D&D 5E Published Campaign Setting or Home Brew?

[AriochQ]

Homebrew. Published material always feels too linear and when it isn't players often treat it like its linear and its a waste of money.

I think you are conflating campaign settings with adventures. A campaign setting is different than an adventure arc. I never use published adventures, but my campaign takes place in Greyhawk. It is far from linear. The advantage is that there is tons of material regarding the setting which I can draw upon as needed. I don't think one person could ever generate the amount of detail available in Greyhawk or FR.

In college I played in a homebrewed campaign (the DM worked at GDW and later went on to work at TSR), it was an excellent campaign made by a gaming professional, but even then did not come close to the amount of detail available in published settings. Mostly because a single person can only do so much work.

 

[Bupp]

I've mostly run Greyhawk, but I mix in some homebrew now and again.

 

[Shiroiken]

When I first started as a DM, I ran a "Greyhawk" game that had Mystara on the far side of the world, with the Hollow World under it. Had I known more about the Realms, I probably would have put it off to the east (GH has a primary east coast and Faerun a west coast, so this would have been perfect). I pretty much ignored canon, except that I did update with the Greyhawk Wars once I got From the Ashes.

I fiddled with Dragonlance, Birthright, and a couple others afterwords, and then I ran several homebrew worlds. I liked making my own worlds because I could fiddle with the player's expectations. Looking back, I don't think these worlds were very good, but some worked very well for the story I was trying to tell. I decided to return to Greyhawk though, since I got tired of reinventing the wheel each time.

The only real caveat I can give about running a published setting is: IGNORE CANON if it goes against what you want. I foolishly ran L5R/Rokugan for years trying to keep as close to the official story as possible. Eventually I realized that it was really hurting my games so I stopped. Ran my 2nd best campaign (any rpg) ever after that.

 

[Sunseeker]

I think you are conflating campaign settings with adventures. A campaign setting is different than an adventure arc. I never use published adventures, but my campaign takes place in Greyhawk. It is far from linear. The advantage is that there is tons of material regarding the setting which I can draw upon as needed. I don't think one person could ever generate the amount of detail available in Greyhawk or FR.

In college I played in a homebrewed campaign (the DM worked at GDW and later went on to work at TSR), it was an excellent campaign made by a gaming professional, but even then did not come close to the amount of detail available in published settings. Mostly because a single person can only do so much work.

I don't play established settings, so while I may be conflating the two, adventures are unnecessary. All my adventures are designed to either be generic enough to be ported between games if I like them or are designed specifically as part of the larger campaign world.

So it's really neither here nor there.

 

[Snoring Rock]

Back in 1977 I ran a game with the blue Holmes basic D&D. My buddy was deeply into Lord of the Rings but did not play D&D. He helped me develop an incredible world based on our collaboration. My map was hand drawn in manilla graph paper. He and I spent hours drawing pictures of monsters and dungeons. Good times.

My hope, now that I am switching to 5e is to rebuild that world and run a campaign there. Lots of work ahead.

 

[Lancelot]

Homebrew. Which I've been running for nearly 30 years. For the last ten years, we've been doing 6 hours on a Thursday night each week, and about 7 hours every other Sunday. Previous to that, about 4 hours average per week. So... about 9,000 hours? Maybe take off 1,000 hours to account for "minor" dabbling in Gamma World, Rolemaster, Star Wars D20/Saga, etc. Call it 8,000 hours, then.

...which explains why there's no point in me moving to a new campaign world. Every time our group TPKs, we advance the world timeline slightly. Maybe by a couple months, maybe by 30 years. One of my current players was there for the first session; 30 years ago real-time, nearly 240 years ago homebrew-time. I've seen all of the following occur:

1) PCs who are the children, or grandchildren, or even more distant descendants, of PCs who were played years ago in real-time.

2) One PC who is now the ruler of a major empire, but in a humorous way. His character is widely perceived by the populace as a puppet and a fool, because of silly things he did in his adventuring career. The PC simply lucked his way into the throne by virtual of being the last survivor in a high-level campaign. And now, 10 years later in real-time, the empire's citizens regularly recount stories of his adventuring shenanigans ("Remember when the emperor begged for his life after being ambushed by three hobgoblins? ...have you heard about the time he tried to seduce a polymorphed hag? ...what about the time he spent a day as a statue in a basilisk's garden?). The PC himself has no agency, and has been long retired. But the legend lives on.

3) Nations rise and fall. Heck, the actual geography has risen and fallen on a few occasions, when we were playing particularly apocalyptic / epic campaigns.

4) The stories of the PCs are baked into the mythology of the world. A PC builds a tower or a mine? ...it gets added to the maps. A PC slays a major NPC or crushes a cult? ...it gets added to the history, and will be referred to in future campaigns. The party TPKs? ...their failure has ramifications which often inform the start of a future campaign.

