Adventure Modules - Do you use them or not?

[Deleted]

I have been following the thread titled "In which Gronan muses about how D&D has changed" and wondered just how widespread is the use of adventure modules among original school Judges/Referees/Dungeon Masters?

[kenmeister]

Every time I go off into homebrew land, I realize how little time I actually have, and I steer things back to published stuff. D&D is at its best for 20-somethings who don't have families yet and aren't working 50+ hour weeks at the office.

[Koren n'Rhys]

Yep - it's a matter of time not creativity. I may not run a module as written, indeed I rarely use a whole adventure. But I can, and do, pluck out encounters, maps, and whatever bits and pieces I like and puzzle them into something I like. It's quicker than creating the thing from whole cloth.

[geoffrey]

It's so rare that I use a module, though I have gotten a lot of good inspiration from them (especially Gary's D trilogy).

Let me list modules that I have actually used in play:

B1: In Search of the Unknown by Mike Carr (a few times)
B2: Keep on the Borderlands by Gary Gygax (many times)
Prisoners of the Maze by Rob Kuntz (once)

I think that's it. I have used individual rooms stolen from modules, but that hardly counts.

I find that it's more work studying a module than it is to make my own adventures. In the last 10 years I've used a module only twice (once for B1 and once for Prisoners of the Maze).

[Sean Michael Kelly]

I'm much the same as others. I've got a busy life and use the adventure modules as tools to supplement our games. Some i've never played, but just enjoy reading for the ideas and inspiration.

[Morandir]

I tend to use them quite often. In a lot of ways it's a holdover from my days of playing 3e, when I used modules because I didn't want to spend hours on stats for monsters and NPCs - I just wanted to play, and letting someone else do all that work was far easier. My laziness has followed me into OD&D. Modules like B1 and B2 also helped me get the "feel" of old-school D&D. I have since gained enough confidence in my ability to make my own stuff, but I'm not above dropping something pre-made onto my outdoor map. I'm quite happy to steal any good idea I find from a module, forum or blog and use it in my games.

In addition, there are some modules that are, in my opinion, simply too cool not to use. Death Frost Doom, The Grinding Gear, and the aforementioned B1 and B2 have all provided my group with plenty of fun.

Right now I'm running a mini campaign based around B4 to give myself time to construct a true megadungeon - though even here I'm stealing stuff from other places. I'm using Blackmoor town and castle/dungeon as the base, restocking and modifying the dungeons to suit my setting. The outdoor map is the OS map. I've used the tables from Vol. III to determine the occupants of all the castles on the map, supplementing with stuff from Secrets of Acheron and Carcosa. I'm really excited about the whole thing as this is the first time I've made everything myself, except the maps of course - but that's because I'm terrible at drawing maps.

[Deleted]

I never had much use for them in campaign play, though I often ran them as one-shots and such by player request.

I bought the first few with great enthusiasm but they were so different from my style of gaming and play that I just never got "into" them. For this reason, they were outside of my official world.

[gloriousbattle]

I like them as a quick way to determine the shapes of rooms and where the goblins and traps are, though I usually change them to fit my campaign.

I like them as time savers.

[Deleted]

I have my OD&D game this Saturday. I am working Saturday from 8am to 1PM then driving an hour home and my game starts at 430pm. I will have worked the last 6 consecutive Saturdays and I have very little free time which is why we only play once per month. This Saturday will make 26 consecutive months we have played since we started it up.

I do not use modules, but I also don't have any time at all to sit and write up anything ahead of time. The only thing I have is that I jot down ideas as I have them and I take that sheet with me to the game. Other than a few tables I rarely open up the books, I just create it on the fly as we go. So far the players have been on 3 different planets in 3 different realities, explorered in 4 different dungeons and covered between 100,000 to 200,000 square feet of dungeon. They have traveled across two continents and a stretch of ocean and are getting ready to set sail again in the game coming up.

I believe I could play 8 hours a day every day for a couple of years and have new things everyday. I wish I did have time to set and write. All I know is as long as the players keep telling me they are having fun and keep coming back I will keep doing it on the fly.

[DungeonDevil]

50/50.
I love reading the modules as literature, too.
I do place a strong amount of emphasis on creating, developing my own campaign and tinkering with mechanics and stuff. That's where most of the fun is, not necessarily by running solely through pre-published materials.

[kesher]

I'm way tooooo busy to NOT use modules. Plus, I was trained into them back in the 80's. Plus, there are so many GOOD ones out there now.

I just feel far more free these days to alter them deliberately or on the fly...

[coffee]

I had to go with "occasionally". Some modules provide good maps, or inspiration, or whatever.

But the last module I ran was Tower of the Stargazer from Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy RPG. That was an eye-opener for the style of game it was intended to be.

I could use the same rules and run pretty much "vanilla D&D", but the module me showed some of the stylistic choices one could make to give the players a different experience.

But I still like creating my own stuff.

[Finarvyn]

I don't use modules that often because, honestly, I don't have the time to read them in the depth that they deserve. To really run a module right you need to know everything about it so that all of the factions are doing the right things, etc.

I like Gary's modules and love the first few TLG Haunted Highland modules, but I don't use that many otherwise. Instead I'll usually just throw together a few rooms of a dungeon and let my group work through them.

What I'd like most is a bunch of one-off tournament-style modules where my group and I could play in 1-2 sessions as a complete event without having to stick to some grand storyline.