How Do You Feel About Published Adventures as a GM?

[Blue]

The last time I ran a published adventure in D&D, TSR still owned it. Okay, not entirely true - I did a teaching campaign for my kids, niece and nephew, and specifically did one off DMsguild, telling them I was doing so, so they could experience a different adventure design than I do.

(I also do a new homebrew setting for each campaign.)

I find it a lot easier to keep everything in my head, cater to player interests, and follow player agency when I only have my stuff in front of me, not someone else's and connections I may not realize have to change.

That said, I'm running a new-to-me system called Vaesen, 19th Century Scandivanian folklore horror & mystery, and I'm running a published adventure that many GMs recommended as a good starter, to see how this runs and in what ways it's the same or differs from other GMing experiences I have, like neo-trad D&D or PbtA Story Now.

 

[prabe]

My experience is that play oriented to characters is an attribute of having 3 or fewer players at the table. The fewer players you have, the more time you can spend focusing on character drama and character goals and slice of life. Get up to 6 or 8 players, and that becomes dysfunctional and getting through the adventure becomes a very functional way to game.

Neither is better or worse than the other. It's just depends on your players, what they enjoy about the game, and the size of your gaming group.

I've managed (and am managing) campaigns for five and six PCs where all the goals after the kick-off came from the characters, without disfunction that I've noticed.

I don't have a problem with people playing through adventures, so long as I'm not one of those people.

 

[Desdichado]

Strip them for parts... If I get around to reading them at all. I intend to read them... Most of them are just kind of tedious to read, though. And they're never structured in such a way that I could actually run them. My style just doesn't accommodate such strict rails at all.

 

[zakael19]

I've run exclusively published adventures until recently. I thought they saved me time. I thought that having tokens and profiles pre-built along with the chapters made things easier. I thought that a plot and story details would help me provide good content.

I was wrong across the board. Prepping a 5e WOTC module (with the exception of LMOP) takes tons of time, because they're formatted to be read not run. You have to go hunt down stuff all over, argue with the formatting of plot beats, fill in gaps, etc. I spent a night making tokens, now I can drop them all in at a whim. Dungeon maps make things terrible on VTTs - Id rather draw a wire diagram and throw out challenges on the fly responsive to the players; with a couple combat as sport encounters balanced on level.

And that's before you get into the fact that the massive plot holes, need to chivvy players along or it feels "wrong," and all that other jazz.

Capping the group at 4 players lets me ensure everybody is engaged and responsive, gets spotlight time, and we've just gone off the 'rails' in the last campaign following an adventure plot.

I do love a Schley town/city/region/encounter map though. How nice that you can buy them all from his site and re-use wherever.

Now a good setting book? One filled with interesting faction conflicts, enticing locations, adventure hooks, character backgrounds with built-in quests and similar stuff you can just rip and deploy at will? Those are valuable. The 4e Neverwinter one is a fantastic example, just ready to be played through with a handful of battle maps and some tokens.

 

[Umbran]

Anyway, enough about me. How do you feel about published/pre-written adventures?

Broadly - I use them a lot, and I don't use them a lot. It depends.

I'm very happy running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight right now. Having a blast. And, guess what? I do not care if it is the best written thing in the world or not. It hands me a big bunch of content I can use with my players, and takes the effort of putting the whole thing together off me, and allows me to concentrate on making it fun for my players at runtime. If some things have plot holes or aren't the best balanced in the world, again, I do not care. For me, patching that over is very little effort, as compared to dong the rest of the prep.

I've had enough fun with it that I am apt to buy a couple more of the 5e large adventures, just so I have another entire campaign or two in my pocket, with only as much notice as it takes me to read the thing. For D&D, it really is about the prep savings for me.

For investigative games (Ashen Stars and Shadowrun, for example) I like published adventures not so much for the broad prep it saves me, but for the pot details - a professional writer and editor can generally do a better job of writing mysteries and plot twists than I usually can, given that I have a day job.

 

[CandyLaser]

I enjoy pulling ideas out of published adventures, and from time to time I've been known to use them as a starting setup. The last 3.5 campaign I ran borrowed the setup and the initial hex map from Pathfinder's Kingmaker adventure path, but veered wildly from the plot of the path - I kept the Stag Lord as the initial antagonist, but that's about it. The eventual plot of the campaign wound up involving a prolonged war between the PCs' nation and another realm founded by a group of adventurers in the mid-levels, and then some of the seeds I planted at the beginning of the campaign bore fruit at the end when the plot turned into an attempt by Tharizdun to break free of its containment by creating a time paradox, which the PCs undid by traveling in time to turn the paradox (which they'd caused, by going back in time and killing a villain early) into a stable time loop involving a petrified simulacrum of that villain that they'd been carrying around in a bag of holding for about 5 real-time months.

