You set aside three months to let your party of heroes have a grand adventure through your better-than-Tolkienesque campaign and instead of completing their first quest and ridding the cellar of rats for the money they need to gear up for the adventure, they capture the rats and begin breeding them. Then they set up a pest control service in the starter village and sneak into cellars at night to let the rats go so they can go in a few days later and receive more starter quests to rid the cellar of rats.
So how long such a campaign lasted for you last time exactly?
Oh I haven't ran a D&D campaign since I was 16 or so (~ 30 years). My players at that time weren't that clever (maybe a couple). If it were to happen to me now I'd probably just let them go about their merry way while dropping hints once per session about the goings-on outside of their little hamlet and then eventually have the level 15 baddies descend upon their lazy level 3 butts and lay waste to the starter village.
Jfc, I have never had my life summed up so well
The key is to make the condo also out of cardboard.
Pretty good metaphor for how I tend to run pre-written adventures these days. Take the general story and setting, and rework it so that the narrative revolves around your players' characters. Ran a pre-written adventure where the big bad was pretty boring, so I replaced him with a character from one of my player's backstory.
I take this to mean that it's not necessarily that this happens less in a pre-made campaign, but that you put the time and effort into creating your own only to see this happen. It's kind of like getting your kid a gift from the store only for them to play with the box vs. hand making a gift for them over several weeks only for them to play with the box.
I fucking hate this meme, published campaigns have their place but they are not better, and often times are worse, than homebrewed campaigns because they are not fitted to the players
Agreed for the most part. You'll still have the same situation in a published campaign where the players may be more interested in "side content" than the intended path (maybe more so since published campaigns tend to have specific things players need to do to move the story forward). I've personally run published adventures that very quickly veered into homebrew just because the players had different motivations than what the adventure path assumed.
Anyway, I think the original post was more of a generalized observation and wasn't specifically meant to say published campaigns are better or worse than homebrew.
So, what you're saying is that you know all about writing all about peanuts?
As you said they have their place. I don't think every campaign had to be 100% customized to the players. Twinkle the banished necromancer doesn't belong in Waterdeep Dragon Heist, but the player can make a character that would fit within that setting.
If you want it 100% then you can jam a character peice into a campaign puzzle if you really want to. It just requires work.
Happens in published campaigns just as much, but you can at least use the book as a hammer and keep slapping them with it until they're back on the rails.
Homebrew is fantastic because you can steer where your players go, provided they go somewhere interesting.
Published campaigns IMO are at their best when they're like, "here's a detailed world with interesting NPCs and here's the villain's master plan and the steps they're taking to enact it", and at their worst when they're like "by now your players should have done A, B and C so they should go do D now."
My favourite published campaigns are the most sandboxy. The Lost City had a sanctioned hardbound 5e conversion by Goodman Games. It's just this underground city with dozens of temples and other locations in immediate proximity to one another, and you can sort of do them in whatever order. But there's hints and suggestions about where to go next.
I started looking at OSR campaigns/scenarios after getting annoyed yet another time with far too verbose settings and constrained scene-to-scene flows. And how boy are they refreshing. Think they may be right up your alley.
Woodfall is one I recently got through a Kickstarter and been loving reading it. https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/258469/woodfall
As it should be. Death to prewritten campaigns and railroading. Read the sections of Dungeon World about campaign and session planning. I don't recommend the game itself but those sections are a gold mine for how to run a fun and rewarding game in general.
