What do you look for in an adventure pdf?

[LordKruelos]

So I was overthinking the other day --

I wondered what makes someone decide to buy an adventure -- for the sake of argument, let's assume it's FantasyCraft, but it's more of a general question.

What sorts of things are you looking for that would convince you to buy?
Art? Does Color mean a lot more than Black and White for a pdf?

Just sort of a general question.

[Gentry]

Price. 

Seriously, though, I balance price to the look of the product (which I determine from preview panes). My tolerance for price is directly proportional to the apparent production values of the product. If there are egregious typos in the preview, my threshold of pain drops to the 99-cent range or below.

[LordKruelos]

Price. 

If there are egregious typos in the preview, my threshold of pain drops to the 99-cent range or below.

If there are egregious typos in the preview, the editor commits seppuku. It's the rule

[Krensky]

It depends.

Reality Blur's OSF PDFs have been good, and I have a subscription to Paizo's APs. I've liked the Paizo Pathfinder modules I've purchased, but those tend to be chosen more for the plot or theme. Then again I know the production values in Paizo's work are top notch. Their hardback binding isn't as good as Crafty's, but their smaller books are well done.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Cover art.  Dungeon Crawl Classics (the earlier ones) tempt me because of their covers.  Paizo stuff falls flat.

That said I've never bought any adventures.  I'm just saying if a good cover can attract me it's probably going to push someone else over the edge.

[Bill Whitmore]

I have never cared for one-off adventures.  I almost never run one-off games.  That means to use one, I have to adapt it to my current campaign.  Often this requires more work and story telling gymnastics than just writing my own adventure using the 2 paragraph blurb for the adventure description as a basis.

Having said that, I absolutely love the boxed campaigns that AEG produced like Freiburg, Ryoko Owari, and Otosan Uchi.  Things like Ptolus really intrigue me, too, though I have yet to fully read it.

[LordKruelos]

What about if instead of a single adventure, it was essentially a mini-campaign or set of adventures surrounding a given geographic area?

[Gentry]

Price.  

If there are egregious typos in the preview, my threshold of pain drops to the 99-cent range or below.

If there are egregious typos in the preview, the editor commits seppuku. It's the rule

Agreed, but that's typically the problem--there's no editor to begin with. Silly typos in the preview means somebody's just slapped the product together, probably by themselves, based on what they thought (or their friends assured them) was a good idea, but probably isn't. Preview typos make me think of those really bad American Idol tryouts where the "singer" is really just trying to see what they can get away with. It irks me.

What about if instead of a single adventure, it was essentially a mini-campaign or set of adventures surrounding a given geographic area?

Are you asking if any of us would be interested? I'm typically always interested, until I see the typos.

[Goodlun]

I agree with the boxed adventures, I guess I want it to be BIG, lets see
I liked:
Golden Voyages a lot (Al Quadim 2nd ed)
Dragon Mountain (also a D&D 2nd ed adventure)
those two stand out to me I am sure their have been plenty of others.

[Khaalis]

Content, content, content.

Personally an adventure "sells" me by its content. The theme and feel of the adventure. What's the hook? What's the plot? Will this plot intrigue my players? Does it have a twist that isn't just another cookie cutter plot outline?  Will the adventure fit easily into any campaign with Minimal effort or does it require a specific setting?  I prefer adaptive adventures. A skeleton that can be dropped into any game.  For example if it says the basics are that the King's daughter is kidnapped by a rival and the job is retrieval, I prefer adventures where it is specifically kept generic rather than being based on say the last 100 years' history of Hooksdale and the order of the Hooksdale's Light - some regional specific only religion and deity, etc.

Aside from that comes production quality. How good are the maps? Can they be used as-is as battle maps? Are there player handouts or suggestions for related props? How well does the plot flow? Is there room for expansion and side story or is it a railroad show?

In general, I prefer either small one-off setting-generic adventures that can easily be dropped into a campaign as I have need for them (ex: Paizo's "Carnival of Tears") or a specific campaign core like D&D's "Against the Giants" or Paizo's adventure paths (ex: Curse of the Crimson Throne).

[LordKruelos]

I'm really appreciating this conversation so far, both because it's confirming some of my own private brainstorming and because it (unintentionally) is highlighting some of the uphill battle of trying to sell a PDF-only adventure.

