Adventure elements that worked for you.

[K]

Ok, so rather than get into a huge "what makes adventures awesome" thread, I was wondering what singular elements people considered to have made an adventure particularly good for you?

Here are some of mine:

--the new plaything: something you find in the beginning of the adventure that you use the rest of the adventure. Sometimes its just a few potions the "client" hands out to ensure the adventure is a success, and sometimes its a charmed air elemental who luckily failed its save and now you rampage though the dungeon with it.

--the set with moving parts. Basically, its the part of the battlefield where you can do fun stuff like toss people off cliffs, into rivers or lakes, trees that can be set on fire, etc.

--the thing you get to keep. Sometimes, its just a gate that connects two points, and now I can use it whenever I need to cut short my travel time, and other times it is a zombie chimera I get to get to ride around. In the Adventure Paths by Paizo, the first adventure usually has a hidden complex in the heart of the city that you could easily use as your personal batcave.

--feats, items, and PrCs as a result of the adventure. Maybe its the Black Mage in me, but forbidden lore wrested from necromancers is the best.

--the RP bonus. You know, like now you don't have to pay for beers in the Tipsy Mermaid because you stopped the red dragon from burning it down.

--crazy locations.... the crazier the better. I mean, who needs a small base town when you can have a small base town in the the caldera of a dead volcano? Floating cities? Tombs built like the maze from Cube.

What's on your list?

[Username17]

I've always had a knife edge with the truly memorable. That is, the very unexpected and the very large are memorable. And that can be good or bad. I remember when a closet troll did a metric fuck tonne of damage (killing my character) and I remember when the team took down a Glabrezu in the middle of a siege. And both of those events were cool.

But I also remember DMs fudging. And that really isn't a cool memory no matter whether it was cock blocking the defeat of a major enemy "too soon" or saving a PC from a multi-attack from a set of swords.

Big damage values are memorable, but only in that they are substantially out of sync with the normal damage value. Twenty seven damage isn't really big or small inherently, but if you were expecting eight damage - that 27 is big and therefore awesome and memorable.

Turning points are memorable, but only in a good way if they are fair.

Painful as it is to admit it, I believe that critical hits, and especially huge critical hits are "good for the game" - to the extent that having damage show up 5, 6, 4, 8, 5, 22...is way more exciting than just having damage show up in the 7-11 range every attack. And I take it as given that having a fair way for the PCs to recover beats the living shit out of fudging the rules so that PCs aren't taken down in the first place.

-Username17

[kosall]

I think my most memorable experience was finding a dead bronze dragon suspended from a ceiling by hooks and chains, freeing the dead body and then bringing it back to life with a Rod of Resurrection.

The Second most memorable was being eaten by said dragon...

[Kaelik]

I think my most memorable experience was finding a dead bronze dragon suspended from a ceiling by hooks and chains, freeing the dead body and then bringing it back to life with a Rod of Resurrection.

The Second most memorable was being eaten by said dragon...

DMs being asshats is pretty memorable.

[RobbyPants]

DMs being asshats is pretty memorable.

Oh yeah. I know this is about the exact opposite of the intent of the thread, but a good adventure elements to avoid is unfairness as a DM. That's a quick way for anyone on the short end of the stick to quickly hate the game.

Here's one to use sparingly: larger than usual treasure hoards. If the group is used to finding a few hindered gold here and there, suddenly finding a few thousand or a gem worth that much is really fun and memorable. Of course, if you do it too often it becomes commonplace. If the game is full out Monty Haul it tends to get boring. The plots seem to become more stale (even if they haven't actually gotten worse) and the rewards are very uninspiring.

[Username17]

Large treasures are amazing and memorable, but like big damage they require both their own presence to be integrated into the rules and also that the other treasures be proportionately small. There was one time that I handed out a few cubic feet of precious metal and it was an actual huge deal, because the rest of the game had been spent worrying about individual silver pennies. Obviously, the thrill and excitement of finding actual kilograms of copper, silver, and gold could only happen once in the campaign. Had it happened a second time it wouldn't have meant anything.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Exactly. It has to be paced.

