When you're starting out at a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, site-based adventures are set in a single location that is driven by exploration more than story or a complex plotline. Easy to create and easy to run, site-based adventures such as The Tomb of Horrors and The Temple of Elemental Evil are infamous among long-time D&D players for their simplicity and sheer genius.

A more challenging adventure to create is an event-based adventure, an adventure built around a series of events that the characters can influence through their actions. The characters have a complex goal or mission that they must accomplish, and the encounters that take place are a direct result of that effort. There may be maps for many of the encounters, but the events take place over a course of time or as triggered by previous events and keyed to a flowchart, timeline, or some combination of the two.