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Published Adventures and You
- Thread starter mearls
- Start date
I use quite a few modules from Dungeon, WotC web, and regular purchased. I blend them in with ideas and stories I've created myself. I might take a module, use the statted monsters and maps, but create a diferent reason entirely for being there and what the goal is.
I also agree that dungeon crawls get pretty old, and my current party is high enough level that they have access to some pretty potent magic. Almost all mundane obstacles are a joke, and I start to feel silly if everytime thay use a tried and true tactic there is some specialized trap waiting for them. But having interesting statted monsters available to plug as opponents is awefully useful.
Plus, some of the stuff we used, especially some of the Dungeon modules, were really fun. My group loved the stoned gnomes and the barbarian who lost his rage from an older Dungeon mag.
I also agree that dungeon crawls get pretty old, and my current party is high enough level that they have access to some pretty potent magic. Almost all mundane obstacles are a joke, and I start to feel silly if everytime thay use a tried and true tactic there is some specialized trap waiting for them. But having interesting statted monsters available to plug as opponents is awefully useful.
Plus, some of the stuff we used, especially some of the Dungeon modules, were really fun. My group loved the stoned gnomes and the barbarian who lost his rage from an older Dungeon mag.
Psion said:
Indeed.
Actually, I've known a few adventures which I've tried to read and I end up wondering, "and the Villain of this adventure is who, exactly?" and "what are the PCs meant to do?"
Interestingly, often it seems that the more background information there is, the less intelligible an adventure becomes. So much time is spent setting up the adventure, that little things like "adventure hooks" and "adventure synopses" get lost.
Cheers!
The_Gneech said:Published adventures gooooood.
Being at work all the time so I can't write my own adventures, BAD!
-The Gneech
I'm in the same boat.
The campaigns I have run have consisted of all published adventures exclusively, from 1st and 2nd ed AD&D, 3rd ed D&D and Dungeon magazine.
I have time enough to modify the ideas presented in them as necessary (or convert stat-blocks to 3rd ed), not create from scratch.
I do dislike the interminable number of dungeon-bashing adventures that are out there, however. Adventures that consist of mainly wilderness with perhaps a few small ruins to explore are rare, and treasured by me. Adventures where characters can use their mounts, mounted feats and utilise tactics that don't involve blocking doorways or corridors.
I would love to see more of these 'wilderness' types of adventures, and less of the dungeon crawls. There's plenty of adventures like them out there already.
Greyson
Explorer
mearls said:
I have never ran a homebrew game in 15 years of D&D gaming. I have always used commercially published adventures, throughout all of the years. First, I don't have the creative streak required to imagine a compelling adventure. I can admit that, and will never assume I have that flair for fantasy design anf writing. Second, and even more pressing for me, I do not have time to conceptualize, draft, edit and write an adventure. I guess at my age and point in life, I cannot devote the time necessary to create my unique homebrew.
So, I rely on the experts: Monte Cook - Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and The Banewarrens (two of my v.3x favorites); Bruce R. Cordell - ubiquitous author of recent v.3.0 adventures for WotC among others; Old stuff, that has been revised to v.3.5 by Wolfgang Baur, Sean K. Reynolds, etcetera. And, of course, anything from Dungeon Magazine, which I think has become a teriffic resource for contemporary v.3.5 adventures.
Kalendraf
Explorer
I try to run a mix of about half-published / half-homebrew adventures, often running the homemade ones in between the published ones. Here's some of the reasons for doing one or the other:
Published Pros
- Usually requires less work to prepare adventure.
- Often these have good stories and innovative encounters that I may not have thought of on my own.
- Even if I don't run an adventure I purchase, I can usually harvest NPCs, encounters or other ideas from it.
Published Cons
- Not always able to fit into my campaign. Many adventures make geographic assumptions that may not easily fit. Others make historical, political or religious assumptions that may be too hard to reconcile.