The initial overthink came from looking at the "quest locations" map from Dragon Age II and wondering how a similar approach might be useful as an organizational heuristic for a published adventure set.


Questions of production quality seem to be falling into 3 general categories:
1) Quality control and consistency in the text (starting with "Have an editor" also including "make it easily portable to )
2) Production of aids and handouts ("How good are the maps? Can they be used as-is as battle maps? Are there player handouts or suggestions for related props?) -- to be honest, I feel like for anything I release this would be a strength, as I kinda have a track record for producing game aids, handouts, etc
3) Production quality of the printed product ("Boxed Set" "Bindings") -- most of these questions fall somewhat outside the scope of a PDF-only product

-------------

Some additional questions:

Battle Maps and PDF-only format -- Since such a product would rely on the consumer choosing to print or not print given aids, and would likely be limited to standard home/office printers sized paper...
a) Would a "Tiled" battle map (multiple 8.5x11 pages with 1"x1" battle map format that can be arranged to reflect a much larger map) be something useful for people?
b) Since the consumer is doing the printing (and incurring any additional printing costs), should those battle maps make use of color or emphasize ease of printing on a B&W printer? Should they use color sparingly?
c) Would a single "encounter overview" map showing the placement of individual tile sheets be more trouble than it is worth? Would such a map be better targeted toward "public" view or for GM-only view?

Generic vs Specific -- It seems like there's tension between a desire for modular skeletons that can get dropped into any setting or campaign vs something with intricate twists and "deep-dive" coherency.
"I absolutely love the boxed campaigns that AEG produced like Freiburg, Ryoko Owari, and Otosan Uchi."
To me, those seem like exhibits X -- XX for a geographically-organized campaign space but at the same time, I worry about how to build such a self-contained beast without also imposing overmuch on whatever campaign it gets dropped into. Thoughts on finding the happy medium?

Handouts -- How much is too much? Using FantasyCraft's emphasis on "Clues" -- would sheets of "clues" formatted to print on sheets of 3x5 cards be over the top? When is "something for the players to hold in their hands" a neat addition and when is it burdensome?

[spinningdice]

For a pdf/e-product I think the trick is to make everything non-essential.
Tiles I would use if available, but I only currently have a B&W printer at home, if you're doing them I'd either do basic B&W tiles or provide both high colour and B&W print friendly versions. Alternatively if they're mostly grey anyway (such as most dungeons) ensure they can be printed in B&W with minimal loss of effectiveness.

I'd rather have the flavour present, most generic adventures feel fairly bland to me, if it's got some context if becomes far more effective.

Handouts I'd be tempted to just go for it, there's no physical space to worry about in a pdf (unless there is -  I'm not sure of Drivethru or it's ilk's restrictions/costs for file size), if the user chooses not to print them then it's no real loss. Obviously this is dependant on the time it takes you to create the things, but most handouts in adventures don't look like they'd take too long, they're either maps (which is generally modifying an area map you'd have anyway) or notes (in which case find a funky font and stick it on a "note" background).

[Bill Whitmore]

Generic vs Specific -- It seems like there's tension between a desire for modular skeletons that can get dropped into any setting or campaign vs something with intricate twists and "deep-dive" coherency.
"I absolutely love the boxed campaigns that AEG produced like Freiburg, Ryoko Owari, and Otosan Uchi."
To me, those seem like exhibits X -- XX for a geographically-organized campaign space but at the same time, I worry about how to build such a self-contained beast without also imposing overmuch on whatever campaign it gets dropped into. Thoughts on finding the happy medium?

Let me try to clarify my thoughts on this since in the first paragraph I said it had to be generic and I then noted several things I love that were very setting specific.

I never play in nor run one-off adventures for my home games.  My players and I only do campaigns.  If you want to write a single adventure that we are going to be interested in buying, it absolutely must be generic enough to drop into our ongoing campaign.  The more requirements that the adventure requires; such as continent spanning churches, nations being at war, rampant demon problems, evil gods, evil areas like the Shadowlands or Mordor, etc; the more work it is going to require me as a GM to make it work.  At some point that work makes purchasing a product, which is supposed to be reducing my workload, an unattractive option.

