WotC Which releases do you own?
Published adventures just never make sense in my brain. Not when I read them, not when I try to run them; it's been a complete disaster whenever I've tried. Heck, they barely make sense to me when I'm playing and someone else is running. Published setting kinda bounce off, too, but I can usually mine them for ideas (or at least a subclass or three).
Nebulous
Legend
Could you elaborate on that some?
JiffyPopTart
Bree-Yark
Agree
The entire time we were doing the ToA adventure path my character, a naturalistic Chultan native, kinda felt like the dead SHOULD stay dead and the curse wasn't so much a curse as it was nature returning the world returning to "normal".
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Everything but Mad Mage and the Starter Set.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
I got the crunch books, DMG, PHB, MM, Xanathar's, Mordenkainen's and Volo's. The only setting book I've purchased is Sword Coast, because I run the vast majority of my games in the Realms. The only adventure I've purchased is Mad Mage, because Undermountain is my all time favorite dungeon. Crunch books are what pull $$$ from me for the most part.
On published adventures barely making sense to me as a player (as opposed to my inability to run them)?
Basically, it inevitably comes up that there's a point in a published adventure where it stops making sense as a sequence of things the PCs would do. Maybe it presumes the PCs will surrender. Maybe it presumes one course of action when there's another one that feels more likely to wrong-foot the BBEG. Maybe it's just that things just seem to connect, either causally or sequentially or geographically. I tend to notice those; I've (accidentally) blown up at least one campaign by asking the exact wrong question at the exact wrong time and tipping over the entire edifice.
And that leaves aside the fact that in published adventures it can feel to me as though my character is an interchangeable cog. That's a matter of taste, not the adventure not making sense.
Nebulous
Legend
Published ones not making sense, as opposed to homebrew do make sense. I was just curious.
I'm not bothered--sorry if I seemed to be. It's a question that does require thought, and I'll try to give it that.
I don't think I can explain why published adventures don't make sense to me as a DM. Maybe it's just that adventure-writers don't connect things the way they connect in my brain. The closest thing I can compare it to is walking around on a battlefield--say, Gettysburg: I can read an account of the battle, and follow the sequence of things, and it makes sense; but when you walk around you encounter things in non-chronological order, so if I read about it and then go there in short order, it makes less sense after I've been there than it did before. My brain occasionally works weirdly. Obviously, I write my homebrew so it makes sense to me, because it's my brain on both ends, so to speak.
As a player, it's simpler--or at least easier to put into words--but it still might not make sense to anyone not me. When I've played published adventures, it's felt as though my character wasn't moving through their own story but was instead moving through someone else's. Not necessarily the GM's--this isn't strictly about the published adventure being a railroad (though some are)--just not that character's story, or even the party's story.
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