Playing with Pre-packs

[bluegargantua]

Again, another topic I hope hasn't been done to death:

Another question which has been tugging at my mind recently is:

 How frequently do people run published scenarios for their favorite game (assuming they exist)?

I know that some GMs custom-build all of their adventures, while others will often just pull down a module and run it.  There are pros and cons to both sides and I'm not hugely interested in debating it here, I'm just trying to gauge how frequently people turn to prepackaged adventures for their game.  Note, that I'm speaking here of campaign games.  I'll frequently use modules or scenarios for one-shot games because it's a quick, easy way to hash through a system without a lot of time investment.  

Personally, I like a lot of games that either don't or can't really support module adventures.  Some, like Nobilis and Amber are as unique as the players who participate.  Others, like Dying Earth or Continuum just don't have many/any adventures yet.

Still, I do buy modules.  I've got a fair amount of D&D modules which surprises me because I don't even run the system and I generally have these specialty niche ideas which force me to roll my own adventures.  But I take a great deal of inspiration from modules and will often crib from them extensively when I draft my own stuff.  If nothing else, a ready-made map saves me from having to play Amateur Cartographer which is a blessing from above in my book.

One interesting side note:  the old Top Secret game had some of the best modules I never used for their original system.  The exotic locales and secret agent adventures could, with a shift in mechanics, be almost seamlessly dropped into a game of In Nomine.  Although it was customized, I played them almost entirely out of the book and had some great games.

Why the interest?  I want to ascertain how valuable these adventure modules are for GMs.  Do GMs enjoy using them "as-is", with a few modifications, as fodder for their own adventures, or not at all?  Is their value in producing such items for a game, or are you better off with just a few pointers and let it go at that?

later
Tom

[Clay]

I run almost exclusively pre-packaged adventures for Call of Cthulhu.  The published scenarios seem to be fairly excellent, with only a few dogs.

The other games that I run don't work with pre-packaged.

[GreatWolf]

I've been gaming for 12 years or so.  I bought my first scenario book three months ago (One Shots for Unknown Armies).  The only reason that I'd run any of those scenarios is because they are totally self-contained.  I *might* run Exhaustion from Lawyers, Guns and Money if I ever run a TNI game of UA, but only because it captured my fancy.

Otherwise, I never use pre-published scenarios.  Too often they are designed to be "one size fits all" and I rather have my scenarios tailored specifically to my characters.

At the same time, Ralph Mazza is running Pendragon for my wife and I, and he has been raiding his Pendragon scenario books to support his Intuitive Continuity approach to Pendragon.  He has told me that he is looting and mangling the scenarios, rather than running them as written, but it does seem to be working well for him.

So, two answers for the price of one.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[rabidchyld]

Hello old friends.

Most of my games are adventures that I make up myself, but there is one exception:

My group has a set of characters who I exclusively run in those little $2.50 D&D 3E booklets.  It's a campaign that's been going on for a couple of months now and all I do is change the names of the places they are to keep the fluidity.  I love it because I buy and read those little adventures all the time, so I am very familiar with them when I end up running them, and they love it because they can give me 15 minutes notice and we can play a game.    

It has come in very handy especially in the last couple of months what with us keeping holiday hours and such.  

Oh, and The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, but I'm so disgruntled with the group that plays that I may not run it for them again.

My other D&D game is a world that I created, based off of George RR Martin's Song of Fire and Ice book series, so all those adventures are written by me, with obvious inspiration from the books.  I get a few ideas from other sources sometimes, but not very often.  

My Chthonian game, which unfortunately has been on the back burner for a while, is written before each game with the help of Zak, who is the brains behind that whole operation.  By the way, I am really looking foreward to running that again.  

My Star Trek games are generally made up by me, although I have used pre-generated adventures before.  The thing I really hate is that there are only a couple of people who want to play so it's rare when I do and I forget where they are and what they were doing.  Incidentally, my new year's resolution is to keep better journals of my games so I don't have that problem.  

I would like to run Call of Cthulhu, and if I did I would use the prepackaged adventures for that.  All of those I have played in have been very cool.  

Overall, I like having lots of sources around to get ideas from, but I like to flesh them out myself.  I feel like if I make it up it's easier to go with the flow when my players do unexpected things because I've already invented it in my mind instead of reading it from a book.  It's harder to wing it from a book for me because the world isn't really real in my mind.  

Does that make sense?

melodie

[xiombarg]

Almost never.

I hate 90%of all prepublished adventures, because they're so hard to do RIGHT. That is, without railroading and excessive linearity, and requiring the PCs to make decisions that make no sense. (I don't mind linearity if they can figure out a way to seamlessly and non-heavy-handedly deal with PC decisionsmaking that's a touch "out of the box", but it's rare.)

Adventure SEEDS, sure. Actual adventures? No. They're too inflexible.

