How often did/do you use modules in oAD&D?

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Slightly more than 0, so I voted 10%.

 

[T. Foster]

Back in the 80s we used purchased modules approximately 2/3 of the time but, significantly, even our home-brewed adventures slavishly followed the TSR module format -- they'd have about the same size of maps and number of encounters, the same types of challenges, the same sorts of backstories and plots, the rooms/encounters would be written up in "module" format including statblocks and read-aloud boxed text, and we'd give them names and letter-codes (I remember at least one where I even included optional "tournament scoring" like the A and C series). So even when we were playing home-brewed stuff we still played in the episodic "module-style" and never in the more freeform/open-ended campaign mode of OD&D or a lot of the advice in the DMG. Between-adventure downtime and large-scale wilderness travel were always handled abstractly -- when we finished one advaneture we'd mark off an appropriate amount of in-between time (usually a couple months), do our bookkeeping (training & upkeep costs, buy new equipment, hire new followers, etc.), and skip ahead to the canned intro of the next adventure.

EDIT: FWIW, my current AD&D group has been together for almost exactly 3 years meeting approximately every other week (but with lots of missed sessions), and in that time it's all been home-brewed material except for a lone 2 session "break" around last Xmas when I ran a one-off module separate from the regular campaign -- so the total there is less than 5%. However, even so we're still playing in more or less "module-style" in that we're playing discrete "adventures" with beginnings, middles, and endings and the downtime in-between glossed over rather than an organic freeform no-visible-seamlines sort of campaign.

 

[jgbrowning]

About 30% of the time

Same for me.

joe b.

 

[S'mon]

It was about 50-50, whereas now it's more like 90-10 scenario-to-homebrew.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I said 90% but if I could go back I'd lower it to 70% or 60%. The modules were (up until about 198...3? or so) skeletal outlines meant for a DM to take and flesh out and put in their campaign, and that's what I have done or currently do. There's more story in my campaign to the "G" series than simply "Go in, kill the monsters, take their stuff" and in that, I think my reliance on the modules to be the be-all end-all solution is lessened.

 

[Mythmere1]

Slightly more than 0, so I voted 10%.

Same, although over the years that has still accounted for a lot of modules.

 

[Mycanid]

About 80% of the time. We made attempts to be creative. Emphasis on the word "attempts". :\

 

[Jackelope King]

I never ran a module before I started 3E, and that one was me gutting a module from an e-Zine, almost entirely re-writing it before the game started. There just really isn't any published stuff out there that I could ever drop into my games... they go too far afield from the "traditional" fantasy most of the modules out there are written for. I'm not in most module writers' target audience, so I write pretty much all my own adventures from scratch.

 

[Vague Jayhawk]

We used published adventures about half the time. Some of them we used several times. But we never used them the way they were written.

 

[jdrakeh]

10%. We occasionally raided modules for the good bits, but mostly we plundered books, films, and other sources of inspiration that we (as a group) loved.