What makes a good adventure? Options

[ting-bu-dong]

Hi,
what, in your opinion are the parts that make a good adventure? Sure, there are basic rules like 5 minutes of fame per player and so on, but what else do you consider to be necessary for a good adventure?

tbd

[DigitalMage]

Pacing - its something that all good movies or novels have. Basically you don't want a constant stream of action, or a constant stream of character developement, or a constant stream of investigation etc.

This is one reason why I always like to throw an action scene into a scenario - be it a combat, chase scene or an acrobatic abseil into a corporate headquarters from a rigger control helo.

The now defunct Dreampark game explained this quite well using the following terms:

Hook - a hook scene is one which gets the characters involved and into the action of the game. E.g. the players are at their favourite bar when a contact of theirs comes stumbling in, near death. He hands them a datachip and mumbles "Someone....someone gunning for you. But more...you...just the first..." before dying.

Development - this is the legwork, investigation and character development aspects. It may end in a revelation or lead into a...

Cliffhanger - the action scene, this should further the story in some way, and not just be a "random encounter" with some thugs.

Climax - the big showdown - it could be a fight, a tense negotiation with a dragon or something else. The key is that this is where the fate of the players hangs in the balance, success and failure of the entire adventure is determined here. Do they manage to blackmail the corp CEO into dropping his plans to use the barrens lot as test subjects? Do they manage to kill the "big boss"?

A typical adventure would be paced as follows:

Hook
Development 1
Cliffhanger 1
Development 2
Cliffhanger 2
Development 3
Climax

[Sphynx]

Uniqueness. Too often I played in SR games which became almost monotonous in that the only thing the GM could think about was new buildings and defenses for us to break in, and it became, quite literally, Shadowrunning. The good games are where you hit a building, not cause Mr Johnson pays you some creds, but as part of some adventure that will right some great wrong, and breaking into the building is part of that procedure.

I think in my 150+ karma period of adventuring, I've done maybe 3 or 4 actual "runs" where I had to breach security of an inner-city building and extract something. And even then, it wasn't for any mega-corp, but to obtain info on something bigger, or to undo some wrong.

The problem with uniqueness is that alot of GM's turn the tables completely and it becomes a 'save the world from total annihilation' kinda game. Those, while fun, are so unrealistic that it seems more like a comic book than the gritty env that Shadowrun should portray.

Sphynx

[Abstruse]

You forgot something -- the twist. A twist of some sort makes an adventure more memorable. It doesn't always have to be Mr. J screwing the PCs, just something unexpected. The extraction isn't voluntary, the prototype is going to blow up taking half a city block with it, etc.

Mystery always works well too. If the players, as the PCs, have to figure something out, it's more fun and gets them deeper into the game. Plus, it gets boring having the typical "Break into R&D building A to steal thing B and bring it to meet spot C while avoiding guard paraanmials D".

Basically, variety is what makes adventures good. Don't try to cram too much into one adventure, spread it out. Have one Matrix-heavy game, then a magic heavy one, then a mob-based one, etc. If you cram too much into one game, the players get overloaded and it's harder to make anything seem "new" because everyone's already seen everything.

It's more than a single good adventure. It's about a good campaign and making sure your players have fun every week.

The Abstruse One

[Pistons]

[Crusher Bob]

The obvious requirement for a good adventure that no one seems to have mentioned yet is that the players and the GM have fun. Since people get into gaming for different things, an adventure that one group might find 'great' . One of the reasons that the 'five minutes of fame' usually shows up is that the 'five minutes' will usually involve what the player got into the game for (be it combat, talking heads, investigation, or whatever). Also note that what the players want from game to game might change, so an adventure they might have found great will. Personally I'm just coming off a week of work that involved something like 30 hours of overtime, I'd probably not find an adventure involving an intricate plot and carefully placed clues that interesting, even though I might like such an adventure some other time...

Bah, tired already, will talk some other time...
I'll leave you with this quote:

"There was no fighting, there was no killing... I was useless!"

[ting-bu-dong]

[Bob the Ninja]

[Drain Brain]

No cracks about ninja's coming out of the closet, though... :D

And I could do without a ninja in my closet! I just want to find clothes and... stuff.

[Crusher Bob]

[Velocity]

[Crusher Bob]

My place of higher education used 'Staff' quite often, so you could be going 'to see Mr staff, or getting the staff' instead.

[Ezra]

[Fygg Nuuton]

[Pistons]

[Talia Invierno]

I'm appreciating the linguistic twists here :D

It's something I don't think any published SR adventures have yet really taken advantage of. At most, they'll require reasonable fluency in a particular language, but rarely make use of the "colour-blind test" linguistic variant. (The reference is a design which colour-blind people can make out because they are more sensitive to shading, but those who can see colour in the standard way will see a completely different design based upon colour, missing the shading design entirely.) I'm notorious for adding in such hidden double meanings based on separate languages: the person fluent in one language but with only bare knowledge of a second catches the one secondary meaning - and utterly misses the meaning associated with the other language. Alternately, shift the script: multiple associations clear in kanji seem to evaporate when the sounds are translated into romanji.

Another fun thing to play with is local currency ... especially when the PCs' own actions manage to devalue what they earn.

And all of the above, of course. There's some good suggestions in this thread. (Although I'd suggest "fun" comes from the willingness of the GM to adapt the adventure to the group and the general cohesiveness of the group, rather than from the adventure in and of itself.)

[BitBasher]

For my game the plots that work out best are the plots that have some kind of personal relevance for the characters involved.

Often times when starting a new game we have to start a game several times till we find characters that we can empathize with, that have some sort of resonance. After that the far reaching plot finds itself and those characters work twards their life goals, and every run where they get closer to those goals is important, and like a stepping stone to their characters long tern development.

Even i the run starts unrelated, glimpsing a face from the past that might hold answers, a piece of technology that leads them somewhere, it may be incidental, but it gives the characters and the game a sense of purpose and lets the players identify with their characters and their goals. This is what makes an adventure interesting.

It's that the job has to mean something to the character, and soncequently the player.

[edit]
incidentally my games never ever center arounf anything "Good" or "Right" typically, they center around whatever the characters goals and aspirations are. Everything from retiring happy and supporting their old parents to tracking down the murderer of your family, to exacting vengance on an old enemy. For some it's as simple for making peace with themselves over something that they did to someone else that they torture themselves over. Just real people with real problems.
[/edit]