D&D 5E Do premade adventures save prep-time?

[kikai]

I am a little bit stuck - my time to prepare our roleplay sessions (DnD 5e, previously 3.5) is rather limited. As a student, I used to create the adventures and campaign world on my own, which was a lot of fun (in itself and playing it), but it also took a considerable amount of time. I thought: As I don't have the time anymore, I use ready-made adventures (e.g. Rise of the Runelord). But it feels that this takes as much time as before, just getting acquainted with the narrative, marking the important parts etc.

So what is your experience. Do ready-made adventures actually save time? If so, is there a special way how you prepare? Or is the prep-time the same for your own adventures?

Thanks and best regerds,
kikai

 

[iserith]

I am a little bit stuck - my time to prepare our roleplay sessions (DnD 5e, previously 3.5) is rather limited. As a student, I used to create the adventures and campaign world on my own, which was a lot of fun (in itself and playing it), but it also took a considerable amount of time. I thought: As I don't have the time anymore, I use ready-made adventures (e.g. Rise of the Runelord). But it feels that this takes as much time as before, just getting acquainted with the narrative, marking the important parts etc.

So what is your experience. Do ready-made adventures actually save time? If so, is there a special way how you prepare? Or is the prep-time the same for your own adventures?

Thanks and best regerds,
kikai

If you're trying to faithfully run the adventure as written, I have found it takes more time than to create one on my own. When creating your own stuff, you can trust yourself to improvise quite a bit more because it's your own creation and you know what you're going for exactly even if you don't follow this or that from your notes exactly. If you're trying to do what the module says exactly, there is less improvising and more double-checking and reading in my experience. So if you're really looking to cut down on prep time, I'd recommend getting a D&D 5e module, reading it to get the gist, then just winging it with the module as a rough guide.

If you're converting a module from a previous edition to D&D 5e, that's even more effort than creating your own stuff or running a module for 5e in my view.

Learning to improvise well and creating/finding tools that help you do that is the surest path to cutting down your prep time before games.

 

[delericho]

It depends on the adventure, and how much I have to adapt it to the specifics of my group, but in general yes.

Actually, a fuller answer would depend on the quality of the game experience I'm looking to provide. The very best experience is likely to be gained from my homebrewing the entire adventure and having lots of time to do that 'properly' - to write up the stat blocks, to frame all the scenes just so, and so forth.

But that "gold standard" is time-consuming.

If I'm homebrewing without access to that time, corners are going to be cut - I'll use a stat-block that is "good enough", or even just wing it without one at all; I'll frame scenes on the fly; or whatever. Which may or may not work out, but very likely I'll feel that I've not done as good a job.

What a pre-gen adventure lets me do is skip a lot of the "number work" - the generation of those stat-blocks, so that I can worry about scene framing and other areas. What that means is that I can invest a lot less time to get a product that is good but not great - but I can probably get to a point where it's better than a low-prep homebrew relatively quickly.

But to push that pregen up from good to great, and thus to match that "gold standard" I've defined above would require a lot of work be invested, getting really familiar with the material, with doing a lot of adaptation. And at that point, I'm probably better off homebrewing.

So, if I'm running a game tomorrow, I'll probably do a better job with a pregen adventure. If I'm running a game in four weeks, though, I'm probably better off homebrewing.

(One more thing: when we're playing a campaign, my group meets once every two weeks for a 3-hour session. I've found that most pregen adventures actually work quite poorly in that format - they tend to do better with longer and more regular sessions. In particular, with high-level 3.5e play, and any 4e play, we found we were lucky to get through 3 encounters in a session. And since a lot of pregen adventures are built with several 'filler' encounters, they're really not ideal. So, actually, for that campaign format, I've found that homebrew is the better way to go.)

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Yes, it does save time because you have the basic plot and the maps. It's much easier to make changes to what has already been done than to create something from scratch.

Personally, I pride myself on never having an original idea in anything I do in D&D: behind everything I run is a published product even if it is not always apparent.

 

[Tormyr]

I would echo what has already said. With that said, some adventures may work fairly well right out of the box. Princes of the Apocalypse may be one of those.

