How Long Should An Adventure Be?
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- čas přidán 14. 04. 2024
- Not everything should be longer...
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Jerry brought to my attention that I pay for the adventurelookup domain name, and he pays for the server upkeep. Just posting that here to set the record straight.
You know, I could have just pointed people to the DM's Guild, I'm not even sure why I didn't. It was certainly around and thriving when adventurelookup happened. I think I just assumed "not every good adventure is on there." Or maybe I wasn't happy with their filtering? No idea. But certainly use the DM's Guild! I literally don't care! Whatever works for you!
@@helloMCDM I only check the DM's guild when I know exactly what I'm looking for. In my experience, browsing it is PAINFUL
I think adventurelookup has better search/filter options than DM's Guild. And it might list adventures not on DM's Guild, though I'm not 100% on that. Either way, the former is benefit enough for me to use it as my first port of call for trying to find a module for my games.
i think this comment needs a pin
@@helloMCDM adventurelookup is far superior to DMs guild, plus it doesn't support the Wotcies.
Can we rename this from "How Long Should An Adventure Be?" to "OH GOD NEW DMs PLEASE WATCH THIS BEFORE SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR FAILURE"
😂 yes
No kidding, the very first thing I tried to run in 5th edition after not having played for a very long time, and not dming since at least 3.0 was Storm King's thunder
@@GamerNxUSN An adventure you could run forever and never really address the plot. Don't get me wrong, I quite like it, but you could just wander the forgotten realms for ages in that one, and get into all kinds of mischief before you remembered you were supposed to be doing something else. Which is good, unless you want to finish the damn thing lol.
As a dm... No.
I feel like that would be too clickbaity. I feel like "adventures should be shorter" would be a better title.
Thank you. I've been telling players this for years. I can't say how many times I've heard someone say, "My buddies and I picked up Call of Cthulhu for the first time and will start with Masks of Nyatlathotep!" (660 pgs), or "We picked up Traveller and will begin with Pirates of Drinax!" (multi-book campaign). I feel the best way to begin any RPG is is to run a lot of little adventures, sample all the different things it can offer, and then once the GM and players are used to the game and know what they like and want, then they can pick up a hardback campaign book if they wish.
This is why I feel so much discordance with the WOTC published campaigns. Most of them start at level 1. In a lot of cases there’s a sort of tutorial chapter you can skip, but that will still just get you to level 3. I’d rather run up to like level 5 or 7 or even 10 or higher doing episodic adventures, and then when the party has a vibe and some stories accumulated, pick up a more long-running written adventure to finish that group off in an epic way. It would also fix the problem of having to make people roll characters with a reason to stick together at the start of, say, Dragon Heist or Hoard of the Dragon Queen. If I had an adventure going from level 10-15, I could presume the group is already together and have been adventurers, and know the drill.
I know Mad Mage exists, that’s in the right vein but by no means is that for everyone.
The greatest DM ALIVE!
@@matthewshroba1511 Whew! Still in the running… I died years ago 😂
Yup.
That, or seeing the multiple Reddit posts saying “I’m a new DM and I’m trying to learn rules and develop a massive homebrew setting. Please help.”
Another thing about longform campaigns is commitment to that bit of content. If you figure out halfway through a one-session adventure that it isn't for you (bad writing, not to your taste, or any other reason), you've had an unsatisfying afternoon. If you figure out 10% of the way into a campaign book that it isn't for you, you've had an unsatisfying month, and the sunk cost fallacy means you're more likely to get 20 or 30% through rather than just 10% at least by the time you give up.
Ah, my Princes of the Apocalypse experience
I want shorter adventures with less specificity made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm NOT KIDDING.
I agree. thats what made B2 such a GREAT adventure. (maybe not the paid more part of course)
Same. I don't want some low tier writer's magnum opus. I want five solid pages from an experienced DM and a map.
I made a couple ones that are free on itch
Hell yeah, the designers and writers deserve more.
What do you mean by less specificity?
I cannot express how much I needed this. I never figured out why I was so unsatisfied with my games when they fizzled out, but it’s because I planned for a grand opera when I should have been focusing on singular acts. Even a big, overall story can be broken into clear adventures each with their own goals and rewards. It’s so much more obvious now and I’m surprised I never figured that out even if I’ve been watching RTG since the beginning.
Yeah... The "opera" is the collection of stories; the chapters, if you will. It's the tale of the adventurer's lives.
Chapters; episodes; adventures!
In my experience, it works better to plan for an adventure and figure out how to make them a campaign rather than the inverse
THIS, I just figured this out myself
My cousin used to draw my brothers and I custom comics starring him and us as rival karate fighters. Every birthday we’d get a new full page comic and one year he tied all the stories together, culminating in an epic TWO pager. It blew our minds. I think that was the biggest influence on my DM style once I started playing dnd.
"People end up doing a lot, but they don't feel like they accomplished anything."
Truer words. I'm in a group that's been playing through some of those year-long hardcovers and for all I do have a good time, that's down to the DM and players more than the adventure itself. Going back to an older video, many of them seem allergic to rewards and more about shuttling people between set pieces in an aimless sort of way. Lots of little objectives that are meant to act as episode breaks, but none of them do because they all end on cliffhangers.
My DM works their tail off to make it all work as well as it does, but the big books do not make it easy.
TV analogy for D&D:
One-shot = made for tv movie
Adventure = a tv miniseries
Campaign = a multi-season tv series
One-shot: Spirited Away
Adventure: a single episode of Cowboy Bebop
Campaign: Cowboy Bebop
Curse of Strahd: One Piece
But a single episode of Cowboy Bebop is way shorter than Spirited Away, maybe switch those two@crimsonhawk52
I compare Adventurer's League to scifi TV series.
Look at any of the seasons of AL or even the Dreams of Red Wizards. Each module is completable in 1 session (2 if you really want to explore everything). The modules from one to the next continue the meta plot, but each module is completed in 3-6 hours of play. It has a hook, a beginning, a middle, a BBEB, and a wrap up. It's very similar to playing DnD in the style of Startrek, or Supernatural, or Legends, etc...
Even this analogy is tainted by how television has changed, even something Colville calls out.
An adventure used to be An Episode!
If my first option to run games was a series of smaller adventures. Damn man would I have felt better.
When we needed him, he returned.
❤
Sure, he's got a lot to learn, but I beleive Matt can change the world
First disclaimer: I'm old. My gut reaction was no shit, Matt. Then I read most of the comments. Things I grew up knowing include pay phones are at gas stations, all your family and friends phone numbers were memorized, and D&D was modular.