- A common problem is that the reward level is out of whack requiring heavy modification to gold or items listed as treasure.
- Many encounters, puzzles or traps make assumptions of party make-up. For example, a recent adventure I ran out of Dungeon magazine required use of an arcane scroll that only wizards and sorcerers can use. Party had none, and the bard and rogue didn't have enough points in use magic device to use it. I worked around it by planting a potion that allowed a major boost to use magic device, but felt this was kind of a cheesy solution.
- Reading and familiarizing myself with a big adventure can take several hours. If modifications are needed, it can become almost as much work as writing my own adventure.
- Players do unexpected things which sometimes the published adventures don't expect. This can affect home-made adventures as well, but in those cases, I usually have a pretty good feel for how the party will react.
Home-brew Pros
- Can tailor encounters, traps and story to party which can lead to a story that the players are very interested in.
- Can bridge adventures much easier. Explain transitions between other encounters in a more believable manner, etc.
- Related to previous point - I find that I often come up with with encounter situations that are much more balanced or challenging to my party. Might involve maps, creature mix or other aspects.
- Feeling of ownership for creating it yourself. Sometimes I get congrats from my players like, "That was a great encounter," or "How'd you manage come up with that? It was really creative!" Makes me feel good to hear that.
Home-brew Cons
- Takes a lot of time. I find that prepping for a typical 4 hour session takes me about 8 hours of work on average. Less for something simple or repetative, but even more for something with a lot more variety and backstory.
- Sometimes you overlook the obvious. I've had adventures go astray when I totally overlooked something obvious like forgetting about certain character abilities. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it can be frustrating.
- Can get burned out trying to think up a cool adventure. This is another reason to alternate between published and homemade stuff.
Published Pros
- Usually requires less work to prepare adventure.
- Often these have good stories and innovative encounters that I may not have thought of on my own.
- Even if I don't run an adventure I purchase, I can usually harvest NPCs, encounters or other ideas from it.
Published Cons
- Not always able to fit into my campaign. Many adventures make geographic assumptions that may not easily fit. Others make historical, political or religious assumptions that may be too hard to reconcile.
- A common problem is that the reward level is out of whack requiring heavy modification to gold or items listed as treasure.
- Many encounters, puzzles or traps make assumptions of party make-up. For example, a recent adventure I ran out of Dungeon magazine required use of an arcane scroll that only wizards and sorcerers can use. Party had none, and the bard and rogue didn't have enough points in use magic device to use it. I worked around it by planting a potion that allowed a major boost to use magic device, but felt this was kind of a cheesy solution.
- Reading and familiarizing myself with a big adventure can take several hours. If modifications are needed, it can become almost as much work as writing my own adventure.
- Players do unexpected things which sometimes the published adventures don't expect. This can affect home-made adventures as well, but in those cases, I usually have a pretty good feel for how the party will react.
Home-brew Pros
- Can tailor encounters, traps and story to party which can lead to a story that the players are very interested in.
- Can bridge adventures much easier. Explain transitions between other encounters in a more believable manner, etc.
- Related to previous point - I find that I often come up with with encounter situations that are much more balanced or challenging to my party. Might involve maps, creature mix or other aspects.
- Feeling of ownership for creating it yourself. Sometimes I get congrats from my players like, "That was a great encounter," or "How'd you manage come up with that? It was really creative!" Makes me feel good to hear that.
Home-brew Cons
- Takes a lot of time. I find that prepping for a typical 4 hour session takes me about 8 hours of work on average. Less for something simple or repetative, but even more for something with a lot more variety and backstory.
- Sometimes you overlook the obvious. I've had adventures go astray when I totally overlooked something obvious like forgetting about certain character abilities. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it can be frustrating.
- Can get burned out trying to think up a cool adventure. This is another reason to alternate between published and homemade stuff.