 

[Golden Bee]

I thought it would be a more popular opinion, but I absolutely love running published modules! I don’t run everything I read… Nevertheless, there are a dozen scenarios I’ve run where I couldn’t come up with the concept for if you gave me a pencil, a pad, and a decade.

Especially for obscure games (Like Bedlam Hall), the modules let you know what the game is supposed to be like. I challenge all the creative people here to come up with something as good for Spirit of ‘77 as “Nine Lives in the Fast Lane”. Amazing comedic set up, and assortment of ways for it to play out, and a twist that has delighted group after group of players.

I’d like to shout out the following ones in particular, and my teasers from my writeups:


SHUT IN by F. Wesley Schneider and James L. Sutter
The periodicals would elide the less heroic details, like Connie smashing a septuagenarian from behind with a baseball bat to protect Florence from a 140-pound attack dog.

Gallery of Souls! by Magnus Seter and Petter Nallo
He prepared to sacrifice a mystically gifted artist to the goddess Morta. The art collector was to be the new Roman emperor, a Caesar to rule over the living and the dead.

Race the Snake! by John Simcoe
“Keep the assassin alive or my daughter’s a dead woman.”

The Wives of March! By Caleb Stokes
If this pulp adventure had a cover, it would have a one-eared ruffian hanging from the third-floor balcony of the DeSoto hotel in Savannah Georgia, grabbing onto Aldous Bingen’s pant leg.

To end all Wars! By Paul "Wiggy" Wade-Williams
“That’s a Matisse,” sighed Valeira. “People will bomb just about anything.”

 

[Li Shenron]

Part of it is simply that I am an improv GM and I don't see the value in detailed adventure design even if I am writing it. A loose outline, a handle on the rules, and a list of names are really all I need. That is how I run games in person and at cons. I just find that more difficult on Fantasy grounds than it is in person, so I default to adventures. But, Monday I started a new adventure "my way" even using FG and it went great. Now, I am dreading running my Pathfinder2ER Abomination Vaults campaign tonight because I do not like the adventure as written.

Anyway, enough about me. How do you feel about published/pre-written adventures? Do you run them as is? Strip them for parts? Don't even consider them? When you run an adventure of your own design, do you "write it" before play? If you do use pre-written adventures, what kind of "prep" do you do with them?

The value I am looking for in a published adventure is the shared experience. It's the possibility of meeting other people and asking "Oh, you've played Ravenloft/ToEE/KotB too! How did it go for your group, did you beat it or failed?". It is similar to sharing opinion after watching the same movie or reading the same book, except that not just experience but also literally the story varies between different groups.

But like you, I also do not like reading and preparing published adventures very much, because it is a lot of work and takes me a lot more time than the time we'll spend playing it. Improvising and making the story up as we play is a lot easier, and fundamentally the quality of the game is not really different, but it doesn't deliver the same shared experience.

At least, if I run an improvised adventure, I prefer using an established fantasy setting so that there is something to share but it's only partial, and it still requires some work (although after years you probably remember a few settings well enough so that you can run a game in them by memory).

 

[overgeeked]

I really dislike story- or event-based modules. They’re too often used as an excuse to railroad. And to get from the start to the finish, especially in modern AP-style modules, you’ll have to railroad. I really hate railroading. Location-based modules are a bit easier to deal with.

When I do use modules it’s mostly to strip for parts. At most I’ll turn a module into a sandbox to use. Maybe drop a quick dungeon into a sandbox. Or use for nostalgia. Like using Keep on the Borderland, Village of Hommlet, and In Search of the Unknown as the opening region for a game.

 

[TheSword]

I can’t quite come to terms with the people saying they don’t want to have to read the published book, because it takes too long? How else do people suppose the information should be conveyed? People are also talking like being good to read and good to run are mutually exclusive. They aren’t.

If you miss something because you missed or misread the segment then change it. Your the DM. Don’t cry about it and say the book made me do it! I can’t really see what the author can do for you, rather than put it in print. The rest is ok you.

A typical 1-10 campaign will last me a year+. It takes me 4 to 6 hours to sufficiently digest a 270 page hard cover to comprehend where everything is and what the running order is. 6 hours major prep for a years game time.

After that it’s 30 mins to and hour before each session - yet I have all maps uploaded and walled, all tokens in place, all artwork available at a click. I couldn’t do a fraction of that in an hour, let alone plan, research and write the damn thing.

It comes back to my suspicion. A lot of homebrew is a few cursory notes and then winging it. Monster stats, NPC spells, room descriptions etc. I don’t want that from a DM and I won’t do it as a DM.