D&D 5E Published Adventures: Yea or Nay?

[mcbobbo]

In addition to being able to borrow from adventures I like the shared experience. I've had fun talking about adventures with other gamers and what has worked and what didn't.

Very true. This can be pretty awesome when the adventure is widely known enough. Talking about your home game typically goes the other direction, IME. For this reason I often read adventures that I doubt I'll ever run.

 

[The_Gneech]

I love good adventures and always want more. Sometimes I run them straight as written, sometimes I leave 'em on the shelf, sometimes I kill 'em and take their stuff for another adventure of my own design.

Also, I don't get the idea that 5E has somehow "failed" in the adventure department. Lost Mine of Phandelver is really good!

-The Gneech

 

[TerraDave]

I like em and use em. Though these days its unlikely I would use an adventure published after 1984, or at least based on something published in 84 or earlier.

Rules have gotten better, adventures, its more mixed.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

If they go back to 1E style adventures, yes. If the stick with the hardcover/adventure path style, then a resounding NO! As for what I do with them, I use them (mostly) as is, mine them for ideas, and read them for my own pleasure.

 

[MortalPlague]

I run and play homebrew, mostly. But I won't hesitate to run an adventure that catches my interest. Or to steal one and plunk it down in my campaign. The important part is that the table is having fun!

 

[Rod Staffwand]

I don't run them, but I'll peruse them for ideas on occasion. I find them a boring read, totally impersonal to my campaign, and not much of a time saver.

I honestly don't see how reading/memorizing a 30-60+ page adventure is any sort of time saver. I run most of my games with a couple of pages of notes and a couple of pages of stats. If something doesn't get used it goes in the archive and trotted out when the PCs go off the rails and I need to improvise a bit more than usual. Once, I ran an epic quest into the Abyss with 15 minutes of mid-session prep and my players though it was one of our best.

 

[Hussar]

I have absolutely no problems admitting that someone like [MENTION=23937]James Jacobs[/MENTION], [MENTION=42043]Eric[/MENTION] Mona or [MENTION=2]Piratecat[/MENTION] can create better adventures than me. I loves me modules. Even the crap ones like Gargoyles or Puppets still have ideas worth yanking.

 

[Gilladian]

I have a home campaign world, and I really only want to run adventures that fit into it fairly well. But that still leaves a lot of room for published modules. I've used them for years, and I'm sure I'll keep on using them. Phandelver is a good example. The town of Phandalin got pulled out, remapped, had a few new NPCs added to it, a shift in setting from "a volcano erupted here" to "the dragonwar ended five years ago here". The town mayor became a political appointee of the local Count, and has now been replaced by Sir Whatsisface who was rescued by the party - who were the Count's hirelings. The Redbrands were a mercenary group during the war, and they settled here in Phandalin when their trade collapsed after the war, and took up banditry and slaving to make ends meet. Wave Echo Cave, Cragmaw Castle (aka Caer Mawr) and a couple other sites became ancient ruins of the previous empire, and Venomfang is the youngest offspring of a dragon killed by Greenvale's armies during the - you guessed it - Dragonwar.

So yeah, a good adventure module is good fodder. Some get ripped apart and used piecemeal, while others get major plot points but not the structure of the adventure re-used, while others the "dungeon" gets used, but not much else.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I must have read a bad adventure or two back in the day that put me off. I spent 25 years snobbishly against published adventures, and only ever ran ones I wrote myself.

Lately I haven't had time for that (though some days I think I could write my own faster than it takes me to read a published adventure, so "time" is kind of a bad excuse) so I enjoy running published adventures.

Even bad ones. I can always adjust them...

So once I would have said no, but now a definite yes.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

I'm not interested in published adventures, I won't play them, won't read them, won't buy them, and if future material is tied too closely to official modules, I won't buy that either.