Why Your D&D Adventure Feels Boring: Balance the Three Pillars

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I’m currently running Ghosts of Saltmarsh for one of my groups, and the adventure Danger at Dunwater seemed pretty darn interesting at first. There’s exploration. There’s diplomacy. There are factions to deal with. It is very different from your standard dungeon crawl.

So, I prep this monster of an adventure, and I do mean monster. There are more than fifty areas in the lizardfolk lair, multiple ways to move through it, and a ton of material the dungeon master needs to be ready to run. Then we get about two hours into the session and I realize something is horribly wrong.

Two of my players are bored.

Not just a little quiet. They are clearly disengaged, and the farther we go, the more obvious it becomes.

That was when I realized Danger at Dunwater had a problem for my group, and I needed to fix it fast.

What Danger at Dunwater Is Trying to Do

The basic premise of Danger at Dunwater is actually pretty cool. The characters are acting as ambassadors to a lizardfolk colony, and their ultimate goal is to convince the lizardfolk queen and her people to ally with the town of Saltmarsh against a tribe of evil sahuagin.

Of course, the situation is not quite that obvious when the characters first arrive. They need to explore, figure out what is happening, interact with the lizardfolk, and eventually gain an audience with their queen.

Even from that high-level description, you can probably tell this is not your typical dungeon crawl. The characters are not expected to move from room to room killing monsters, taking their stuff, and looking for the next door to kick down. Assuming they do not start murdering lizardfolk the second they arrive, the adventure becomes one massive social interaction with exploration mixed throughout.

There is a lot of talky talky.

And originally, that sounded great to me.

A Quick Rant About “Roleplaying”

There is a note in the module discussing the original 1982 version of Danger at Dunwater. It explains that the adventure emphasized exploration and interaction, and then refers to it as a roleplay-focused adventure.

And this annoys the crap out of me.

Combat is roleplaying, too.

For some reason, people constantly use “roleplaying” as shorthand for talking to NPCs, as though combat suddenly stops being roleplaying the second initiative is rolled. Your character is still making decisions. You are still portraying what that character would do. You are still interacting with the fictional world through that character.

Combat, exploration, and social interaction are all roleplaying.

Anyway, rant over.

Mostly.

Prepping This Adventure Was a Beast

One of the first things that struck me about Danger at Dunwater was just how much preparation it required.

The lizardfolk lair contains fifty-two areas, and there are multiple routes the players can take through it. That means you cannot simply prepare the next six rooms and assume the group will follow a predictable path. You have to be ready for them to go almost anywhere.

That is a lot of prep.

This is one reason large dungeons are often divided into levels. Dungeon levels create a natural constraint on the players while also helping the dungeon master. Most groups tend to clear one level before moving on to another, which means the DM can usually focus on preparing one or two levels at a time instead of the entire dungeon.

If the lizardfolk lair had been divided into four levels with maybe fifteen areas each, it would have been far more manageable.

But no one has ever accused me of not being a hard worker, so I prepped the whole freaking thing.

And it was a grind.

Then My Players Started Setting the Dinner Table

Game day arrives, and my players do what good players often do. Instead of charging into the lizardfolk lair and murdering everyone, they talk.

They quickly gain an audience with the queen and learn that they need to earn the trust of both her and the larger colony. The module has a point system for doing this. The characters explore the lair, interact with the lizardfolk, help them with various tasks, and earn points. Once they get enough points, they have won the colony’s trust.

So my players start doing exactly that. They walk around. They talk to lizardfolk. They help people out. They gain points.

And I start noticing that two of my players are checking out.

Then we get to a scene where some lizardfolk are setting a table for dinner, and the players decide to help them set the table. Naturally, this earns them more points.

And that was the moment I snapped.

There was no way we were going to spend another game session setting dinner tables in a D&D game.

Maybe some groups would love that. More power to them. But I was not enjoying it, and I could tell some of my players were not enjoying it either.

Fortunately, we ended the session right around there, which gave me time to completely overhaul the adventure.

The Problem Was the Three Pillars

The issue was not that Danger at Dunwater was bad.

The issue was that, for my group, it leaned far too heavily into two parts of the game while almost completely neglecting the third.

D&D is generally described as having three pillars: exploration, social interaction, and combat. Danger at Dunwater had plenty of exploration and a mountain of social interaction, but very little combat if the characters approached the lizardfolk peacefully.

And I have players who like combat. That is the important part.

A different group might have loved the adventure exactly as written. If your players enjoy spending an entire session talking to NPCs, exploring a settlement, and solving problems without fighting, then you may not need to change a thing.

But I was not running the adventure for some theoretical group. I was running it for my players.

