Help me identify what's happening (D&D isn't fun anymore?)

[jaappleton]

Let me first preface this 100% by saying this is a ME issue. I love the game, I adore it. I care about my table, DM and fellow players a lot.

When we first started playing 5E it was a ton of fun. It was exclusively homebrew adventures as we get our feet wet, learning things. And some stuff we got wrong, until we learned how to do it correctly. We messed up a few rules along the way but now we've pretty much got everything down.

Curse of Strahd was our first published adventure, last year. And it took quite awhile to finish. Honestly, looking back.... I didn't like playing it.
We've since now played through roughly half of Saltmarsh, and while I like it a little more, I also don't enjoy it too much.

I've found with published adventures, you typically have to work within a constrained field. Barovia, or Saltmarsh and the surrounding area in these instances. Which makes sense, that's what is entailed in the adventure and that's what the designers had intended you to focus on.

But knowing that I'm kinda stuck on these rails feels immensely restrictive to me. I know I'm not going to fight a Dragon, or a pack of Kobolds, etc. In Saltmarsh, I know its a bunch of Sahuagin. I know we're not going to travel off to some weird exotic land we've never encountered before.

In homebrew, our dumb and stupid ideas led to remarkable things. Know when you're a DM, and your players propose some crazy silly thing and you're in your brain just screaming "YES DO THAT IT'LL BE AWESOME!!!"? Know that feeling? It really seems like the published stuff has stifled that.

Should we just move on from the published stuff?

[Waterdeep Merch]

Let me first preface this 100% by saying this is a ME issue. I love the game, I adore it. I care about my table, DM and fellow players a lot.

When we first started playing 5E it was a ton of fun. It was exclusively homebrew adventures as we get our feet wet, learning things. And some stuff we got wrong, until we learned how to do it correctly. We messed up a few rules along the way but now we've pretty much got everything down.

Curse of Strahd was our first published adventure, last year. And it took quite awhile to finish. Honestly, looking back.... I didn't like playing it.
We've since now played through roughly half of Saltmarsh, and while I like it a little more, I also don't enjoy it too much.

I've found with published adventures, you typically have to work within a constrained field. Barovia, or Saltmarsh and the surrounding area in these instances. Which makes sense, that's what is entailed in the adventure and that's what the designers had intended you to focus on.

But knowing that I'm kinda stuck on these rails feels immensely restrictive to me. I know I'm not going to fight a Dragon, or a pack of Kobolds, etc. In Saltmarsh, I know its a bunch of Sahuagin. I know we're not going to travel off to some weird exotic land we've never encountered before.

In homebrew, our dumb and stupid ideas led to remarkable things. Know when you're a DM, and your players propose some crazy silly thing and you're in your brain just screaming "YES DO THAT IT'LL BE AWESOME!!!"? Know that feeling? It really seems like the published stuff has stifled that.

Should we just move on from the published stuff?
I just had a conversation with a few of my players who have convinced me to re-run Curse of Strahd soon, because it is their favorite game that I've ever run. I've heard of groups like your's, including from a good friend, where they didn't have fun and everyone was bored or miserable. I think I may know why.

I was willing to bend it. I changed plot points to suit my needs. I wrote a LOT of extra material for it, all focused on the players, and broadened the lore. In short, I took a setting that had nothing to do with the players and twisted it to be all about them, reacting to their presence, changing as they changed it.

This took a lot of extra prep work, which for many defeats the entire purpose of using a published campaign. Why would you spend just as much time preparing to use a published campaign as you would use making your own? And I don't really have much of an answer for that. In my case it's because I was a Ravenloft fan from before CoS, and my excitement for it was palpable. I turned off the lights and lit candles. I burned incense. I created dry ice fog. I made my own props. I handmade maps for Castle Ravenloft. I served the entire banquet Strahd offered the players. I was excited for it, and I wanted my players to love it. So I gave them all the same care and attention as I would had I made the entire campaign myself.