I hope I'm doing the community a service by outlining how I run campaigns. Characters have to have a backstory even if it is "I woke up this morning with no recollection of how I got here". I will work in backstory for any player that wants it. Campaigns have one to four story arcs. The end of each arc has a seminal encounter. Of course, the end of the last arc is the finale. Each story is comprised of however many modules I want/the players thirst for. Some modules in an arc just happen on the way to the next McGuffin. I run an open world so if the players ignore clues and go a different direction, I'll improv a scenario, reshuffle the environment (even the story is malleable), or sometimes pull an element from a later arc to whet appetites.
This post is full of 'me', but the point I'm making is hell yes adventuring is modular. Make liberal use of places like drivethrurpg. You have permission to change any element of a module to fit your story. And you should make changes, especially when it comes to magic items found in a published module. Anything 'broken' in a module can be explained as rumor, lie, myth, planar travel, or Magic. You get the idea.
12:45 SO TRUE. My partner and I recently starting watching Columbo and found it so relaxing. Just single episodes with satisfying, self-contained arcs. And saying, ugh remember when TV was like this? I mean, I like prestige television too, but having to go an entire season before any satisfying conclusions is insane.
And sometimes you (general you) watch a whole season and still don't find it satisfying.
same reason I love watching Detective Conan. Can just drop in and watch any string of episodes from anywhere. Longer episodes are a treat once you've built up familiarity with the larger cast but it's ultimately best at 2-4 episode cases ( i.e. 1-2 hours).
The episodic model, in my opinion, is what MAKES the grand sweeping finale act of a campaign as epic as it is. You've spent time with your characters doing a huge variety of other stuff, most of it not related to this plotline; but over time - maybe even years - it slowly builds in the background until you can't just do monster of the week any more, you HAVE to go and vanquish the big bad so that you might ever know peace.
Six seasons and a movie! Good enough for Troy and Abed, good enough for D&D adventuring.
Troy and Abed running moooodules!
"I won at Dungeons & Dragons. And it was advaced!"
@@EllebeebyKnightsss!
This guy gets it
Yes -- this was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show model of a story arc combined with monster of the week, culminating in big season finale.
Delian Tomb is such a template, so easy to reskin a thousand different ways. And itself is just a concise synthesis of a thousand different adventures.
Might not even need to be fantasy. Could adapt it to something like Traveller and replace the goblins with pirates or something and make the place some sort of old research outpost or mine. The size and shape of the rooms isn’t the important part of the adventure so they can be reworked as-needed so long as each room serves the same purpose and has the same connections to the other rooms.
@@procrastinatinggamer I actually started to do this with one of the old West End Games d6 Star Wars modules, though I was just changing it from Star Wars to a more generic Science Fantasy so it wasn't that big of a change.
@@procrastinatinggamer I've run it as a historical swashbuckling adventure dropped into an on-going campaign. "The Templars' Tomb". Goblins became bandits, the kidnapped child became the child of a French nobleman, and it made an awesome little sidequest.
I love this video and how passionate Matt is about D&D. As a pretty new DM I went through all of this before figuring out that less is more with groups that only get to play a few times a month.
You can see in his eyes and hear in his voice how sad he is that people tried to discover the great game of D&D and got burned out because all you see is "Grand adventures! and making huge worlds for your player to play in."
The very first campaign I ran I made the whole world from scratch, every location, NPC, and quest came from nothing because I thought that was the only real way to do it. I made a lot of mistakes, and it ran off the rails so much. But everything worked out in the end because my group of friends really wanted to play so we made it work.
But as the DM trying to do all that it just fell apart multiple times. It was so stressful to try to tie such a large world together in a way that makes sense because it was just too big to hold the plot together with so many different adventures in one place. Watching running the game and learning that I didn't need to do all of that just to play this game we love took a huge load off my shoulders and it really makes me enjoy the game more. I am glad that I didn't just say "This is too much." and give up. I think everyone getting into D&D should watch this video first it is just spot on.
Swift, ouch that hurts. My partner has started running their own game and my advice was taken from Matts (Colville and Mercer), "start small". We have a wide galaxy, we know the main structure. Major groups, and such. Total Locales? We have "space" and This Planet we were approaching.
Think Firefly-esque with Starfinder mechanics.
This is gold. My 3 year adventure campaign is literally a string of 6 session self contained adventures strung together by the characters and a reoccuring villain that is up to something bigger that occassionally shows up to suggest a bigger theme.
Everyone celebrates each "episode". They are full stories in their own right. And we take a couple weeks off between each one. It works and I have been advocating for this approach to campaigns for years.
The party just Jessica Fletchering their way around the local area completely episodically is one way to sew a bunch of adventures together, but Matt has talked before about also having the party find correspondence from Bad Guy A in Bad Guy B's lair. You can also have major enemies attempt to run away more often -- most of the time, they'll fail, but the ones who do get away can show up again in another context, which can give a sense of continuity to the campaign.
You can achieve continuity by buying a bunch of modules and editing them a little to tie them together. Merge the blacksmith in adventure A with the one from adventure B. In fact, merge the whole town. These ones both have monotheistic churches -- now they're the same church.
Once you have your list of modules, you can just build your campaign setting out from there, instead of making a setting and then looking for adventures that fit.
@@omarbenmegdoul8950 Merging towns can be really useful -- you can do it as you describe, but occasionally, I'll keep both blacksmiths and now I have competing blacksmiths, or keep both churches and now the town has religious tension, etc. Merging towns can also be nice if you have two or three really vaguely sketched towns from their original modules. If each adventure as a town with 3-5 named characters in it, now you have 6-15 named characters for your town.
@@honoratagold 100%
Back in the day with modules we often either Jessica Fletchered things or stitched them together as you say. No need for a premade and complex AP.
A sequence of three or four modules was quite nice… Slave Lords and Desert of Desolation were good examples.
I would really like to see a video where you go through a bunch of campaign settings and talk about what your favorite ideas and tropes are. Even maybe talk about how you’d mishmash them together. Love the videos!
I personally regard the original Greyhawk Gazetteer as the best campaign setting created. Every type of fantasy government you could want and every type of adventuring environment. And just short entries to fire your imagination.
You should check out his world building livestreams.
Unspoken damage the full-on big books has caused (from someone who started before this norm then had newer folks join up) is how hard it was to break folks of the "looking for the plot" habit, even when I would directly tell them, "I'm not here to serve you plot. Plot will emerge from us so long as you play."
