D&D 5E Do premade adventures save prep-time?

[Charles Rampant]

I've found that when I run pre-made adventures that conversations become much slower. I have to pause and read the NPC description and the plot goals before and during each time the players roleplay with someone that they meet. This is in addition to spending a lot of time trying to read and memorise the adventure between games. However, I am hopeless at dungeon layouts and suchlike, so I prefer to steal premade ones rather than make my own.

I can echo the suggestion upthread to use premade settings but your own adventures; that seems to be the sweet spot of time saved. Using the Realms, for example, results in a reasonably deep-yet-generic setting that you can swiftly read up on enough to locate your adventures, and will save you a lot of time spent trying to create your own deep-yet-generic setting to use. You miss out on some fun that way, though.

 

[Morrus]

Sometimes they need more. If you've played an adventure the GM hasn't read, it's sometimes better when they just wing it rather than make you spend half the session watching them read!

 

[redrick]

My best prep to quality ratio has been with homebrew, especially if you count just formal prep (that is, not daydreaming about your campaign in the shower, walking to work or lunch, or what have you.) The best session I've run recently was formally typed up in about an hour on my cellphone during my commute (to and from work.) This involved drawing maps, writing up encounters with NPC motivations and tactics, and picking monsters out of a PDF.

My worst sessions, however, are usually the ones where I am doing homebrew and have done no formal prep. The session immediately after the one I've described above had nothing but mental brainstorm notes. A lot of improvising on the fly, and I introduced a puzzle before realizing that I hadn't fully fleshed out the solution to that puzzle. It was incredibly painful.

Adventures have been the most prep efficient for me when they involve large exploration settings with lots of keyed locations that don't necessarily interact too much. These are the kind of adventures that I can basically "run off the page," only needing to stay one room ahead of the adventurers. Once I have to worry about holding a complex thread together, with multiple NPCs, back stories, clues, etc, I find it harder to follow the adventure than to follow something I have created for myself.

 

[Nebulous]

Lost Mine of Phandelver saved me tons of time. It gave me hooks, NPCs, an overall villain and about 5 fantastic maps, all of which I would have had to drum up myself. Lots of times I found myself thumbing through the book when the players went off the beaten path. For example, when they finally reached Wave Echo Cave, it was totally unexpected. I was not prepped or ready for it, but the pre-made adventure made that a seamless transition.

That said, I did spend time tweaking things because I just enjoy that, so the adventure was not 100% as-written. Particularly the last fourth, it was greatly changed up.

 

[Jester David]

I am a little bit stuck - my time to prepare our roleplay sessions (DnD 5e, previously 3.5) is rather limited. As a student, I used to create the adventures and campaign world on my own, which was a lot of fun (in itself and playing it), but it also took a considerable amount of time. I thought: As I don't have the time anymore, I use ready-made adventures (e.g. Rise of the Runelord). But it feels that this takes as much time as before, just getting acquainted with the narrative, marking the important parts etc.

So what is your experience. Do ready-made adventures actually save time? If so, is there a special way how you prepare? Or is the prep-time the same for your own adventures?

Thanks and best regards,
kikai

Pre-published adventures do take some prep. Whether or not it is more or less is dependant on how heavily you prepped for your homebrew. Homebrew prep is incredibly variable.

I've run lower prep games where I largely improvised the narrative and spent all my prep. However, that's really dependant on me being "in the zone" in terms of improv and brain power.
A prepublished game really ensures the quality when my weeks are busier or I'm just not feeling it that week. And prepublished usually involves more initial prep but decreasing prep in later sessions as you skim content you've read a couple times before. And it's certainly easier prep to read and absorb than having to be creative.

 

[Nebulous]

A prepublished game really ensures the quality when my weeks are busier or I'm just not feeling it that week. And prepublished usually involves more initial prep but decreasing prep in later sessions as you skim content you've read a couple times before. And it's certainly easier prep to read and absorb than having to be creative.

I've found the creativity in-play is still more than sufficient for me - roleplaying baddies, improvisational dialog, and because I like minis and maps, there's still lots of works behind the scenes to get all of that prepared. But yes, once you've read through the scenario multiple times you kinda get it memorized and can often drop hints that you might not have considered at first blush.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I am a little bit stuck - my time to prepare our roleplay sessions (DnD 5e, previously 3.5) is rather limited...
So what is your experience. Do ready-made adventures actually save time? If so, is there a special way how you prepare? Or is the prep-time the same for your own adventures?

That's obviously going to vary with the DM. But, the nature of the prep time is different.

When you're making your own scenario, you spend some time just coming up with ideas - and that's not necessarily sitting down and focusing on the game, an idea can hit you in the middle of other activities. You also spend focused time satting out and making notes on the things you've come up with. You build NPCs, choose/create/mod monsters, set DCs, draw maps, outline plot arcs or whatever else it is you feel you need to be ready.

When you're using a published scenario, you spend focused time reading & understanding it, maybe adapting it to your group in some way (tweaking a stat here or there, dropping or changing some element you don't like). Depending on the product, there can be very little to that process, or a great deal. A simple, 'railroady' scenario, like one the earlier Encounters freebies, you could prettymuch pick up and run. A more involved AP takes more time to thoroughly understand so you're ready for what the party might do and how things change based on what they do (or don't do).

With the systems you're familiar with, it probably is easier, on balance, in terms of focused time dedicated to prep, to use a published scenario. You avoid the effort of building NPCs/monsters and designing encounters. And, 5e gives you license to overrule anything that turns out to be problematic in play - your players should be accustomed to DM rulings as part of the ordinary pattern of play (describe action, DM decides success/failure or calls for a roll and describes results), so when you override the module, it shouldn't seem unusual or out of line.

 

[Jacob Marley]

In my case? No, it doesn't save prep time. A few years ago I was introduced to two very useful tools that significantly reduced my prep time: Mythic Game Master Emulator and Dyson's Dodecahedron. These two sources, coupled with the random encounter tables from the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide and the World of Greyhawk Boxed Set, provide the foundation for my game. My prep consists of printing off the latest map from Dyson and maintaining & reviewing my campaign lists & notes as established in the Mythic system, and writing up a couple of stat blocks. Easily less than an hour prep for a five hour session, often times less.

 

[Psikerlord#]

In my experience the least prep adventures are pre-mades, but which you liberally wing.

So you use the maps, the NPCs, the rough story or setting or whatever. But you tweak the adventure as you go. A kind of half pre-made half homebrew adventure. You cant really go too wrong.

I have found the most fun adventures tend to be complete homebrews however. It is easiest to tie an adventure directly to the players/PCs by making it yourself. Even then though there are lots of online tools to help with this sort of thing - NPC generators, dungeon generators, etc.

 

[Uchawi]

They do save time, and my favorite balance between story and crunch are the old school modules like desert of desolation for AD&D. It had enough to support why the adventure existed, made it easy to digest and also have a loose foundation to add what you want. The adventure path format that is the equivalent of a short story book makes it harder to find stuff and you often miss key points in all the narrative. So that style ends up being to much for me.