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LFK wrote:

I wanted to throw a bit more into this thread since I think my late-night "post before you forget" idea is a little thin.

In the last 6 months or so I've come to realize that I'm not actually that great at writing adventures. I can be, but I don't have the time to devote to making *great* adventures, or even entirely good adventures. Passible, I suppose.

Part of this came from prepping my 4e campaign, going back through old notes and whatnot and realizing that good stories were in there, good settings, but the adventures themselves were kinda on the bad side. This mingled with experiences as a player where we ran through a few pre-written adventures amidst the usual homebrew and I started to wise on to the fact that hombrew does not inherently equal good, and began to feel that Homebrew has been set up by the community as a kind of Holy Grail of "real D&D".

On the other side from that was coming to the boards and seeing people talk about Temple of Elemental Evil, Keep on the Borderlands, Undermountain, and other iconic adventures that have effectively entered the communal language of "what D&D is" but they're all adventures that I've never played.

Last little factor is that any given pre-written adventure probably won't be any worse than what I would probably write, and still saves me a lot of time.

In that regard this topic really isn't about "who's pre-ordering" as it is about general feelings towards the pre-written campaigns: who's planning on getting them and for what purpose, what are the pros and cons of pre-builts, and is it a good idea that WotC is trying to shape the GSL for the express purpose of encouraging more adventure writing?

I think that pre-written adventure modules are handy for new DMs and for new editions. My groups first campaign will probably start with the WoTC adventure modules while we familiarize ourselves with the new rules, before branching out into home-brewed content.

We do run our own home-brewed world, but our group is more into the Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard style of fantasy than Robert Jordan epics, so it's really just an open sandbox with a few dangling plot threads that exist as adventure hooks for PC's. Our world is no more "real D&D" than Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Starjammer, or some other groups home-brew world.

The only advice that I really have to impart about writing good adventures is A) Let the players drive the plot, don't let the plot drive the players; and B) Give the PC's something to do besides kill and loot. Give them a mystery to solve, or a few cool riddles and puzzles, or a rapidly crumbling tower from which to escape, or a volcano god to appease, whatever. The key is throwing in a little variety, because kill, loot, repeat gets monotonous after a while. Oh, and a little absurdity here and there never hurts either:D