This is why I have loved the Paizo output for the last two decades. A couple dozen “Quests” for short session entry, a vast selection of one shot vaguely connected “Scenarios” from society play, a few handfuls of “Modules” to get you several sessions of action, and “Adventure Paths” for when you want six connected modules to span 1-3 years.
When I was just starting my first campaign as DM, I took Colville's suggestion and ran Cult of the Reptile God. And you know what, it was a lot of fun taking that adventure (it's town, NPCs, monsters) and making it work in the larger world and story. It still took us 5 or 6 sessions to play it, everyone had a blast, and I had to do much less work then if I tried to completely write my own adventure from scratch.
I wish this video existed when I started DMing. I ran Princes of the Apocalypse, the huge modern remake of ToEE. Players gave me elaborate and exciting backstories, and I used them to generate all these crazy ideas. But these plot threads never came up. "After this adventure," I told my players "we can do your backstory stuff."
Naturally, they wanted to know how long they'd have to wait.
"Err.. the module says it ends after level 13, so... a few years?"
The module was exhausting. It suffered from every problem the big WotC adventures usually suffer from, and it required extensive rework. Everyone enjoyed it, but they could feel the fatigue setting in. They could see it in my DMing. They told me to cut it shorter if I wanted to, to have it wrap up after level 6 with the current plot thread. "No!" I told them. "The module says it must run to high level. Besides, there's so much cool stuff to see in here."
Years and years passed. Players dropped out. I took long breaks to fight burnout. There was an epic conclusion, but it was diluted by the relief I felt that it was finally fucking over.
Nowadays, I am quite a bit more experienced as a GM. I have slowly realized that short form, typically episodic play is healthier for our group, who are all trying to balance their lives and jobs and different hobbies. I feel vindicated that Colville champions the same ideas here, but a bit melancholy about everything I could have done better if I had had this sort of advice from day 1.
Thanks Matt - here's hoping the next generation are even better equipped than I am.
The problem with Princes of the Apocalypse is that it starts out cool, with some surface exploration work and finding the Haunted Keeps and looking for the missing dignitaries and such. But all the keeps funnel into a single connected Big Dungeon that's basically 9 levels deep (treating each quarter of the ruined city as a separate level, the Fane as one level, and each node as one level), and that's WAY too much for a single dungeon. It would have been better to have smaller dungeons, split up in different locations and make the travel between the locations into an exciting adventure as well. I'm looking at Ocarina of Time as a model here - there's usually some stuff you need to do in order to get into each of the temples. You don't just go straight from the forest temple to the fire temple, you visit Kakariko village on the way there and see what's up there, go to Goron Town to learn that all the Gorons have been captured, and get some items you need.
Another great facet of "they're short!" is that, in a group with multiple would-be GMs, you get a bounded duration behind the screen. "Okay, for the next 6 weeks we're playing in Alice's world, then Bob has an idea for something he wants to run, then Cara wants to try out Other System, then..."
You can even share the world, and collaboratively build it out -- the "add a swamp here" idea scales, and more brains makes for more cool ideas!
Same world, but can be different rules. It does give you all an ever growing community of NPC's you can swipe from. You need a farmer who just knows waaay too much? Well Alice had Farmer Jenkins. Just so happens it's market day and you are using Other System, so Jenkins is in town doing selling some of his lambs.
Honestly, a series of one-shots connected by the shared characters and setting is THE WAY to run a game. My newest playgroup got started because I showed up with my GMG and Player Core, spent a weekend making a dungeon, and dropped them off at the front door. I thought we'd finish up in an evening- they got so into it that we played until people remembered they had work in the morning, and the second session finished after 6 hours.
People were messaging me within days to ask about the next adventure. Imagine that- your players motivated to hop back in, beating down your door.
Long, narrative-driven games filled with longing, ennui, double-crosses, and world-spanning machinations have their place, but nothing beats the sheer power of a player's imagination when they hear heavy footfalls echo down the hallway, and one of them quickly hoods their light as they duck around a corner. Whatever it is pads closer to them... you may have a moment, a scintilla of an opportunity in the inky black to strike out before it is upon you, or it may simply move on.
Those small moments where victory and defeat are in their hands, with a clear goal and an end in sight are what keep 'em coming back.
Everything else is just padding the runtime.
YES! the small moments of tension where the players can see there actions REALLY have immediate consequences are the what makes the game magical .🪄
One thing I love about Dungeon Crawl Classics is how many first party, high quality, short adventures there are. I like to arrange them on a hexmap, tie them to eachother via an overarching story, and formulate a campaign from them.
Absolutely true! Its a fantastic game, with the best adventures!
I love that they’ve also started compiling them into tomes. I love Goodman Games so much
@@midnightgreen8319 I think OP is referring to what DCC did BEFORE they created their own game. They used to make short adventures like the one that Matt was using in the video. The actual game came... I don't know when but later. It might have been around the 4E D&D era.
@@JacksonOwexthe DCC RPG was the response to 3e, I believe. But the DCC publishing line still developed adventures for 4e. They don't for 5e from what I've seen
Which ones would you recommend?
One other reason why I think players and DM’s are so used to the epic campaigns. The people that learned about the hobby through the shows like critical role, dimension 20, and all of the wizards play games were long weekly campaigns that went for years. They weren’t short adventures. They were long narrative storytelling. And if you got into the hobby through those shows, that’s what you you think D&D/fantasy table top games are
Also video games have long epic campaigns as there sold on x hour of game play.
To be fair, that's what Dimension 20 do. They're closer to what's being suggested here, even if not quite.
Critical role 1 and 2 really were not single long adventures. Yeah, Matt did a good job making it feel cohesive, but there was a lot of small unrelated stuff going on.
@@Lord_zeel The first half of campaign 2 especially was extremely modular. It was pretty much "visit new town, solve 1-2 problems, leave" and repeat, with maybe 4-5 sessions per adventure. There was definitely a narrative through line, of course, and some connective tissue between the modules, but there were also a lot of very self-contained pieces.
This is why I’m grateful I really got into the hobby from Outside Xbox and Xtra’s Oxventure series, instead. It’s much more episodic for dozens of eps until they decided to do a longer storyline later. This also made it more conducive to live shows. The adventures also tended to be much more scenario-based rather than plot-driven, which led to me feeling like DMing was something I could do, and had a great time running my own adventures for the first year or two of being a DM, before I started tackling prewritten stuff.
