Do you Run Published Adventures As Is?

[Wombat]

Question to the great unwashed masses here at EN World, do you run your published adventures as written? If not, what major or minor changes do you make to them excluding adapting them to your campaign world?

I've run something like two pre-written adventures "as is" ... one was in Paranoia, the other was about half set for RuneQuest (Borderlands, if I remember the name right).

When I do pick up pre-written adventures (which in and of itself is rare), I find I have to change many things to make it fit any given campaign -- placenames, hooks, types of treasures, races, types of classes, personalities of NPCs, religions, you name it.

The larger problem I find is that most such adventures assume there are certain ways that PCs will act ... and this ain't necessarily the case. Sure, in a dungeon you go from room to room (and for the most part, rather illogically, the encounters stay within the confines of the rooms), but in an outdoor setting, a city, a forest, where there is no set logic tree the players may do things in a very "strange order" (by the standards of the written module).

I am used to writing up adventures: A very detailed beginning, a few set pieces, looser notes as it goes along, hopefully an end bit, and a LOT of flying by the seat of my pants. I try to give the players enough room to make their own choices/enough rope to hang themselves, but put time limits and set sequences in to "railroad" matters slightly, thus providing some structure. If they veer totally off course, so be it -- we run with it.

Thus written adventures are only useful to me as a guide for ideas, almost never as a set adventure. The authors (and this comes from reading adventures pertaining to something like 15 different systems) assumed a more linear thought pattern, usually, than I have found common in PCs.

 

[Drowbane]

not once.

 

[Drowbane]

Never.

 

[Raven Crowking]

It might seem like a silly thing, but I like to change treasure amounts from "200 gp" to "197 gp" or "211 gp". It always seems weird to find piles of neatly counted coins........

 

[bento]

The published adventure must inspire me if I'm ever going to run it, so I'll leave most of the story alone. Where I adjust is to increase or decrease the encounters to better match the party, and make the monster ecology a little more consistent.

Right now I'm nearing the end of running B4. To run it for a fourth level party I had to increase the level of the mooks and enlarge the rooms for better combat encounters. I also gutted the bottom three levels of the pyramid as it was one random monster fight after another, and I wanted my players to get to Zargon quicker.

 

[Rothe]

Never. But some require no deletions just fleshing out to fit my setting.

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

Strait adventures I run to fit in with my setting; the only changes generally are cosmetic. (Instead of the orcs, it's bandits from the eastern thieves guild or what not.)

Adventure paths I run as is; admittedly they don't always go as planned but it generally quickly runs back to the major plot itself.

I don't tend to make major changes unless the published material requires it - I had to do a lot of work for my Wheel of Time game; Prophecies of the Dragon turned out quite good with a few extra adventures placed in there. (And using the side adventures - those are actually good.)

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I sometimes will run an adventure right out of the box (for example, I ran B2: Keep on the Borderlands for my group a couple of months ago, because they'd never played through it). Usually, though, I use adventure modules for scrap. I'll take an NPC here or a small site there and stick it into an adventure of my own devising.

Later
silver