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DungeonmasterCal
First Post
I use my adventures of my own creation exclusively. Over the years, I've tried to run published modules, but after only a short time, the players detour right out of the adventure into their own pursuits and I end up winging the rest of the adventure, anyway. I love the idea of modules, and used to buy Dungeon magazine all the time. But when I realized I was buying a magazine and getting maybe one magic item out of it and not the full use, I stopped.
Cassius_the_Elf
First Post
I tend to run premade adventures because I think they are usually better than what I make up.
I don't have any real problems fitting most into the campaign, all you have to do is modify the reasons the party have for getting involved and most premade modules fit happily with only minor enviromental changes.
So, The Northern Journey started things off 'til they reached Silverymoon, researching tattoos sent them off to deal with 'Thieves in the Forest", a favour called for further information had them invesigate "The Pit at Loch Durnan" and then their success there brought them to the notice of the local authorities. They got involved with "Deadly Ice" whilst escorting someone to Citadel Adbar (and also to sneakily try and get an idea of the political situation there).
They are about to investigate a "Goblin Cave" because of links to some Cult of the Dragon fellows that have been causing trouble for them for some time. They will end up getting involved in Gygax's Necropolis as I just like the look of this.
So as long as you have the theme of the campaign sorted in your mind, the actually chapters within it are quite easy to fit.
I also like the variety of bought modules. I think a lot of DM's have a style of adventure they will run, be it political, hack/slash whatever. A lot of home written adventures ran by the same DM often seem to share too many similar characteristics to previous adventures, as that is how the DM likes to write.
One of my old DM's always ended up creating uber-undead monsters at some point in adventures that were just ridiculous and would always have a sulky wizard who was just too powerful to deal with in any way other than fawning or hiding. His written adventures always got boring and samey as he wanted to be some sad goth wizard in real life, and his adventures showed it.
Another DM is very keen on city based adventures with a lot of human interaction and cleverness needed, where you can be very stuck for a long time wanting to know what to do. As we reach boiling point he usually then throws in a bought small module that has us investigating some old monastry or dungeon and stabbing things, and that change of pace is re-invigorating! If he didn't it would get dull and as he doesn't want to bother with loads of stat blocks and balancing monster encountes a premade sorts him out.
I don't have any real problems fitting most into the campaign, all you have to do is modify the reasons the party have for getting involved and most premade modules fit happily with only minor enviromental changes.
So, The Northern Journey started things off 'til they reached Silverymoon, researching tattoos sent them off to deal with 'Thieves in the Forest", a favour called for further information had them invesigate "The Pit at Loch Durnan" and then their success there brought them to the notice of the local authorities. They got involved with "Deadly Ice" whilst escorting someone to Citadel Adbar (and also to sneakily try and get an idea of the political situation there).
They are about to investigate a "Goblin Cave" because of links to some Cult of the Dragon fellows that have been causing trouble for them for some time. They will end up getting involved in Gygax's Necropolis as I just like the look of this.
So as long as you have the theme of the campaign sorted in your mind, the actually chapters within it are quite easy to fit.
I also like the variety of bought modules. I think a lot of DM's have a style of adventure they will run, be it political, hack/slash whatever. A lot of home written adventures ran by the same DM often seem to share too many similar characteristics to previous adventures, as that is how the DM likes to write.
One of my old DM's always ended up creating uber-undead monsters at some point in adventures that were just ridiculous and would always have a sulky wizard who was just too powerful to deal with in any way other than fawning or hiding. His written adventures always got boring and samey as he wanted to be some sad goth wizard in real life, and his adventures showed it.
Another DM is very keen on city based adventures with a lot of human interaction and cleverness needed, where you can be very stuck for a long time wanting to know what to do. As we reach boiling point he usually then throws in a bought small module that has us investigating some old monastry or dungeon and stabbing things, and that change of pace is re-invigorating! If he didn't it would get dull and as he doesn't want to bother with loads of stat blocks and balancing monster encountes a premade sorts him out.
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