I really like some of the adventures in published modules, but I always feel constrained or not really connected with the story when I run them. Has anyone else felt this way and does anyone have tips for fixing it?
Specifically, I'm running Candlekeep Mysteries with a side of Saltmarsh. I usually run Homebrew intrigue campaigns, but I wanted to make use of all the adventure books that I've bought. :) Plus I think that some of the adventures seem very fun and well written.
The only adventures I have been involved with as written were Avernus and Icewind--the former being effectively a glorified fetch quest and thus rather constraining and the latter being incredibly poorly written and emotionally hollow and thus impossible to connect with. I am sure that those problems persist in other campaigns as well. The big problem: They do not tend to take into account the myriad possibilities available to players nor do they tend to add much more than a paragraph or two of personality to the NPCs. If you are not homebrewing the campaigns to actually add some meat to them, they'll always feel rather devoid of any character.
Personally, I figure if I have to homebrew anyway, I'm just going to run a homebrew campaign and use the adventures for some inspiration. For example, I had to send my party to the Underdark in a recent campaign--so I used Out of the Abyss for its maps, some of its characters, and its towns, cities, and other locations, discarding the actual story of that campaign and supplanting it with my own. Candlekeep is another great book the opposite treatment--you can run a mini adventure nearly as written, reskinned for your specific campaign. Great way to insert a fun little side quest or objective if you do not have time to fully prepare for a session.
I've never run official modules, but I have done third party adventures and I've played through ToA and Icewind. I think the trick is to use what's written more as a springboard than as a manual. Latch onto whatever inspires you in the story and homebrew some NPCs or even story arcs from that. You and your players will naturally gravitate towards certain narrative elements and build a great story together.
Rime of the Frostmaiden was one of the best D&D experiences I've ever had, and my DM homebrewed the crap out of that module to adjust for how poorly it's written. For us, it ended up as a revenge plot against a goddess who cursed each member of the party personally. We went to the same places in the book and fought the same monsters, but the emotional beats and stakes were more than "save the Dale." They were, "get your daughter/boyfriend/hometown back from Auril's icy clutches." And when the module seemed too disconnected with the stakes and plot (e.g. Caves of Hunger), we bailed and the DM adjusted. My fellow players and I connected with the setting, not the hooks, so our DM ran with that.
I’m glad you posted that anecdote theologyofbegels - perfectly captures how an adventure DMed by someone who plays it to the book can lead to a much worse experience than with a DM who puts in a degree of effort.
The setting itself was great and I rather enjoyed the parts where we were just seeing the world—but the story… ooph. I won’t spoil much, but it really needs a DM who can actually make Auril a worthy adversary, a villain with a understandable motivation, in the midst of a redemption arc, or something that the players can feel connected to (all of which are possible even as written since they forgot to write anything for her). That…. Didn’t happen in my campaign, despite the DM committing other DM sins like binding my Paladin to Auril… and not giving her any personality for my NG Paladin (but not in his definition of NG, so therefore it was the “wrong” way to play NG and I needed to be punished with an evil god) to actually make that bond complex.
Was a bad campaign in a great setting, and really cemented my opinion on how modules should be used.
Yikes! Sorry to hear about your experience. I also completely agree with your assessment of it being a bad campaign in a great setting. I read through it after we finished our campaign and the only words I have are "dumpster fire."
I do think that some modules are worse than others, and Icewind Dale is probably bottom of the barrel from a storytelling and organizational perspective. For some people, running modules straight is enough because of their playstyle - all they need is a quest and some baddies to slay and they're happy as can be. For others, they need to connect emotionally with the story and feel like they're doing something meaningful in a narrative that makes sense. The Icewind module, in my opinion, requires a lot more work on the DM's part to get it to resonate with certain playstyles.
As I said to OP, I think using published content as a springboard for each group is the way to go. Some tables will be happy to run with a module as-written, others may need the DM to tweak it to make it really sing - and others may necessitate reconstructive surgery. As long as you can identify what engages the players (and you as a DM!), you can make a great story come alive. The nice thing about modules is that most of the heavy lifting is done for the DM, but I don't think any published adventure is intended to be run without a little personalization. Modules can never account for player unpredictability.
I'm currently running a campaign that is a hodge podge of Tales from the Yawning Portal, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dragon of Icespire Peak and the extra modules that came with it, and Candlekeep Mysteries. The main reason I am using published content is because the game is online and the resources provided save me an immense amount of time preparing the modules to run.