This is one of the best reframing of the frustrations DM’s and players have. And why not to be concerned with them. Thanks Matt. 👍
Yeah, that module-based style was my D&D. You just wander and have a bunch of random adventures. And those were our stories. Like the old pulp serial novels. Or Conan or Fafhrd or Elric. The connecting thread is the hero or the group of heroes. btw, I've heard newer players call the books "modules" and I find that a little odd, too, but not actually wrong, I suppose. But I do love those old classic modules. Many of them were so brilliant.
I often give my players “homework” when we’re away from the table and i send them RTG videos and ask them for their opinions on the subject and i reward them with XP or gold. I’m sending this to my players immediately because it made me realize that I’ve been running my homebrew campaigns like huge hard cover adventures. The biggest reason we abandoned the last one is because i lost motivation to run it! The next thing I run will most likely be a shorter collection of adventures. I also love the idea of downtime and never feel like my table has the opportunity to capitalize on it because the story must go on and the tension is always building!
I'll second the downtime thing. It's almost ingrained into us to ignore downtime.
I GM Pathfinder 2e, and even though downtime is baked into the system pretty well, whenever I try to put forward a hint that 'now might be a time to take a breather', there's always some errant plot hook that they must chase like so many doomed fish.
Gotta get back to knowing how and when to stop and smell the roses.
I think this is really great, that you are turning attention towards the benefits of downtime. When I played, downtime was such an integral part of our characters greater, idiosyncratic development (separate from the party identity). It allowed us to pursue individual agendas and it created 'lifespan' to their narratives. For us, it wasn't just an awareness of how our character were progressing through levels but how they were progressing through the years of their lives and how they were filling those years beyond 'the adventures.'
I'm sharing this with not just my players but friends and co-workers are currently DM'ing (he's doing Strahd right now)
yeah, ive fallen into the same trap. for me it's easy to homebrew a couple interesting ideas to start, but then get into a rut developing just one. randomly throwing in a splatbook would break that monotony
My husband managed to sneak his players in to The Curse of Strahd by using Vanrichten's Guide to Ravenloft-- meaning he seeded the campaign using the settings and mini games in the book, and a singular framing device to have his players going from one Domain of Dread to another, leading up to the Curse of Strahd. By the time he got to the big campaign book, he had already made them immersed in a grander story with clear goals: Escape Domains, and Return Home.
This is advice I've been advocating for for years. I'm so glad such an influential creator is spreading the word. I've seen so many new DMs break trying to run huge adventure books instead of starting small. Excellent stuff
Yup. Do a short one, resolve the main tensions of that adventure, but leave some background tensions unresolved. If the player LIKED the adventure and start asking "what was the deal with this, what was the deal with that?" narrate a "post-credit scene" to answer those questions, and show that this story COULD keep going. If they like the promise of this, make a similarly sized adventure, chain it together and BAM, you have the beginnings of a campaign.
Im gonna have to send this to all my DnD groups just to let it percolate.
The "Adventurer's League" adventures are the better design plan for adventure length. It's a single sitting of a game night, more or less, and can be tinkered with as needed to suit the table. Each season had a storyline it told if you string them together, and it made for a feeling of a "campaign" by doing so. I don't completely fault Has/Wiz for writing their "Big Book of Campaign," but if they made each chapter a single adventure with an overarching plot, it would be a better design.
Using the example of "Curse of Strahd" as a baseline, Chapter 1 would just be "Death House." You arrive in the country of Barovia, you encounter the House, you defeat the House, and you end in the village of Barovia. End of the "Adventure Proper" for the night. You let your players visit the town for a bit, and let them hear about some of the rumors about town, then get a feel for which hook they're likely to take. Next week, you run the next adventure, which is another self contained chapter all its own, and repeat until they go to Castle Ravenloft for the finale. This design allows for a DM to insert ideas for adventures they have to be inserted as desired, like dropping "Castle Amber" in at a point where you think it would fit in your game.
I think one of the better designs, outside of the single serve modules, was the Pathfinder "Adventure Paths" system. After a few weeks of doing Book One of the story, which were chaptered out as single adventures that would take a week or two to complete, you'd move on to Book Two. You felt progress as you moved to a different book with new stories to expand on the previous one you were doing. There was a sense of actual accomplishment when you finished a book. You don't get that from the D&D Campaigns because it's the same book, every week, for months on end. You never feel the sense of progress from moving forward because nothing has really changed. You're still in "Curse of Strahd." Four months later, it's still the Same. Damn. Book.
The Adventure's League series Eberron Oracle of War is great to run. Perfect storyline and you should be able to go from level 1 to 20 in 20 or so weeks.
One problem new DM to AL need to know. Depending on the season, the adventures are occasionally not in sequence. Find the "Content Catalogue" Vers 9.2 which will give you the names, levels, and estimated run time. for more information.
Just wait till you learn about the Great Pendragon Campaign.
Sticking to your theme of changing my life one clip at a time, this one was no different. 1) You have just shattered my biggest barrier to entry. I ran Phandelver once and then nothing else, because of the very problem you highlighted: reading Strahd cover to cover is a daunting task, even for the avid reader which I certainly am not. So thanks, this was an absolute eye opener!
Also, 2) COLUMBO IS ON CZcams?!?! Well, that's my weekend sorted!
You sir still are a river to your people.
Your statement of people not knowing the concept of episodic content absolutely blew me away. Its a dynamic i hadnt even ever thought of before. Holy cow. Explains why the adventure im writing, ive been focusing on keeping it compressed and manageable. Ive broken up the main bits i want into chapters and i didnt really understand *why* I was so focuses on that.
A weird side effect of the defaultization of the 250 page hardcover adventure, is that when they DO make anthologies, they feel compelled to make them 1-14 because "these must all go in a row" is the expectation. I have seen people complain about Tales from the Yawning Portal not "making sense in order". I have seen people complain about Ghosts of Saltmarsh "not having a main plot after the 6th chapter". They're...they're anthologies? They're not supposed to have a central narrative? Doing the entire sequence of TftYP in a row is going to generate nonsense stories because they aren't meant to generate a novel!
I also think that the length of the epic-length adventure tends to disincentivize customizing adventures. When there's that many moving pieces, when reading ahead is that difficult, you get nervous to change things. What if that character is important later? What if that being a castle ends up being a big reveal?
That being said, I am a little down on micro-modules. The happy zone, to me, is the 3-location, 30 page module. That's a coherent story unit, smaller tends to be so self-contained and so narratively sparse you're basically just buying a keyed map.
