Quote from: ggroy;323622At times I wonder if any of 4E D&D modules have had much playtesting.

They have math for that, these days.

Quote from: Nicephorus;323481I think a large chunk of D&D modules in the 90s and maybe even the late 80s were decent reads but were too railroady for me to run.  I can't name names as it's been too long.

A lot of Paizo's Pathfinder adventure paths and modules can be a good read.  Each of the adventure path books are almost like reading a short story or a "novella" with some rpg style encounters.  If one stripped out the combat encounter mechanics and compiled an adventure path's story texts into a book, they can probably pass for a full length fantasy novel.

Though running them as is, may be a different matter.  I haven't tried running any of them as written.  They way they are structured, they can be kind of on the railroady side. I've only taken some of the storylines and encounters for my sandbox 4E game.

Designing game modules is far and away my favorite part of RPG game design.  Settings are fun too, but modules are like the meat to the sauce.  It's what everyone showed up for.

Most modules I've read in the past 20 years have been pretty horribly designed.  Simplified ones with spare rules like those from Goodman Games at least don't get in the way of themselves. And the Dungeon adventures from the 90's were pretty good too in terms of inventiveness.  But lately everything seems to want to be a novel with predetermined choices for the players to follow a plot or, worse, no game modules whatsoever. But the last are really a different design of games where players gather to create a story (why buy one then, right?) rather than be tested in their abilities against one.

My best advice for testing is to score everything in the module according to the game design you are using, add up the points, and make sure everything is even based on all opposing factions involved.  In D&D this is based on the two opposing alignments.  BTW, I don't count neutral parties as full opponents.  They are really just potential resources for both sides anyways.  So, as long as opposing sides are equal in total point value BEFORE the player-characters are taken into account the module should be balanced.  This allows the players' actions to be the deciding factors to the starting state of equilibrium.

However, seeing as how things stand in relation to each other, not just in terms of points, but also based on positioning, knowledge held by NPCs, etc., I test run the modules myself with different parties.  If it's a convention game or 1-shot essentially, I use a good mix of PCs and stick with the one pre-selected party the players can pick from before game time.  If it's my normal homebrew campaign, then I test it with the current PC party and few variants on that depending on the holes in the party based on race, class, highly potential equipment, etc.  Once I feel it's pretty tightly designed I plot out the potential scenario script for the NPCs.

So really, balancing based on a complete point total and then dry running the module a few times to look for potential problems: the difficulty of the game being too high or too low, errors in scenario design, overlooked unbalances based on mapped relationships, all sorts of stuff that can ruin a game.

Oh, and my personal opinion is modules that are fun to read were sold to people so they could read them, not play them.  Meaning they read like a good script for the PCs and not an RPG module.  In other word railroad "adventures" written by people who want write stories rather than design a module for a game.

Quote from: Hunter_Rose;323576I always wondered how the Temple of Elemental Evil played out.  I never ran the entire series, but I did purchase and read through the collected edition.  I always wondered if running through Elemental Evil would have the same epic feeling as running through Against the Giants, Descent, Vault, and finally Demon Web Pits.

Its interesting you should say that. I have run ToEE three times and never made it past level 4.  Just too many rooms and too many fights. People had fun while it lasted but it was simply too much.

In that sense, TOEE has been my most disapointing module expereicne.  Postivie ones have been:

I6 Ravenloft.  Reads well, plays even better. I ran this one with 3.5.

C1 Lost Tamoachan.  Easily the best 1 session module you could run.

I3-5 Desert of Desolation series.  Again ran with 3.5.  Pretty solid, especially I4 Oasis of the White Palm.

B10 Night's Dark Terror.  The best module I have ever run.  Ran it twice, once with classic rules, once with 1E/2E.

The Sunless Citadel.  A surprisingly good module.  Very good introduction to 3E.   If only KotS could have been of similar quality.

None of the above modules try telling a story (Ravenloft comes closet), perhaps that is why they worked so well.