Poll: Why do we buy this stuff?
A new year means a new start and the inevitable tidying of my office. When moving my piles of D&D modules it occurred to me that I’ve never played most of these. Am I the only one who buys this stuff but never uses it?
How many of the adventures you buy do you actually run?
- Some of them (63%, 20 Votes)
- Most of them (19%, 6 Votes)
- None of them (13%, 4 Votes)
- All of them (5%, 2 Votes)
Total Voters: 32
Loading ...Do you buy adventures mainly because...
- You want to run the adventure (28%, 9 Votes)
- You like to read them (25%, 8 Votes)
- They give you ideas (25%, 8 Votes)
- They are a ready source of NPCs and encounters (22%, 7 Votes)
Total Voters: 32
Loading ...What is wrong with modern adventures?
- Too expensive (28%, 9 Votes)
- Too much plot & background (25%, 8 Votes)
- Badly written (16%, 5 Votes)
- Too much mindless dungeon bashing (16%, 5 Votes)
- Nothing (15%, 5 Votes)
Total Voters: 32
Loading ...The best type of adventures are...
- One-offs that can be dropped into any campaign (67%, 22 Votes)
- Linked sequences of adventures that form a big campaign (24%, 8 Votes)
- Massive campaign packs (9%, 3 Votes)
- Specific to a setting or game world (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 33
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January 4th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
If I’m spending money, it’s rarely on an adventure. I pick up alot of free ones though and answered based on those experiences.
Viriatha´s last blog post..Reptile Folk
January 4th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I admit, it’s as much bloody minded indignation that I’ve spent the money as desire to run the thing that makes me run them. I don’t mind putting together campaigns but time is always a constraint. And the good ideas make the rounds. You’d be surprised where I had NPCs from the old Slavers series show up…
January 4th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
I have very little experience buying adventures. It seems to me you need to download and read through an adventure first before you know if you’re going to run it. Then, after I run the adventure, I go buy it to give the author his due. But when I download it, I intend to run it. I read GM advice sites or Dragon if I want ideas.
I bought about 12 adventures from Goodman Games before they stopped publishing d20 on Jan 1st. I don’t know how many of those I’ll run because I haven’t even read them yet and a lot of them are for first level.
I just wish I could tell by reading an adventure how much fun it is going to be!
January 4th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I find store bought modules helpful for ideas for my home game, but rarely play any “as written”. I ran 3.5 RPGA modules for conventions, and home games in the past; these were free, but tended to be badly written. Unfortunately, with 3.5 RPGA you were required to run them “as is” which gave me ulcers. The newer 4e RPGA stuff is getting better, and they let the DM have more freedom during play which in turn, has lead to less ulcers.
shent_lodge´s last blog post..Centaurs of the Green Forest
January 5th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I just wanted to toss in an additional reason why I buy/run adventures. Although for the last 30 years I ran strictly my own ‘world’, of late I have been running RPGA LG/LFR and have been buying and using adapted modules because that was the only way to stay ‘legal’ and break out of the universal formula that their short adventure form tends to impose (currently that seems to be: two easy encounters and one skill challenge – in any order – followed by one boss encounter).
However even while not DMing RPGA, I still occasionally buy the adventures for the ideas- I just wouldn’t run any of them ‘as written’. (Being cheap, however, I rarely pay MSRP for them and usually buy them after they have been discounted for one reason or another. Often used.)
And I’d point out that I spent far more on 3rd party 3.5 books that I never used than I ever did on modules. I think that buying stuff that looks interesting and might have a few good ideas in it – but that much more gets bought than ever gets used.
Carl