Great point! I hadn't considered that, but I did find it kind of weird to hear people talking about running candlekeep mysteries as a campaign. Like... I think you are missing the point of the book?
I appreciate that you used Strahd as your example. From what I understand from our DM running it, Strahd is one that you NEED to read before you run it because there's lore bits spread throughout the book that players can interact with at any level.
Curse of Strahd is also probably the module that needs to be modified the most and can't be played out of the box.
At least it is only one book. The Enemy Within is five books with five companion books and two city books.
I am reading my way through them now.
Matt this may be the most helpful video you have ever posted. I started running the game because of this channel, but I’m in my 30s, my friends have kids, we all have work, so if we play once a month we are lucky. We’ve been playing almost 3 years and we love it. But it’s become a real slog as the DM.
I’m running Curse of Strahd because it’s the highest rated adventure. And it’s really awesome. But the amount of time
It takes to prep, to read the whole book, to keep all the story lines and interactions in my head, it’s rough.
The most fun I’ve had while DMing was connector sessions. 2-3 session adventures to connect between the larger adventures. I could home brew a lot more without worrying about messing up some plot point 90 pages away.
I think after we manage to get through strahd (in like 2 years) I’ll start
Doing this.
9:47 My friend group ran into this issue last year, after two separate campaigns fizzled out due to life issues and some extended breaks; we got lost, and just kinda stopped caring about the plot.
So what we did was decide to restrict ourselves to a "westmarches"-esque system. Where we're all part of a guild that takes on short quests with definite rewards; now, each adventure is a couple sessions at most, those that wish can easily switch between different characters without losing verisimilitude, and the GMs can take it easy and even switch around to let everyone be a player. It's been a great shift in how we go about the hobby
KFC and a new Matthew Colville video. Life ain't so bad afterall
The netflix series vs columbo analogy is perfect. There's a reason why most of the stuff I watch is from the 90s - a time when home-recording meant that fans could follow an overarching plot, but someone just flipping channels and landing on your show couldn't be counted on to have seen the previous episode so your episodes HAD to be self-contained, and sometimes a little monster-of-the-week episode is exactly what your show needs to pace things out a bit.
Hell, one of the biggest complaints Voyager had was that the Kazon plotline dragged on way too long, and in later seasons things massively improved when the Hirogen showed up and were basically a short, sweet introduction-elaboration-climax storyline spread over a few episodes in like, one season, then it was on to the next encounter.
Some friends and I started playing D&D a few years ago, and kept cycling through DMs. I started, and tried to construct a huge epic adventure...it fizzled out LONG before we finished. Few months later, another friend started DMing, again trying to run a big epic adventure. That too fizzled out. Then a few months later, a third friend took up the DMing helm, but he decided to run a series of shorter modules (Ghosts of Saltmarsh anthology). I think this has been our longest playing streak, and we're all still super invested and always excited for the next session - and we can keep the plot straight! As romantic an idea as it is to run a huge, sprawling, interconnected adventure, Matt is totally right. Short modules are best suited for modern play styles.
As someone who joined the hobby in 5th edition, this video made me do some thinking. When you talked about connecting different small adventures I found myself asking "How?" How do we as dungeon masters relate this 1st level adventure to this second level adventure we want to run next? How do we seed the first adventure to motivate the players to go on the second adventure? What specifically do we need to do? Leave criptic notes about the goings on in the beginning of the next adventure? Give clues to rare and powerful magic items that will appear? Have the bad guy escape and have him reappear in the next adventure? These questions might be more related to story telling techniques and motivating your players but they are what came to mind.
When it comes to how we perceive campaigns as episodic stories vs a singular grand plot, I think video games have helped shift how we see things. When I think of a complete campaign, I tend to see it as something similar to Bravely Default or Ocarina of Time, where small actions you take progresses you towards completing some larger goal. Each dungeon in OoT would be an adventure, but you always have that main motivation in mind: Beat Ganondorf. With prewritten, modular, D&D adventures I can see how its difficult to weave those together with whatever major motivation you give your players.
This is why we've seen a lot of anthology books from WotC. Tales of the Yawning Portal, Candlekeep Mysteries, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel, and Keys From the Golden Vault are all a bunch of small adventures put together with maybe a framing device to optionally run them all as a big campaign, but they're pretty good to just grab individual adventures out of to put in other games.
I object to characterizing them as "small". I find they're usually medium - length adventures, and seem to be written with the assumption that you'll play one or two of them before leveling up.
HARD AGREE.
love short adventures, one page adventures, elven tower's stuff etc. it's good stuff.
Thanks for all your help over the years Matt. Because of the way you demystified DMing, I've been running a Traveller game for just over half a year now. Never would have thought i could do it (or that it would actually be fun) before I found this channel.
My favorite module to run, especially for new players is at it's most recent iteration a 3.5 module but I've adapted for 4th and then again for 5th "SOMETHING'S COOKING" in which the players discover a baker's cottage has been ransacked and a spell has been cast in their kitchen culminating in the group having to fight a giant Calzone Golum. It's the best thing ever written.
I just finished a year-and-half epic long campaign where my players went from level 0 nobodies in small nowhere town to leading an epic Helm’s Deep battle across two sessions against a massive undead army. And my players and I loved that campaign. It had an incredibly epic and satisfying finale that hit so hard because we had spent so much time with these characters and their efforts to protect their caravan.
And I completely agree with Matt here. Because though my players and I loved that campaign, we were all VERY exhausted by it.
I appreciate the reminder to look for small adventures. I think that’ll be a good way to get a palette cleanser for me and my players before we commit to something that epic again.
And that's the key, really. Playing an epic, long campaign is a commitment that everyone needs to understand and accept before such a thing should ever be attempted. For folks like you and your players, you know what it takes, and you can go into it with clear expectations. When you're all on board with making it happen and seeing it through, it's an incredible journey. If not everyone is ready or willing to take that on, then it flames out as so many do.
I love short adventures and I love long campaigns, both as a player and GM. They scratch different itches within the hobby. And yet only epic adventures & one-shots get any love from most content creators, which colours the expectations of everyone, both new & experienced.
So, hurray for tight, engaging 5-10 session adventures. Deep and long enough that you get the joy of thinking about your character and the adventure while taking a shower (or when you're supposed to be working), but concise enough that you and your busy friends can commit to seeing to the end. Love it.
