I am a homebrew snob

[DonTadow]

As I said in my post, in the past, I have found published adventures to be useful; published settings, however, I have found to be less so. It is important to distinguish that it is the latter that we are discussing here.Nobody here is suggesting that they create settings out of their own minds and nowhere else, like the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus. What I am saying, at least, is that published setting materials are a very inefficient way of picking up ideas for one's homebrew. Supplements like Joe Browning's Magical Medieval Society, for instance, give you tools for constructing a homebrew more efficiently. Similarly, if one is looking for inspiring ideas, I find that reading a novel, or real world history or mythology is far more likely to produce new and interesting ideas for a homebrew than reading published settings is. Yes -- I'm sure that there are ideas in published setting materials that could make my homebrew better but there are fewer of them per 100 pages than I would find in the various other sources I prefer. For instance, I am currently filling notepad after notepad with fascinating ideas from the book I'm reading now: Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Smoking Mirror.

I can understand not being able to pick and choose out of published settings. I am not big on them either and find that I have not been able to use much from them outside of maybe a god here and an npc. But it is more or less the saying thatp ublished adventures are useless that had a bug in me.

 

[JesterPoet]

See, that's just silly. What's the difference between a homebrew and an "official" setting anyway? FR and Eberron are just homebrews that went to the big city and got their name's in lights.

I'm addicted to homebrewing, but I'm not a snob about it. I have no problem playing a game in just about any setting. There are even a handful of published settings I'd run although not many. I've run published adventures here and there from time to time, although not often, but I read published adventures a fair amount and steal all kinds of elements from them.

Maybe I'm just the odd one here, but to me, not homebrewing is the timesaver, not the other way around. To correctly run, say, the Shackled City adventure path in the Forgotten Realms, I need to read all the FR books and be familiar with them. I need to read all the adventures several times, and know them very well inside and out. I need to have much more of a plan to run something published as opposed to something homebrewed, where I just need a vague outline and a handful of stats.

So, beside the fact that I can't really run anything without making it my own and tweaking it a bit (which is reason enough to prefer homebrewing) I don't often do published material because it's so much harder and time-consuming to do so.

Wait now... let's just remember.... I didn't say that homebrews are bad and published settings are good. I just said that the homebrews I've played in have never been as good as the "homebrewers" claimed or thought they were.

 

[ForceUser]

I'm with Hjorimir on this one (no surprise to those who know us). Homebrews, for DMs with the creativity and the time, are where its at. Neither I nor my players enjoy published settings; we've tried. Published campaigns seem to lack that spark, that intimacy, that animus, if you will, that makes a well-delivered homebrew shine. There's an immediacy to a homebrew that published campaign settings can't seem to duplicate. I don't know if I can explain it any better than that. Hjormir's homebrew campaigns blow away anything I've ever seen published: on a thematic level, on a mechanics level, and on a presentation level. He puts an enormous amount of creative energy into his worlds, and it shows. Everything makes sense, events follow logically, the world isn't overrun by epic-level NPCs that make your PCs look like hammered dogsh-t next to them. In short, our homebrews are filled with the elements of D&D we most enjoy, which does not often coincide with basic assumptions of the game (such as, say, how magic items are handled).

I've run many campaigns over the years. Every time I tried to run a published setting, my players quickly lost interest and I had to reboot with a homebrew. I got the message: we want homebrews. If I had to qualify why this is so, I'd have to say that a homebrew is an expression of the vision and creativity of an individual DM, while a published setting is often the expression of a team of creative people who make compromises while designing a product for market. A good homebrew embodies the DM's signature creative style, which in my experience, players value highly. Sure, you can inject your style into Forgotten Realms, but only to an extent: without a significant amount of rework (I.E., homebrewing), at the end of the day, it still belongs to Ed Greenwood and his vision. It's not yours.

I think ownership is the key for a lot of DMs that homebrew. I know that for me, I have to feel like I am the sole authority on the setting before I can truly enjoy running the game. It has to belong to me, not to Wizards of the Coast. That said, I borrow liberally from published sources, but always put my own spin on things.

[/ramble off]

 

[Thorin Stoutfoot]

I run entire campaigns using published adventures...

...and I even run them in Greyhawk, the first published setting. My players are always surprised by how much I manage to tie them together. I don't have time to make adventures or settings, so this is the way I play nowadays.

 

[Hjorimir]

To say theres no room for improvement is to admit failure. I guess I"m kinda of irked at the arrogance that some think their adventures can get no better and need no inspiration. The best writers read. The best artists watch their peers.

The mistake would be to think that published adventures are the only source of inspiration. While I cannot speak for others, I find lots and lots of inspiration that makes its way into my creations. Movies, books, these boards, story hours, pictures, etc. all weave together to help me visualize just what I'm looking for.

 

[DonTadow]

The mistake would be to think that published adventures are the only source of inspiration. While I cannot speak for others, I find lots and lots of inspiration that makes its way into my creations. Movies, books, these boards, story hours, pictures, etc. all weave together to help me visualize just what I'm looking for.

I agree with you 100 percent. My current 15 session adventure is a swirl of an adnveture from a dungeon magazine, an Isaac Asimov Short story, and the story arc from season 5 buffy

 

[Numion]

Ingenuity is a DM's best friend.

Ok, I'll bite. Tell a little about your world, and lets see how 'ingenuous' your stuff really is

 

[Turjan]

Tell a little about your world, and lets see how 'ingenuous' your stuff really is

Heh, that's a good remark . Most homebrews, if they don't fall into the standard Greyhawk category anyway, have 'ingenuities' of the "my elves are gruff, stocky and wear long beards" kind . Of course, my homebrew has a few shifts that might look similar to that one , but I don't think that's the 'ingenious' part of it. The main excuse for using the homebrew lies in the center of the adventures: I prefer conflicts between human or humanoid groups to monster or demon slaying plots, and here the hundredth enactment of Harpers vs. Zhentarim might get old. The homebrew leaves enough space to freely paint a political landscape without having to consider published conflicts. That's enough of an excuse for its existence, although this does not claim that the homebrew is terribly interesting for someone not involved in the campaign.