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?

[500 Toads]

shrug There's always a time investment anyway, wherein the GM should read thoroughly to understand any major actors and their motivations, and at least somewhat prepare to handle logical-but-unanticipated-by-author lines of action with less risk of needing to retcon things later due to inconsistencies. With something like D&D 5E, you'll also probably want to tweak loot for the party composition given that things like spell scrolls are limited in who can use them, and even among a category like "martial weapons" builds can make it so that somebody is much happier to see a glaive rather than a longsword, etc.

Have a larger or smaller party than expected, tweak. Got a group of players that's very into combat and very familiar with combat tactics and build optimization but you're running an adventure that's basically "story mode" difficulty when it comes to encounter design, tweak (significantly).

More severely... if it's something with a significant plot railroad, I know that I'll probably have to take a deep look for the various gaping plot holes and excessive railroading and address them, in order to make things organically make sense on their own right. For instance, if the plot involves somebody being framed for murder; well, then it's the GM's responsibility to be prepared to handle lines of inquiry including magical means (incl. Raise Dead, Zone of Truth, Detect Thoughts, Visions of the Past, etc) even if the author of the adventure instead chose to proceed as if the frame-up would simply be taken at face value by everybody and ignore possible objections in favor of merely pushing the party onto the next scripted bit of plot.

Conversely, if it's a sandbox... 'll know that I might need to put in more work to tie pieces together, to be prepared for when things might interact in unanticipated ways, and perhaps to tweak things to reduce decision paralysis etc.

 

[Shiroiken]

I've been running "modules" for decades, and I've never run one straight out of the box (the closest is when when I've run one-shots). IME, published adventures are designed to be broadly accessible so that they can be used by many different groups, but good DMs should customize them to fit their game. This could mean making adjustments to fit it in their world, adjusting encounters to fit the PCs capabilities, or fixing problems within the adventure (bad maps, poorly worded puzzles, plot holes, etc.). Yes, this can be a lot of work, especially in a poorly designed product, but overall it's still usually easier than coming up with the adventure whole cloth. Even with radically different systems, such as updating a 1E adventure to 5E, sometimes you just take the premise of an adventure and redo the details in the edition you're playing.

The question becomes value. The only 5E adventure products I've purchased were Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Vecna: Eve of Ruin, with mixed results. For GoS, the introduction, town, and low level adventures were really good, but I didn't enjoy the higher level stuff (which wasn't actually Greyhawk material, but generic material rehashed into Greyhawk). EoR required a ton of work to make playable, including a massive rewrite to the plot. Each provided me with a full campaign that was a lot of fun, so I guess they were worth it, but I'm gun shy on further adventure purchases. I'd rather update my existing collection of adventures (mostly BECMI and AD&D). If I've got to do a lot of work either way, I don't want to invest a lot of money into it.

 

[jasper]

When your players agreed to play in a published campaign, they agreed to TRY to color within the lines. So, you don't have to make that many changes.

 

[dulsi]

Oh please my dear lord do not let me die stupid before i find out what a tiger chair is

When playing 7 Days to Die with friends, we happened to have a storage box with mostly chairs. I removed everything else and started collecting all chairs. Eventually my friend noticed and labeled the box "Chairs? I guess". It latter because the Lady of Chairs.

For the adventure I had some aberrations infiltrate the cult of the Lady of Chairs to create living chairs as part of the plan to take over the world. (Usually my campaigns take a little while to go off the wall. This one started that way. The Kobold Gallus Knight comes from another game where they worship a psychic chicken.)

 

[Benjamin Olson]

If I am just sat with a blank canvas I usually really struggle to get to work on making anything. I'm not incapable of creating things without a prompt or constraints imposed upon me, but boy do I waste a lot of time not really getting started and rethinking the core premise six times and whatever.

So I usually start with a published module, but unless its my first time playing the game or I'm running organized play or something I'm really just going to take the module as a jumping off point.

I regret the time I've wasted actually trying to run anything from WotC's "big dumb campaign" books. All of them absolutely have some cool ideas I like, but if you're not running them by the book they have too many details and moving pieces (whose interrelationships are often not signposted) all of it poorly indexed to build your own campaign upon without being an enormous pile of work. They're also too much work to just run as is.