But not everyone is that insane about a published adventure. I sure wasn't when I ran Dragon Heist. It was neat, but it didn't inspire me to go crazy. And from my players' responses, I'd say the difference was immeasurable.

[NecessaryWeevil]

In that case, maybe you'd be better off if you don't consider the published adventure as a set of rails, or even a sandbox which they're not allowed to leave, but as a box of toys you can reach into when desired.
As the saying goes, plans are futile but planning is indispensable.

[IsaacsAlterEgo]

I feel very much the same. Published material is far too railroad-y and doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity on the DM's part, unless you have a really stellar DM who goes above and beyond and only really uses the publish material as a reference rather than a step-by-step guide.

I've tried to get through Phandelver numerous times and can never really bring myself to. It's too by the numbers for me, and default forgotten realms lore is in my opinion, very dry. But I'm having a blast in a Dragonheist campaign right now where the DM has basically thrown out a good 60-70% of the book for her own custom material. It sounds like what you might want is a DM who's willing to go off-script and improvise more, and tailor a campaign more to the characters rather than having a one-size-fits-all-adventure.

[MaxWilson]

Should we just move on from the published stuff?

Yes.

12345

[jaappleton]

I just had a conversation with a few of my players who have convinced me to re-run Curse of Strahd soon, because it is their favorite game that I've ever run. I've heard of groups like your's, including from a good friend, where they didn't have fun and everyone was bored or miserable. I think I may know why.

I was willing to bend it. I changed plot points to suit my needs. I wrote a LOT of extra material for it, all focused on the players, and broadened the lore. In short, I took a setting that had nothing to do with the players and twisted it to be all about them, reacting to their presence, changing as they changed it.

I think this has something to do with it.

CoS was my DMs first time running a published adventure. It was our first time doing a published adventure.

For a first time... It was a bad fit. Don't get me wrong; My DM did a terrific job. As a first time going through a published adventure, especially CoS which is so broad, he did great. Personally I'd never want to run it, or if I did, it'd be with massive changes. I know the Tarokka deck helps randomize things, which sounds really cool, but it also can render entire locations utterly time wasting. My table definitely needed some nudges in the appropriate direction to figure out where to go next, what to do, how to start crossing stuff off of our list and we just... We really struggled with direction, for sure.

But why do I have this same aspect with Saltmarsh, then? I like how its a collection of shorter adventures and it gives me a great sense of accomplishment to go out, quest, and then get rewarded. I enjoy that.

.....but its also seeming kinda formulaic? Predictable?

-----

EDIT:

@IsaacsAlterEgo I think you have a really solid point here. Its tough running published material to personalize it a lot more for the player characters. I was flipping through Frostmaiden, and I really liked the idea of playing a Goliath to really connect myself to the game specifically for that reason. To have a reason to really give a damn about what's happening. Its really hard to do that with published content because... Honestly, its a lot to ask anyone to "Hey, go through this whole published book. Take all of it, and make it much more about our five player characters."

I feel like I'd be giving my DM a project. DMing is hard enough as it is, I'd never ask anyone to do that.

[Amnestic]

In homebrew, our dumb and stupid ideas led to remarkable things. Know when you're a DM, and your players propose some crazy silly thing and you're in your brain just screaming "YES DO THAT IT'LL BE AWESOME!!!"? Know that feeling? It really seems like the published stuff has stifled that.

Should we just move on from the published stuff?

Is this a difference in approach for your DM between the two? Do they have issues deviating from the material that they wouldn't have in deviating from their own planned notes? When you do propose this crazy silly thing in a module, how do they react differently to in your non-module play?

[jaappleton]

Is this a difference in approach for your DM between the two? Do they have issues deviating from the material that they wouldn't have in deviating from their own planned notes? When you do propose this crazy silly thing in a module, how do they react differently to in your non-module play?

My DM seems to have more apprehensions about do it with published material. I don't blame him one bit, because its hard to hard to be conscious and ever aware of how far reaching into the future of the module you have to be as a DM to ensure whatever changes you're making, especially on the fly, don't have massive, negative impacts on how the adventure is structured.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I think this has something to do with it.

