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Message: <blockquote data-quote="reanjr" data-source="post: 2090082" data-attributes="member: 20740">The only place I appreciate customization suggestions is during the story hook.  Give me at least half a dozen ways to get the party involved.Other than that, I prefer the adventure to be focused on the plot elements and unique specifics so that little is wasted when I invariably have to customize it myself.  For instance, statting every creature out is useless.  If an encounter is designed with battle in mind, that's one thing.  But to stat out the captain of the guard beyond (♂ Human Ftr 3) just because the party has discourse with him is pointless.  Leaving him so thinly fleshed out allows me to do customization on the fly on my own.As for boxed text.  It's important to clearly mark any assumptions that are being made before any boxed text.  This will allow the DM to catch any inconsistencies.  For example, if the boxed text describes the town as being "cloaked in shadow, the rooftops barely illuminated by the moon descending below the peaks" then right before it, it should say "PCs arrive in town at night."  Keep track of people, too.  In my experience, PCs have a bad habit of killing/redirectig NPCs.Customizations are also nice to have if the adventure hinges on some extraordinarily minor detail.  Playing through the second Eberron adventure, we came to a dead stop when a player grabbed the sword guiding the BBEG.  After being a bit harrassed, the BBEG left the scene of the battle.  Well, after 24 hours, the sword no longer had any hold on him.  Bam.  Adventure over.  25% through.  Following what came next in the adventure was highly nonsensical.  I probably would have been able to recover on the spot if I had read the adventure ahead of time, but if I'm going to spend that much time prepping, I'm not going to buy an adventure.  I can outline my own adventure in half the time it takes to read a published one.  Since it's my adventure, all the detail is in my head, saving loads of time.  Anyway, if the adventure authors had forseen this problem (which they should have) they should have written a small snippet on getting the adventure back on track if the sword is lost.Anyway, I do lots of customization, but it's all on the fly.  If an adventure isn't done in a way that lets me know the basics of what's going on and what's going to be going on, then that really messes up my DMing style.  I'd prefer an inspiring 2 paragraph adventure outline to a 32 page adventure that is difficult to run due to assumptions.</blockquote>

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