I started with Saltmarsh and the Sunless Citadel. Advancement has been about 1/2 or less the expected 5e rate since the group have been playing since AD&D days so the suggested advancement in 5e modules feels like a whirlwind. This let me run the modules from TftYP and GoS in parallel jumping between the two. The party has bought a house in Saltmarsh that they use for a base of operations and the scope of the campaign continues to grow. It started as individual adventures linked together through plot devices but has since expanded and I am introducing some more large scale plot lines (developing out of random earlier details) to tie things together and give the campaign a focus as it moves into late tier 2 and tier 3 (they are level 8 now). Ideally I plan to run it until level 20 just to see how 5e plays out at high levels. AD&D didn't play that well at high level and I have much more hope for 5e.
The key to running set pieces from other sources is to tie them together with some plot devices. Choose your world, give some thought to the major factions present, then see how the modules can be tied into a larger plot line. Some of the adventures become side quests while others will have elements that will advance the primary plot. Make the smallest changes needed in the modules to tie them into the plot lines you've developed. Sometimes this can be just a couple of changes to NPCs or adding some evidence to be found by the players that ties the modules together. Sometimes you just change the allegiance of the bad guys. For example, I have included the Red Wizards of Thay (as a replacement for the Red Brotherhood :) - they sound similar enough) to the island Abbey adventure in Saltmarsh then tied the Sahaugen into a larger plan by the Red Wizards to invade/disrupt trade in the nation and along the coast of the country containing Saltmarsh. I added some documents to the Sahaugen adventure pointing back to the Red Wizards and added some Red Wizard symbology to the Abbey thus tying these into a larger plot line - to which I will later add Dead in Thay from TftYP. However, the world has a lot more going on than that - and the Red Wizards are only one of several factions that are ultimately after the same items - one of which has just fallen into the hands of the party in a slightly modified version of Storm Lord's Wrath from DoIP. I used 2-3 of the mini adventures and the setting.
In addition, to keep things simple and require less work, I set things in a modified Greyhawk (where Saltmarsh was originally set), in part because some folks have created the most awesome world maps for it and there is lots of available published material for organizations and politics if needed (though I have added/changed the major factions in certain areas).
Anyway, I find the key to making use of published short adventures is to tie them into larger plots where necessary and otherwise use them much like quests/side quests etc. By creating a larger storyline and making minimal modifications to fit that storyline, it increases the feeling of connection to the content and eliminates the constraints since the story is the one you are telling - not a disconnected module unconnected to anything else. You also don't need to tie every adventure into your main plot lines - some of them will literally be side quests driven by character interest or some rumor or information they pick up.
I've only ran waterdeep dragon heist. And i changed a lot of it. I incorporated character backstories and players wanted to keep going past 5th level so we are now level 10 full homebrew spinned from the modified module. I mostly homebrew now but sometimes i look at other modules for coold ideas and incorporate them in my game.
I think the only key advise is to no let youself be constrained. Its not homebrew OR modules. You already know how to build your own stuff. Keep what you like, change what you don't.
I personally feel like published adventures suck. Feel free to disagree, but in my experience, they result in a constraining, frustrating drag that doesn't allow any room for the players to think creatively or have any effect at all on how the story goes. They're basically Pre-Made Railroaded Games In A Box.
I will give them one merit though - by reading through the adventures, you can get inspiration and see how an adventure plays out. When I was a new DM, Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak were good for that purpose. You can use some encounters, scenes, concepts, NPCs, treasure, etc from these adventures, and have a great time doing that.
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Panda-wat (I hate my username) is somehow convinced that he is objectively right about everything D&D related even though he obviously is not. Considering that, he'd probably make a great D&D youtuber.
"If I die, I can live with that." ~Luke Hart, the DM lair
With those books specifically, they aren't really designed to be run as a complete campaign. Each adventure is its own stand along story.
With GoS and CM, I used them in my own homebrew campaign as the base of an adventure, but then changed NPCs, locations, or whatever else to match the story I want to tell and the PCs decisions.
Sort of like a DIY crafting kit where you need to supply some of the materials too.
Published adventures are loose frameworks freely adaptable to fit an individual game. I'm running the Lost Mine of Phandelver, but making changes as I see fit. I didn't like the stat block for Glass Staff, so I rolled him as a PC and picked his spells/tactics to suit me. Going to add a homebrew dungeon near Old Owl Well because I wanna tie in some Netheril lore. Adding a faerie dragon prankster for flavor. A tweak here, and tweak there, and before you know it, you've taken a published source and made it your own. At least in theory.
