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?

[Toe Knee Nose]

My comment wasn't an insult. It was an honest question. I'm honestly not sure what the fun of DMing is except for world building.

Oh gawd.

I LOATHE world building. It's the least fun part of gaming for me. I have no interest in building some world. I do it because there needs to be a location for adventures to occur in, but, scratch the surface and it's all cardboard underneath.

For me, the fun of DMing comes during play. Managing the group so that everyone has a good time (including myself) is the best part of DMing for me. Detailing out the intricacies of elven tea parties is the lowest priority for me. Could not care less about the history of the setting beyond what is needed for the group to function and if the players want to add to the history of the world? FANTASTIC. Zero problems. You want to bring in an intelligent undead skeleton as your PC? I'll add that in ASAP and wrap all sorts of adventure hooks around it.

To me, world building is what happens during and after play. The players did X and Y, so, I guess that means that Z is now true in the setting.

 

[TwoDollar DM]

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.

you might love Fantasy Grounds where you copy the adventure text then delete the stuff you dont like -rather than writing it out and then put the whole note onto the map, or link to another note then export the whole thing later for your notes

 

[Johngernaut]

I LOATHE world building. It's the least fun part of gaming for me. I have no interest in building some world. I do it because there needs to be a location for adventures to occur in, but, scratch the surface and it's all cardboard underneath.

Building a WORLD is an enormous amount of work. Drawing a map is 1% of the problem. Every place has its own culture and history, local figures etc. And it's extremely difficult to do any of this in a way that doesn't duplicate one of the many fantasy settings that already exist.

For this reason I do make use of setting guides like Ravenloft or Sword Coast. I'll probably get the Greyhawk guide when it comes out if it looks decent. Having all this background lore sorted out for me means I can focus on the parts I care about which is the specific story and antagonists.

The adventure modules though, yeah I agree with the OP. Useless. I ran one of those once and it basically supplied all the parts that are fun and easy to make - encounters and dungeons. But it left me almost completely hanging with developed characters and dialogue which I find pretty difficult and very important to make games feel alive.

 

[Coroc]

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.)

Psycho chicken

 

[Li Shenron]

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.

I started off my DMing life long ago with a homebrew adventure. IIRC I only had the 3.0 PHB, so I think I made the adventure up using only the sample monsters in the PHB appendix.

Since then, I have built a fair library of published adventures (also of even older editions, esp. thanks to a friend who moved overseas and left me a box of old D&D stuff including many issues of Dungeon Magazine) so I continued DMing mixing up published material with homebrew elements. Mostly, I just recognized that if I completely designed an adventure from scratch, it wouldn't be any better than a published one but it would cost me more time compared to taking a published adventure and swapping elements I didn't like (for instance, I don't usually like gonzo-wierdos monsters and replace them with something more recognizable from folklore).

In recent years however, I wanted to run published adventures closer to the originals, especially famous adventures of the past which I never played back then. The purpose is to connect to a lot of people who played the same adventures, and have a shared experience. But as I run only 5.0 this usually means I have to convert them (i.e. use 5e versions of monsters) so the experience cannot fully be the same if the ruleset is different. And it's still hard to resist the urge of making my own modifications... one of my (very slowly) ongoing campaigns was supposed to be the original Ravenloft, then for serious time constraints of the group of friends who wanted to play it, I had to shrink it to become a one-shot game, failed at it (they didn't even manage to reach the castle on that single session), then we decided to continue it as a real campaign but the modifications were already in place and the result is not that close to the original.

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?

IMXP players don't care either way. I played with both newbies or casuals who wouldn't know the difference and true grognards who know better than anyone that it ultimately doesn't matter. I try to avoid players in their metaphorical "adolescent phase" of gaming, so I don't hear much complaints at all, neither about adventures nor rules or anything. I also generally play with friends, family, workmates and acquaintances rather than complete strangers, and among those people there are only a few who know much about published adventures, and quite certainly if they have already played an adventure before I am not going to run that one again.

 

[Retros_x]

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

I'm honestly not sure what the fun of DMing is except for world building.

Than you ironically lack a bit of creativity here, or maybe empathy towards other perspectives on the hobby: different hobbyists might enjoy different aspects of a hobby. This shouldnt be such a hard consideration.

DMing is much more than world building - you dont even need world building to DM. I enjoy running the game for my friends much more than crafting a fantasy world, actually playing it instead of living my unfulfilled author dreams in a way too large world file. If there is something about prepping I like, its definitely not the world building and lore, but the storylines and scenarios, actual dramatic questions, moral dilemmas, that stuff is the fun part of prep. The stuff I will actually see play out in the next sessions. I am not passionate about creating some landscape that looks like warped Europe/Asia with some fantasy politics that is just European history in a costume, because lets be real, thats 90% of the settings I read about, be it offical settings or homebrew.

Also peoples brains work differently. I personally, not just in the creative space, but also in my professional life and just in general - I work better when I have something to work with and I can improve that. Analyze whats good, whats bad, improving that. I am much less proficient when I have to start with the blank paper/canvas, the green field.

So I guess I indirectly already answered OPs question: I am definitely in the middle, I like to take something and build on that as a foundation. Much easier for me.

Also from a pure practical perspective: Building everything from scratch takes a LOT of time. I work fulltime, I have to do housework all by myself, I want to spent a lot of time with my friends and family, I have other hobbies, other creative endeavours, I do sport, I read, I play videogames, I want to learn more new stuff - Its not a lot of time in a week to spread over all these interests and duties so I have to prioritize hard. Building complete worlds is just not too important for me to justify the amount of time it would take from other stuff.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My comment wasn't an insult. It was an honest question. I'm honestly not sure what the fun of DMing is except for world building.

