D&D General Campaign Source Books vs. Adventures

[Rabbitbait]

Unfortunately, I can’t speak to 5E‘s Tomb too directly (or 4E for that matter) - I’ve had an awful experience with the former and none with the latter - but with a large portion of it being a hexcrawl, I don’t think it allowing for side ventures is a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t feel incomplete and leaving the DM out to dry with large gaps of “and something happens, make it up until the party is X level”… and then the book picks up with the next part of the story.

5e's Tomb of Annihilation was absolutely brilliant and might just be the best campaign I have run, but did not really have much room for personalisation. Yes you could insert side-quests, but given that the majority of the adventure is coming across trouble in the jungle it does not leave a lot of room for a characters back-story to come into play. There is a lot you can do at the start before you go into the jungle, and probably a bit in the lost city of Omu. Once you are in the tomb itself there isn't really any opportunity to insert anything else.

HOWEVER - the campaign is brilliant for providing little self contained adventures that can be pillaged for use in other campaigns.

 

[aco175]

I tend to default to FR over the 4e era so I just want adventures and not world building unless it is part of the adventure, such as developing Neverwinter in the new Phandalin book next year. I have not bought any of the new books that cover other worlds though.

If a new setting world is coming out, I can see having half and half material in order to play. The new Dragonlance book should have some core rules covering gods and history to that setting since it cannot default to FR or base assumptions for D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I generally far prefer setting sourcebooks, but given the low "what Micah Sweet wants" quotient of WotC's recent setting offerings, I guess a good adventure is all I can reasonably ask for.

The DMsGuild is killing it though. Keep on keeping on!

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Both, but Monster books are probably my overall favourite.

 

[not-so-newguy]

If I'm buying a book today? Adventure, I'm going to get way more actionable material out of it.

But, that's misleading, because wikis have collated the information I would normally get out of sourcebooks, so I can do directed research fairly easily. I love a good sourcebook, I have several arriving at my house shortly. That said, they're older edition ones, because I haven't been largely impressed with the modern versions of them.

I bolded that part because this is how I ran my Mystara campaign last year. I'm pretty much in the same boat.

 

[Reynard]

Both, but Monster books are probably my overall favourite.

User name checks out.

 

[Steel_Wind]

A full campaign of interlocking adventures - and it's not even close.

That doesn't mean that I won't cut parts of the adventure, alter here and there, and add things over there. I do that all the time and consider it to be fun. Thing is, I only have so much time to homebrew -- and I also spend a LOT of time on custom battlemaps and creating and modifying overhead token art and sound effects.

I got only so much time available. Home brewing a whole campaign is not something I do much anymore.

What I do is in accordance with the time I have available and my motivation to do so. Typically, this is exceptionally high as I prep the campaign for play in Foundry and in the first ~3 months or so of a campaign. It tends to drop sharply after that. I may "get it back" -- and I may not, too. I've been doing this long enough to know my own patterns.

 

[Burnside]

In terms of official 5E stuff I'm actually getting use out of, it's pretty clearly adventures - and for me, Tomb of Annihilation, Out of the Abyss, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and other adventures also serve as sourcebooks. Out of the Abyss is arguably a better sourcebook than it is an adventure.

 

[Umbran]

I love campaign books, but I want adventure modules. WotC has put too much emphasis in the recent past on adventures that span the life of campaign.

That's what DMs Guild is for. They opened that market up to individual creators and small companies, so they could focus on larger products. This makes a lot of business sense - WotC is big, and is geared for big projects. Small projects are going to represent a poor choice for them, from an opportunity cost perspective.

 

[overgeeked]

campaign/world books or adventures

It’s world books by a mile. As long as there’s a good bit of adventure seeds, interesting locations, useable NPCs, etc. Either way I’ll have to put in a heap of work to use the content. I don’t do railroads, so everything ends up a sandbox. The PCs go left when they should have gone right in the first five minutes with a world book, I have the rest of the world book to use. The PCs go left when they should have gone right with a module, well I just wasted all that time and money. Sure, I can part it out and use it later, maybe, but it’s less work to get immediate use out of a setting book. Especially if they have location-specific random tables. Oh, I love me some random tables.