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.

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"

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.

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.

I want shorter adventures with less specificity made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm NOT KIDDING.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When we needed him, he returned.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

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.

Im gonna have to send this to all my DnD groups just to let it percolate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 KZfaq?!?! Well, that's my weekend sorted! You sir still are a river to your people.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

HARD AGREE. love short adventures, one page adventures, elven tower's stuff etc. it's good 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. 👍

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.

KFC and a new Matthew Colville video. Life ain't so bad afterall

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.

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.

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?

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!

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 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!"

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

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 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!

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.

I tend to run games as episodic things like Matthew describes here. I do add in some connecting material. I think of it as a bit less like Columbo where every episode is completely self contained and more like a slightly more modern show like Castle where there's the episodes unique stuff and then the last 10ish minutes of the show ties things into the larger season long plot line. It's easy to do too, just insert some content at the end of the adventure that hints at the next module you intend to run and links things to the BBEG and their organization as being ultimately behind what happened in the current adventure. For example: I just ran an adventure where the level 1 heroes had to rescue some missing miners who went missing between the mine and the town they live in. It turns out that the evil but semi-intelligent monsters that kidnapped them did so because the miners looked tasty and would provide food for them while they searched the area for their target who is fleeing their master. So I get a hint at what the players can do next (go find this guy running from the BBEG), and a link to the the BBEG and his group because these are scouts for the larger BBEG's army trying to capture this guy who has possibly valuable intel. The next adventure? I could plop the guy they're looking for at the end as a captive. Or maybe he's their next quest giver and he can tie things to the BBEG explicitly from the start for the next adventure. Or perhaps something else entirely. Marauding monster? Displaced from it's home by the BBEG's army. Or an escaped war beast from the army. Unrelated Orc tribe causing trouble? Food is scarce for them because the BBEG's magical influence has made their hunting lands baren of wildlife. So now they are looking for food sources elsewhere... and my those traveling caravans have a lot of it. Bandit's on the road rolled as a random encounter? Spies sent by the BBEG's army to kill the adventurers! Or perhaps (content warnings permitting) slavers looking to capture new recruits for the BBEG's army/mines/whatever. Do enough of these and then run an adventure where they kill off the BBEG..... but his lieutenant escaped and plots revenge... or.....

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.

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"

As an old school DM, I can confirm that this is 100% true. Shorter, episodic and modular adventurers are better, or at least easier to run. I guess I assumed newer/younger DMs and players just preferred the big hardback adventures. It never occurred to me that they didn't know any better because all they had seen for 5E was epic, multi-tier, adventure hardbacks. There are good smaller adventures for 5E on DriveThru. Joseph R. Lewis (Dungeon Age) has tons of great stuff for 5E.

I’ve been running a campaign for my group if 3 players for just over two years now. We started at level 3, they’re currently level 13, and it has been quite a ride. It’s basically a sandbox adventure set in a world where the boundaries of the different dimensions came shattering down, allowing all sorts of extra-planar threats to enter the material plane while, for some reason, completely locking out all gods from interfering. So it’s pretty much a post-apocalyptic adventure where our heroes traveled from settlement to settlement discovering a new problem that needed to be addressed, sometimes in a single session and sometimes over quite a few. Eventually the players set down roots, allied themselves with the remnants of the old empire trying to restore order and rebuild itself, pissed off an archfey, found themselves the focus on an imprisoned evil entity who seems very keen to help them, got an airship, got that airship destroyed by a dragon, killed said dragon by picking it off after it was baited into a fight with a demon prince, imprisoned the Baba Yaga, traveled back in time a bit, and have been absorbing pieces of a MacGuffin that seems to be at the center of why the world broke. I just made sure that so many balls were in play that there was always something for the players to do, and let them go wild. There’s definitely an overarching story going on, and it’s becoming more and more prevalent as the campaign goes on, but the semi-episodic nature of them arriving in a place and dealing with a new threat was central to allowing the players to engage with the world in their own way. Do I recommend this for everybody? No way in hell. This has been an endeavor and definitely requires the right kinds of players. But if you do want to tell a grand, epic story and run a huge campaign, make it as episodic and bite-sized as possible. It keeps a constant forward momentum going, which keeps the players (and the GM) interested instead of getting bogged down in one place for too long. That’s what I’ve learned, at least, after years of countless campaigns fizzling out.

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?

I feel like most homebrew campaigns are short adventures that eventually cumulate to a grand finale. At least from my experience. And that is just so much healthier for everyone. Even if the campaign as a whole fizzles out, you have a bunch of adventures completed and it doesn´t feel "wasted."

As a GM, I always feel like I WANT to run an epic story, but find it hard to maintain the enthusiasm I started with. Not just published modules, but my homebrew stuff as well. My current group does mostly one-shots, which has honestly helped, since I need to write something that can be played in one evening (although I do usually add a sequel hook just in case). Started in the 80s, so it's not because long adventures are what I'm used to (although I did have some of the original Dragonlance modules back in the day, which were probably the beginning of the trend towards epic stories). Going on a tangent, I recently read "Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword and Sorcery", which mentioned that one of the reasons the Sword and Sorcery genre died in the 80s and got replaced by High Fantasy (along with the glut of Conan clones) was that one of the defining characteristics of S&S was brevity, and publishers favored High Fantasy due to the potential for long sagas which would keep readers buying the next book in the series.