All of the other aspects you've listed are possible from the players' perspective, not only the DM's side of the screen (acting, seeing how others respond to the in-game challenges, seeing if the party can defeat the mastermind). Maybe I'm missing something, but world-building and making rulings (I'd argue this is really world-building, but I could see where others might disagree, especially if they view the rules as primary and the world secondary) seem like the only core difference between DMing and playing a character in another DM's world.

Does a joy have to be totally unique to be a joy?

A rhetorical question, but also kind of a direct question too. I don't understand why the joy has to be totally unique to GMing, utterly unrelated to the player experience. Besides, players do world-building too--it's just on a smaller scale, namely, their backstory. "But the GM can do whatever they want with world-building!" Sure, so can the player--up to the limit of acceptance by the group. Now, maybe the group usually allows the GM to make that call. But would you say that that then means you as GM could world-build truly, absolutely anything, and your players would not ever complain no matter what, under even the most bizarre, extreme, upsetting, obscene, unconscionable things? If not, then you are recognizing that the table's approval is still tacitly there, just rarely calling attention to itself.

More importantly, surely there must be some allowance made for creating combats? Players never do that. Or writing riddles/puzzles, or portraying a large and diverse cast of people (since players usually only play one character, and even when they don't, they rarely play multiple characters during a single session). Or creating brand-new magic items. None of those are "world-building" as I would define the term. Sure, many of them will relate to world-building you've already done, or might inspire you to do new/additional world-building, but that does not make these things constitutive of world-building any more than writing words onto paper or screen is automatically constitutive thereof.

 

[tombowings]

Does a joy have to be totally unique to be a joy?

A rhetorical question, but also kind of a direct question too. I don't understand why the joy has to be totally unique to GMing, utterly unrelated to the player experience. Besides, players do world-building too--it's just on a smaller scale, namely, their backstory. "But the GM can do whatever they want with world-building!" Sure, so can the player--up to the limit of acceptance by the group. Now, maybe the group usually allows the GM to make that call. But would you say that that then means you as GM could world-build truly, absolutely anything, and your players would not ever complain no matter what, under even the most bizarre, extreme, upsetting, obscene, unconscionable things? If not, then you are recognizing that the table's approval is still tacitly there, just rarely calling attention to itself.

More importantly, surely there must be some allowance made for creating combats? Players never do that. Or writing riddles/puzzles, or portraying a large and diverse cast of people (since players usually only play one character, and even when they don't, they rarely play multiple characters during a single session). Or creating brand-new magic items. None of those are "world-building" as I would define the term. Sure, many of them will relate to world-building you've already done, or might inspire you to do new/additional world-building, but that does not make these things constitutive of world-building any more than writing words onto paper or screen is automatically constitutive thereof.

I think we just disagree about the definition of world building.

 

[tombowings]

Than you ironically lack a bit of creativity here, or maybe empathy towards other perspectives on the hobby: different hobbyists might enjoy different aspects of a hobby. This shouldnt be such a hard consideration.

DMing is much more than world building - you dont even need world building to DM. I enjoy running the game for my friends much more than crafting a fantasy world, actually playing it instead of living my unfulfilled author dreams in a way too large world file. If there is something about prepping I like, its definitely not the world building and lore, but the storylines and scenarios, actual dramatic questions, moral dilemmas, that stuff is the fun part of prep. The stuff I will actually see play out in the next sessions. I am not passionate about creating some landscape that looks like warped Europe/Asia with some fantasy politics that is just European history in a costume, because lets be real, thats 90% of the settings I read about, be it offical settings or homebrew.

Also peoples brains work differently. I personally, not just in the creative space, but also in my professional life and just in general - I work better when I have something to work with and I can improve that. Analyze whats good, whats bad, improving that. I am much less proficient when I have to start with the blank paper/canvas, the green field.

So I guess I indirectly already answered OPs question: I am definitely in the middle, I like to take something and build on that as a foundation. Much easier for me.

Also from a pure practical perspective: Building everything from scratch takes a LOT of time. I work fulltime, I have to do housework all by myself, I want to spent a lot of time with my friends and family, I have other hobbies, other creative endeavours, I do sport, I read, I play videogames, I want to learn more new stuff - Its not a lot of time in a week to spread over all these interests and duties so I have to prioritize hard. Building complete worlds is just not too important for me to justify the amount of time it would take from other stuff.

I consider all of those things either world building or able to be accomplished from the players' side of screen.

 

[tombowings]

Oh gawd.

I LOATHE world building. It's the least fun part of gaming for me. I have no interest in building some world. I do it because there needs to be a location for adventures to occur in, but, scratch the surface and it's all cardboard underneath.

For me, the fun of DMing comes during play. Managing the group so that everyone has a good time (including myself) is the best part of DMing for me. Detailing out the intricacies of elven tea parties is the lowest priority for me. Could not care less about the history of the setting beyond what is needed for the group to function and if the players want to add to the history of the world? FANTASTIC. Zero problems. You want to bring in an intelligent undead skeleton as your PC? I'll add that in ASAP and wrap all sorts of adventure hooks around it.

To me, world building is what happens during and after play. The players did X and Y, so, I guess that means that Z is now true in the setting.

Is creating adventure hooks not world building? Is not adding the intelligence undead into the game no world building?

As for managing the group, I guess. But I don't manage the logistics of my game. I leave that to the players. They know I have no tolerance for event planning/management. I don't consider it a DM exclusive.