Yeah. I try to dig around under an idea catches me "Oh, Lost Mines is a Western" or and then I start filling out details. I start making the NPCs act like that genre or adding in random encounters that fit that theme.
Really, do what you feel is cool. The adventures in 5e are too big though, in general. So, you need to insert content that you really love -- because the more you love it, the more likely the players will too. Lean into your inspirations. A couple months ago, I was watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and it hit me that Part III would make a good formula for a travel adventure. So now, I am throwing a bunch of weirdo powered extraplanar bounty hunters after my players, who all want to collect Zariel's big reward of like 1,000,000 soul coins. Also, they have a time that started at 110 days before the campaign is lost-- both of which I stole shameless from Jojo. Do the players know JoJo? No, probably not. But they get to fight all sorts of interesting encounters and I get to play a bunch of over-the-top villains with crazy powers.
I think what has helped me to get into the story is to come up with a fun character and personality for the NPCs introduced in the pre-written adventures, whether that means drastically changing the race and personality of a character, or just coming up with a fun voice for them.
For example, when playing through Lost Mines of Phandelver, I would voice Sildar Hallwinter using a not-particularly-good Patrick Warburton impersonation. It made him more fun for me to play and helped inform any decisions I might make for the character.
In that same adventure there was a character named Halia Thornton who is a shady tradeswoman who secretly works for the Zhentarim... I changed her name to just Thorn and made her into a goblin who dresses extravagantly and wears a ton of jewelry and makeup, literally comparing her to the Female Gremlin from Gremlins 2 and she instantly became a favorite NPC of the players. I didn't really change her function within the story itself in any meaningful way, but just making her more outlandish helped to make it more fun.
Another little thing I've done is occasionally using characters I created and using them as NPCs to fill roles in the world. I don't know about all of you, but I have probably a dozen or more character concepts in my head that I know I'll never be able to play, since it's so easy to come up with a character but so time consuming to use them even just for a one-shot. So I sprinkle them into my story, usually either as an informant, occasionally in a role that helps in combat (or, more likely, as an opponent for the players to face), and just use those fun character and class combinations that I otherwise would never have the chance to try out.
As DM I adore the prewritten modules because I can focus on the stuff I'd rather focus on: Characters, interactions, and role playing.
Here's where I am as of today:
Ravenloft 1921 - Basically I'm running Curse of Strahd but the players are survivors of a plane crash that was bound for Cairo from Amsterdam. One of them knows that magic exists (warlock) while the rest are mundanes as you'd expect to find in the 1920's Lovecraftian. While there are some early and significant "not in Kansas" elements, it works. I run it with my own take on what story elements to focus on because I've been running Ravenloft since 1988.
The Convergence - 100% homebrewed game. I have 3 plot points per season arc that the PC's need to move through and then each week I figure out "things" that can happen/ be presented, that will move them closer to the next plot point.
The Bitter Victory - 80% written. We started on the high seas with me trying to build a story around a specific tiktok lyrics of which are:
There once was a lass sent out to sea Ordered by the king ‘stay away from me A princess should not fall in love with a commoner and a thief So I sang the sirens song In hopes one day she will come home with more than her weight in gold to take me fathers throne
But after homebrewing some encounters between the characters and some pirates, I shifted to a dungeon in Ghosts of Saltmarsh which has taken up the last 4 of our sessions. And it was nice to NOT be planning combat encounters.
Those are my streamed games. Off line I've got a game of Dragonheist, and two of Candlekeep and possibly a 3rd.
For me, if I have to plan, I want to plan story tie ins, NPC attitudes and roleplay chances. I don't want to spend time looking through the encounter builder to plan fights. I don't want to think too hard about mechanics when I can think about story. While some of the adventures have "rails" to them, dropping in pre-written elements (ie using Isle of the Abbey from GoS) takes SO much weight off my shoulders. And really, while I appreciate DM's who can run a sandbox.... I cant.
I just don't have the temperament to sit and wait for a party to say "we've decided, after much debate, that we want to do X". And then go off and plan X. By using some rails and story elements that are planned, I can give them a path to go down and let decide how to go down it.
I really like some of the adventures in published modules, but I always feel constrained or not really connected with the story when I run them. Has anyone else felt this way and does anyone have tips for fixing it?