I miss my local game store
Yeah, I'm prepping a new campaign that I'm expecting us to start in the next month or two and I had already planned it to be much more sandboxy than what I ran previously to the same group. This video has just basically cemented for me to really go for this kind of many short adventures style rather than some huge long story than my previous campaign was. Thinking that basically any one adventure should be like 2-3 sessions long at most. Different adventures can be kind of linked together and have related themes (same villain behind it all and stuff), but segmenting the sessions into these kinds of shorter adventures is going to be a very interesting approach that will hopefully help keep things fresh and help players remember what's going on.
I feel like this is something that's happened in all areas of entertainment (probably for the same economic reasons). Classic fantasy heroes like Conan, Elric, and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser all got their starts as episodic short stories in magazines. Every TV show, from Leave it to Beaver to Star Trek, was episodic and could be syndicated in random order without hurting the viewing experience. At the movies, you used to get cartoons, short subjects, or serial episodes along with your main feature. Everything has to be "Super-Sized" now.
Great video, I would definitely show this to anyone who was new to DMing and looking to get into the hobby. I personally love the epic campaigns, and have been blessed with group who have made it through several multi-year ones. However, one of my favorite things to do during these big campaigns is take a 1-3 session breaks every so often and run something small. Whether it be a brand new system to try out, or letting someone else take the DM reins so I can play. This style has worked out amazingly because we've gotten to do the big overarching story, but still get the variety of new systems or different settings with different people taking the lead, and that gets you those satisfying, fun conclusions while still getting to have your epic story too!
The phandelver comment felt like it acknowledged and resolved some buried trauma i didn't realize i had.
Like getting out of a bad situation and having someone acknowledge how bad it was and that you're not crazy.
Being able to hold the reason of Why Anyone Is Doing Anything and Having The End In Sight is so fucking important for the game to be Fun.
So many dwindled campaigns because we start off with a 1-20 vision but lose sight of any completion. My favourite time playing anything dnd related was the pathfinder module Fall of Plaguestone, as we had a quick implied start And We Got An Ending. Like actual epilogue tying up lose ends. Closure.
And a campaign ending without closure, a campaign just fizzling out, is so frustrating when you've spent hours and hours on it but never felt like you reached a destination. The journey is important, but the destination shows you how you've changed on the way.
I feel personally attacked by this video.
But seriously, I tried to make a "seeded" campaign once, a new city with a guild full of short adventures, fun NPCs and an arena. We started as a college group, so I wanted a campaing that ppl could join or leave at any time (I also didn't know what Saltmarsh campaigns were). But, every time, a plot just happens. Always the result of what came before.
One players sent me her background without reading the setting and ended up picking a dead goddess. Another just said "I was born in a cult and ran away. Have fun GM". I managed to combine both with the fact the second player had to leave the game to make one EPIC adventure that took us a year and a half (ended just last week). I'm glad we could finish it on a high note. Now I'm ready for some GM vacation.
I love the old Dungeon Crawl Classics modules they made for 3.5 and they have been the foundation upon which I set all my introductory content when I DM for new players. Even the Flapdoodle mine seemed much larger than it should have been for an intro product.
DCC should be the benchmark for the length of adventures. Long enough to get you through some amazing scenes but never overstaying their welcome.
I see you quoting the Delian Tomb video
@@eleintblood lost mine of flapdoodle? Phandelver. Whatever. I have been asked "how do you actually play D&D" more times than I can count, and the delian tomb is always there for a session I didnt know I was going to run that day.
I've only really done the big hardcover adventures. I DMed Curse of Strahd (back during the lockdown when my players actually demanded that we play three times per week), then one of my players DMed Waterdeep Dragon Heist (which got a bit wonky at the end, because we didn't play as often anymore, and a lot of the time we just didn't really know what we were supposed to do), and now I've been putting off DMing Icewind Dale Rime of the Frostmaiden for the last two years because it just (subconsciously) feels so intimidating and like so much of a commitment.
But this video inspired something in me; Two days after watching it I suddenly had this idea that wouldn't let me go, and now, after two more days, I am halfway through writing a little adventure set in the Forgotten Realms (inspired by reading the Drizzt books recently). I was aiming for only one session, although the inspiration didn't stop, so now my notes look like it will be more like three sessions. But most importantly, my group is actually gonna play D&D again after a two year break during which nobody felt prepared to take on a big campaign, because none of us realized that we could just do a short little adventure instead
This was very refreshing ... an old- school classic Matt Colville video.... the best. Thank you.
I have been buying, seeding and tweaking small adventures for YEARS. Not only do they allow me to optimize my time in prepping but they also give great examples and use cases for how to package drama and narrative across your longer campaigns. The hardback campaign books are something I always see peddled but I never see anyone having a good time with them due to the weird and often conflicting scope of them.
You know how they include levels 10-20 in 5E basically so people can fantasize about getting to those levels, not so you can actually play them?
I feel like the "Giant Campaign Tome" exists for the same reason.
I don't know, it all depends on your group and how you play.
I know I am in a minority, but I DM for a group of 6 players. They are now level 16 after a 5 year long homebrew campaign.
much like how the market for APs is not actually the same venn diargram circle as the market for "people who play games". these overstuffed books made mostly for reading than for *playing* really became an epidemic decades ago (and arguably already back in Dungeon Magazine's overwrought but terribly made small adventures) but 5e really accelerates the trend due to the inherent profit motive of hardcovers and hasbro and the fact that they dont even make modules anymore
Most of my campaigns made it to lvl 20 or had a TPK. Most of the time neither was the end of the campaign.
I appreciate the usage of Curse of Strahd right in the beginning as the example of a big adventure, because it immediately adds a dismissal I need to put myself in the headspace for this video.
"It's not about the Quality, it's about the Quantity." Curse of Strahd is straight gas, I love it so much, but it's still long, and that's the point.
I will be trying a smaller adventure episodic-type campaign next time I get the chance to DM. Maybe Elric's pulp fiction story beat pace will make a good example?
I've been a DM since '78 and appreciate where you are coming from! I love my old modules and still plan sessions with them in mind.
Three years ago I said I wanted to DM Candlekeep Mysteries. Starting with them being a loosely connected string of adventures we have played about 15 official DnD adventures, 10 third party 1 shots, and 4 custom adventures to string them all together and everyone has been having a blast. I've tried to "end it" twice and the players are persistent. Were about to start 'Chapter 3' which will be Vecna: Eve of Ruin.
Wow, normally Matt's videos are often ones on ideas or advice that I took for granted for already knowing beforehand, but still appreciate the videos and the feeling of what I was doing was somewhat "correct". This video however is one that I wasn't aware of I needed to hear. One of my biggest hurdles DMing has always been "Planning out my campaign", because it just seemed so... variable that the idea of planning these events when the characters can do anything always left me overwhelmed.