It can also be rewarding if it comes after an understandably long dry-spell. For example: if you're killing a bunch of oversized vermin and snakes in some jungle, no one really expects to find typical treasure. But if after a long streak of doing that, the party finds the tomb they were looking for, the treasure at the end of that will seem more sweet.

[Maj]

I have a difficult time getting into adventures where the world doesn't interact with the players. My favorite games are always the ones where the characters have some sort of impact... Even if it's just a small thing like a village kid asking your character for an autograph because you slew the dragon.

[Dominicius]

Roleplaying XP.

It just worked for some reason.

[Username17]

Exactly. It has to be paced.

It can also be rewarding if it comes after an understandably long dry-spell. For example: if you're killing a bunch of oversized vermin and snakes in some jungle, no one really expects to find typical treasure. But if after a long streak of doing that, the party finds the tomb they were looking for, the treasure at the end of that will seem more sweet.

I think a treasure system could really leverage the different economies into getting that kind of feeling more than once. The turnip economy gives way to the gold economy, and some day you really find that you can just have a ridiculous amount of cabbages if you want.

The keys are, I think several:

• Do not under any circumstances make a specific wealth by level system. There is no joy to be had in transcending the gold economy because it's Thursday and you are "owed" a transition.
• Do not make perfect parity between the wealth levels. There is no feeling of wealth from using blue rocks instead of gold coins "because you are in Act III." There really needs to be more than token differences.
• Do not make the game unplayable or nearly so if the players get to a major wealth check point early or late. Because players will spend some amount of time running around in the fucking desert fighting gryphons and land sharks. Or they'll raid an orcish caravan right off. In either case, the game has to retain playability.

-Username17

[K]

Treasures have always been memorable for me when they had a story attached to them.

So I remember every magic item I have ever gotten (with the exception of scrolls and potions), but the ten silver here and hundred gold there just didn't make an impression. Like, I honestly once forgot that we left a few thousand gold worth of armor buried for later sell-off because I honestly didn't care enough to play Logistics and Dragons right then.

I think that memorable treasure can worth though. I don't see why someone might not have a normal sword with a ruby in the pommel without automatically being forced to say "ok, then we sell it for another +2 on my cloak." I really hate that crap.

[Username17]

I think there is a sack of diamonds you recall fondly even though it is "just money."

-Username17

[Crissa]

Well, except for the fact that after the cubic feet of treasure had been gained, we lost half of it to bandits and then ended up long and far from where we could spend it. Then we ended up where they looked at our script and coins and said, 'That's worthless' because they were trading planar currencies of concepts, souls, and ways home...

After that, we were just hoping for some treasure that wasn't heavy, large, or carrying tetanus.

-Crissa

[K]

I think there is a sack of diamonds you recall fondly even though it is "just money."

-Username17

Yeh, but that was "and now we don't have to worry about money anymore" money, which is substantially bigger than an amount of treasure that you get where you want to save it by not sleeping in inns and paying bridge tolls.

[Zinegata]

I may be terribly gamey, but I generally cannot see treasure as anything beyond a gp value >_>

[Crissa]

Well, there was that toll we paid with a 'pig' which was really a sea-gull... And then ended up using a fairly expensive arrow of death instead.

-Crissa

[Prak]

--the thing you get to keep. Sometimes, its just a gate that connects two points, and now I can use it whenever I need to cut short my travel time, and other times it is a zombie chimera I get to get to ride around. In the Adventure Paths by Paizo, the first adventure usually has a hidden complex in the heart of the city that you could easily use as your personal batcave.

This I definitely agree with. An eberron adventure has an abandoned cannith factory in ruins which it takes place in, at the end of the adventure I figured since I already had the keys and had beaten it's defenses, I might as well use it as HQ, I repaired the defenses and fixed holes in the structure and set up house in it, and it has been the coolest treasure I've ever received. As I think about it, I'll have to see if I can do the same with an adventure site outside of town in the game I'm in now.