Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 11 - Prebuilt vs Homebrew Adventures

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

Advantages and disadvantages of prebuilt adventures vs designing your own homebrew adventure.   Have an episode idea?  Send it to me at [e-mail]

This episode of the Taking20 podcast is brought to you by caffeine. Just as critical to gaming as dice are. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening to Taking20 episode 11, where we discuss pre-built adventures versus homebrew adventures. Please take a moment to like, subscribe, and rate us wherever you found us. It would really mean a lot to me. I'd greatly appreciate the feedback. Also, we now have a Patreon, patreon.com slash taking20podcast. You can get access to things like outtakes at the lowest tier,

all the way up to subscriber-only podcasts, and monthly Ask Me Anythings. So, head on over there and give us some love if you're so inclined. So, what are pre-built adventures? Pre-built adventures are modules, adventures, adventure paths, campaigns produced by a publishing company for your use. They come pre-populated with everything you need to run it. A lot of them include things like backgrounds and maps, things that you would need to successfully run this particular adventure or campaign. Usually they're already balanced for a certain level or strength of PC, so there's not a lot of adjustment that may be required by you in order to run the adventure.

Homebrew adventures are where the adventure is made up by the GM. Plots, plot hooks, NPCs, dungeons, treasure, monsters, all of it is made up by the GM, and the GM is responsible for making sure everything is balanced for the level of PCs that will be running through this particular adventure. There are advantages and disadvantages to both pre-built and homebrew adventures, and we're going to talk about each one separately. Pre-built, they can be run with little or no modifications. That's a huge advantage for the DM or GM. You need an adventure that you can get up to speed on very quickly, drop it in, and have your characters run through it? Pre-builts are the way to go. A lot of the difficulty balancing is done for you.

One book or one series of books may have everything that you need to run it. You might have to look up certain treasure items, monsters, etc. just to get some stats, but at least they're pretty much drag and drop. The disadvantages of pre-built is that they can stifle your creativity. The adventure is built for you, but the designer of the adventure had a certain vision of what he or she wanted the adventure to be. So it limits your capability to find the exact right adventure that you want without modification. Flip the coin to homebrew though. With homebrewing, you have infinite creativity. It is a blank slate. You can run any type of adventure, anywhere, anytime that you would like.

It's the potential to make it exactly what you want. But that's also the disadvantage. It's a blank slate. And a lot of authors will tell you that there is nothing scarier than a blank slate. Another potential disadvantage of homebrew is the potential for power creep and the potential to be unbalanced. As the GM, you want to keep rewarding your players and give them better and better items. But if you're not good at keeping the power level balanced for the level that the party is, you wind up throwing 9th level items at at a fourth level party, and now all

the future adventures become unbalanced. Another potential drawback of homebrew is that if players criticize the adventure in any way, they're not having fun, they want more of combat, they want more social encounters, it's really easy for the GM to internalize that. Take that as a criticism of him or her. You shouldn't, mind you. You may just be giving the players a type of adventure that they would really not prefer to be in. So don't take that criticism of your adventure to mean criticism of you. So what's my advice? Well, if you're just starting out, stick to pre-built. It's easier as a new GM or newer GM. It may be hard to get everything balanced in a purely homebrew setting. I know you have this amazing

world in your head that you would love to share with the players, but it's hard to get it right before you get experience running campaigns in general. Start out with pre-built adventures, maybe even pre-built one-shots being the very first adventures that you DM. Now obviously there are going to be exceptions to this rule of starting out with pre-built one-shot adventures. A good friend of mine who is a new GM, she just started running a campaign a few months ago. Rather than starting with a one-shot, she decided she wanted to start with the big boy, Rise of the Rune Lords. I talked to her briefly, suggested maybe she start with something smaller.

She went, pish posh, I've got this. So she started running Rise of the Rune Lords, and last I heard, they're having a great time. Still, I think this is the exception rather than the rule. My general recommendation is start out with a single one-shot adventure to DM or GM with. It really helps you get your sea legs. Now as you get comfortable GMing, absolutely take some of the pre-built adventures or pre-built adventure paths or adventure seasons or whatever your gaming system calls them and tweak the snot out of it. When you're starting, keep it simple. Make small changes here and there. Change the location, like move Crypt of the Everflame into the Realm of the Fae and have them adventure there.

I say Realm of the Fae because I believe D&D calls it the Fae Wild, whereas Pathfinder calls it the First World. You can move Keep on the Borderlands to the Frozen Forest in Faerun. But changing the location of an adventure really doesn't change all that much, and it's a good simple tweak that you can make and still make it your own. Run the Daughters of Fury adventure, but include more harpies and maybe fewer ogres and have a different big bad evil guy. Run the Orcs of Stonefang Pass, but change the bad guys from orcs

to some sort of underground evil dwarves, whatever they're called in your campaign. So changing monsters is another way you can kind of make it your own and apply it to your particular world. Changing the major people, again, easy to do, but something that should be done with care because you have to remember the exact change that you made. Maybe it's a different king or ruler. Maybe it's a different quest giver that the PCs interact with. Different main NPCs that they're going to have to spend time with or maybe even adventure with. Making those changes is not difficult and it's a good first change to make. Just remember the changes that you make as you're going through the adventure. It can be significantly more difficult to reskin entire adventures because you may have to change wholesale monsters, wholesale locations.