Specifically, I'm running Candlekeep Mysteries with a side of Saltmarsh. I usually run Homebrew intrigue campaigns, but I wanted to make use of all the adventure books that I've bought. :) Plus I think that some of the adventures seem very fun and well written.
Only spilt the party if you see something shiny.
Ariendela Sneakerson, Half-elf Rogue (8); Harmony Wolfsbane, Tiefling Bard (10); Agnomally, Gnomish Sorcerer (3); Breeze, Tabaxi Monk (8); Grace, Dragonborn Barbarian (7); DM, Homebrew- The Sequestered Lands/Underwater Explorers; Candlekeep
The only adventures I have been involved with as written were Avernus and Icewind--the former being effectively a glorified fetch quest and thus rather constraining and the latter being incredibly poorly written and emotionally hollow and thus impossible to connect with. I am sure that those problems persist in other campaigns as well. The big problem: They do not tend to take into account the myriad possibilities available to players nor do they tend to add much more than a paragraph or two of personality to the NPCs. If you are not homebrewing the campaigns to actually add some meat to them, they'll always feel rather devoid of any character.
Personally, I figure if I have to homebrew anyway, I'm just going to run a homebrew campaign and use the adventures for some inspiration. For example, I had to send my party to the Underdark in a recent campaign--so I used Out of the Abyss for its maps, some of its characters, and its towns, cities, and other locations, discarding the actual story of that campaign and supplanting it with my own. Candlekeep is another great book the opposite treatment--you can run a mini adventure nearly as written, reskinned for your specific campaign. Great way to insert a fun little side quest or objective if you do not have time to fully prepare for a session.
I've never run official modules, but I have done third party adventures and I've played through ToA and Icewind. I think the trick is to use what's written more as a springboard than as a manual. Latch onto whatever inspires you in the story and homebrew some NPCs or even story arcs from that. You and your players will naturally gravitate towards certain narrative elements and build a great story together.
Rime of the Frostmaiden was one of the best D&D experiences I've ever had, and my DM homebrewed the crap out of that module to adjust for how poorly it's written. For us, it ended up as a revenge plot against a goddess who cursed each member of the party personally. We went to the same places in the book and fought the same monsters, but the emotional beats and stakes were more than "save the Dale." They were, "get your daughter/boyfriend/hometown back from Auril's icy clutches." And when the module seemed too disconnected with the stakes and plot (e.g. Caves of Hunger), we bailed and the DM adjusted. My fellow players and I connected with the setting, not the hooks, so our DM ran with that.
I’m glad you posted that anecdote theologyofbegels - perfectly captures how an adventure DMed by someone who plays it to the book can lead to a much worse experience than with a DM who puts in a degree of effort.
The setting itself was great and I rather enjoyed the parts where we were just seeing the world—but the story… ooph. I won’t spoil much, but it really needs a DM who can actually make Auril a worthy adversary, a villain with a understandable motivation, in the midst of a redemption arc, or something that the players can feel connected to (all of which are possible even as written since they forgot to write anything for her). That…. Didn’t happen in my campaign, despite the DM committing other DM sins like binding my Paladin to Auril… and not giving her any personality for my NG Paladin (but not in his definition of NG, so therefore it was the “wrong” way to play NG and I needed to be punished with an evil god) to actually make that bond complex.
Was a bad campaign in a great setting, and really cemented my opinion on how modules should be used.
Yikes! Sorry to hear about your experience. I also completely agree with your assessment of it being a bad campaign in a great setting. I read through it after we finished our campaign and the only words I have are "dumpster fire."
I do think that some modules are worse than others, and Icewind Dale is probably bottom of the barrel from a storytelling and organizational perspective. For some people, running modules straight is enough because of their playstyle - all they need is a quest and some baddies to slay and they're happy as can be. For others, they need to connect emotionally with the story and feel like they're doing something meaningful in a narrative that makes sense. The Icewind module, in my opinion, requires a lot more work on the DM's part to get it to resonate with certain playstyles.
As I said to OP, I think using published content as a springboard for each group is the way to go. Some tables will be happy to run with a module as-written, others may need the DM to tweak it to make it really sing - and others may necessitate reconstructive surgery. As long as you can identify what engages the players (and you as a DM!), you can make a great story come alive. The nice thing about modules is that most of the heavy lifting is done for the DM, but I don't think any published adventure is intended to be run without a little personalization. Modules can never account for player unpredictability.
