D&D General I defend published adventures constantly then I spend two hours tweaking every one I run. At what point am I just homebrewing with extra steps?

[TwoDollar DM]

I'm usually the one arguing against the paper-and-pencil purists. You know the position: a real GM needs nothing but blank paper, a pencil and enough hours. I've never bought it, and I say so often. But I've been prepping two videos about published adventures, and looking back at what I actually do with a published adventure made me thoughtful. I replace plot points. I edit the maps. I change the NPCs — not just names, but who/what they are, what they want and what they're doing about it. I revise the end goal of the whole thing. And I rewrite the consequences of the party succeeding.
Two things follow from that, and I've only recently noticed both:
1. It's why I've cooled on the big WotC campaign books. More pages means more material to reconcile with my changes, not less work. A 250-page campaign written to hang together as a unit actively fights being taken apart. I end up doing more work than if I'd started from less.
2. It's why I keep drifting toward short free/low cost adventures. Because I've stopped treating them as adventures at all. They're raw material a source of maps, NPCs, plot points and encounters that I strip for parts. A one-page dungeon doesn't resist being dismantled. It was never load-bearing.

So the question I'm actually sitting with: is it still worth the time, energy and money hunting for interesting published adventures, or should I buy a couple of good random-table books and let those be the permanent prompts for a fully homebrew way of working?

The one argument that keeps me on the published side: every adventure I've ever run has had at least one thing in it I wouldn't have thought of. One plot twist, one NPC, one weird variation on how magic works in that place. Random tables give me combinations. Adventures give me someone else's judgment, a choice a human being made that I wouldn't have thought to make. That's harder to generate randomly.

So...Two questions, and I suspect this crowd is biased toward one answer:
Where do you actually sit — 100% homebrew, verbatim-faithful to the published text, or somewhere in the middle? My guess is almost everyone's in the middle, and that long campaigns push you further toward the middle over time whether you planned it or not.
And the one I'm more curious about: how do your players feel about it? Are they quicker to judge a published scenario they recognize — or quicker to disengage from something you wrote yourself? Or do they genuinely not notice and not care which is which?

 

[billd91]

I'm somewhere in the middle and I think that's where a lot of people are - I hesitate to say most, but it could very well be true.
And my players seem to be quite OK with it. After all, they're the ones largely asking for certain Adventure Paths to be run because they've heard things about them and want to give them a go, AND they're the ones creating characters that will push at the boundaries and want their ideas incorporated. So naturally, that puts us in the middle as I use the AP as the main backbone of the campaign while rewriting stuff to incorporate their input.
And, as far as I'm concerned, this is what you're expected to do with published adventures - customize them to fit your own game and group of players.

 

[aco175]

I'm in the middle of going through the Heroes on the Borderland box to rework it for my group. I find it is made for a new group of players, so my group would not like parts or know about skill checks and such. I find that I'm changing a lot of the keep quests since my group would like some things over the 'newbie' quests and restrictions such as no long rest outside the keep and no combat in the keep.

The last big book I ran more following along with the book except when the players chose to go off script. It was fine both ways.

The players do not notice or care if I go more by the book or if I make up things since I do both a lot.

 

[saviirkad]

I'm big on modifying publishing adventures to fit my group, or even to fit it around an entirely different story that I'm telling, and ultimately my own conclusion is that I need both in equal measure for different things.

Sometimes all I need is to cannibalize something small, or I've got a particular adventure I'm thinking of doing, and there's a string of disconnected small adventures that I could pull apart and stick back together. Or I've got all this other stuff going on, but this one short adventure would work great if I just slotted it in here, with modification to make it fit.

But also, the big adventures provide me with far more pieces to work with, so I have much less risk of running out of material to cannibalize and have to take more time to develop past. There's also more connective tissue between the pieces that I can draw upon.

Closest I've ever come to running an adventure as-is was just when I started running two games simultaneously, with the same group but the new game was minus a player. We added a second game to accommodate that other player's schedule preventing them playing every single week, but I also made it clear that I'm putting most of my creative efforts into our "main" campaign. I'll be running this other campaign straight from the book with minimal prep in mind.

But even then, I couldn't not tailor it to our group's dynamics, and it very quickly just became Main Campaign #2.

 

[Blue]

I'm 100% homebrew in terms of setting and adventures. My average campaign runs about three years and I do a new setting for each (just because I like making setting), and all of my adventures are 100% me. I usually have a bunch of hooks out there but my players pick their own things to do so some of it is improv. I do arcs for each character that I weave around the other plot elements as well, definitely not something can could be done in pre-done adventures. There is no pre-determined Act III, things grown from player options.