CoS was my DMs first time running a published adventure. It was our first time doing a published adventure.

For a first time... It was a bad fit. Don't get me wrong; My DM did a terrific job. As a first time going through a published adventure, especially CoS which is so broad, he did great. Personally I'd never want to run it, or if I did, it'd be with massive changes. I know the Tarokka deck helps randomize things, which sounds really cool, but it also can render entire locations utterly time wasting. My table definitely needed some nudges in the appropriate direction to figure out where to go next, what to do, how to start crossing stuff off of our list and we just... We really struggled with direction, for sure.

But why do I have this same aspect with Saltmarsh, then? I like how its a collection of shorter adventures and it gives me a great sense of accomplishment to go out, quest, and then get rewarded. I enjoy that.

.....but its also seeming kinda formulaic? Predictable?
It is, absolutely. I had NPC's that kept offering hooks for particular places, but always as choices. During session zero, I let them know that these were me telling them what sort of areas they could reasonably take on at their level, but I'd never force them into any particular location- if they didn't want to do something, that's fine. They ended up doing everything, but I remember that they were least enthused about Argynvostholt. I nearly forgot about it, and threw a pretty lame hook at them right before they marched on Castle Ravenloft because I'd forgotten to give any hints that it even existed. I tried my best to make up for it with some really chatty knight ghosts, but I really failed that landing hard. It wound up basically just being as it was in the book, too clerical and sterile, too lifeless. There just wasn't any heart in it.

If you aren't too busy to write your own adventure as DM, I'd say don't run anything you don't love. You have to be infatuated with your setting. You have to love your NPC's, and want to introduce them to all your friends. If you can't, that lack of care will make it rote and boring.

I absolutely don't blame your DM for it at all, but maybe see if you can get them to make up their own. Something that gets them excited, that they really want to talk about. When you see their eyes light up, you'll know you're in for a good time.

[x3n0n]

My DM seems to have more apprehensions about do it with published material. I don't blame him one bit, because its hard to hard to be conscious and ever aware of how far reaching into the future of the module you have to be as a DM to ensure whatever changes you're making, especially on the fly, don't have massive, negative impacts on how the adventure is structured.

(Below, all mentions of "you" mean "the DM".)

On that topic, it certainly helps to have read through in advance to build a skeleton structure for the adventure, and even use one of the various "guide to whatever" Cliff's Notes that are on DM's Guild. That way, if you want to preserve key plot points, you can decide what will get you there. You don't have to be on rails, but you do need to find hooks that will encourage your players to find what you're excited about (and be prepared to abandon or repurpose things if necessary).

[Amnestic]

My DM seems to have more apprehensions about do it with published material. I don't blame him one bit, because its hard to hard to be conscious and ever aware of how far reaching into the future of the module you have to be as a DM to ensure whatever changes you're making, especially on the fly, don't have massive, negative impacts on how the adventure is structured.

And do you think you/the rest of the party likewise acted differently because you knew it was a premade module? If, for example, your DM had advertised the next game as being "gothic vampire centric" but none of you (save the DM) knew it was a module, d'you think you might've acted more...freeform?

My guess is (based on my own experiences) the answer's yes, and there's not necessarily anything wrong or incorrect with that. Part of the game is that DMs shouldn't be too railroady but players also shouldn't be too freeform (unless that's explicitly the kind of game you're playing) to cut down on DM improv and wasted plans. I could be wrong, of course, and your group didn't change their approach, and if so just ignore that part as a wrong assumption.

I think the two choices (continue with modules or throw them out) are potentially a bit binary. There's a lot of good ideas/premises from modules worth stealing or adapting, and dismissing them entirely seems a waste, but perhaps your group shouldn't be running modules, just using taking ideas ("I want to run a game where a hobgoblin army with dragons invades a country", "I want to establish my own kingdom", "I want to stop an invasion from hell").

