Justin Alexander asks on his blog Whither the Dungeon?. The subtitle is "The Decline and Fall of D&D Adventures", although I should mention he specifically means "knowledge of how to run adventures". Although indirectly, I suppose the trend he describes affects the quality of adventures as well, as the people writing adventures now are those who never learned how to run adventures, so they don't know what to include or how to present it.
I wonder, though, if there is some additional reason for the decline of adventure writing. But perhaps that is a topic for another time.
There is a simpler reason. Adventures just don't sell that well. There are plenty out there, but the time it takes to write them is not worth the return you get.
ReplyDeleteThat's true about the quality of adventures, I suppose. There's certainly not as much demand for adventures as people let on. So the people who could write good adventures, don't, since it's just not worth it.
DeleteBut I think Justin's point was more about GMs running either published adventures or those they made themselves. People just aren't getting useful advice on how to run adventures. In fact, I saw a Reddit post just today from a younger GM complaining about that very thing. They didn't feel they really knew enough about how to run adventures.