Wombat
First Post
Scott_Holst said:Question to the great unwashed masses here at EN World, do you run your published adventures as written? If not, what major or minor changes do you make to them excluding adapting them to your campaign world?
I've run something like two pre-written adventures "as is" ... one was in Paranoia, the other was about half set for RuneQuest (Borderlands, if I remember the name right).
When I do pick up pre-written adventures (which in and of itself is rare), I find I have to change many things to make it fit any given campaign -- placenames, hooks, types of treasures, races, types of classes, personalities of NPCs, religions, you name it.
The larger problem I find is that most such adventures assume there are certain ways that PCs will act ... and this ain't necessarily the case. Sure, in a dungeon you go from room to room (and for the most part, rather illogically, the encounters stay within the confines of the rooms), but in an outdoor setting, a city, a forest, where there is no set logic tree the players may do things in a very "strange order" (by the standards of the written module).
I am used to writing up adventures: A very detailed beginning, a few set pieces, looser notes as it goes along, hopefully an end bit, and a LOT of flying by the seat of my pants. I try to give the players enough room to make their own choices/enough rope to hang themselves, but put time limits and set sequences in to "railroad" matters slightly, thus providing some structure. If they veer totally off course, so be it -- we run with it.
Thus written adventures are only useful to me as a guide for ideas, almost never as a set adventure. The authors (and this comes from reading adventures pertaining to something like 15 different systems) assumed a more linear thought pattern, usually, than I have found common in PCs.