[Valmark]

It does sound like you have a problem with rail-roading and that you aren't the kind of target for published adventures. Because published adventures are by that nature rail-roads, unless the DM goes the extra mile. And even then, there's only so much you can do while staying into the adventure's limits. Especially if the DM doesn't even run it well, though it doesn't look like that's the problem here (I've got a DM currently that is pretty good but we've realized he's somehow getting everything in the adventure wrong).

Unless you have a character that fits nicely with the adventure (as in, someone that doesn't have a reason to act differently from what the adventure says) you'll either have to deal with it or skip them.

[Darth Credence]

...

Should we just move on from the published stuff?

Yes. You sound like you like a lot more freedom, so go with what you enjoy. Modules aren't for everyone.

[micahaphone]

My favorite part of DMing off a module has been adding my own stuff to it, or twisting it to better match my player's interests.

Though I will say that I'm currently a player in Curse of Strahd, getting close ish to the end, and it's definitely in general been a very different feel from normal DnD. The general "life sucks, nothing you do will make things better" depressed vibe that Barovia carries with it is very effective at setting the tone of gothic horror, dread, and misery, but also really dampens most heroic stuff you do. I'm enjoying my time playing, but it took me a while to adjust. My DM is phenomenal and I know they've been adjusting and tailoring the module too. We recently finished a quest with Argonvostholt and absolutely loved it. I know that took some amount of homebrew from them. In general, I'd say the horror atmosphere of CoS can make the game feel a bit more hostile when you're more used to your DM "yes and"-ing your heroic player shenanigans.

[clash]

Honestly official modules are rarely worth running in my opinion. WoTC is fantastic at world building. The modules provide excellent worlds, and great NPC's, but I wouldnt want to run one as written. They are not good at writing cohesive, easy to run adventures.

I have experience with both Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd. Both games require more work to run then creating and running your own homebrew campaign. I would never use one to reduce my workload as a dm because they just dont work like that.

If you want to use their creative genius for your as the world and run your own player centric campaign in it I think that would be more interactive and likely less work then the campaign as written.

[DarknessEternal]

Start DMing and make your own adventures.

Be the change you want.

[zinycor]

Start DMing and make your own adventures.

Be the change you want.

I completely agree with this.

Also, try different games, try playing with different GMs and with different groups.

Also take a breathing from gaming if you feel like it.

In the end this is a hobby, a game that you play for fun. If it isn't fun, is no big deal.

[Tawmis]

Should we just move on from the published stuff?

Yes.

I have played D&D since, 1978. I've DM'ed most of that time. There were spouts in there where I didn't play a lot of D&D for years. But I have every edition, pretty much every book, including all of the DUNGEON Magazine, and most of the DRAGON magazine - only thing I never got was 4th Edition. (Played a few sessions, never cared for it - never DM'ed it due to my bad experience)

I bought all (well, now "most") of the published modules for 5th edition (have not gotten the last few books released, due to financial constraints).

But when I bought and read Horde of the Dragon Queen - I really liked it. I thought, "This will be a fun adventure to pull my party through." So we did away with the previous characters (which was a tweaked version of AD&D and 3.0/3.5 that I was running) - and began our adventure into 5th Edition. And at first, it was fine - get the mission, follow the cultists. All fine and good. Gather some information, good. Go to the castle in the swamp - things start to go side ways. As a DM, I realize - these players for the most part are not the stealth types. So on the spot, I am tweaking the adventure to prevent a TPK because of how they were going about things. They get inside the floating castle successfully - and enter a few rooms, act suspiciously, kill some more cultists. And I am thinking, "By now, someone would have found the bodies. Or the blood. There's nowhere to hide these bodies on a floating castle."

So while, someone can say - it's not a railroad adventure. It is, if you want it to work based on the book's "check points."

I've found, just doing my own adventures, so I don't need certain things to happen to make sure the "story" proceeds "as laid out" has made my life as a DM infinitely easier; which is how I normally DM anyway.