 

[ExploderWizard]

In general, for me, it takes more time to become familiar with someone else's adventure than to create my own. Using elements of published material woven into my own adventures IS a time saver. Maps, monster stats, NPCs, even whole encounter areas pre-done and ready to drop in wherever they fit saves quite a bit of prep time. That is why I love old style modules so much. Just meat & potatoes that I can work into my own meal without having to hunt for the things I want buried in the text of some complex plotted adventure.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

This is a style thing and depends heavily on how much prep time you need to feel comfortable. My personal experience is that running a module can take exactly as much prep time as a read-through, but YMMV on how good the experience is if you as DM are having to flip around and look things up to remember this or that....but the visceral sense of playing something official can be fun. OTOH designing my own module is a piece of cake....but I do a lot of freeform design, and that works for me because I build an assumption of imrpov into my games. I may stick a villain in a plot, say, "He wants to accomplish this, has these henchmen and resources, and has a timeline kinda like this" and then during play determine that the villain does things very differently....so I tend to leave the "how this goes down" out of everything I plot, and merely identify who the players are. In the end it works well...but only for how I run things. I recently re-ran the old classic module Tomb of the Lizard King, which was written from very specific assumptions (PCs go to tomb, kick door in, kill monsters and bandits, loot.) The actual play ended up with them trying to join the bandits, then betraying them....the module as written was functionally useless for advice on the approach the PCs took, so I ended up scrapping most of it and going back to improv to get through it. This is why I never really get into published content....it always feels like too much work on too many assumptions. BUT....I really like the recent Princes of the Apocalyspe module as it looks very open in approach, will probably try to run that one.

 

[kbrakke]

It used to be that I prepared for my homebrew a lot. Because I was both writing world things and working on new story things. These were my bad times as a gm, it was my first real attempt to dm a full campaign and I made so many classic newbie mistakes. I have learned a lot in the last 2 years and I have started to experience different styles of dming.
I find that dming in a fully homebrew takes the most time for me. Making maps, thinking of how the world works and coming up with names in addition to making encounters. I did myself no favors by dming 4e without ever reading a core book. I only had the rules booklet and the online tools. It was still fun, but I was unsatisfied with how I was as a dm and felt too overwhelmed. I tried again with the Next playtest, but didn't get much beyond an initial city and bits of history.

Once I decided to set a campaign in an already written campaign setting everything changed. I spent about a week just reading the setting book (Eberron in this case) about an hour each day on my commute. After that I have done very little prepwork every week. Mostly just adjusting plot points to account for players impact on the world, filling in details where I had none, or making stat blocks for villains they might fight. Having a book that gives me NPC's with names and motivations already has helped a lot in letting me feel like I can safely improv without changing the feel of the world too much. Actually the most prep after the initial readings have been when I incorporated modules in to the plot.

My experience with prewritten adventures has varied, but on average I do more prep for those than for my home games, but less than a full homebrew. I usually just read the adventure when I have spare reading time. For Adventurer's league running HotDQ it was similar to my home game. Lots of initial prep, but not much upkeep. For expeditions and pathfinder adventure paths I do a reasonable amount of prep before each session, definitely more than my home game. Pathfinder is more work for me because I'm still not a master of the system. Anything with spells completely throws me for a loop.

Overall I find a similar experience where pre-written adventures don't necessarily result in less prep, but if used as a setting they result in much less prep over time for me. Something like rise will be high initial prep for me but less prep as the game goes on.

 

[Celebrim]

Yes.

How much time they save depends on your style as a DM and the amount of good content that the adventure provides. Equally, even if they don't save time per se, they provide inspiration and you can cut and paste content out of the adventure and repurpose it to your plot. In my own campaign, I've used bits and pieces of 'Of Sound Mind', 'Mad God's Key', 'Whispering Cairn', 'Isle of Dread' and even 'Tomb of Horrors' altered to the themes and setting of my campaign and sometimes rebalanced to suit the PC's levels.

The other thing to consider is the ability to improvise well on the fly is closely tied to your experience doing these very sorts of things. No one improvises well at all until they've developed a library of material and ideas to draw from, and practiced creating new material. Eventually an experienced DM gains the ability to see the world and paint the white spaces of it as soon as they are entered. But that comes from experience. Reading modules, making maps, describing rooms and spending time imagining out of the game helps fill in that palette so that you can do it in the middle of the game as well.

 

[Umbran]

Yes, premade adventures are a time-saver, at least when I'm using them largely as written. For some games (Shadowrun, for example) I vastly prefer using published materials.

Overall - if the edits I need are story-based (so that the adventure is relevant to my particular group and their history), then the module is a time-saver. If, for some reason, I have to make major mechanical changes, I don't generally bother with a published adventure.

On the other side, I also love adventure seeds - give me the basic plots and motivations of the NPCs, and let me drum up the mechanics on my own, and that also saves me time.