Unauthorized "Fan Cut" Adventures

[Simplicity]

Given the fact that almost every adventure that a DM integrates into their
campaign is changed someone, I'm surprised D&D hasn't seen more "fan cut"
adventures. For those who don't know the term, a fan cut is like a director's cut... made by the fan community for a movie. Typically, such re-editting is unauthorized and possibly illegal. "Fan Cuts" have been showing up for movies (I've heard of supposedly 'better' versions of Star Wars Episode I, for example... and just plain different versions of 'Harry Potter').

Given that this is occuring for movies, why aren't we seeing it more in D&D adventures? As a community, ENWorld knows a lot of the 'flaws' of classic adventures: misplaced ropers, overly powerful half-dwarf slavers...

If you could make a "Fan Cut" of a classic (or even new classic) adventure, what adventure would it be, and what would you change?

For me, I'm thinking of a better Shackled City adventure path... And looking at the new Dragon magazine topics (ecology of Dark Ones)... Oh, what a nice fit that could be.

 

[GSHamster]

Well, part of it is that it is a lot easier to write your own adventure than it would be to make your own movie. Plus you can sort of 'edit' an adventure while you run it, imprinting it with your own twists and personality, in a way that you really can't with a movie.

 

[Endur]

Every GM "ad lib's" and interprets the module. No two games will be exactly alike.

So, movies and modules are completely different, in that the module fans are constantly producing fan versions of the modules.

 

[Arnwyn]

Given that this is occuring for movies, why aren't we seeing it more in D&D adventures? As a community, ENWorld knows a lot of the 'flaws' of classic adventures: misplaced ropers, overly powerful half-dwarf slavers...

What do you mean? We see it all the time. Heck, Quasqueton has an entire series on the older modules about what people's experiences were (which includes what people did to modify them), and when WotC's adventure path modules first came out, people were pointing out problems and solutions all the time. And, as others have mentioned, almost everyone will run an adventure their own way to best suit their campaign - so almost every version is a "fan cut".

Do you mean "why don't we see fan versions posted more often"? Well, there's that who legality issue you yourself brought up. Seeing how strict WotC's conversion guidelines turned out, nobody is allowed to (and nobody wants to bother) - rightfully so, I might add.

 

[Kalendraf]

On a related note, I suspect many DM's write intro or conclusion adventures to allow smoother transitions to/from published adventures. I suspect some of these could be quite useful to other DM's. I'm not sure how how copyright issues would affect this, as you'd likely need to borrow at least a few of the names for purposes of explanation.

 

[smetzger]

There are some on Monte's RttToEE forum. There are lots of posts on that forum about how people have changed certain things about a particular encounter, how they have adapted it for FR, what changes were made for an evil campaign, and what changes were made to incorporate splat books. The biggest is the update to the 3.5 ruleset.

I don't think we see more because most adventures are short lived and there isn't a whole lot of ongoing fan support for it. I think longer adventures that have a dedicated and active messageboard have a much better chance of variations being available.

*:> Scott