Percentage of Original Material

[EOL]

Follow-up...

I'm sure all of us (with the possible exception of Gargoyle ) have bought stuff we haven't used but does anybody have a problem with writing original material that never gets used?

I find that it's mostly little stuff, being anal about creating stats for all the NPC's in town even thought the players never actually have to fight any of them. Or crafting some beautiful area that the PC's never take the time to find.

 

[Kweezil]

To be honest, I've always tried to write my own material for my games, but there's just so much cool stuff in the published material (and I end up buying almost anything with a d20 on it these days) that much of it ends up getting worked in. It probably helps that there are still huge undefined swathes of my campaign world that I can drop published material into.

 

[Laslo Tremaine]

OT

Applenerd, you rock my world!

Clarus the Dog-Cow rules!

 

[jhallum]

Mostly new, some old.

I've been a big fan of Toril for some time, but I tend to use out of the way places for my games, and create my own adventures out of various adventure hooks in the storyline. I've run games in the Bloodstone Lands, Tsurlagol (pre Living City), and now an epic game in Chessenta. I like areas that give me a guideline, but don't spoon feed me most things that I need. I still have to come up with the details, which is fine.

I think that my next game will be held in a world of my own devising, though. I think I need to be challenged at the world building level at some point.

---

My 3E game,

The Beholders of the Inner Sea

 

[Pielorinho]

Discounting rules stuff (spells, PrCs, etc.), I probably create 75% of my stuff. I'm currently running the first published adventure that I've run in a campaign in years -- ever since I ran the first Temple of Elemental Evil, now that I think about it.

Even now, though, I'm tweaking the adventure in pretty big ways. Changing descriptions of monsters in some places, changing monster types in other places, changing motivations across the board, changing buildings and their history, and so on. I have trouble with even the best published adventures in terms of plausibility -- often bad guys seem almost random in their actions and in their alliances -- so I figure I gotta tweak things if I'm going to enjoy running them.

Daniel

 

[Terraism]

My group isn't able to get together as often as they could in the old days, so we're not really playing much of a continuing campaign. What we've done is create a "basic" character and we run them through published modules whenever we get together - adjusting the level as apropriate. I'm doing my best to keep it so we're moving up levels as we go (so they can keep magic items and stuff) , but we also hold on to all stats for each level in case we go back and do another 5th level adventure again (or whatever).

So, no time for the "in-between" stuff that makes up a campaign - we're just hitting published stuff and I'm loosly tieing them in.

-HM

I'm doing the *exact* same thing... we don't get together often enough to get involved in a storyline, so it's all one-shots... and, thus, I'm really starting to hate DMing. I need plotlines! More than two hours worth! As such, I didn't vote... the campaign I'm running uses 100% other people material... but the campaign I'd LIKE to run is all me!

 

[Ulrick]

It usually winds up being 80% original, 20% other (published material).

I have A LOT of published material (adventure, campaign setting stuff, etc.) And everytime I start a campaign or enter a new phase of a current one I think to myself "Gee, this would be a great time to use some of this stuff. I bought it, I might as well use it." But noooo....my creative juices start flowing I start thinking up "better" stuff that would be easier to put into my campaign world.

In my campaign world, there are no orcs. None. Now, ask yourself, how many adventures and campaign settings have ORCS in them? GAAAHHHH.

Ulrick

 

[EOL]

It works both ways for me, sometimes I have such an original idea that I scrap whatever published stuff I was going to do or completely rewrite it.

On the other hand sometimes I come across and adventure that's so cool that I just have to run it and then I end up bending over backwards to modify my campaign so that it dovetails into the published adventure I want to run.

 

[Darkness]

I write most of it, and when I use published stuff, I change it so much that I end up writing most of the adventure myself anyway.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I use published campaign settings pretty much as is but write my own adventures. Sometimes I will lift ideas from issues of Dungeon or old modules I have but I try to make as much up myself. I'd say its about a 50-50 split for me.