Hearing this, using multiple adventures to make one campaign, how on earth could you ask a DM to plan AN ENTIRE campaign, lol. Thank you for this video I don't feel so inadequate at DMing as I did before
This is, above all else, my favorite video of yours. I have been battling with this concept for years. Every single campaign has failed in disaster. And yet everyone shot has been a resounding success. This video video finally crystallized the idea that I’ve been working on for years. Thank you for making this video.
This is so true that even changing how you aproach big adventures, trying to chop them into smaller episodic bits that sometimes have overlaping background and lore, already make big cover adventures WAAAAAAY better and fun to run.
I did this with Rise of Tiamat, and MAN. The campaign made a flip from "I CAN'T STAND RUNNING IT!" to "HELL YEAH! We gonna play today!"
Matt I can personally attest that shorter Books like Against the Cult of the Reptile God or Keep on the Boarderlands, are so much more manageable as DM. I've ran a weekly fantasy grounds game for several years, with 2 failed attempts of running Strahd, falling apart at the 75% and 50% completion mark. Running Against the Cult of the Reptile God both at home in person and in fantasy grounds has been a way more enjoyable experience for both myself and my players. And I have snuck the Delian Tomb into at least 2 modules so far, the players were to busy killing Hobgoblins before they sacrificed a village elder to notice!
This is something a lot of newer ttrpgs I have seen are doing. Putting out anthologies of small scenarios. I think to "Kids on Bikes" or "Apocalypse Keys"
Every time you make a new running the game video I remember what it feels like to be excited to run TTRPGs. This one I think is going to help my next session in the DM chair be much more fun and much more sustainable.
THIS is why you are Matt Coleville. One of your best videos ever!!!
You mean to tell me that people think Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is an adventure? I mean... only in loosest terms. That is more of a world you agree to play in!
The benefits of the short adventures also increase over time. They fill out white space. They give static resources like tombs and catacombs. They become reusable as just because you oust the goblins doesn't mean that koblods won't move in and "upgrade" the place afterward in custom content. They provide friends and enemies and armies and BBEGs that can be be reused. They provide a life (death?) to a local area. The hook that gets the party going on the adventure provides hooks of their own for who/what they are helping to gain favors of tools, information, gold, or magical items in the future. The fact so many don't understand "monster of the week" shows just blows my mind!
One of the even weirder things I've noticed from published adventures is that not only do they expect you to finish this long grand storyline, but they're referencing each other, like you can only get the full story if you run all the published adventures together, then play the finale like an MCU situation. I can't say enough how much I hate that.
I like a woven together narrative, in that I like to connect one shots together into a zelda-esque narrative. Mini adventures with a cool big bad behind it all. Then I can decide how/why they connect, and add new ones or remove pointless ones based on player choice. It's way easier than the giant book style, which I'm coming to resent if only because it's way more work, as you say, and I wind up rewriting so much of it anyway
This is what I'm hoping to do with the campaign I'm planning on running. All the bosses answer to a bigger boss but each will have their own adventure tied to them.
There's also no reason you can't weave multiple adventures in and out with each other. I ran a game of Shadowrun for half a decade with the same players, and about every third run was part of an overarching plot that started with the first session and resolved in the last session. Roughly six _hundred_ hours of play, and a third of it was effectively one "module" But no one burned out because little things were accomplished on a regular basis.
The overarching plot was a grand tale of revenge. It was personal, it was long-simmering, it was vicious on both sides. Those runs didn't tend to pay very well, if at all. So the team would make one of those runs and then need to take more normal shadowrunning work to refill their coffers for the next time. One adventure that loses money, two that make money, one more that loses money, two more that make money. Every time getting just that little bit more information, chipping away that little bit more at their enemy's powerbase. Incremental progress about which the players took copious notes. I knew my players already at the start of the game, and the first session drove barbed hooks into the players rage buttons. They didn't know his name, or what he looked like, or where he lived. But whoever he was? He was already dead, painfully. They just needed to find him and tell him about it.
I do like large adventure modules, but I agree, short episodic adventures work better for a variety of reasons. My favourite adventure module of all time is Beyond the Mountains of Madness, which I have played to completion with three separate groups. But even though it is over 500 pages, it took exactly 10 sessions every time I have played it. That really is pushing the boundary of how long an adventure can/should be.
When I DM for my weekly group, it's episodic Pulpy get the McGuffin like Dr. Jones. And so far there has been one new character per episode. We apparently have a red shirt problem.
My absolute favorite thing about watching a Matt Colville video is hearing him say "this may be a short video", pausing, checking the video length, and it NEVER is
WOW!!!! Thank you so much Matt. I started playing in '83 in middle school, using a friends dad's City of Hommlet as a beginning. Played through all the editions, and in 5th, I have forgotten those earlier lessons of small modules. I truly appreciate the kick in the pants to shorten my adventures, and connect them in the same city.
Ok, at the end now; I had a series of one-shots and it was fun. The players yearned for more social stuff and a more connected story. One of my players rose to the occasion, assumed the mantle of DM (thank you Running the Game) and he is running LmoP for us. I have never before enjoyed a campaign this much!
I feel like I was Leto Atreiedies II. I put the pressure on my players, filtered out the ones who wouldn't commit to playing almost every week and now, the group is stronger for it.
...
wow; I never realized before :D Thanks, Matt!
That’s one hell of a “literally me”
Love that your example harcover is Curse of Strahd. I ran that as my first time DMing, and was not equipped for a 10 level story with far more experienced players. Something smaller would have been nice.
However, you can definitely use Curse of Strahd in a sort of modular way. Use Strahd as a B-plot villain, constantly sending agents after the players, maybe pulling them into Ravenloft occasionally. And if they want to stop his evil plot, they'll have to go in after him.
I think this might be your best video yet! This video, more than any other, got me to start writing my first adventure (adapting the Delian Tomb), and expanding my world setting. Thank you this one Matt!
As a DM who ran 1 complete campaign from levels 1-9 and couldn’t run another one for over 4 years (still haven’t), this video is one of the most wonderful and validating things I have ever seen. Those 4 years of self hatred, feelings of not being good enough, and pressure from my group actually took a serious toll on my relationships with my friends and my (already extremely fragile) mental health. So all that to say, thank you so very much Matt for saying what I (and I’m sure many many other self doubting DMs) needed so badly to hear.
