D&D 5E I can’t seem to DM written adventures.

[DEFCON 1]

I might be one of the lone dissenters here then, LOL (depending on how we look at it.) I enjoy using pre-written adventures because they serve as a really nice backbone of an entire campaign arc. Now that being said... I also do not really run the adventures as they are in the books, following the story from point to point, just "reading along" as it were. I use the adventures as the spine of the story and then find anything and everything I can in other modules and books that are close to how the story goes to populate all the surrounding areas with like-minded side plots or additional details. For Curse of Strahd for example that meant stripmining Return To Castle Ravenloft for parts, the 4E module Fair Barovia! had parts I inserted into the campaign, and I read through a whole host of 2E Ravenloft Campaign Setting material to have at my fingertips for ideas should they be necessary.

What that does is allow me to have a pseudo-sandbox available when necessary if the players veer off the beaten path of the main storyline... but everything out there still constrains the world and feeds back into it. The players might decide to forsake the main breadcrumb and go do X... but because I know what the over-arching storyline of the campaign is and know all the bits and pieces of all the adventure parts I've collected that I've already run the red yarn to (It's Always Sunny meme-style)... I can improvise organic connections that can circle the group back around towards the main story from wherever they have wandered off too. And almost always those connections are more than intriguing enough that they will pick up those breadcrumbs on their own (and not feel as though I'm "railroading" them.)

Just because my Ticket To Ride train ticket might say 'New York To Los Angeles', it doesn't mean there's only a single track to get there. Which is why I gather as much additional material over and above the pre-written adventure as I can, so that I can lay down that track in 75 different configurations depending on the whims of the player's interests. But at the end of the day I'm still using the plotline of the adventure book as the narrative outline, because I find it results in deeper and more involved stories than just laying down random encounter track after random encounter track in front of the train in hopes that it just creates a satisfying narrative after the fact.

 

[robus]

I agree. The other thing I forgot to mention is that there is simply too much variation of party makeup and options to just use the combat encounters in published mods as written for me. For some groups I've DMed for every encounter would be a cakewalk, others would be threatening a TPK every other encounter. I've gotten pretty good over the years at creating combat encounters for my group (even if some still surprise me), but every group is different so I always have to tweak the difficulty of published mods.

So longer to read through the mod to understand what's going on, flipping through pages to find details, and I still need to review all of the combat encounters. Heck, even some non-combat encounters are going to be a breeze for some groups and a virtually insurmountable obstacle for others just depending on what character options people have chosen.

I still don’t understand why they don’t tag them with the intended difficulty, so that we can easily recalibrate. That’s the weird part. There’s no “design intention“ communicated, it’s all fevered dream fanfic.

 

[robus]

I remember when D&D first got alterations to the standard formatting conventions that originated in 1970s tournament modules, there was a backlash. This was the "Delve Format" of late day 3.5 (which carried over into 4e). It broke down room descriptions, had everything you needed to run it on a two-page spread whenever possible. DMs complained that it "ruined the story" and made D&D "a tactical skirmish game."

IMO, I think the better way of doing it is to present a bullet list of creatures and a few memorable details at the start of the room description, with other details in a paragraph that can be read for more information following. This is similar to the adventure formatting of Old School Essentials.

Thanks for the insight into where this current style came from!

 

[Redwizard007]

I might be one of the lone dissenters here then, LOL (depending on how we look at it.) I enjoy using pre-written adventures because they serve as a really nice backbone of an entire campaign arc. Now that being said... I also do not really run the adventures as they are in the books, following the story from point to point, just "reading along" as it were. I use the adventures as the spine of the story and then find anything and everything I can in other modules and books that are close to how the story goes to populate all the surrounding areas with like-minded side plots or additional details. For Curse of Strahd for example that meant stripmining Return To Castle Ravenloft for parts, the 4E module Fair Barovia! had parts I inserted into the campaign, and I read through a whole host of 2E Ravenloft Campaign Setting material to have at my fingertips for ideas should they be necessary.

What that does is allow me to have a pseudo-sandbox available when necessary if the players veer off the beaten path of the main storyline... but everything out there still constrains the world and feeds back into it. The players might decide to forsake the main breadcrumb and go do X... but because I know what the over-arching storyline of the campaign is and know all the bits and pieces of all the adventure parts I've collected that I've already run the red yarn to (It's Always Sunny meme-style)... I can improvise organic connections that can circle the group back around towards the main story from wherever they have wandered off too. And almost always those connections are more than intriguing enough that they will pick up those breadcrumbs on their own (and not feel as though I'm "railroading" them.)