Given that kind of history, the benefits of the homebrew for me are pretty obvious. The players can see the effects of their actions on the world. They are the protagonists, even if their names and roles change every 6-9 months (the average length of one of our campaigns, before it TPKs).

I can't get that with the Forgotten Realms. Joe PC can't kill Manshoon permanently, accidentally open a gate to the Abyss and turn Cormyr into a burning wasteland, then seize the throne of Amn. 45 Realms-years later, the grandchildren of the new King of Amn won't be waging a five-nation war with Thay, only to be betrayed by... [cough] ...anyway, you get the picture. I mean, sure... you can do that with the Forgotten Realms. But, for me, it's always going to feel fake. Ignore for the moment the irony of me claiming that an imaginary homebrew fantasy world is somehow more authentic.

The point is that it's not the real Realms. Every new supplement produced basically tells me: that's not what happened. Your players didn't do that. In the Year of the Disgraced Comedian (or whatever it is in the Realms Reckoning; I've honestly lost track), here's what actually happened according to the latest module/novel/CRPG. You can't see your new tower on the map. You're not listed as the ruler of Amn. Some world-sundering event occurred, but you didn't have a hand in it. Your PCs are not actually the heroes. They're there to impact things, sure... but only on the edges. After they're gone, there will still be a Waterdeep, never fear. And Szass Tam. And Drizzt. There will always be a Drizzt.

So: Go the Homebrews! It's a lot of work, but it's worth it for everyone. I'll happily pillage Forgotten Realms supplements for adventure ideas and other cool things, but I'll be equally happy to never see another campaign setting released by WotC as long as I live. I'm actually quite pleased with the current Adventure Supplement strategy. It's a better use for my money than the fifth iteration of the same-old / same-old campaign setting stuff that everyone can download and re-use from 1e/2e/3e/4e (personal advice: get the 3e version of the Realms... that hardback is awesome).

[...and, final thought, what would be my answer if I had to pick an existing campaign setting to start anew? Planescape. Punk tieflings + smiling fiends + aggressive philosophy + infinite staircases + tripping the astral = awesome]

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

I like published settings, principally FR, but I also have campaigns I want to run in Dark Sun, Eberron, and Midnight.

I like the idea of homebrew but I simply am map-tarded. I don't want the hassle of creating maps for my games. I do collect various world maps that I find online and save them for that day in my retirement when I decide to build my own world but I would rather save that creative space in my brain for ideas I can use within the boundaries of someone else's creation. And that's another thing: I like colouring inside the lines. I do find boundaries to be surprisingly liberating... and, when they're not, you can easily colour outside of them.

 

[Wik]

Always homebrew, for the simple reason that when I run in a published setting, I tend to want to "stick to the books" and not make up new stuff. When I homebrew, I have rough ideas, and then react to what the players are wanting/doing, and adjust the gray areas of my campaign to suit it.

For example, my current world started in 4e, and has switched over to 5th. When I first designed it, I had a loose map and "an empire". Due to starting PCs, I learned that my world had a dragonborn island, the empire was composed of Tieflings (and they had a tragic history), and that minotaurs were searching for their homeland.

I've been adding to it ever since, due to player choices in play, my own desires based on adventures I want to run, and new PCs coming into the mix. Since we've started fifth, I've discovered that there's a druid going around awakening animals to create some sort of army, a religious feud boiling over, and that the southern lands are filled with jungles.

I like being surprised by my gaming, being creative at the drop of the hat, and producing something new and unique... and homebrewing gives me that.

Plus, I like being able to steal ideas from here and there, drop them into my own world with the serial numbers filed off, and then claiming the final product as my own. It's peachy.

 

[LapBandit]

I homebrew on top of the Forgotten Realms. The elves are less friendly than in most FR literature, severe and removed, from slightly to extremely xenophobic. The dwarves concentrate on staying underground unless they belong to no clan hold, then you can be sure they are in the process of retaking an old one or creating a new one. Half-orcs are extremely rare, human women almost always finding a way to either get rid of the pregnancy or disown the child shortly thereafter if it looks remotely orcish. Half-elves are an oddity, few and far between. Gnomes are slightly more haughty and removed, looking down their noses at the other, less intelligent, races. The biggest threat to civilization are orcs in the North and Hobgoblins pretty much everywhere else. Thay is much more active along the Sword Coast, in fact, they are trying (in secret) to repopulate and control Leilon.

 

[fuindordm]

I run both. My current campaign is homebrew because I wanted to run an argonauts/sinbad/lost in space style campaign with Arabian themes, and nothing I own really fits the bill. But I've happily run campaigns in Eberron and Greyhawk, and would love to try other settings if WotC would just update them.

Typically my homebrew settings start with a 2-3 page description, hopefully enough to inspire players, and I add depth as we go along in the form of adventure backgrounds and player contributions. Each adventure might have another 2-3 pages of backstory that ties it into the larger setting as well as giving the maps and monsters reasons to exist.

I'm not one to keep running the same setting for 30 years though. After 2-3 years in a campaign I feel like trying something new.