Now, I would buy more adventures if they were, say, a collection of NPCs and an intersting situation to throw the PCs into, with perhaps a timeline of events if the PCs don't get involved, rather than the usual "and then the PCs MUST do THIS" type of scenario.

Plus, published adventures are, by their nature, almost always somewhat de-protaganizing, in that they're designed for a "generic" group. It's difficult to avoid this... but I prefer to wrap my adventures around the quirks of individual PCs. (Which is why I like a big chuck of adventure seeds instead... I discard what I dislike without feeling ripped off and be like: "Oh! That will work great for Emily's character!")

[hyphz]

Quite often.

Since this is Actual Play, I will confess - with some shame - that I tend to run prewritten adventures so that I can't be blamed if they aren't very good.  Even if they include rubbish - like the Spycraft adventure which had a narcoleptic employed as a security guard at a high security military base - there's still always the defense of "well, I don't like that much either, but I guess we can complain when *we've* written commercially published gaming books."  Yea, I know that's really lame, but - hey, it's what actually happens, so here it is.

However, I do tend to get worried if an RPG, or especially a setting book, doesn't include a sample adventure (unless it's a game where the players get authorship powers).  If a setting book goes on for ages about all the potential for (say) political manipulation in a setting, then if it doesn't have a sample adventure that tells me that the authors didn't think through how it could be realised in practice, and if it includes a sample adventure that doesn't include political manipulation, or includes it but has it executed purely mechanically or predictably, then that tells me the authors were probably (ahem, let's be polite here) using hyperbole - if there's so much potential, why can't the setting authors (who know the setting best of all) use it?  Come to think of it, that test gets applied to examples of play as well..

[clehrich]

I'd like to second the remarks on Call of Cthulhu pre-packs, which are very often pretty damn good.

Beyond that, I almost never run a pre-pack straight.  On the other hand, I beg, borrow, or occasionally buy all sorts of adventures that seem potentially relevant to what I'm doing in my current campaign, and then steal, bend, and revise at will.  I admit, I don't generally give credit where it's due, either.  Sorry.  But I make extensive use of the things as mines for adventure ideas, settings, and whatnot.

As an example, kill puppies for satan isn't a game I'm likely to run, but the initial adventure idea is interesting if set in another context.  I particularly like the idea of having a mental asylum mapped out on the GM's high school, down to the last detail, which means that my descriptions of it are likely to be tinged by longstanding negative feelings about my HS experience, and also ensures that I know the details backwards.  So I'll happily steal that, and maybe even the adventure concept (rescue your idiot friend who got caught doing something occult that normal people would consider a sign of insanity), but I won't run the adventure directly from the text.

[John Kim]

I pretty much never run any pre-packaged adventures.  I think there are several reasons for this:

1) Most RPG adventures simply suck, in my experience.  There are some exceptions -- like the excellent Call of Cthulhu line.  However, I tried buying a D&D3 module that people genuinely recommended which could potentially fit my current campaign called "The Greenland Saga".  However, I found it so nauseating that if anything I used it as reminders of what *not* to do.  

2) My games are often in genres which aren't supported well by RPGs at all, let alone the few lines that have decent adventures.  This might be partly that I'm subconciously trying to be different, but also that RPGs are in a fairly narrow range of genres.  My current game is an alternate history of Vikings in New England in 1392.   A previous game was children's fantasy (along the lines of Narnia or Oz).  

3) I like the plot to come naturally out of the PC's characters.  Most of my current campaign has been about very personal conflicts of the PCs with their relatives and others.  This is very hard to make work from pre-packaged material.

[Blake Hutchins]

I have the book-length campaign The Traveller Adventure, produced by GDW in the old-time Traveller days.  Despite my usual disdain for spamventures, I confess that I fucking love this book.  A classic "tramp merchant crew stumbles into sector-spanning intrigue" kind of gig, it has some clunky parts founded on verrry questionable assumptions about player behavior, and it risks running the players along a giant railway line, but there's still a lot of damn cool material to mine.  I've always wanted to run what would amount to an Illusionist campaign using this book.  Lately my thoughts have been turning that way again, maybe with Story Engine.  Aahhh, yeah.  Such contemplation maketh for a dreamy grin to spread across the face.

But other than that, yeah, for my games and style of play, canned material blows except as creative fodder to scoop out and mix in where it might be useful.

Best,

Blake

[Ted E. Childers]

I've run a d20 Star Wars campaign for about a year on nothing by one prepublished adventure after another.  It took some work on my part to come up with rational for stringing them together, but for the most part it was pretty hands off for me.

The results?  Satisfied and happy players.  They've really enjoyed the campaign so far (after I've run approximately a dozen+ published adventures).  

the irony of it is this:  Although I enjoy the low prep/little effort required of a GM, I ultimately feel less satisfied when I run these games.  As a GM, I have felt much more satisfaction and enjoyment when I actually wrote and directed a story for my players.  Maybe it's just personal preference, but I find it much more rewarding.