That pitch aspect is important to me right now because my group is considering using that approach to choosing our next game. If every game on our list of potentials had a pitch-oriented one-shot, that’d make things pretty simple.

So I started a forum thread to collect advice/guidelines for one-shots.

I certainly hope the one-shot isn’t dead, and if it is, that’s not good for our hobby and we should all actively try to resurrect it. Sure, I like working on my campaign, but if the cultural norm has become that running a single game means writing a long, complex plot with an atlas of maps and encylopedia of cultures, then quite frankly there are going to be fewer games and fewer new GMs. Not everyone with an interest in GMing has the time or desire to write a campaign and if they think that they’re signing up for 15 games by default, they might not even run the first one. So, I’m all for encouraging the one-shot and by extension, I hope publishers continue publishing (good) adventures, one-shot or otherwise.

Once I’ve read through the adventure, though, and have a head full of plot and setting, I *do* modify the heck out of it; changing scenes, reworking the plot, swapping characters, tweaking stats, etc. The adventure I actually run is much changed from the adventure as published.

However, I am not the publisher’s friend with regard to buying these adventures: I don’t buy them at the published price. I will trawl through second-hand shelves, reduced-to-sell bins, and old magazines, where I pay a fraction of the original price. The adventures are just as good, for my purposes, when they are five or fifteen years old. I plan to modify them beyond recognition anyway.

This seems to be part of the problem (and I freely admit that, by not buying the adventures at the price set by the publisher, I’m part of the problem). Other types of books — the “crunchy” books, like core rules, expansions, and splatbooks — need to be mostly consistent with everything else the group plays with, so they tend to buy relatively current books at the published price. Those books tend to get a lot of re-use, and are mainly used as-is (house rules notwithstanding), so the value received is clear. The price matches the perceived value.

Adventure modules are only for use by the GM, and for those GMs that plan to significantly re-work the body of the adventure, the fact that the statistics are way out of date doesn’t really matter — they plan to tweak and re-write the stats anyway. The price, though probably fair considering the creative quality and effort, doesn’t meet the perceived value.

Thus, the fraction of income seen by the publisher for purchased adventures is miniscule compared to the more crunchy books.

But well-written campaigns (a series of linked adventures) are always good sellers. The campaign has to be well-written, but if it is, a ‘campaign-in-a-box’ is much more useful for players now.

One reason I think there is a perception that modules don’t sell is that generally only one copy of a module is sold to any given playgroup, whereas source books often sell multiple copies to a playgroup. People may also speculatively purchase source books more often than modules (buying a splatbook because it might be usefull in the future vs. buying a module because I’m going to run it right now).

Frank

Other than that, I haven’t purchased modules in a long long time. Now that Dungeon Magazine (as we know it) is not going to be an option, I may look into other material.

1. In addition to adventures really appealing only to GMs, GMs are more likely to buy a splatbook (which also appeals to players) than an adventure.

2. Published adventures run the risk of being purchased and read by players. While this can lead to rampant metagaming, the more common problem in my experience is a GM announcing (or even starting to run) a published adventure, only for a player to say “umm, I already read through this.” (This is a big problem in gaming groups with multiple GMs).