Pre-written vs homemade adventures

[Sindal]

Hi guys
General dm question for those that fo it

-do you run more pre-written adventures or more of your own personal written advenutues.

Just curious

[Mastikator]

Mix, but with pre written I change things to suit my needs.

[claypigeons]

Hi guys
General dm question for those that fo it

-do you run more pre-written adventures or more of your own personal written advenutues.

Just curious

When I was first getting feet wet in the 5e DM pool, I started with pre-made - specifically Lost Mine of Phandelver.

As I gained experience in the system, I started to modify encounters in pre-made stuff, as well as branching out into my own fully homemade adventures. I have played 3.5e basically since launch, so DMing wasn't new, just the system.

[Jophiel]

85% self written, 15% published with that published content being 3rd party adventures modified to fit the overall campaign. Never run a WotC official campaign.

Edit: This is for my personal games. I've also run a bunch of Adventure League one-shots or three adventure arcs but I don't count that since then I'm not given the option to use my own material.

[NaughtyTiger]

Almost entirely pre-made.
Mostly I was doing AL content.
And, let's face it, I may run a great game, but I cannot write a great story

[animorte]

It’s probably 80/20 for me. We mostly do custom adventures. Once a year or so somebody will be interested in a campaign book that we might find the time to run.

Mostly just home brew, but one shots are a nice way we’ve been able to include some official content, which still feels like it always needs to be modified. But that’s are part of the game, right? Love it. Just need more time!

[Alhallor]

I'll mostly run pre-written stuff, that I always modify (even if it's just the beginning or just one encounter).

I have some homebrew games but they are always blatantly influenced by either a game series or have an established setting (not totally homebrew in my opinion.)

[Rafaelfras]

For 3rd ed. I wanted to stick with the official timeline, I made 3 campaigns based on 3 book trilogies, "The return of the Archwizards", "The year of the rogue Dragons" and "The last Mythal" For the first we were participants in the events helping to bring Shade back into the world, then helping stopping their nefarious plans of melting the ice, helping Kelben and the seven sisters to take Shade out of the sky and finally fighting in the last battle against the phaerin to save Evereska. 2nd one I replaced the main group entirely, only Kara the song dragon showed up to involve us in the story. It culminated with our Confrontation against Sammaster himself. Last in the last Mythal I involved Araevin´s party heavily in the story making then go after everything I didnt wanted my own party to lose time with. It culminated in a confrontation with Malkazid and Sarya shortly after. Loads of fun, but also loads of work.
For 5th I have less time and less books too. So I finished PotA, but i made the 4 prophets way more prevalent in the story (to the point where the air prophet was the daughter of one of the party members) It went super well and now I am on STK, heavily modified, because they all are at lvl 15 now. Having a very good time too

[PhoenixPhyre]

99+% homemade. I've run a total of two premade modules and participated as a player in half of PotA. Currently at about 20 campaigns and a bunch of one shots total.

[stoutstien]

Almost exclusively homemade but I do cannibalize modules and use them to test out homebred PC options.

[Xervous]

99% homemade, most modules are too narrow on if-then assumptions.

[Sigreid]

I prefer home made adventures, but pre-made can be run with less time and effort. So what I often wind up doing is taking premade adventures (which I don't really like most of them) and take their pieces to make my own thing.

[Easy e]

95% Homemade, with the occasional updated, ancient module from Dungeon magazine.

I mean, over half the time I am running my own home made game system as well as scenario to boot.

[clash]

85% self written, 15% published with that published content being 3rd party adventures modified to fit the overall campaign. Never run a WotC official campaign.


100% this. I usually run homebrew campaigns. If I run a premade it's to take some of the load off. WOTC campaigns do not do this. All of their prebuilt modules are more work to run in my experience than a homebrew module, mines of phandelver being the exception.

[da newt]

Currently I'm DMing some AL so it's prewritten stuff, but I do find that I have to spend significant time smoothing it out to make a coherent / logical-ish story and balanced encounters. Some of the AL seasons suffer from some terrible proofing and story line contradictions. I assume that the different authors were all working on their various chapters at the same time so they only had a very vague idea of what had 'already' occurred.

As a player I'm involved in a 100% homebrew game and a homebrew game based loosely on an old campaign.