An idea that I have that I'd love to try is take the Ghosts of Saltmarsh and instead of have it be sailing ships, have it be airships with cloud cities. I think it'd be an interesting variant on that particular adventure path and just I would love to see what it would look like. The most difficult reskin or conversion that you can make is if you're trying to change between gaming systems. One of the classic adventures that I mentioned multiple times on this podcast is Keep on the Boar Lands. It's one of my favorite adventures from Dungeons and Dragons first edition. It was one of the first true adventures that I

both ran through as a player and DM'd others through, so I absolutely adore this particular adventure. I sat down to update it to 5e, and doing so is a tremendous amount of work because you really have to understand the way armor class worked in first edition versus the way armor class works in fifth, and it is dramatically different. You have to understand both gaming systems in order to effectively convert it. The alternative is to strip the meat on the bones of the keep on the borderlands, just keep the general structure, and then just populate it with monsters and NPCs that fit the new edition. That is simpler to do and that is what I would recommend. Moving against

the cult of the reptile god from Greyhawk to Pathfinder. That, again, would be very difficult because you do need to understand both gaming systems. Converting from Pathfinder 1e to 2e is not bad at all. I mean, you can actually do it on the fly. To help learn the 2e system, I converted some Pathfinder Society 1st Edition one-shots on the fly while I was playing with players. It really did help me learn the differences and the nuances between second edition and first edition. I only can do it on the fly because there are very good instructions put out by Paizo on how to convert 1e material to 2e, and I'm a very

experienced DM. That's not something I would recommend new DMs to try, just kind of fly by the seat of their pants. One of the things you're going to have to keep in mind regardless of what conversion you're doing, what changes you're making to an adventure path, and what other re-skinning that you happen to be doing. Re-skinning and homebrewing in general may require adjustment of the difficulty of the adventure. If you're taking an adventure that was written for third level characters and you've got fifth level characters running through it, some of the things that you can do to scale it up is to give the monsters class levels, for example. That's not just an ogre, that's an ogre rogue too. So it's got two levels of rogue attached to it with all the feats that come with it. Give the monsters magical items,

give the monsters better armor class, more hit points, higher difficulty classes of the saving throws that the party has to make. Better attacks, more damage, better abilities, or more abilities. That's one thing that you can do is you can scale up the monsters that the PCs are fighting. Another thing you can do is include more encounters per day. It requires more resources by the party. They're not just mowing through three or four encounters per day and then going to sleep. In the existing combats that are defined within the module, add some low-level baddies that support certain combats. Think of it, if you had a

lieutenant in an ogre army, chances are there's going to be some lower-level ogres around that are trying to suck up and get promoted to higher levels of the army. So sprinkle in a few of those. Have them show up scattered times throughout the combat. Make the party think and don't let them just stand there and turn it into a slog of hit, hit, damage, damage, hit, damage, miss, miss, hit, damage. Make them use some tactics. Make them think a little bit more. Even if you're throwing low level baddies that die in one to two hits, it makes the party think. You may have the opposite problem where you're taking an adventure that was written for 9th through 11th level characters and you're trying to run 6th level characters through that. You may have to reduce all those items that

I mentioned earlier. The armor class, the hit point, the DCs for save. Otherwise, if you let them run against the monsters as defined, usually 9th to 11th level encounter levels will demolish a 6th level party. You may have to give the party more powerful items in order to stand up and have a chance of making it through the adventure, or you may have to have fewer encounters per day, reduce the number of traps or how dangerous they really are, give them fewer obstacles to overcome, but that at least gives them a chance of running through the adventure successfully, even if it would be very, very difficult. Listen, there's some DMs out there that can

improv an entire campaign. They can sit down with nothing, throw a few adventures at the characters and start stitching together an entire campaign from nothing on the fly. If you can do that, first off, I love you. Secondly, a lot of this advice really isn't for you. If you can improv an entire campaign and have your players love it, do it. But for you new GMs, if it's your first homebrew full campaign and you want to dip your toe in this water and see if you like it, look for three, four, five pre-built adventures and stitch them together under an overarching theme. So you can take five pre-built adventures, for example, put an overarching theme of a war around the entire thing. So you have these adventures going on, you just may have to change the big bad evil guy that's pulling the strings of all these different

little adventures that are going on. That way it ties it all together, and then you have to just design the one big encounter at the end where they're fighting the general or fighting the dragon that's leading them all. Stitch these adventures together under an invasion that's going on or a mad tyrant that has risen to power and is trying to usurp the throne. Stitch these adventures together under a cataclysm. There's a lot of different ways you can tie these adventures together and have this overarching umbrella of a campaign. That way there's not a lot you have to change. You just have to find

ways that these adventures make sense in the overarching theme of a cataclysm, for example. Just because you're starting out with pre-builts doesn't mean you will completely abandon your homebrew. Work on that mess in the background. Work on designing the world that you want the characters to adventure through. Work on designing the little towns that they may go in and out of. Work on picking the NPCs that they're going to be interacting with quite a bit. You're getting your sea legs as far as running adventures, but you're also being able to scratch that creative itch of creating this homebrew world. And then when you're ready, now start running the characters through it. But the main thing you should keep in mind,

that rule number zero, regardless of anything else, fun is the goal. Player fun and DM fun should be baked into the entire process, whether you're running pre-builts or homebrews. Start slow, modify as you feel comfortable, start customizing and tweaking as you go. Pretty soon you'll be running an adventure in your own home world in no time. This episode wound up being a little bit short and that's okay because I think this is a good place to stop. Next week I'll release two episodes and after that, I'm going to move to my standard one episode per week pace. If you do have any episode topic ideas or have any feedback for me,

please head over to taking20podcast.com and send me a message. I'll make sure to credit you if I do make that episode. Once again, I want to thank our non-made-up sponsor, Caffeine. C8H10N402. Stay awake. There's much to do. This has been Taking 20 Podcast, Episode 11, Pre-Build Adventures vs. Homebrew. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and here's hoping that your next game is your best game.