Using Purchased Adventures: How much work do you do?

[DarrenGMiller]

As appears to be the norm here, I do a lot of reworking of the adventure. Mostly the same stuff that has been mentioned. I add/alter plot hooks (sometimes even scrapping the existing plot completely and only using encounters or locales), customize the BBEG's to fit my game (either change them or bring them in before the adventure if possible, even if only in rumor, etc.), rename or change locations, work in existing adversaries or NPC's the PC's might already have, scrap the text boxes, check stats, fix errata, etc. It sounds like a great deal of work, but what is different from doing it "from scratch" is the initial creative time. Someone has built me a framework and I add to, tears down parts, customize and complete it. With my work schedule, that is all I have time for. That said, I hated the later 2E adventures where there was no adventure really, just a bunch of background and suggestions. Those seemed to take more time than doing it from scratch.

DM

 

[Psion]

I do greatly prefer it when an adventure gives you good places to "plug in" your game to the adventure. A good example is banewarrens. All of the involved organizations are fully fleshed out, but:

- Each involved organization is broken down, so you can replace it with an appropriate one from your world, and
- Each organization lists where all of its agents are involved in the adventure, so if you you have to make changes or insert known members of the organization, you don't have to hunt for them.

But generally, I find it difficult enough to retool an adventure to fit my campaign, I pretty well have to strip it down. Though YMMV (frex, I found it much easier to drop adventures into Second World than my own campaign setting.)

A little off of the adaptation topic, I find many adventures difficult to use simply because they are not well organized and hide information. For example, I remember one otherwise well regarded adventure hid the information about the entrance to a dungeon in a pile of non-headered text. Many other adventures will announce what the goal is pretty clear, but in the adventure description, it obscures where the actual object, person, or other item or interest among pages of room, encounter, or event descriptions.

This may seem an odd criteria, but I don't want to have to read an adventure from cover to cover before I use it. I demand good summaries, and the body of the adventure text should let you know how to run a room, encounter, or situation without correlating information from other parts of the adventure. (FWIW, I think WLD scores well on this score; it even includes scaling information right in the text and writes the rooms in a very clear manner.)

 

[MonsterMash]

I usually tend to be pretty selective with the adventures I buy so that I only need to put in the changes to location and character names to run as written, but may tinker a bit more to tie into some of the ongoing plots IMC.

 

[Wormwood]

If I have to do more than recite the boxed text, I think I'm being ripped off.

Seriously. When I'm awash in free time, adventure-writing is fun; but when I purchase a module (or Dungeon), I want the author to do my heavy lifting for me.

 

[Ravellion]

It very much depends. Since I use a homebrewed setting, there are certain adjustments I can count on having to make- things to do with religion, geography or history- but a good module can be adjusted as needed on the fly.

I think almost no DM can run a module on the fly though. You really must read it through at least once. Otherwise, I agree.

Rav

 

[Berandor]

I do too much. I read at least twice, then I make some handouts, change the background if needed, switch NPCs as needed, change situations as needed. I write down the NPC and monster stats into a statblock form I designed for myself (changing classes, monsters and levels as needed), and I ready initiative cards.
I write down some additional notes.

And then I run the adventure and forget 50% of what I changed/noted - which is why I do so much in the first place DM, know thyself.

But what I can say is that the pre-game work makes me know the module quite well, and I can adapt and anticipate changes *in* the game on the fly, then.

But I'm like barsoomcore, in that I just *have* to fiddle with everything.

 

[WizarDru]

Good answers, all.

Let's look at this from a different tack. Clearly, unless you're using a mega-module like RtToEE, Banewarrens or a series of connected modules like Freeport or the like, every module is going to require some degree of customization to a particular campaign. Wormwood, however, raises an interesting point: what heavy lifting are you looking at the author of a module to do?

For example: do you want breakdowns on skill checks (it's a 2" ledge and slippery, so DC14) or just a flat number? Whisper of the Vampire's Blade has been widely criticized for being a real railroad (both for the location and the plot ), since it requires you

Spoiler

to keep narrowly missing the villian of the piece, repeatedly throughout the module.

Do you want suggestions at how to recover from the sort of situation that reanjr mentions, where the PCs completely derailed the adventure 25% of the way in? I'm reminded of Wulf Ratbane's description of the drow module where they stopped the story (Queen of Spiders, was it?) literally somewhere in the first act, when the ambush that is supposed to kick-off the story proved fatal for all the bad-guys, effectively ending the module right there (which is probably more indicative of bad setup for that encounter, but let's ignore that possibility for now).

What kind of factors and information do you consider most important in the DM toolkit, beyond stat-blocks and flavor text?

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I'm not very good at running modules. If I need the book open in front of me then it 'does something' to my game. Not sure what it is, but it tends not to go well.

I do like mining modules for plots and NPC ideas. I'll read them cover to cover a couple of times. Then put them down and rewrite things from memory. Quite often combine 2 or 3 of them together to make something odd.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

As far as module layout goes, I really liked the old Shadowrun modules and the way they were laid out:

The module was split into scenes. Each scene had a setup, what would likely happen and a number of exit options covering the way things could go. Also which scenes could logically follow from each exit. In the event of the PCs wandering off track, ways they might be enticed back to the module. They tended to cover a good range of the possible outcomes. Often dealt with the impact of the death of a major NPC, PCs losing and other 'disasters'.

There was sometimes a 'pushing the envelope' section giving some ideas of beefing up the challenge for a tougher group.

At the end, they'd cover several ways they thought the module might end and where things could go from there.


All in all a really cool format. Not all of the material lived up to it, but you can't have everything!

I find a lot of the DnD modules I've got run in a much more linear fashion. I feel some of them have material that could have benefited from this treatment.

 

[Ed Cha]

I use them mostly to get inspiration for ideas and just read them for fun, too.