Do you Run Published Adventures As Is?

[The_Gunslinger658]

Hi-

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?

With Age of Worms, I am turning the Seeker Cult into more of a cult that does gather old stuff but the strings are being pulled by a Demon Lord in the back round. Theres more, but just in case one of the players are lurking about here, I really dont want to give away too much info.

Scott

 

[Psion]

Rarely.

I am finding it increasingly unsatisfying to try to run adventures out-of-the-book.

Many adventures are written out of the core. I like more than the core. So I often embellish to add more interesting non-core elements. (This is pretty easy if you pick an adventure that is lower level than your party. Add a few levels of PrCs or templates to spice things up...)

I often find that to weave it into my world, I have to make a few changes. I like things to be part of the bigger tapestry. This can be as simple as replacing a few names, patrons of NPCs, nation names, etc. But as often, I'll replace goals, swapping them out for objectives important to PCs in my game.

Finally, sometimes I find existing adventures boring, unworkable, or use plot or setting conventions that don't sit well with me. (Example: time travel plots are a non starter for me.) These adventures I'll typically strip for parts, taking maps, creature stats, cool encounters, etc., and pulling them into my own adventures.

 

[buzz]

In general, yeah. The whole reason I use published material is due to lack of time, so if I had the time to make major modifications, I wouldn't be using a published adventure.

However, in running Eyes of the Lich Queen, I've been skipping past various Spot and Gather Info checks called for in the text. Mostly because they're checks for really inconsequential details, or else checks that, if failed, mean the adventure stops dead.

 

[el-remmen]

Never.

There is always some change - esp. since most the adventures I run are 1e/2e ones from Dungeon - and often I totally gut them, keeping some NPC names, but using the maps and some basic stuff, totally changing the plot and connections.

Of course, there are also changes required by the setting, like changing the names of nations and organization, adapting classes/kits that don't exisit anymore - cutting out 60% to 90% of the magic and 30% to 60% of the treasure.

 

[freyar]

Sometimes, though I find that I'm doing less and less of that as I become a better DM. I am really trying to adapt published adventures to my players' tastes, as well as to plot lines in the rest of the game world.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

No. They always end up getting tweaked to one degree or another. See the "background/spoliers" for my lost city campaign (link in my sig) for an example of how I change things.

 

[T. Foster]

If an adventure is good enough, I'll run it straight. I might expand on it (and one of my criteria for a good adventure is that it has room for expansion) but I won't generally change much. There are some adventures that I like parts of but wouldn't want to run the adventure as a whole as-is (usually because there's a railroady-forcefed plot that I don't like) and for these I'll often consider doing some modification, but in practice this rarely happens because there's too much effort involved, and if I'm not willing to run the adventure as-is I'll probably end up not running it at all.

 

[HellHound]

Yes.

My latest foray back into D&D was on a compromised deal that I would ONLY be running published modules.

We're having a great time, and I'm doing very little prep.

 

[Desdichado]

No, never. At best, I'll take the framework of a published adventure, beef it up and/or customize it to the campaign and run that. I'm more likely to simply steal ideas in terms of maps or NPCs or general plot ideas, but recombine them in completely different ways than what the adventure author intended.

And mostly, I don't even do that---I just let the ideas percolate, and then write my own adventures, where some of the ones I've read no doubt cast a subconscious shadow from time to time.

 

[Desdichado]

In general, yeah. The whole reason I use published material is due to lack of time,

Oddly enough (I guess) I find it much more time-consuming to run published material than to just do something on my own.