captures best what I’m trying to take issue with: the way an adventure is structured and presented for easy use. I would posit that, structurally, most official 5e adventures are seriously flawed and could be so much better.
Let’s back up for a moment. What is the point of a published adventure? For me, it’s two things: it’s a resource to make your life easier, and it’s a source of ideas and inspiration you maybe wouldn’t have come up with by yourself. I would argue that most 5e adventures tick the second box. But do any of them tick the first?
Published adventures are not textbooks, and shouldn’t aspire to be. Nor are they instruction manuals, encyclopaedias, novels, or research papers. For them to work well at the table and be easy to read, we want something more like a cookbook: evocative, colourful, and inspiring, but fundamentally readable, with clear, simple, economical text throughout, and only occasional longer passages for background and extra detail, perhaps at the start or end of a chapter.
In terms of economy, older modules are so much better than 5e ones. The Forge of Fury, my favourite adventure of 3rd edition, is 32 pages but manages to pack in enough material for at least three or four sessions of play. You could probably read it from cover in a couple of hours. Curse of Strahd, on the other hand, is pushing 260 pages, and sure, it’s enough material for a short campaign—but when are you going to read all that?
Credit where credit’s due, though: the newer WotC adventures are definitely more evocative and colourful. The art is fantastic, among the best in the hobby, and it’s often the first thing that reviewers single out for praise. But readable?
There are a number of things WotC adventures could do differently, and I’m not the first person to point most of them out. Here are some suggestions.
1. Shorter adventures. The longer the book, the more unwieldy it is at the table. Matt Colville nails this.
2. The adventure site model. I wrote about this last month. Easy to follow and cuts the railroading. Win-win.
3. Focus on the situation, not the outcome. I read a fantastic article recently about why we should stop using the phrase ‘If the party’ because players will come up with their own solutions anyway. Many adventure-writers spend too much time second-guessing how a situation is going to pan out. Let’s leave more blank spaces and empower DMs to improvise.
4. Leave gaps for DMs to fill in. This might feel contradictory for a published adventure, but it cuts down on padding and empowers DMs to improvise.
5. Cheat sheets. I love these! Key information gathered on a single page somewhere, like NPCs or lists of adventure locations.
6. Annotated maps. By coincidence, Sly Flourish wrote about this a few days ago. If there’s space to label rooms on a map—why don’t we?
7. Better typography. I’m not a professional (unlike this guy), but why are WotC still using a font for their body text which can’t do proper italics? And why do we have four tiers for our headings and subheadings? And why are they all in horrible hard-to-read small caps? Crack open pretty much any book by Free League and see how much better they are.
8. More bullet points. Again, think cookbook. If something doesn’t need to be in continuous prose, trim it. (Incidentally, bullet points lead to more white space: criminally underused in many 5e products.)
9. Use symbols. I learned D&D from the AD&D First Quest starter set. There were fun icons in the margin for traps, read-aloud text, DM secrets, that sort of thing. Adventure-writers could do this, too!
10. Or colour. This happens a bit—every chapter of Witchlight has a different footer, for example—but could we embrace this more? Enemies in red, NPCs in blue, skill checks in green, traps in orange, side quests in purple . . .
11. Embrace the inverted pyramid. Journalists use this to structure news stories. Start with the Who, What, When, Where, Why, then the important details, and leave the background detail to the end. Again, think about cookbooks: sure, you might have a page about Siclian gastronomy and all its culinary heritage, but you keep it separate from the page on ‘pasta alla Norma’.
12. Let names and art do the work. The Dragonbane Starter Set has an NPC named Baryton Chubbycheeks. He looks like this. What more do you need?
13. ‘Lite,’ embedded stat blocks. Do we really need to flick to a second book just to find out a hobgoblin’s hit points? Older editions would compress a stat block to a single paragraph. I would argue that for most monsters, you need hit points, armour class, attack rolls, and damage—and not much else. Bob World Builder has a great video on this.
14. Rosters and modularity. Justin Alexander is good on this. Rather than keying every encounter to a particular location, uncouple them: start with a table of adversaries and you probably won’t need as much text for the area descriptions. It’s also more dynamic.
15. In general: stop overwriting. And yes, and I appreciate the irony that this one bullet point probably sums up most of the ones that preceded it.
In essence: with a few shifts in approach, we could make published adventures shorter, clearer, simpler, and easier to run. If WotC and other designers focused on these principles—clarity, concision, ease-of-use—we could see adventures that are more fun to run and play.”
And to that end, maybe I should stop writing. Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments below.