Just because my Ticket To Ride train ticket might say 'New York To Los Angeles', it doesn't mean there's only a single track to get there. Which is why I gather as much additional material over and above the pre-written adventure as I can, so that I can lay down that track in 75 different configurations depending on the whims of the player's interests. But at the end of the day I'm still using the plotline of the adventure book as the narrative outline, because I find it results in deeper and more involved stories than just laying down random encounter track after random encounter track in front of the train in hopes that it just creates a satisfying narrative after the fact.

I've got a buddy who does this really well. Wove Curse of Strahd, and Horder of the Dragon Queen together beautifully

 

[Bill Zebub]

The general category of Thing I Hate Most About Prewritten Adventures is when I'm forced to read long, wordy paragraphs in order to extract the few details I need. There's nothing like reading a full column to find out, "Ok, the NPC's name is Bob, he's grumpy, and he's worried because his son hasn't returned."

The specific case is the multi-page backstory that the DM is supposed to fully understand in order to run the adventure. Ugh. Save me.

 

[Incenjucar]

I do not enjoy running other folks' adventures. The only time I will do so is if I'm doing an official game for a store, which I have only done a handful of times. Even then, the last time I ran a prefab for a store I was so annoyed with the adventure's story that I modified it on the fly to make it more interesting and to factor in the PCs and players better to make it more personal.

Full respect to folks who make them and use them, and I recognize their value for groups and for creating shared experiences, but they are not for me.

 

[Enrahim2]

I feel one issue here is that there are so many things that is called "Prewritten adventures". A location based death trap dungeon like tomb of horror provide something very different than an epic coherent campaign like War of the burning sky, and very different from this again we have low prep skeletons like Sly Flurish' adventures.

Even within a single "style" there are an enormous range of extremely different experiences. A simple keyed dungeon could for instance be a designed as deathtrap dungeon, a hackfest, an elaborate puzzle, a political hotpot or a pure funhouse of weird ideas.

I consider myself one that like to run pre-made adventures, and having a very wide range of interests. Still I find myself outright dismissing about half of the adventures I read as not usable for my purposes, and the remainder usually require some significant interpretation and adaptation to fit my overal "style".

So why not just make my own, if I need to do work anyway? Bacause I find running something based on other people's ideas more fun! This way I as a DM get to take some part of the same kind of fun as the players - exploring and discovering something I have not made myself.

And as many have pointed out, it is important to look for adventures that covers prep you are not fond of yourself, but feel you need. For my case, adventures with good handouts, maps, illustrations and dilemmas I myself find thought provoking are key things I value a lot. However I enjoy providing alternatives to combat, find reasonable explanations for anything, and tailor phasing and descriptions to party - so adventures with unavoidable combat, obvious breaches of internal logic, overly rigid structure or heavy on read aloud prose tend to turn me off. While for others this might be exactly the kind of things they want to help their prep.

 

[Clint_L]

I like writing my own stuff, and letting the campaign be driven to a significant degree by player ideas and choices. So if the pre-written adventure is too long and storyline driven, that's not very useful to me, though I do enjoy reading them and seeing what parts I can pilfer. On the other hand, I enjoy inserting the occasional short adventure or pre-written location, such as White Plume Mountain, because the storyline is minimal and easily adapted to my campaign, and then I get total a break and play with someone else's toys for a session or two.

For starting DM's, I think "Lost Mine of Phandelver" is a great example of a pre-written adventure because it is such a sandbox that it lets the players more or less do what they want, though there is a loose plot going on with enough guidance to help the DM keep sessions running smoothly. I consider it the best low level adventure ever written and I would love to see WotC do more like it (I don't think the latest starter adventure is nearly as good).

 

[AnotherGuy]

I've found through my experience, the creativity leaps far more wildly (for me) when it is just me alone carrying the story, without a module or AP backing it. I've come to this realisation when I look back at my own adventures and I'm impressed at what I imagined.

Having said that, the better part of this last decade I've been running published APs and modules, modified with personal elements here and there and the weaving in and out of character backstories, but still the core campaign storyline relies on published works. I'm a bit of a completionist, so when I'm done with the published stuff, I'm going back to designing my own adventures full time.

 

[el-remmen]

I am little different. I mostly run published adventures but I don’t know how (nor do I think it is even possible) to run one “as written.”

I mix and match places, characters, and scenarios and then slather it with my special sauce. This is why I love 80s and 90s Dungeon mag so much: grist for the mill.