[Mikal]

Let me first preface this 100% by saying this is a ME issue. I love the game, I adore it. I care about my table, DM and fellow players a lot.

When we first started playing 5E it was a ton of fun. It was exclusively homebrew adventures as we get our feet wet, learning things. And some stuff we got wrong, until we learned how to do it correctly. We messed up a few rules along the way but now we've pretty much got everything down.

Curse of Strahd was our first published adventure, last year. And it took quite awhile to finish. Honestly, looking back.... I didn't like playing it.
We've since now played through roughly half of Saltmarsh, and while I like it a little more, I also don't enjoy it too much.

I've found with published adventures, you typically have to work within a constrained field. Barovia, or Saltmarsh and the surrounding area in these instances. Which makes sense, that's what is entailed in the adventure and that's what the designers had intended you to focus on.

But knowing that I'm kinda stuck on these rails feels immensely restrictive to me. I know I'm not going to fight a Dragon, or a pack of Kobolds, etc. In Saltmarsh, I know its a bunch of Sahuagin. I know we're not going to travel off to some weird exotic land we've never encountered before.

In homebrew, our dumb and stupid ideas led to remarkable things. Know when you're a DM, and your players propose some crazy silly thing and you're in your brain just screaming "YES DO THAT IT'LL BE AWESOME!!!"? Know that feeling? It really seems like the published stuff has stifled that.

Should we just move on from the published stuff?

Yes, a thousand times yes.
A pre packaged module for a single dungeon is fine to throw in, but a custom campaign even in the existing settings is 1000% better than blindly doing large adventure paths or whatever you wanna call them

The way I see it, a custom campaign is like cooking from scratch, using fresh ingredients in new way.

Sprinkling some modules or adventures in is like using store bought spaghetti and sauce but everything else is made by you.

Stuff like storm kings thunder, curse of strahd, are like eating at fazolis. Yeah it’ll do the job, but it’s so bland.

As a player and dm since the late 80s, I’ll tell you every memorable campaign I’ve been in has had a little to do with following module to module (or doing a single adventure path) as possible.

[ThatoneGuy84]

100% Published adventures are not for me.
And I have played/run so many.
Published adventure content is much less Sandbox then my table likes. So either have to be willing to "follow the general idea of the storyline" or play homemade campaigns. Just seems to be how our group flows.

[MaxWilson]

I've found, just doing my own adventures, so I don't need certain things to happen to make sure the "story" proceeds "as laid out" has made my life as a DM infinitely easier; which is how I normally DM anyway.

Seconded. Making up your own stuff (or stealing stuff from other mediums, like movies and books) is actually easier than trying to conform to someone else's pre-written narrative. Using someone else's material can be worthwhile if it's really high-quality stuff--I have some old Paranoia adventures that I am just dying to rip off someday, and I am also not very good at writing mysteries so I would like to steal those from someone else too. But it can also be a lot of work, especially if their material is hundreds of pages long, as WotC adventures tend to be, and... I just don't get enough value out of them to bother.

[jaappleton]

UPDATE:

We were scheduled to play tonight.

Turns out that the whole group, DM included, pretty much felt the same way. :smalltongue:

We're going to be doing like a 5 session mini campaign until Tasha's comes out, then have Session 0 for the new homebrew campaign.

[Sigreid]

Go back to home brew adventures. It'll be more fun. I mostly use the published adventures as source material to be chopped up and plopped into whatever I really want to do.

[MrStabby]

Should we just move on from the published stuff?

Yes...

Can I sell you on some collaborative world building?

Run a few one shots. Play some characters of the kind you might not normally do. Have a laugh. Take a breather.

Whilst you do this, build a world but as a group. Work out the lore, the regions, the gods. Work out as a group the kind of things you like and that you dont.

Then play in this world and expand it. You have the joy of discovery as people build the world around you adding to the lore. You get the joy of experiencing your creations through another persons interpretation.

[Waterdeep Merch]

UPDATE:

We were scheduled to play tonight.

