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.

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.

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"

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."

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

TV analogy for D&D:
One-shot = made for tv movie
Adventure = a tv miniseries
Campaign = a multi-season tv series

so, it's been a year, and I think MCDM did something really cool to answer the question "how long should an adventure be" with their last Draw Steel crowdfunder, and I don't think anyone has formally mentioned it.

IIRC, MCDM found a way to measure an adventure, then created terms for different sizes of them.
Their third core rulebook, "Encounters" has their smallest type of adventure: "Delves". They're about 2 to 3 encounters.
Bigger than that are "Quests", which are 5 to 6 encounters. There are two Delves on their Crack the Sun crowdfunder.
After that, there are "Adventures", which are around 15 to 16 encounters, which is usually one level in Draw Steel. MCDM's "The Fall of Blackbottom" is an adventure.
Lastly, there are "Campaigns" which consist of multiple levels. The 5e books Matt mentioned are Campaigns, as well as Crack the Sun itself, which is split into five acts, one per level.

That's my understanding of it anyway, I can't remember where specifically I heard this, so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that language is extremely useful for directors, homebrewers and designers and i want more people to know about it.

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.

Something else that I think this does; it's add variety to your experiences and stories that you run. Not only does this make the campaign more interesting but give more experience into different styles of adventure and dungeons for your own future designs.