Are you D&D edition agnostic when looking for pre-published adventures?

[catsclaw227]

OK -- I just to a quick look at Streets of Zobek patron project written for Pathfinder. Looks awesome, evokes images of shadowy corners and shady dealings. But, oh crap. It's written for Pathfinder. Good game, but not what I am DMing right now.

It made me start to think... Who cares if it's written for Pathfinder? It's not (mostly) a crunch book, but a series of adventures. I came to a crystallizing realization that I have never cared...

When I am DMing a campaign where I want run an AP, or want to sandbox, but have the adventure seeds be pre-published adventures, I don't care if the adventure, or series of adventures, is made for 1e, 2e, 3.x, Pathfinder, 4e or any base D&D derivative.

There you go....

I am agnostic to prepublished, official, or 3PP, D&D edition when it comes to adventures. Of course, if there's an appropriate adventure written for my current game system, it's easier to implement, but hear me out...

I always like to make the adventures my own. I add other existing campaign information into the sessions, infuse the 3pp NPCs with my campaign aesthetics, I may even shake down the way the adventure is played, but you see, that's all STORY stuff!

I am a 4e DM, for full disclosure, but that's irrelevant to this discussion. I have converted 1e and 2e adventures to 3e, I converted Judges Guild stuff to 4e, warped 3e adventures to Savage Worlds RPG (Red Hand of Doom), so I think story is key here.

Yes, (OMG, yes) good tools for conversion are essential, DM Genie was a wonderfind for 3.x. That program never got the props it deserved. And, yes... that's one plus to 4e... I can create any older monster easy with DDI Adventure Tools and a sprinkle of this monster and a sprinkle of that monster.

But I love adventures. And a good story will prompt me to convert it to make it work for the edition of D&D I am playing.

Are you adventure edition agnostic*?

*I know someone here will question my use of the word agnostic. It basically means "without knowledge", and has in many interpretations meant "without preference". Sure, I could have said I was edition "indifferent" but no... the volatility of D&D forum personalities can be almost... religious. Therefore the use of "agnostic" instead of "indifferent".

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Are you adventure edition agnostic?

Mostly so, but not 100%

I've done my fair share of conversions, even running the Desert of Desolation series in GURPS, but it shows.

Things like resource management, enemy mapping, or space considerations can differ strongly between systems, making conversion a greater effort than it seems at first glance.

So I prefer adventures written for the "correct" version, but quality beats mechanical correctness.

 

[Crothian]

Mostly I am but it really depends on the adventure. Lately I've been interested in more of the old school modules but if something cool comes out for a cutrrent game and I hear about I'll at least take a look.

 

[Mikaze]

For the most part. I certainly appreciate if the mechanics are reasonably close to something I'm using, but I'm the sort that buys crunchless supplements without hesitation if they catch my eye.

I still hunt for 1e/2e material to use in my Pathfinder games, for example.

 

[Stormonu]

Generally, I buy adventures because they save me a lot of work, so I am generally NOT edition agnostic.

 

[S'mon]

Yes. Actually the epiphany was when a player explained to me I was an idiot for running a 3e adventure (Lost City of Gaxmoor) using only the published stats, and any decent DM would change them to something better...

Since then I've been willing to tweak stats. And if I'm going to tweak stats, I can convert too!

So I've run C&C using 3e modules, which funnily didn't work that well.
I've run 3e using BX and C&C modules, which worked great.
I'm currently running 4e using a 3e module, also working very well.
And I'm running 1e using the 3e Wilderlands stuff, also great..

 

[Doug McCrae]

Yes, but I no longer buy adventures.

I think one is better off going straight to the 'primary sources' - myth, folklore, novels, movies, etc - and getting inspiration from there.

 

[Ariosto]

It usually makes no great difference to me which TSR-D&D edition someone had in mind. The differences that would trip me up tend to be on the other side of the "black box", in rules that have to do with how material in a scenario is interpreted in more mechanical detail, rather than in "stat blocks" (which can be literally identical).

With 3e, differences that at first may be quite subtle tend to create an increasing divergence at higher levels. It can be quite misleading to assume that "an orc" or "a 12th-level wizard" has quite the same position in the scheme of things. Neither simple swapping-in of something by that name from the old game, nor naive "conversion" of numerical factors, is likely to remain satisfactory in terms either of "balance" or of "feel".

It can come down very much to a "port" from scratch, offering little if any advantage over starting with something called something quite other than "D&D".

The amount of space taken up with lists of 3e-specific game jargon can seriously impact what is left for more useful material. I got thoroughly disgusted with this effect when I bought a Goodman Games hardbound collection. Some Necromancer Games products, on the other hand, have given me pretty decent value for money.

With 4e, so many basic assumptions are so different that the more something is meaningfully a 4e product, the less I can get out of it. What would fill an hour or
more in 4e might take 10 minutes or less in my game. What is next to irrelevant in 4e might be of prime importance in my game, while an "encounter" central to the 4e game simply does not happen.

The closer material is to plain fantastical fiction, the more widely applicable it is. A description of some weird "plane of the multiverse", or the customs and affairs of a strange city, or legendary phenomena of a wilderness region, can be quite handy.

Really, I tend to get most use from material that has no direct connection whatsoever to fantasy gaming, or even to genre-fantasy fiction. There is inspiration to be found in such diverse works as Richard Burton's The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities; Jorge Luis Borges' A Universal History of Infamy and The Garden of Forking Paths; and Louis L'Amour's The Walking Drum.

 

[jgbrowning]

I am not edition agnostic. I group them into a three categories: (Basic, 1e, 2e), (3e, 3.5, Pathfinder), (4e).

joe b.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm pretty much edition-neutral when it comes to buying and running TSR/WotC D+D adventures...so far in my current 1e-based game I've used 0e, 1e, 3e and 4e adventures - haven't hit 2e yet mostly because nothing's fit well. The only things I look for are a) whether it's a good adventure, b) the general layout and use of space, and c) whether I think I can use it or steal ideas from it at some point down the road.

3rd-party stuff is another matter entirely. There, I have to see what system they're using (e.g. old Judges' Guild stuff where they used their own nearly-incomprehensible stats system) and whether I can figure it out; and I tend to avoid early 3e-era OGL stuff as what I did end up getting at the time was universally bad.

Speaking of off-edition adventures, has anyone tried running Orcs of Stonefang Pass (4e) yet, in any edition? I've bought it and read it; it looks good, but I'm not sure if it'll play as well as it reads. I found that with Keep on the Shadowfell - most of it (actually, all of it except about the last 5 encounters) didn't play nearly as well as it read.

Lanefan