These days I really think the optimal pre-published campaign for me is one that lasts for 3-5 sessions so that I have something manageable to work from while I get to know a new batch of player characters, and then I can build things out from scratch based on those characters and their goals.

 

[kigmatzomat]

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?

I have done multi-year campaigns from scratch, produced multiple world bibles. I have also run campaigns that were 80% original and 20% published adventures mixed in either for some extra flavor or because it had an idea that meshed with my overall plot.

These days I am running Shadowrun, using what are truly some of the worst organized adventures ever, doing a lot of plot rewrite to hit the tone I want and address bad writing from 1993. (Flow charts make them so much better)

Players are fine with them all.

I can world build with any of them, either making pregen NPCs part of the world lore or swapping them out for an existing NPC. I always have to do some rewriting to maintain continuity after players do the unexpected, even with the homebrew stuff. I find it is much less work to rework a plot than the hours and hours I used to spend making maps from scratch.

I have found pregens are great for transitions, providing a different feel and context, and as the "beginning" of something they have minimal continuity issues to deal with. Just pick a good one as those NPCs may be around for a while if the PCs take a shine to them.

 

[Milli Rabbit]

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?

I run published adventures like so:
1. Read the book as much through as possible before session 1.
2. As I go through the chapters, I take notes on the most critical information and interesting NPCs to me or I think will be interesting for my table. Very brief notes.
3. I run session zero and explain the scenario. Ask players to develop a reason to be there. Then I link each of them to the notes I already made. For example, a player entering my Deadfall campaign was a former pirate. This will be useful in a later chapter where the party deals with pirates. I will sprinkle in foreshadowing earlier, though.
4. Sprinkle in foreshadowing. Again, brief notes. You're not writing an essay. NPC#3 in adventure one mentions "I heard some pirates in the southern seas were causing trouble for the Red Wizard's Knights."
5. Run the adventure mostly as-is otherwise unless Im super excited and motivated to add more like I am with adding a Chase scene in Eltabbar.

 

[TwoDollar DM]

I regret the time I've wasted actually trying to run anything from WotC's "big dumb campaign" books. All of them absolutely have some cool ideas I like, but if you're not running them by the book they have too many details and moving pieces (whose interrelationships are often not signposted) all of it poorly indexed to build your own campaign upon without being an enormous pile of work. They're also too much work to just run as is.

Yes this is my experience as well. Even with Fantasy Grounds where you can copy and then edit and rearrange whole sections it really becomes just some collected ideas/concepts only partially fitting together.

 

[TwoDollar DM]

2. As I go through the chapters, I take notes on the most critical information and interesting NPCs to me or I think will be interesting for my table. Very brief notes.

Yes I have my 'set' list of adventure elements

• Setting/Hook/History
• Plot Points
• Rooms/Areas
• NPCs
• Treasure
• Consequences

So I will keep, revise, remove or replace these elements and of course this happens much more quickly that it sounds.

 

[Milli Rabbit]

Yes I have my 'set' list of adventure elements

• Setting/Hook/History
• Plot Points
• Rooms/Areas
• NPCs
• Treasure
• Consequences

So I will keep, revise, remove or replace these elements and of course this happens much more quickly that it sounds.

Yeah, even that might be too much for me. I don't mess with much from the campaigns. Part of session zero is me explaining to the party what the goal of the campaign is. If they aren't interested in that goal, we dont do the campaign.

Deadfall is a spy thriller about undermining and stopping Szass Tam. If we can't agree on that sentence being the driver for the rest of the campaign, then Id rather not run it. You are spies. You can be flavors of spies but fundamentally murder hobos don't fit here. I would rather give natural consequences than let it slide. In the case of Deadfall, you get swarmed by high CR spellcasters and their knights. Its a death sentence. If you only sort of screw up, the adventure recommends some consequences.

The things I change are primarily adding bits I really want like the chase in Eltabbar just feels cool for a spy thriller, and making inconsequential NPCs more important by connecting them to the party. The hardest part of my prep is reading haha I've started utilizing the new Maps VTT features to add pins to maps. I think it'll be useful for running campaigns in the future. I just suck at organizing it right now and so it takes a lot more time than it will once I get a rhythm.