What makes a good adventure?

So lets get some discussions going. Essentially, I'm gonna try to think op a good topic to talk about, and we'll see how far we can take it!

So the first topic: what makes a good pen and paper RPG adventure? What elements are necessary for fun? What add to the fun? What kind of people, setting, ambiance, peripherals, etc, take a game up to the next level?

A great adventure is like a great book. It has a beginning a middle and an end, hopefully one that everyone has the potential to make it too. The fastest way I found to take the fun out of the adventure was to make it a grind for no reasonable purpose. I had a DM who liked to through random encounters into his adventures which was fine until that's all we were doing.

Taking the game to the next level is all about the details that unfold during the adventure. If everything is a generic then nothing really stands out and lets you grab onto the story which is what this is all about. One of my favorite games had a crazy NPC that was following our group around and the antics that that one character added to the game was what made it one of the most memorable to me.

Sorry if that was kind of disjointed, I've been a bit sick lately and took some Dayquil.

If that's you disjointed on Dayquil, I imagine your usual stuff is even more golden :)

I hope so, do you guys get into terrain details? I found that those were another point that brought the adventure to life especially when the players started using their surroundings in combat instead of just hack and slashing their way through.

I guess I didn't include my own thoughts. I agree: I always compare a good adventure to a good book. In fact, I've tried writing down some of the adventures I've been in as stories. I think the key to both is good engagement. You want a story to have strong characters who you can relate to or idealize; in the case of RPGs, that means PCs that aren't flat. Another important point is detail. Its not enough to know you've reached a village by the side of the road. What is the road like? What's around the village? What are the people like?

Engagement leads to immersion, and immersion is a sign of something you're really enjoying.

I think the most important thing is a purpose.

All of the ingredients mentioned so far are important - non-flat NPCs, interesting PCs (whatever interesting means for your group), enriched settings (but not so many details that the players become bored listening to it all), a plot arc (with some semblance of planning). The note about random encounters touches on my thoughts here - random encounters are bad when they lack a point. If it's an encounter just to have an encounter, then it's not contributing to the adventure and so it is, quite literally, wasting everyone's time**.

The adventure needs to have a purpose. This will drives the players to engage with it and helps the GM run things well in the background. Like a good story, every encounter and every step along the adventure path should move the adventure closer to the final outcome, advancing it towards its purpose.

**As an aside, I think it's very challenging to have RANDOM encounters which are not, ultimately, going to harm the quality of the adventure. So, when speaking with new GM's I often advocate planning all encounters. Random encounters can be done well (ie/ when the random table is composed by the GM of encounters that each could have a point OR when the GM is good at free-wheeling a random encounter result and incorporating it into a larger story), but doing them well is a skill and requires effort.