When it comes to adventures, is less more?
I ask because I've seen adventures range from 4 pages to 104 pages more or less (I'm not counting mega dungeons, settings or adventure paths).
For me, the sweet spot is usually around 16-24 pages. Long enough for maybe 2 nites of adventure but not so long I can't familiarize myself in less then an hour or so.
I know at times more IS more, but for the me, less is usually more for adventures.
Rural Ruminations
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Maps form such a fundamental part of our gaming experience. We explore
them. We journey across them. We delve into them. We defend them. We attack
them. ...
18 minutes ago
Assuming the page count is detail, I like 4 to 7 pages for a straightforward dungeon crawl, 10 to 20 for a multi-session adventure with a more complicated plot and several locations, 30 to 60 for a mini-campaign involving multiple NPCs and intrigues.
ReplyDeleteIt also depends on what game is being played. 4 pages of S&W:WB adventure is probably one or two game sessions worth, 4 pages of D&D4 is probably a statblock.
true about the system.
ReplyDeletelets say i'm assuming the usual OSR style statblocks
This seems like a predictable response: it's not so much the page count, but is the product any good?
ReplyDeleteAt first, I was tempted to say that a larger page count would have more ideas to pull out, but I have stolen plenty of great ideas from things like the "one page dungeon," so who knows?
I was also tempted to give you the exact perfect number for a straightforward dungeon crawl, but that is a secret, my fried.
for what it's worth, I favor a two-page spread per encounter or interesting area (two facing pages). Assuming 5-8 such elements in a small-medium adventure, that'd be about 10-16 pages just for that part, plus a few more at the meta-level (for instance, showing relationships between the different 'encounters', providing backstory, and so on).
ReplyDeleteAll in all, I would expect a fully-documented adventure to run 20-30 pages... but that includes a fair bit of whitespace, small maps, supplementary material (such as the new monster I devised for the adventure).