And I can't answer your question, because I've been doing this for decades and have no experience if my group would judge me running a pre-written adventure differently. I enjoy coming up with adventures. I am better at running my own adventures because I know them better, from theme to plot to details. I don't have to look things up. I don't worry about improv invalidating something someone else wrote and I don't remember. This is how I run.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So the question I'm actually sitting with: is it still worth the time, energy and money hunting for interesting published adventures, or should I buy a couple of good random-table books and let those be the permanent prompts for a fully homebrew way of working?

There's a gap here. "I like to customize" ≠ "I like to do it all myself". You might hate the gruntwork parts, but love the filigree tweaks.

The one argument that keeps me on the published side: every adventure I've ever run has had at least one thing in it I wouldn't have thought of. One plot twist, one NPC, one weird variation on how magic works in that place. Random tables give me combinations. Adventures give me someone else's judgment, a choice a human being made that I wouldn't have thought to make. That's harder to generate randomly.

Extremely so, yes. There are other ways to add such things. Frex: Ask a friend to look over various pieces you like, and try to add one thing that sticks out from them all but also fits together.

So...Two questions, and I suspect this crowd is biased toward one answer:
Where do you actually sit — 100% homebrew, verbatim-faithful to the published text, or somewhere in the middle? My guess is almost everyone's in the middle, and that long campaigns push you further toward the middle over time whether you planned it or not.

Middle, and it's hard to even say it leans one direction or another. Because I VASTLY prefer systems that are already well-balanced, reliable, and flexible. But when it comes to adventures and stories and plots, I want the freedom to do as I like--I appreciate a robust setting to work from but other than that I am much more happy putting things together myself.

And the one I'm more curious about: how do your players feel about it? Are they quicker to judge a published scenario they recognize — or quicker to disengage from something you wrote yourself? Or do they genuinely not notice and not care which is which?

I've only run one campaign for others. We'll see how the second turns out. Both are fully homebrew in terms of story and mechanics; I'm not using any canned adventures or creatures. For the upcoming second, I am using the Shadowrun universe but not any adventure stuff from it. Partly, that's because I don't trust the Shadowrun authors to hit the right balance of darkness and brightness for my taste--I need a world where there's both light and dark, otherwise it's just...contrived. If there isn't anything good worth protecting, who gives a damn? And if there's no actual darkness it ain't cyberpunk.

 

[bsss]

In the middle, leaning homebrew. I am actually preparing to run a published adventure (for a 13th Age Glorantha PbP, because I don't really know Glorantha well) for the first time in maybe 20 years --- otherwise, I do my own branching paths/set pieces adventures and steal adventure-stuff from published adventures.

As you say, the effort of winching a published adventure into my campaigns is just too great. They're easier to pilfer ideas from.

 

[overgeeked]

Where do you actually sit — 100% homebrew, verbatim-faithful to the published text, or somewhere in the middle?

When I run D&D-likes, I run them as open-world sandboxes. I fill them with content for the players to interact with. I will drop location-based content from modules (dungeons, towns, etc) into the sandbox, but nothing like an adventure path. So not 100% homebrew, but closer to ~90% homebrew.

And the one I'm more curious about: how do your players feel about it?

They seem to love it. They like the freedom to choose, the consequences if problems are ignored, etc. I strive to evoke the feeling of a living, breathing, changing world. Doesn’t always work. But that’s the goal.

 

[Distracted DM]

I'm somewhere in the middle and I think that's where a lot of people are - I hesitate to say most, but it could very well be true.
And my players seem to be quite OK with it. After all, they're the ones largely asking for certain Adventure Paths to be run because they've heard things about them and want to give them a go, AND they're the ones creating characters that will push at the boundaries and want their ideas incorporated. So naturally, that puts us in the middle as I use the AP as the main backbone of the campaign while rewriting stuff to incorporate their input.
And, as far as I'm concerned, this is what you're expected to do with published adventures - customize them to fit your own game and group of players.

While it may be expected... I wonder if it's spelled out anywhere in 5e adventures or books. It was in at least a few of the previous editions' adventures, but I do not recall whether or not 5e states that anywhere.

 

[tombowings]

I've never see the appeal of using adventures written by someone else. They always clash with the thematics of my world.

Besides, isn't crafting the realm and populating it the fun of being a DM?