I'm currently running a campaign that is a hodge podge of Tales from the Yawning Portal, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dragon of Icespire Peak and the extra modules that came with it, and Candlekeep Mysteries. The main reason I am using published content is because the game is online and the resources provided save me an immense amount of time preparing the modules to run.
I started with Saltmarsh and the Sunless Citadel. Advancement has been about 1/2 or less the expected 5e rate since the group have been playing since AD&D days so the suggested advancement in 5e modules feels like a whirlwind. This let me run the modules from TftYP and GoS in parallel jumping between the two. The party has bought a house in Saltmarsh that they use for a base of operations and the scope of the campaign continues to grow. It started as individual adventures linked together through plot devices but has since expanded and I am introducing some more large scale plot lines (developing out of random earlier details) to tie things together and give the campaign a focus as it moves into late tier 2 and tier 3 (they are level 8 now). Ideally I plan to run it until level 20 just to see how 5e plays out at high levels. AD&D didn't play that well at high level and I have much more hope for 5e.
The key to running set pieces from other sources is to tie them together with some plot devices. Choose your world, give some thought to the major factions present, then see how the modules can be tied into a larger plot line. Some of the adventures become side quests while others will have elements that will advance the primary plot. Make the smallest changes needed in the modules to tie them into the plot lines you've developed. Sometimes this can be just a couple of changes to NPCs or adding some evidence to be found by the players that ties the modules together. Sometimes you just change the allegiance of the bad guys. For example, I have included the Red Wizards of Thay (as a replacement for the Red Brotherhood :) - they sound similar enough) to the island Abbey adventure in Saltmarsh then tied the Sahaugen into a larger plan by the Red Wizards to invade/disrupt trade in the nation and along the coast of the country containing Saltmarsh. I added some documents to the Sahaugen adventure pointing back to the Red Wizards and added some Red Wizard symbology to the Abbey thus tying these into a larger plot line - to which I will later add Dead in Thay from TftYP. However, the world has a lot more going on than that - and the Red Wizards are only one of several factions that are ultimately after the same items - one of which has just fallen into the hands of the party in a slightly modified version of Storm Lord's Wrath from DoIP. I used 2-3 of the mini adventures and the setting.
In addition, to keep things simple and require less work, I set things in a modified Greyhawk (where Saltmarsh was originally set), in part because some folks have created the most awesome world maps for it and there is lots of available published material for organizations and politics if needed (though I have added/changed the major factions in certain areas).
Anyway, I find the key to making use of published short adventures is to tie them into larger plots where necessary and otherwise use them much like quests/side quests etc. By creating a larger storyline and making minimal modifications to fit that storyline, it increases the feeling of connection to the content and eliminates the constraints since the story is the one you are telling - not a disconnected module unconnected to anything else. You also don't need to tie every adventure into your main plot lines - some of them will literally be side quests driven by character interest or some rumor or information they pick up.
I've only ran waterdeep dragon heist. And i changed a lot of it. I incorporated character backstories and players wanted to keep going past 5th level so we are now level 10 full homebrew spinned from the modified module. I mostly homebrew now but sometimes i look at other modules for coold ideas and incorporate them in my game.
I think the only key advise is to no let youself be constrained. Its not homebrew OR modules. You already know how to build your own stuff. Keep what you like, change what you don't.
I personally feel like published adventures suck. Feel free to disagree, but in my experience, they result in a constraining, frustrating drag that doesn't allow any room for the players to think creatively or have any effect at all on how the story goes. They're basically Pre-Made Railroaded Games In A Box.
I will give them one merit though - by reading through the adventures, you can get inspiration and see how an adventure plays out. When I was a new DM, Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak were good for that purpose. You can use some encounters, scenes, concepts, NPCs, treasure, etc from these adventures, and have a great time doing that.
Panda-wat (I hate my username) is somehow convinced that he is objectively right about everything D&D related even though he obviously is not. Considering that, he'd probably make a great D&D youtuber.
"If I die, I can live with that." ~Luke Hart, the DM lair
With those books specifically, they aren't really designed to be run as a complete campaign. Each adventure is its own stand along story.
With GoS and CM, I used them in my own homebrew campaign as the base of an adventure, but then changed NPCs, locations, or whatever else to match the story I want to tell and the PCs decisions.
Sort of like a DIY crafting kit where you need to supply some of the materials too.