Despite paying for them, I still can't bring myself to do a full adventure book, but homebrewing and pulling the cooler monsters from those books has been great. Plus occasionally giving my players a solo session that can't be found in most adventure books has been a lot of fun. Almost all of them agree that was their favorite session.
12:45 I was just about to say that this all sounds like the idea of episodic vs. serialized storytelling.
I love Uncle Matt's ranting videos. It's like I've sat down on the porch with my favorite uncle and he just starts going but I'm listening enraptured and nodding along.
The timing of this video is impeccable. Just last Sunday, it was my SIL's birthday. We've chatted about playing D&D for months - but on Sunday, around noon, I just threw out casually, "What if I DM for us tonight?" Everyone lept at the idea - and now I needed a session of content! I've DMed before but I'm pretty new still - so I went with the tried and true Delian Tomb. Ran it almost as-is. We had a fantastic 4 hours. Matt, you're 100% on point with this video. Time (for me) to start creating some short adventures for MCDM RPG...
All of my campaigns have been 24-32 sessions.
My abridged Rime of the Frostmaiden was 24 sessions, Curse of Strahd was, I think, 32 sessions, and we’re about to have the finale of my third campaign (homebrew) which is gonna be either 26 or 27 sessions.
_But_ I’m also gonna run a cool 1-2 shot in the same world in a few weeks.
I feel like there's some similarity here to some other entertainment mediums. Like fantasy novels and video games.
I'd be willing to bet (though I admittedly don't have any proof) that compared to 20 years ago, way more video gaming hours are spent in giant AAA games compared to tiny independent games. And you've already talked about the whole, "wow, this novel is thick - think about how much time I get to spend there" phenomenon.
So, how much of the current state is people fantasizing about all the possibilities when they see a big thick adventure, and then inevitably being disappointed when it doesn't live up to their expectations?
Spot on this is the way I have done it since 1981. I am glad to see there are still some of us out there. Thanks Mat
I think the bridge between the style of play Matt is talking about and what has become the norm (epic long adventures) is converting those those super lengthy campaigns into more digestible/accessible bits of adventure.
I've built a super campaign setting that'll probably take years to finish and has a sprawling plot with epic twists, revelations, a deep rich history, etc etc. and you know what one of my player's favorite moments was? a side adventure they had in a small village known for its sheep being secretly terrorized by a Night Hag disguised as the village apothecary. it was a 4 session "whodunit" and the ending was super dramatic, character building and satisfying. now the side adventure "The Hamlet of Fles" will always live with this group of players.
I originally made the side adventure to give myself more time to build out the rest of the main campaign but after running it, I realized I should start making each chapter of the main story its own seemingly self-contained adventure with elements of the main plot tied in and have them all somehow connected in the end as opposed to one long ass never-ending plot. so yea, what Matt says is accurate as far as I'm concerned. folks want a satisfying beginning/middle/end. make it digestible. make it accessible.
I ran a level 1 intro adventure and a connected level 2-5 standalone module for a Pathfinder 2e group, and literally half the table had to have that explained to them.
"So... It's homebrew?"
Nope, it's a prewritten module.
"Are you running like, half of it?"
Nope, it's just a few levels in the same area.
Paizo's been chugging along with these things for years and a lot of folks just have no idea you can do that. And it worked great! The smaller scope got them invested in the town and the shorter campaign made it easier to fit into everyone's lives.
If life slows down, we might pick up another adventure from levels 5-10 or so. But if not, we all had fun. Isn't that what matters?
I think this is a question about accurately assessing the commitment level of players, and the assumption that most players (and DMs) are low commitment in terms of D&D Id say is accurate.
I really needed this video. Thanks for the EQ support and reassurance that episodes are okay, this feels much more achievable
You are so real for making this. It hits on so many different experiences everyone has had over the years
I know you and the gang over at MCDM have been crazy busy, but damn it's good to get a new Running the Game style video.
Coincidentally, Curse of Strahd is the only big adventure I have finished.
I'm from the ADnD days and miss the short modules/adventures. Remember the maps were seperate from the text. Also can digest them easier than those large WotC books.
I'm another echo from the old AD&D days. We had a steady diet of the short modules and were always excited about solving the traps, getting the big bad, and maybe even a last-minute epic death of our character so we could try out a different build on the next module. Those short adventures allowed us to easily take turns as DM too!
@@Gruntled00 agreed, also we had no pre made campaign settings (ie Forgotten Realms, etc) that I was aware of, so we created alot of our own maps and such. I guess Dark Sun show up and Greyhawk was out there but never ran into them. we did alot of mail order for stuff. Some local Cons had stuff too.
I just wanted to say hello to a fellow "old-school" player and also agree that I miss the days of the shorter adventures as well! It made the huge three book MEGA CAMPAIGNS like A Night Below feel so much more special as well! It's a prime example of "If everything is "special" then NOTHING is "special" kind of thing!
I’m from the AD&D era too, but it seems to me that modular adventures were the norm up until 5e.
I got re-immersed in this style of adventure writing when I was running games at a local restaurant that had a drop-in D&D day. Every week was technically a one-shot adventure that had to be completed in under 4 hours, but as the same people came back to my table week after week, I was able to string together a larger narrative.
The Delian Tomb was a huge hit for my group! A few skeletons, a some more undead guardians, an ooze beholder, capped off with a Gelatinous Cube inside a room where the ceiling was coming down round by round. It was epic!
Is that an MCDM RPG class t-shirt? I like!
It's been a while since we had a video! Welcome back!
Our first "campaign" back in 4e was a mishmash of "The Slaying Stone", "Reavers of Harkenwold" (Parts 1 and 2), and "Cairn of the Winter King". My players still remember it more than most full campaign books because they were self-contained and straightforward. We recently went through Curse of Strahd (my second time running it) and the amount of book keeping and just... filler nonsense (for lack of a better term) that my players completely forgot about pretty much convinced me to go back to mixing smaller adventures. Great video Matt!
I love that you gave us the answer right away, and it served as fuel to our curiosity for the rest of the video. Almost like a short adventure, fueling the interest into a bigger setting and campaign.
This was enlightening. I'm a newer DM, and I've never had any interest in running a pre-made adventure. What you outlined is much more appealing. Not a predetermined setting and long term main plot, but plug and play little adventures.
Yeah, it's less "what's next in the pre-made adventure?" and more "the PCs want to hunt down these bandits, do I have any adventures sitting around with a bandit stronghold I could use?"