Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 6576711" data-attributes="member: 10738"><p>This is a style thing and depends heavily on how much prep time you need to feel comfortable. My personal experience is that running a module can take exactly as much prep time as a read-through, but YMMV on how good the experience is if you as DM are having to flip around and look things up to remember this or that....but the visceral sense of playing something official can be fun. OTOH designing my own module is a piece of cake....but I do a lot of freeform design, and that works for me because I build an assumption of imrpov into my games. I may stick a villain in a plot, say, &quot;He wants to accomplish this, has these henchmen and resources, and has a timeline kinda like this&quot; and then during play determine that the villain does things very differently....so I tend to leave the &quot;how this goes down&quot; out of everything I plot, and merely identify who the players are. In the end it works well...but only for how I run things. I recently re-ran the old classic module Tomb of the Lizard King, which was written from very specific assumptions (PCs go to tomb, kick door in, kill monsters and bandits, loot.) The actual play ended up with them trying to join the bandits, then betraying them....the module as written was functionally useless for advice on the approach the PCs took, so I ended up scrapping most of it and going back to improv to get through it. This is why I never really get into published content....it always feels like too much work on too many assumptions. BUT....I really like the recent Princes of the Apocalyspe module as it looks very open in approach, will probably try to run that one.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Doctor Futurity, post: 6576711, member: 10738"] This is a style thing and depends heavily on how much prep time you need to feel comfortable. My personal experience is that running a module can take exactly as much prep time as a read-through, but YMMV on how good the experience is if you as DM are having to flip around and look things up to remember this or that....but the visceral sense of playing something official can be fun. OTOH designing my own module is a piece of cake....but I do a lot of freeform design, and that works for me because I build an assumption of imrpov into my games. I may stick a villain in a plot, say, "He wants to accomplish this, has these henchmen and resources, and has a timeline kinda like this" and then during play determine that the villain does things very differently....so I tend to leave the "how this goes down" out of everything I plot, and merely identify who the players are. In the end it works well...but only for how I run things. I recently re-ran the old classic module Tomb of the Lizard King, which was written from very specific assumptions (PCs go to tomb, kick door in, kill monsters and bandits, loot.) The actual play ended up with them trying to join the bandits, then betraying them....the module as written was functionally useless for advice on the approach the PCs took, so I ended up scrapping most of it and going back to improv to get through it. This is why I never really get into published content....it always feels like too much work on too many assumptions. BUT....I really like the recent Princes of the Apocalyspe module as it looks very open in approach, will probably try to run that one. [/QUOTE]

Verification