Want to Get Better at Adapting Adventures to Your Group?

A published adventure can give you a great starting point, but no book knows your players the way you do. Sometimes the real job of the game master is recognizing when something is not working and knowing how to adjust it without wrecking the rest of the adventure.

The Secret Art of Game Mastery is packed with practical advice for making those kinds of decisions. It covers adventure design, pacing, player engagement, improvisation, preparation, encounter design, and the many other skills that help you turn a decent session into a great one.

If you want to get better at reading your table and adapting your game to the people actually playing it, check out The Secret Art of Game Mastery.

You Have to Design for the Whole Group

This is something every dungeon master needs to consider, whether you are running a published adventure or writing your own.

Does the adventure contain things that all of your players enjoy?

Not everything needs to appeal equally to every person at the table. That is impossible. But if one player loves tactical combat and you go three sessions without a fight, you probably should not be shocked when that player starts getting bored.

The same thing applies in the other direction. If every session is nothing but combat encounter after combat encounter, the player who loves talking to NPCs and interacting with the world may start wondering why he bothered writing a personality or backstory.

Dungeon masters run group games. That means you cannot think only about what you personally enjoy, or what your two most vocal players enjoy. You need to think about the table as a whole.

That is the job.

How I Rebuilt Danger at Dunwater

My solution was simple. I added combat.

I did not remove the social interaction. I did not throw away the exploration. I simply added another pillar so that the adventure had more variety.

First, I had a band of bullywugs attack the lizardfolk lair. The characters helped defend the colony, defeated the attackers, and earned trust with the queen and the lizardfolk as a result.

Now combat was accomplishing the exact same thing the original point system wanted the players to do. They were proving themselves to the colony, just in a way that some of my players found more engaging.

Then things got weirder.

The queen asked the characters to find geckos for the lizardfolk. Long story short, the colony had fallen in love with Zarmolyn’s familiar while it was in gecko form and decided they wanted geckos of their own to keep as honored guests.

So the players tracked down a colony of geckos living nearby. Unfortunately, a yuan-ti claimed the geckos as its own and was not especially interested in giving them away.

The yuan-ti offered a deal. If the characters would drive a group of nasty bullywugs out of an ancient yuan-ti ziggurat nearby, it would allow them to take some of the geckos back to the lizardfolk colony.

Naturally, my players agreed.

They explored the area, talked to the yuan-ti, fought the bullywugs, recovered the geckos, returned them to the lizardfolk, and earned more trust with the colony. That was exactly what I wanted.

I Didn’t Just Add Mindless Combat

This is an important distinction. I did not simply throw random monsters into hallways because I thought someone needed to roll initiative every twenty minutes. The combat was tied into the story.

The bullywugs attacking the colony created a reason for the characters to defend their potential allies. The yuan-ti encounter created negotiation and exploration, then led naturally into another combat encounter. The geckos connected everything back to the lizardfolk and the original diplomatic objective.

There was still story. There was still talky talky. There was still exploration. There was just combat, too.

That variety completely changed how the adventure felt.

More Than Half the Adventure Became Homebrew

Once Danger at Dunwater was finished, my players told me they loved it. They thought it had been a great adventure.

Only then did I tell them how heavily I had modified it.

I explained how the adventure had originally been written, how I noticed some of them becoming bored during the first session, and how I had decided to rebuild large portions of it between games.

At least half of what they experienced was probably homebrew.

And honestly, that is one of the best uses of a published adventure. You do not need to treat the book like sacred text. Use the parts that work. Change the parts that do not. Add whatever your players need to have a better game.

Of course, there was one painful downside. I had prepped that gigantic lizardfolk lair and probably used about twenty-five percent of it. That sucked. But the players had fun, so I will take the loss.

Balance the Three Pillars for Your Group

The entire experience reminded me of something important: adventure design needs balance.

That does not mean every session needs exactly thirty-three percent combat, thirty-three percent exploration, and thirty-three percent social interaction. That would be ridiculous. Some adventures should emphasize one pillar more heavily than another.

But if you completely neglect one of them, you had better be sure your group is okay with that.

In this case, combat was missing. I have seen the opposite problem, too. I have played in games that were almost entirely exploration and combat, with practically no meaningful opportunity for social interaction. Those sessions could become just as repetitive.

A satisfying D&D campaign usually needs variety. Let the characters explore something strange. Give them people to talk to and decisions to make. Then, every once in a while, let them crack some skulls.

Most importantly, watch your players. If they are engaged, laughing, arguing over decisions, and leaning forward to see what happens next, you are probably doing something right.

If they are checking out while their characters set the dinner table, it might be time to change the adventure.