However, the boxed sets I mentioned above were not single adventures, they were entire campaign settings in themselves with numerous adventure opportunities.  Since these define the elements for the overall campaign, the adventures for it can be much more specific.  The Freiburg boxed set in particular was enough to give my group almost 2 full years of gaming.  Rereading the original post, these were a bit off topic as they are not really adventures, per se.

The other thing to consider is your target audience.  If you are writing just for Fantasy Craft, it really needs to be more generic since you are writing for a toolkit system that has no preconceived notions on what the game world will contain.  If you are writing a Cloak and Dagger adventure, while reducing the size of the potential audience, you can be a lot more specific in the setting elements.

As I touched on above, ultimately what makes me decide whether or not to buy an adventure depends on how much it costs vs how much work it will save me.  If the cost is high and it will take a lot of work to drop into my current campaign, I'll skip it and look elsewhere.  If the cost is low and I can easily drop it in to my current campaign with very little work, I'll get it.

One other note in relation to the "get an editor" comments above.  If the adventure does have some requirement, like any of the things I listed above, make sure that it is clear in the product description.  If I found I bought something that turned out to be unusable, it'd likely be the last purchase I made from that publisher.

[LordKruelos]

I've never been a big fan of illogically sprawling dungeons, especially not if I have a whole city to work with. Rooftop battles, sewer trudges, chases through crowded markets, etc -- places where the local color is actually colorful

[Khaalis]

I've never been a big fan of illogically sprawling dungeons, especially not if I have a whole city to work with. Rooftop battles, sewer trudges, chases through crowded markets, etc -- places where the local color is actually colorful

Thumbs up to this!  Who the hell makes an underground complex of rooms and stocks each one with a different monster? Bleh.

Some additional questions:

Battle Maps and PDF-only format -- Since such a product would rely on the consumer choosing to print or not print given aids, and would likely be limited to standard home/office printers sized paper...
a) Would a "Tiled" battle map (multiple 8.5x11 pages with 1"x1" battle map format that can be arranged to reflect a much larger map) be something useful for people?

Yes, tiled maps would be amazing. Normally I have to take an image, port it to something like Word or Excel, make the image squares match to a 1" rule, then print so its broken out correctly by page. Having most of that already done would be great.

b) Since the consumer is doing the printing (and incurring any additional printing costs), should those battle maps make use of color or emphasize ease of printing on a B&W printer? Should they use color sparingly?

As stated before, doing them in color and in grey-scale would be most optimal and make the product more worthwhile for a larger audience.

c) Would a single "encounter overview" map showing the placement of individual tile sheets be more trouble than it is worth? Would such a map be better targeted toward "public" view or for GM-only view?

I would think not. Since you would have to start with the primary "single" map anyway, including it as a DM-only view in the module would be great for the DM, especially if you are going to get into the true difference between DM and player maps. The DM map shows all of the things like traps, secret doors etc. but the player "tiles" don't.

Generic vs Specific -- It seems like there's tension between a desire for modular skeletons that can get dropped into any setting or campaign vs something with intricate twists and "deep-dive" coherency.
"I absolutely love the boxed campaigns that AEG produced like Freiburg, Ryoko Owari, and Otosan Uchi."
To me, those seem like exhibits X -- XX for a geographically-organized campaign space but at the same time, I worry about how to build such a self-contained beast without also imposing overmuch on whatever campaign it gets dropped into. Thoughts on finding the happy medium?

Personally, I don't see a "boxed set" as a module, but as a self-sustaining Campaign. Creating a Campaign set and creating modules, IMHO, are two entirely different beasts.

Handouts -- How much is too much? Using FantasyCraft's emphasis on "Clues" -- would sheets of "clues" formatted to print on sheets of 3x5 cards be over the top? When is "something for the players to hold in their hands" a neat addition and when is it burdensome?

Never too much. Especially in a PDF where there is no real page real estate. The more you can give a GM to make their life and prep work easier the better IMHO.  If you include Clue Cards, that's clue cards I don't have to dig through the material to determine what there should be and then hand type/write on my own. I know in our group visual aids always help immersion, and player aids are always good.  Same reason I assign "action dice" as a poker chips - a visual player aid to remind them of the available resource.