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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7990315" data-attributes="member: 18">No? I mean honestly no. They really aren't. Someone else's random ideas about what makes a good combat encounter in the context of a specific adventure are not something I've found much value in stealing in any edition, having played and nicked stuff from adventures since 1989.What I tended to steal was three things:1) Maps. So many stolen maps.2) Ideas/characters/concepts. Sometimes an adventure is based around some tremendous idea but the actual execution is lousy, sometimes there's a wonderful character who would work better elsewhere.3) Treasures, puzzles, and traps. Specific magic items, and specific traps, can be very steal-able. D&D consistently provides really well for monsters, and building encounters in every edition except 3.XE has been pretty easy, so they're not a problem. But a good trap? An interesting trap? That's gold. So is an actually-good puzzle, though they are vanishingly rare even in published adventures.Thanks for teaching this grandma to suck eggs, dude! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />My point is, the less appropriate material there is, the less reason you want to spend a lot of money buying a big complicated adventure from WotC or whoever. I usually write homebrew adventures so I don't typically need pre-gen ones. But if I want a pre-gen on, I want I don't have to spend just as much effort reading and then fixing as I would have on writing a pre-gen.And this is the key problem I've seen over and over. When you get a pre-gen, to run it well you need to:1) Read it through.2) Understand it - which often requires taking quite a lot of notes, because a lot of pre-gens are really badly written, and really badly organised. Vital description or information that gives a scene its entire context can be a dozen pages away (often later!) in a text box, or worse, in the middle of a paragraph about something else!3) Make any changes to make to make it "not suck". Hopefully there is no 3. A lot of smaller adventures, there is no 3. They're just solid little adventures, and you do little or nothing to make them work (maybe change a town name or something, or otherwise recontextualize them). With big adventures? There's almost never not a 3, and sometimes 1+2+3 here is significantly more than writing your adventure, often for a lesser outcome.Does that make sense?</blockquote>

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