Given the choice, I'd prefer to find a good story that I could use as an outline, and then build my version of it to fit my preferences and party 'desirements'.

[JackPhoenix]

Homemade, but stealing any useful content in published adventurers... not necessarily from the same edition or even the same game.

[J-H]

Campaign 1: Homemade, now on DM's Guild (Castlevania/Castle Dracula). Finished.
Campaign 2: Homemade, high level, will eventually be on DMG.
Campaign 3: A bunch of DM's Guild modules stitched together. May have one or two home-made modules/sections.
Campaign next: Home made adaptation of Baldur's Gate II, so "some of both"?

Using pre-mades takes a lot less prep time.
I've never actually run or even read a WOTC-published adventure.

[Amnestic]

I've run a fair few premades, but I've not run a single one that I haven't made changes to - usually changing some creatures or NPCs, adding bits here and there, taking parts out here and there.

[Zhorn]

Use prewritten modules as a launching point, but sandbox heavily and homebrew in response to the players, regularly bringing in content from other modules as concurrent story paths of other things going on in the world that while don't connect with the adventure they are pursuing, still impact and cross paths with areas they pass through, some times with 'other adventuring groups' (NPCs) shown to be involved in them.

[MrStabby]

Home made... always home made.

[Sigreid]

The advantage home made has over premade is that the WoTC teams don't know your table and even if they did they want to make sales. They are going to write for whatever they think the average group is. It almost by definition means it's going to be mediocre at best and little better than a choose your own adventure book at worst.

The advantage for the DM of premade is you can save a lot of time on maps, encounter design, etc. if you don't have a lot of time to create adventures.

[Danielqueue1]

I tried to run a premade module once. I never went back. Homebrew all the way! My old groups couldn't read ahead to where the loot was hidden, and my new groups are way better and enjoy exploring the worlds I spent so long building.

I am thinking of just not doing one shots online anymore. Too many... issues.

[animorte]

I appreciate the pre-made ones, I really do. Some of them give really cool formats and concepts that I can use in my own stuff later. I generally just enjoy the read more than anything else.

[RSP]

When I DM it’s premade: I don’t have free time to write a campaign (possibly lacking the skill as well, but the time is a big factor).

I’ll change whatever I need to, to fit either my thinking, or to go with what the Players are doing/wanting; but I think making those changes is a regular occurance for any DM, in either premade or original campaigns.

[False God]

99.9999% home-made. Pre-written stuff is great for inspiration or stealing parts of though.

Honestly I find there's a lot of work that goes into REALLY learning an adventure and being able to run it well, to the point that I find it easier to run the stuff I made up on my own.

[kazaryu]

Hi guys
General dm question for those that fo it

-do you run more pre-written adventures or more of your own personal written advenutues.

Just curious

i have never run a pre-written adventure.

not that im opposed to them. But pre-written require a larger time investment for me. and i say that because most of the planning that goes into my personally written adventures occurs while im doing something else. like working. so it doesn't actually eat into my free-time at all.

i also enjoy the act of creating ideas far more than i do actually running the game. so i wouldn't wanna get rid of that.

[LudicSavant]

Hi guys
General dm question for those that fo it

-do you run more pre-written adventures or more of your own personal written advenutues.

Just curious

I write my own.

[Cheesegear]

do you run more pre-written adventures or more of your own personal written advenutues.

I run pre-written adventures for when my players don't have a clear idea on who their characters are.
...Unfortunately, that happens more than I'd like.

Okay, it's been a week since our last campaign ended, and you guys have had an entire week to think about things; What's your next character and what do you want to do?
'I un oh...'
Okay, that gives me nothing. Let's play Storm King's Thunder and I'll just give you a goal...Let's kill some Giants!
'Oh in that case I want to be a Goliath Druid who seeks to end the conflux of Giants...'
There it is.

I'm a huge fan of Tales of the Yawning Portal.
I'm not such a fan of Candlekeep or Radiant Citadel.
Anyone who's read them can probably guess why...That's right! The latter are boring and easy. :smallsigh:

TL;DR.
Pre-written adventures for players who don't know what they're doing.
Make-****-up-as-I-go-along for players who do. I don't like running pre-written stuff for knowledgeable players, 'cause if they're really knowledgeable, I know that there are...Ways...To cheat.