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.

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.

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 campaigns are kind of a mix of both: A series of short adventures where the players build up their characters, resources, and help out the local area, but it's in service of an ultimate storyline goal they've been discovering bits and pieces of as they go on. It's a good way to do whatever you want while weaving a narrative through things. Helps character motivations but keeps things episodic for the most part, preventing burnout. Though to be honest, I get burned out more by having to keep making new content than anything else, 'cuz I homebrew due to playing a an obscure system without a lot of modules, and the modules they DO provide are often setting-specific to their lore, which I don't use.

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 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 forgot how true this is! I also ran the long campaign that fizzled out, and my players enjoyed it, but I had never seen them have more fun than when I just did silly one-shots and episodic modules. I would literally just make a 3-4 hour sessions based purely on vibes (kill the rich warlord who just seized the town; escape the whale that just swallowed you; etc). There was always one main objective, apply pressure/drama, and I let the players do what they wanted to achieve it. It was chaos, and then they would always look forward to the next session with the same characters. It felt like pure D&D.

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.

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.

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!

This was very refreshing ... an old- school classic Matt Colville video.... the best. Thank you.

I think you are spot on! One thing I would add here is that the tension between the kinds of adventures published and the presumed/optimal play in the rules is an old one (speaking as someone playing since 1977). Many of the early modules were derived from competitions at conventions, and so they didn't "run" in the way that home games were presumed to run. Many people who came to know (A)D&D back then also came to think that such modules were the normal mode of play. So, while I agree that the notion of *length* is a new thing haunting the hobby, the fact that published adventures will often clash in how they are written with how one might write up an adventure for one's own table is probably as old as published adventures for the hobby.

12:45 I was just about to say that this all sounds like the idea of episodic vs. serialized storytelling.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Is that an MCDM RPG class t-shirt? I like!

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!

I feel like this makes a lot of sense when thinking about how to keep people engaged using modules. But I also feel like this sort of avoided the root of why there was a shift. I feel as though as consumers of media, there has been an overall shift towards story-driven stories that are less episodic. But I also don’t think that means absent of episodic segments. We have now experienced, time and again, the build up, the release of tension, and the pay off that is only earned when you sat through the whole story, like a rollercoaster for those who binge-the sweetest bite of the whole cake. If you think to something like Breaking Bad, which I feel encapsulates some of the time in which this shift may have started, you have a very story-driven narrative that has vignettes sprinkled in like perfect seasoning. And these served to give the audience context, foreshadowing, and a ton of food for thought in between the main plot. With that in mind, I think there’s a middle ground between “we need shorter campaigns” and “long campaigns are unhealthy for our expectations.” It’s possibly a lot of work, but I feel like there has to be a sweet spot of overarching narrative with self-contained stories that are woven together to create the whole. If, as a DM, you aren’t gaining the buy-in of your characters, you’re going to get that same question of “why are we doing this again?” whether it’s a short or long story or module. I feel that a cultural shift should be met with a culturally aware response. I feel that shorter campaigns may be part of the answer, but also maybe ONLY part of the answer.

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.

The rising popularity of actual-play shows definitely didn't help the shorter adventure ecology. From an outsiders perspective, huge Campaigns (ala CR) are the norm for thousands of people.

I am so happy that you feel this way too! I felt crazy running into person after person who never played something shorter than campaign “adventures” that last months or longer. This makes me all the more excited for the MCDM rpg

I agree with the overall idea, but here's one small bit of nuance: when running a game with a custom scenario rather than something someone else wrote for me, I usually find a lot more to "steal" in large campaign books than in anthologies with dozens of small adventures. For example, I once had a game where the players visited the plane of Avernus, so I pulled out a bunch of NPCs, magic items, locations, etc... From the book of the same name. My players have no idea what a Zariel is, but they loved the infernal war machines, the soul coins, Mahadi's bazaar, Mad Maggie and her Redcap gangsters, etc... Then a couple years later I had an adventure arc in a magic academy so I picked up Candlekeep... And didn't end up using a single NPC or concept from that entire book. Those small adventures are so focused that they don't have any time to "waste" on side quests, NPCs unrelated to the main plot, high concept worldbuilding, or any of the stuff that I would have a use for when running a different scenario than the one in the book.

10:17 Not for Morrowind fans, we’re quite smug about how we spent hours on end lost and having no idea what to do next because we forgot a quest plot point or misread some NPCs directions.

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?

Having run Descent into Avernus and Storm King's Thunder... He's absolutely right.

I just finished a campaign made up of multiple shorter scenarios, with a a few broader arcs for the players present in the background. It worked great. After every one, we wanted to keep going. After the campaign ended, we talked about new characters, new campaign ideas, new settings. We played once every other week and every time we sat down, we felt like something important happened and when it was done, we had a story we loved.

It's been a while since we had a video! Welcome back!