Turns out that the whole group, DM included, pretty much felt the same way. :smalltongue:

We're going to be doing like a 5 session mini campaign until Tasha's comes out, then have Session 0 for the new homebrew campaign.
I figured the DM wasn't in it, it's good to know you're all on the same page. It's often neglected, but of all the people at the table, the DM really should be the most excited to be there. If they aren't having fun, if they don't love what they're running, if the players are burying them at every turn (I'm not slinging this accusation at your party, just a musing), everything loses it's color and flavor. The DM is the world, after all; their thoughts are in every stone, their feelings in every tree.

[Rynjin]

I would compound the idea of moving on to homebrew stuff with "Consider trying a different system". Not permanently or anything, but trying new games is great way to make you appreciate what you love about your favorite game more.

Presumably, there are things you really like about 5e. but the more you play a system, the more the good things get taken for granted and the bad starts to stick out more.

Swapping to a system that's a different speed and feel can be a great palate cleanser; I often quite appreciate taking breaks from Pathfinder (my preferred game) to play Savage Worlds, or Final Fantasy d6 or something. It makes for a good "brain reset" when I get stuck in the rut of thinking about the negatives of PF, like it having too many fiddly bits to keep track of on occasion, or how much its progression is tied to leveling.

[Tawmis]

UPDATE:
We were scheduled to play tonight.
Turns out that the whole group, DM included, pretty much felt the same way. :smalltongue:
We're going to be doing like a 5 session mini campaign until Tasha's comes out, then have Session 0 for the new homebrew campaign.

Good deal.

In one of the current games I am running - I had an adventure for the party where they're in this area similar to the "Underdark" (custom world) but not nearly as lethal (overall). It's full of Drow, Owlbears, Trolls, and the like - and they got a mission to find out who or what is poisoning the water supply to the dwarves. Well, it was meant to be like a mini 5 session thing - but they ended loving what I was doing - so I kept expanding it - and it's currently been about 15 sessions (3 to 4 hours each session) - and they've all given feedback about how they've loved to see the story unfolding. Like I made it so they're helping other races down below (Lizard people against trolls, Bullywugs against Kuo-Toa, Azer vs Water Elementals), and are gaining allies - building up to a big war against the Drow.

Literally, it was just "Find out the drow are poisoning the water. Find the priestess. Kill her. Get the cure."

But it became so much more - like I introduced a crazed goblin who I'd made up on the fly to say he'd been tortured by a Drow alchemist named Doomsilk. And that's how he knows Alchemy, but his mind is a little broken from the torture - and he's the one who is helping the party (told them what components to go get - which is like tongue of a carrion crawler, heart of a troll, etc), because he was there when the poison was made - but gathering the ingredients is too dangerous for him. Then the party was like, "I wonder if we will run into Doomsilk?" And right then, I made up Doomsilk and made him appear a few times and drop driders and other spider-like monsters on them - so now they're all eager to take him down and make him pay.

All of this - because it was a custom world, custom campaign, and not restricted to the binds of a pre-generated module.

[opaopajr]

Because nothing beats personalization & surprises. :smallcool: Because those tap into passion and mystery. These elements stoke and maintain the romance.

Passion inherently personalizes the homebrew experience. Beloved settings often reignite such passionate personalization of published material. Passion brings out that extra GM effort to make the world reach out and try to connect. Personalization shows passionate approaching to players' imagination.

Surprises -- like encounter posture & reaction rolls, randomized distance, random encounter table, rare regional outliers, etc. -- keep things mysterious and thus not fully known. Mystery hints at depth, not fully controllable, hint of danger, a thrill. In a word, mystery keeps things intriguing and thus fresh.

There is meaningful choice in both GM personalization (prep) and surprises for Players (responses). It creates a romantic dialogue of their imagination together. It is chemistry. :smallcool:

[Meichrob7]

So I’m someone who’s moderately new to being a DM, I have less than 50 sessions total ran.