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Published adventures are loose frameworks freely adaptable to fit an individual game. I'm running the Lost Mine of Phandelver, but making changes as I see fit. I didn't like the stat block for Glass Staff, so I rolled him as a PC and picked his spells/tactics to suit me. Going to add a homebrew dungeon near Old Owl Well because I wanna tie in some Netheril lore. Adding a faerie dragon prankster for flavor. A tweak here, and tweak there, and before you know it, you've taken a published source and made it your own. At least in theory.
Yeah. I try to dig around under an idea catches me "Oh, Lost Mines is a Western" or and then I start filling out details. I start making the NPCs act like that genre or adding in random encounters that fit that theme.
Really, do what you feel is cool. The adventures in 5e are too big though, in general. So, you need to insert content that you really love -- because the more you love it, the more likely the players will too. Lean into your inspirations. A couple months ago, I was watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and it hit me that Part III would make a good formula for a travel adventure. So now, I am throwing a bunch of weirdo powered extraplanar bounty hunters after my players, who all want to collect Zariel's big reward of like 1,000,000 soul coins. Also, they have a time that started at 110 days before the campaign is lost-- both of which I stole shameless from Jojo. Do the players know JoJo? No, probably not. But they get to fight all sorts of interesting encounters and I get to play a bunch of over-the-top villains with crazy powers.
Make any adventure you run your own.
I think what has helped me to get into the story is to come up with a fun character and personality for the NPCs introduced in the pre-written adventures, whether that means drastically changing the race and personality of a character, or just coming up with a fun voice for them.
For example, when playing through Lost Mines of Phandelver, I would voice Sildar Hallwinter using a not-particularly-good Patrick Warburton impersonation. It made him more fun for me to play and helped inform any decisions I might make for the character.
In that same adventure there was a character named Halia Thornton who is a shady tradeswoman who secretly works for the Zhentarim... I changed her name to just Thorn and made her into a goblin who dresses extravagantly and wears a ton of jewelry and makeup, literally comparing her to the Female Gremlin from Gremlins 2 and she instantly became a favorite NPC of the players. I didn't really change her function within the story itself in any meaningful way, but just making her more outlandish helped to make it more fun.
Another little thing I've done is occasionally using characters I created and using them as NPCs to fill roles in the world. I don't know about all of you, but I have probably a dozen or more character concepts in my head that I know I'll never be able to play, since it's so easy to come up with a character but so time consuming to use them even just for a one-shot. So I sprinkle them into my story, usually either as an informant, occasionally in a role that helps in combat (or, more likely, as an opponent for the players to face), and just use those fun character and class combinations that I otherwise would never have the chance to try out.
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As DM I adore the prewritten modules because I can focus on the stuff I'd rather focus on: Characters, interactions, and role playing.
Here's where I am as of today:
Ravenloft 1921 - Basically I'm running Curse of Strahd but the players are survivors of a plane crash that was bound for Cairo from Amsterdam. One of them knows that magic exists (warlock) while the rest are mundanes as you'd expect to find in the 1920's Lovecraftian. While there are some early and significant "not in Kansas" elements, it works. I run it with my own take on what story elements to focus on because I've been running Ravenloft since 1988.
The Convergence - 100% homebrewed game. I have 3 plot points per season arc that the PC's need to move through and then each week I figure out "things" that can happen/ be presented, that will move them closer to the next plot point.
The Bitter Victory - 80% written. We started on the high seas with me trying to build a story around a specific tiktok lyrics of which are:
There once was a lass sent out to sea
Ordered by the king ‘stay away from me
A princess should not fall in love with a commoner and a thief
So I sang the sirens song
In hopes one day she will come home
with more than her weight in gold
to take me fathers throne
But after homebrewing some encounters between the characters and some pirates, I shifted to a dungeon in Ghosts of Saltmarsh which has taken up the last 4 of our sessions. And it was nice to NOT be planning combat encounters.
Those are my streamed games. Off line I've got a game of Dragonheist, and two of Candlekeep and possibly a 3rd.
For me, if I have to plan, I want to plan story tie ins, NPC attitudes and roleplay chances. I don't want to spend time looking through the encounter builder to plan fights. I don't want to think too hard about mechanics when I can think about story. While some of the adventures have "rails" to them, dropping in pre-written elements (ie using Isle of the Abbey from GoS) takes SO much weight off my shoulders. And really, while I appreciate DM's who can run a sandbox.... I cant.
I just don't have the temperament to sit and wait for a party to say "we've decided, after much debate, that we want to do X". And then go off and plan X. By using some rails and story elements that are planned, I can give them a path to go down and let decide how to go down it.
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