Books vs Home written adventures?

changoo

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I much more enjoy homemade campaigns over pre-written adventures. Most the Book adventures I've seen for WFRP and D&D are okay to great. The LFR mods are overall okay, but the story line just kinda ends. A continuing story line puts so much more into the fun of gaming.

I say Homemade is the best! Books second and other mods last.

What's your campaign(s) consist of?
 

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I agree a continuing story line is best, however, there are varying ways to achieve that. Home campaigns can be awesome, but it takes a lot more work from the DM to maintain a long ongoing story line with good foreshadowing from the beginning, etc.

I found the Adventure Path adventures from Paizo for 3E were awesome at helping a DM create good continuity, probably better in most cases than the average DM could achieve on their own, especially with limited prep time. The Adventure Path adventures WOTC tried were not too good, because it seemed that WOTC had not really planned out the whole path ahead of time and the adventures were only loosely tied together anyway.

I've found two ways to use support for a campaign I want to run if I don't have time to create it all from scratch- either take a good Adventure Path, and modify it to personalize it to the players and their characters, or take a series of adventures and take the kernels from each but make liberal changes to tie them in better so they flow from one to the other (this takes more work but still less than creating the whole thing from scratch).
 


Homebrew in 4th edition. The monster builder (and DM-friendly rules) just takes all the tedium out of homebrewing, so I have a lot more time to spend on story. Also, I still flagrantly steal any ideas from anywhere and everywhere I can. I'm not paid to be original (not paid at all), but I try to "plagiarize" from where I think the players are unfamiliar (I know them all well) or at least where it would be appreciated.
 

I steal blatantly from everything I can get my hands on. I haven't used a full pre-made adventure in some time, but you can bet I yoink inspiration and encounters from them.
 

I use published adventures about 80% of the time, but rewrite some of the hooks, characters etc to fit the theme of my ongoing campaign. I find that the heroic/paragon/epic breakdown is extremely helpful for this as I am able to write a rough overall plotline for the entire campaign but just concentrate on finding adventures that kinda fit for each set of 10 levels.

After the players rolled up their characters I wrote a rough plotline (very rough, with lots of branching options) for what would be happening in each tier, but only hunted for adventures to fit the first 10 levels. I had to change them a wee bit or write up some connecting bits but it worked very well and allowed me to do some good foreshadowing for much later in the campaign. Some of the stuff that has happened in the first tier has made me rewrite what I planned and I am now hunting for published adventures that kind of fit what I was aiming for in the second tier.

A lot of what I planned has changed as a result of character actions, but having that initial plan gave a good amount of depth to the game.

As for the reason I use mostly published stuff? I'm married with kids - I don't have time to make my own stuff.
 

I steal blatantly from everything I can get my hands on. I haven't used a full pre-made adventure in some time, but you can bet I yoink inspiration and encounters from them.

This.

A good DM is a thief and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

My current Forgotten Realms campaign is a mixture of Caverns of Thracia, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and Savage Tide. The next one I have planned is set in the Moonshae Isles but borrows heavily from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and Paizo's Curse of the Crimson Throne.

For me, the most important thing I steal is art. Good art can set the tone of a campaign in a way that few other things can. I spend a lot of time preparing a campaign arc by trying to find appropriate art for important scenes, events and/or sites... although often it is the art that comes first.

(In some ways my campaign writing style is similar to the storyboarding that is done before a movie.)
 

I make all of my adventures, but I copiously steal and borrow from others if I feel appropriate - then give it my own spin. This is why even if I rarely run them, I view adventures in Dungeon as being invaluable as I can take encounters, maps (most important) and other features for my home campaigns. Good adventures, with a solid interesting antagonist and neat inspirational cartography are the best things ever. Lord of the White Field, published in Dragon is a prime example.

I find though that I am too much of a control freak to run a module as is. For one thing, I find the difficulty of Wizards modules is too uneven and often just bizarre. For example, I cannot fathom why in one encounter in Pyramid of Shadows there are minions so low level in the encounter, that they literally couldn't do anything with a miracle behind them (or me copiously cheating). Another is that I think 4E is a system that is hard to write "generically" for at high levels. You really need an understanding of what your party does and how to "Design" an encounter that sometimes adheres to their strengths, sometimes exploits a weakness and - ideally - does both at the same time.

Of course Wizards, through their complete lack of any support for paragon and epic adventures has made this a really easy decision for me. It's also disappointing, because until recent books like MM3 I was left to "Figure it out myself" on how to make challenging solos and other things. I do wish I had the ability to copiously steal!

If I have a problem, sometimes my ambitious plans get ruined. I've had to several times cut down really awesome ideas, because I didn't have the time to implement them as my "vision" demanded. Such as in Sorrow of Heaven, where due to being so busy in real life I was pressed for writing/encounters. So I had to put in a pretty long - if pretty intense and dangerous - dungeon crawl. I will forever view that stretch of 4 levels in Carceri as a wasted opportunity to do something special with a campaign in epic tier. If I could have had more inspiration to steal from, except for Scales of War and the E1-E3 series (which isn't really that inspiring in all fairness) I think I could have done better with limited time.

Overall though, making my own monsters, dungeons and challenging my PCs is really important to me as a DM. It's what I enjoy most: Knowing that I made fun, challenging encounters that they will hopefully remember for quite a while. Sometimes I fail horrifically of course, like I tried to make an "epic" defense in Celestia of Moradin's Holy Forge against endless waves of archons. But unfortunately, the mechanics never truly gelled and it was just too much of a huge, rather unexciting grind fest instead of how I envisaged the attack. That's one thing I always felt was a real wasted opportunity, but you learn from these things and the next time you try it: It will be even better and genuinely fun.

Accepting failure and that sometimes what you do won't work entirely (as opposed to working as you don't expect, which is a different skillset) is an important part of DMing. Bouncing back to run a fun game and redeem last weeks terrible combat/session is possibly the most important skill when making your own stuff.
 

Almost exclusively homebrew, though that's varied a little bit of late. I'm running an adaptation of Bone Hill for one group, and I intend to do a much-personalized version of the original Ravenloft later on. (Yes, it won't be the Devil Strahd at the end.) I do like reading adventures and particularly swiping stat blocks that appeal to me, but ultimately I like stuff that reflects the campaign as closely as possible, and that usually means homebrew. When the PCs are a bunch of guild-clan members from an isolated city where the outside world is largely a myth, the usual adventure hooks no work so good...
 


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