I started out just running random short adventures from the Yawning Portal collection when our group’s main DM was busy, I then started running it every other week and eventually we finished most of that.

I’d started trying my hand at making my own content when creating bridges and explanations to connect the various adventures in yawning portal. I had fun so I decided to make my own campaign and run it with my players.

It is and was objectively a somewhat ****ty adventure but it was some of the most fun I had, and judging by their reaction it was one of the most fun times they’d had.

On paper it was way less fleshed out, detailed, and creative than the official content we’d all ran before, but the ability to just go anywhere and run with it was something the players greatly enjoyed, and seeing them appreciate the stories I’d made was pretty damn fun for me.

I’d highly recommend at least giving homebrew campaigns a shot. It’s a very very different experience. If I had to make a comparison I’d probably say AL is to Home sessions running published adventures, as home sessions running published adventures are to running your own homebrew campaign.

I admittedly haven’t played a ton of AL so I can’t claim that’s the most accurate comparison, but that’s how it felt to me at least.

[MadBear]

Me and my friends run a hybrid between different published adventures and a sandbox.

Over the first few levels, there are breadcrumbs and hooks to move towards 2-4 different published adventures, and we play until we figure out which one interests us the most. Even then, if after playing in that adventure for awhile we get bored, we communicate that to our DM (usually me) who tries to find different adventures that the group may enjoy, and I move the plot in that direction.

That way, if players are enjoying the fit of a particular published adventure, it runs and plays great. When it isn't quite working we pivot.

I also bought a book called Mini-Dungeon tombs, which contain over 100 small 1 session adventures set at levels 1-20. that way, if I need to pull a random dungeon out of thin air at the last minute to bridge the transition I can.

[Eldariel]

Currently I'm using SKT + ToD + LMoP + DoISP as a combination sandbox for essentially populating the world (and setting the players to start in Phandalin with the Phandelver Pact in the background) and it's working quite well, at least according to my players. There's a lot of cool stuff going around, a great variety of beings (I tossed gnolls in there with Yeenoghu as a side player stealing a bit from OotA). The dungeons and encounters in the books are good baselines. While the main questlines leave a bit to be desired as such, they serve as fine pieces of a greater story (and admittedly, SKT is pretty darn solid straight-up) allowing the players a degree of freedom and variety.

Thus that's something you can also do: use multiple adventures and tie them together and change things up a bit (substitute e.g. duergar or gricks or grimlocks for some of the common adversaries in those campaign paths like goblins and orcs). You can still use most things (I love all the maps and such if you haven't had the players play those yet) but just vary the content up a bit to keep the things from being too predictable. This way the story can take unexpected turns too and things flow in a more organic manner, which should give you the change of pace you're looking for.


In short, most of the published adventures are pretty meh but they serve as a reasonable baseline to work off from. Of course, you can also go much deeper if desired and try to achieve the enhanced effect via greater immersion.

[Willie the Duck]

Fundamentally, a pre-published adventure is something you use because either 1) you don't trust your ability to make a game without said help (new to the game or new to DMing), or 2) you do not have the time to put in the work you know is required to make a homebrew setting (especially a sandbox, IMO the optimal situation, but also a lot of work). If you have the time and energy and skill, I would always suggest heading off into parts unknown (that you the DM have to create).

That said, modules can provide a definite starting point. Just this past weekend I ran the first full session (previous week being a session 0 with character creation, run-down of the new system, introduction to the game world, etc.) for a group of 9 (!) players (not all who will be able to make it every week) who are all new to 5e. What am I running for them: Keep on the Borderlands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keep_on_the_Borderlands). Finally I have a group the size for which the module was initially designed. I've set up a region where the keep exists, a geo-political reason why the protagonist characters would exist and be at odds with the humanoid races and why the later are in the Caves of Chaos/why the PCs should be hunting them. The big thing is that if the party decides they don't want to explore the adventure hook of the module, I have ideas about what else there is to do in the area, and what would happen if the PCs say, "we aren't interested in this, we head down to the next larger town to see what there is to do there" or "we keep heading West."

