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

[Greenstone.Walker]

The prep items that take a lot of time for me are:
- Making up names for NPCs.
- Choosing spells for caster antagonists.
- Producing handouts (because I prefer to give player's handouts and let them read the expository stuff).

These are all helped by published adventures.

I don't gain a lot of time by using published maps because I'm sometimes making that stuff up as I go along.

 

[aramis erak]

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?

They don't save much time, for me. Well, not usually.
What they do is make the prep time far, far easier.

What they lack to make the prep time less: damage checkboxes along with opponent stats.
Most of my prep time is consumed for a module by...
1. looking for all the needed critter stats.
2. Copying down the stats into a stat block in a word processor
3. adding damage tracks for all the various monsters.

 

[meomwt]

Published adventures are great, but it's rare that as a DM, I run them word-for-word. Running Into the Wilds as the intro to a 3.5E campaign a few years ago, I changed the villain in the first dungeon, modified the "base of operations" town to suit, and put window dressing into the dungeons to foreshadow what was to come later (the Red Hand of Doom, as it happened!).

Later on, I found I was churning monster stat blocks to cope with high level play and to give the characters a challenge*.

I think that published stuff is a great first pass, but always needs some degree of adaptation and polish for your group. And that always takes time.



* This might not be such an issue in 5E, as adding "a few more of the same" can make the encounter level-appropriate without needing to vastly over-stat a bunch of orcs, or what-not - as in 3.5E.

 

[S'mon]

The kind of detailed stuff Paizo makes takes way longer than doing it myself, whereas simple stuff like Keep on the Borderlands can be a big time saver. Generally I find there is a sweet spot for published material utility in terms of detail; products written to be read/look good tend to have far too much.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

Not for me, I can prep an 8 hour session in about an hour. I have only run a module once in my 20+ years of DMing, and that was an impromptu one-off.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

It depends on how much rewriting I have to do really. I tend to do better with a barebones location type adventure than some involved storyline.

 

[Bupp]

Yes, it does save time because you have the basic plot and the maps. It's much easier to make changes to what has already been done than to create something from scratch.

Personally, I pride myself on never having an original idea in anything I do in D&D: behind everything I run is a published product even if it is not always apparent.

I'm the same way. Coming up with the basic idea is the hard part for me. Taking someone else's idea and twisting it into my own shape, often by winging it, is where I shine.

I always use pre-made adventures. I will read it about a week out from game time, and re-read/skim the night before/day of. I'll have some ideas in my head of where I might want to take it, but the players are more than welcome to take it in another direction as well (like a poster on the last page mentioned in his Tomb is the Lizard King group joining the bandits!).

My main group I'm running Age of Worms, just started Encounter at Blackwell Keep last time. Except I'm mashing in Tomb of the Lizard King as well. So far we played the journey to the Keep, but I used the opening parts from TotLK. We'll play the battle next, and then I'll replace the lizard man lair with the Tomb, the bandits instead being Ebon Triad cultists, and I'll add in the egg chamber from E@BK.

 

[Celtavian]

Yes. They save a lot of time.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I mainly use published adventures so I don't have to come up with everything myself. I am not that kind of creative.

Running a published adventure, I basically have two ways of running it:
a) as written.
b) de-constructed and remade.

Option a) is obviously the least work. It generally isn't too fun, neither as a DM or a player. Most of all because most adventures are kinda rail-roady. Option b) takes a bit more time, but not necessarily so much more. Let's take a typical part of a published adventure: a medium sized dungeon. Usually it's divided into encounters which has certain assumptions about what the PC's have done and how they enter the room. What I do is just make a list of all the monsters, by room. It's easier if you can make a quick copy of the dungeon map and write the info on the map, so it's more visual. Then I read through the encounters, making short notes on each "encounter" or important NPC. After this, I am ready to run the dungeon. Now I have the information to run a much less static dungeon. It's easier to "kill" some monsters in a room - if they joined a fight in another room, or move monsters around as the situation changes. An attack and then a retreat from the PC's may change the monster distribution completely.

Running the Starer Set module I changed how the castle behaved, after the PC's attacked and then retreated. I sent some of the monsters with bows outside, on top of the roof of the castle to more easily spot intruders and to more easily overwhelm the PC's. They could then alert the monsters inside and attack them from inside the castle. Nothing of the kind was written in the module, but after de-constructing the castle site, it made complete sense (to me at least).

This is one of the reasons I think that adventures could have been written in a much more condensed format, something closer to my de-constructed format. A map with the monsters and their "normal" location (written on the map). Some short notes. A more detailed description of the different rooms and the NPC's and their behaviour and plans. Much more useful than having to flip through 7-8 pages to get a full overview of the same dungeon as it typically is now.

I ran Reavers of Harkenworld using the above approach (actually my first time trying it out) and I think it worked really well. It felt more like one of my own adventures, but with much less work - mainly because I didn't have to find the monsters, create the NPC's and come up with a plot. I just had to de-construct the adventure (reading through it, taking notes on the relevant map), and when running the module mostly rely on my notes and the premade monster stats. Since my preparations didn't rely on the PC's doing as the adventure had assumed, I was much more open to the players wacky ideas and just running with it without having them running into glass walls like in crpg's, which is very easy to do if I hadn't prepared for a more open game style.

 

[Henry]

They save me time AND they give me inspiration I wouldn't have had otherwise. I just dont have hours and hours of uninterrupted time like I used to for thinking about RPGs. The most i've done in a year has been for a 5e gameday event I have prepared, but had it been for a long running campaign I just wouldnt have had the time for that on a weekly basis. Even, then, I converted an AD&D module for it. If I had to prep a whole campaign, I just wouldn't have been able to spend the time.