Must You Tell Your Players What Adventure You Are Running?

[payn]

Yes and no.

If we're talking a published campaign, then I will tell them the name. No reason not to. It does give some ideas. At present I am running a D&D 2024 campaign using Ghosts of Saltmarsh as the base plus additional scenarios and some plans for the future with specific character backgrounds. By the name I suggested they be aware that it will feature a fair bit of nautical flavour but warned that they will have to discover whether the "ghosts" of the title are literal or figurative. I feel that is all they need to know.

Personally when it comes to individual adventures I drop in that they don 't need to know. It spoils the surprise. One of my players does play occasionally with another group so if I think he might have played a published adventure I will just check the name with him first but so far no.

Realistically though I don't see why you should need to tell them. Maybe it's something of the newer RPG generation but we never needed to do that back in the old days so I don't see really why it's considered anything important now.

There definitely was a vibe of "players aint supposed to read certain GM stuff" back in the day. My guess was to keep surprises from the players, but after decades of playing trolls hurt by fire or acid or mimics being a thing just isnt a secret worth keeping or worrying about.

At a certain point, I either stopped playing with old school compartamentalists, or the folks I played with got more interested in GMing and less interested in secret keeping. Part of the collective experience is talking about how your GM and group ran the published adventure. This has allowed a collective wisdom to be shared and general GMing to just simply get better. In the last 15 years ive come to really appreciate a players campaign guide and see it as a bit folly not to provide one to them. YMMV.

 

[TheSword]

Campaign book - yes
Individual segments, modules, chapters, locations borrowed from other adventures - no.

You need to know if the players like sausage but they don’t need to know how the sausages are made.

I always try and have a good understanding of what D&D experiences my players have had - what adventures they have played or run and we have an open discussion of what has been read as I wouldn’t run for a player a campaign if they had read it or played it before. A small location or chapter of one wouldn’t bother me though.

 

[EthanSental]

No, but depends on the group more than likely. I had an introductory adventure that could lead into the of the 5e adventures so depending on which next part appealed to them, i then moved the themed dm screen out in front. I had the generic 5e dm screen out front facing them and as they didn’t notice I had three stacked behind it. I have the DM wall thing but don’t use the middle section, just the wings so they tend to look at what I have in the towers and not the generic 5e dm screen.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Must? No. Can? Sure.

 

[Theory of Games]

I tell them everything: campaign/adventure name, setting info, house-rules, everything they need so that when they make characters those characters fit our shared expectations. I've been vague about what I was running in the past and had players show up with characters that didn't exactly fit what was planned. So now I tell the players everything. It's just easier

 

[Tonguez]

Not really
Running a homebrew world means I change and cherrypick stuff anyway, quite iften I dont even know where a particular bit originated.

If its a big campaign - Enemy Within, Kingmaker etc then sure, its fair

 

[KYRON45]

So I would recommend it, as it gives players a heads up to avoid reading the material.
Now, if the concern is "If I tell my players which module I am running, they will go out and read it" and they would do so even if you told them specifically so they would not do this, boot them. You don't have a healthy table dynamic.

I can barely get my players to read their character sheets.

 

[Ath'kethin]

I have never, in over 30 years of gaming, had players who gave half a toss about the name of the adventure I was running. If any ever asked, I'd tell them, but nobody ever has. That's across many different games/systems, from various editions of D&D to derivatives like Dungeon Crawl Classics to totally different games like Castle Falkenstein or whatever.

The exceptions have been when I was running modules at Gen Con or similar, when the signup required that I put in the module name. But again, I don't know that anyone actually cared what they were called.

 

[Kannik]

Interesting! Never given this thought before. Hmm, I would say I (and my groups) fall into the camp of:

If it's a long-form/story-path -- Yes

If it's a major/well known module, with the intent that will be the majority of the 'campaign' -- Yes

If I'm using a series of adventures (and perhaps mixed in with original scenarios) as part of a larger (but not a pre-published) campaign -- No, but I would let them know the tone/flavour of the campaign prior to starting so that things maintain cohesion and they are informed when they create their characters.

 

[CleverNickName]

Unless you want your players to roll up the most anti-vampire hunting party of vampire-hunters that ever hunted a vampire, you should probably not tell them that they are going to be playing Curse of Strahd. A friend of mine is running that adventure path and literally everyone at the table is rolling up the next Van Helsing.