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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talien" data-source="post: 4150972" data-attributes="member: 3285">Simply put, adventures are shortcuts.  I completely rewrite everything I use – but I need something to start with.  It might be as simple as a stat block, which in itself can suck up hours of time to create for the more complex systems.  It could be simply be a plotline that I hadn’t thought of.  Or it could be maps and descriptions of rooms and areas – I don’t have the time to flesh out a prison complex, a bustling city, or a dungeon.  Published adventures do that for me, so even if I do want to tweak it, I have enough raw materials to work with that at least I have a choice.So back to my three points:A) I disagree with your parallel that adventures are to campaign settings as washer/dryers are to automobiles.  My parallel would be: I expect a mechanic to know how to fix my car, INCLUDING the parts that depend on the engine.  The engine (the core game system) runs everything else.  If the mechanic only insists on working on the engine, I’m much less confident that he knows how to fix the other parts of my car. B) I fully appreciate that every game is, in essence, a unique product. But there’s degrees of uniqueness – there are plenty of Forgotten Realms games that work just fine using the Forgotten Realms campaign, and update them when new material comes out.  Your game is much more customized, and you’re far more confident in your GM skills, so you can customize all you want with confidence.  I’m with you on that – I’m practically system-blind at this point, so much so that I’ve resorted to adapting movie scripts to scenarios.  But I still need raw material: maps, NPCs, statistics.  If a company has expertise on the game world they published, I expect them to be able to churn this information out faster than I could by creating it from scratch.  C) If game companies want a commitment from me as a GM, they need to court me.  If we’re going to enter into a long-term relationship, there better be a long term investment in my game, and scenarios/adventures are one way a game company invests in its GM-base.  I see a commitment to publishing adventures as a measure of both the company’s attitude towards its players and its long-term strategy.  As others have said, writing campaign material is easier than writing scenarios.  When you’re inventing things from whole cloth, who will contradict you?  But writing adventures/scenarios that USE those settings are harder, because it requires ideas to be put into practice (does that NPC’s philosophy really play out as described in his stat block?), tests the rules system (what happens when mecha fight a squad of foot soldiers – is it balanced?  Should it be?  That wasn’t covered in the main rulebook…), and must be balanced against all the character creation systems in the game (does it cater only to a particular type of PC?  Why or why not?  Is that the PC type that the core rules expect you to create?).So adventures are far more than just an easy template for harried GMs.  Campaign worlds are templates for a game, but adventures are how you actually PLAY the game.  If a company can’t produce that (even for free), it’s not producing a complete game.  And if it’s not producing a complete game, I feel well within my rights to distrust the rules system, and by proxy, the company.</blockquote>

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