[Sigreid]

So I’m someone who’s moderately new to being a DM, I have less than 50 sessions total ran.

I started out just running random short adventures from the Yawning Portal collection when our group’s main DM was busy, I then started running it every other week and eventually we finished most of that.

I’d started trying my hand at making my own content when creating bridges and explanations to connect the various adventures in yawning portal. I had fun so I decided to make my own campaign and run it with my players.

It is and was objectively a somewhat ****ty adventure but it was some of the most fun I had, and judging by their reaction it was one of the most fun times they’d had.

On paper it was way less fleshed out, detailed, and creative than the official content we’d all ran before, but the ability to just go anywhere and run with it was something the players greatly enjoyed, and seeing them appreciate the stories I’d made was pretty damn fun for me.

I’d highly recommend at least giving homebrew campaigns a shot. It’s a very very different experience. If I had to make a comparison I’d probably say AL is to Home sessions running published adventures, as home sessions running published adventures are to running your own homebrew campaign.

I admittedly haven’t played a ton of AL so I can’t claim that’s the most accurate comparison, but that’s how it felt to me at least.

Well, despite how it's marketed, D&D is about fun with your friends. Sometimes (often for me) there's no higher fun with your friends than idiot fun with your friends.

[Evaar]

Chances are that your group is very practiced at both playing and running D&D. Your DMs probably have some tools in their belt that are more personalized to your group, knowing how much you all value combat, how hard they can make those combats, how much time to spend on character backstories, how many red herrings they can throw at you before it just becomes frustrating, etc.

Published adventures can't personalize to your group, and even setting that aside they aren't designed to fully exploit the highest level skills of DMs. They're designed to be approachable and to elevate the baseline level of fun for your average group. That group probably has some first-or-second-time players in it who will make suboptimal character and tactical choices, who won't have a notebook of NPC names, who confuse the Xanathar Guild with the Zhentarim, etc.

I do have my qualms with the published adventures as tools for new DMs - substantial qualms, actually. But the intended purpose of these books seems to be to elevate the gameplay of a typical, unpracticed group. For a skillful, practiced group they probably aren't going to offer a lot. They won't be personalized to you. They'll probably feel simplistic and limiting. That's just the reality of using a mass-produced product rather than one crafted bespoke.

[KorvinStarmast]

Start DMing and make your own adventures. Be the change you want.
1. That ^^^^

2. In Saltmarsh, my party has discovered, during Danger at Dunwater, that the reason that the giant croc at the end/bonus went nuts was ... hags ... oh, no, it's probably a coven.

They'll have something to do between a few of the adventures as they scout out the hags, and before they get to Tammeraut's Fate

That's all me. I have also already figured out a tie in to Iuz, Thrazduin, and a couple of other major forces in World of Greyhawk (and Procan) that has already added some depth to another of the side quests.

Modules, for me, are a framework around which to build an adventure with the maps already figured out.

[GandalfTheWhite]

If you're not having fun, you could just...stop playing 5e? There are other systems. I don't mean forever, but a one-to-three shot in another system can be rejuvenating. Since it's October, I recommend the World of Darkness books.

[Jerrykhor]

I think you should move on to homebrew, where things aren't so predictable. If you didn't enjoy CoS, you won't enjoy modules set in fixed locations. For example, OOTA is set in the Underdark, if you already know the lore of Underdark inside out, its going to be boring to you. SKT? You know the drill, giants and stuff.

IMO a homebrew campaign with a DM who is not afraid to mix it up will be exciting. D&D at its heart is meant to be homebrewed, everything in the books are just examples, even the setting and lore. Maybe find a DM who is willing to allow homebrew classes, feats, spells etc. Am currently playing a homebrew Artificer and boy, just reading the document just sparks so much imagination. Whereas the official Artificer just bores me.

But the key to enjoying 5e is the DM, and your fellow players. Preferably one that is not too rail-roady, and players who aren't all new to RPG.