I love running homebrew settings and writing my own adventures. However, I was thinking about my weekly D&D game at the local community teen center and realized that I haven’t written much. Typically, I prep for about five minutes each week on my drive over, and then I improvise the rest, which mostly ended up being cliches. This made me wonder if I would just be better off running modules.
I’ll leave my answer as a cliffhanger for the conclusion. Until then, here are some of my pros and cons between homebrew and modules in this brief diversion from my usual Daggerheart content.
Why you should homebrew
1. Truly unique
I’ll caveat to say that every game is unique: the infinite possibilities within a freeform game like a TTRPG mean that no two sessions can ever be the same. If you’re running a module, there are enough rails where the the big picture can stay the same.
However, when you write your own world or adventures, then everything down to the details is part of something truly unique for your players. Just like how players can obsess over character creation, GMs can just get lost in worldbuilding and campaign planning because you are making something new.
And it’s an incredible feeling when your players engage with your world and story. Instead of just being this idea in your head, it really becomes real.
2. Creative control
When you’re on rails or within someone else’s world, you always have to be careful to stay true. There are facts and details about the world and a known canon to be consistent with. I have panicked when I improvised a detail of Waterdeep that was later contradicted by an official map.
When it’s your own world, the only true things are what happens at the table. The worldbuilding is all yours, and even if you write it down, it only becomes true when the players find out about it. It can be tricky to keep everything in your head, but at least I find it more comforting relying on details I came up with rather than what was written in a book.
3. Because you have energy
It’s hard enough to get over writer’s block even when you want to write. Although I enjoy doing my own homebrew prep, I sometimes am just not feeling up for it and watch the time disappear into internet black holes.
4. Customize to your players
The most concrete reason to homebrew your world and adventures is because you want to build the game around your players. When you run a module, the module is already done, and your players have to fit their characters into the situation. The story isn’t really about them, and the player connections are manufactured.
When you homebrew, then you can start with the player characters and figure out how the world revolves around them and reacts to them. They can inject their own backstory into the world itself. The PCs can be the chosen one because you wrote it for them.
Why you should use a module
1. Get past your own biases
Among my known weaknesses as a GM, I’m extremely boring in designing and picking monsters. I have reflavored the basic NPCs over and over again, and when I actually take the time to prepare more, I struggle to come up with something interesting.
When you’re running a module, you can get out of your own head and into the someone else’s. That can create some new experiences for your players who are used to your world building and adventure design.
2. Learn from the pros
And part of getting head of your own head is that you can learn a lot from how other writers and designers have put together worlds and adventures.
With a module, you can go a step beyond just reading and running to actually think about why it was written as it was. What contingencies did they plan for? How do they maintain consistency in the story? How do the encounters connect?
When I ran Dragon Heist, I loved the little details about the other NPCs and shops that the players shared a street with. I realized I could give shopkeepers more character than just being talking vending machines.
3. A shared experience
As evidenced by this blog, I love writing about how to play and run TTRPGs. However, I hate talking about specific moments that actually happen at my table. It takes too much context to explain what’s going on in the story. Jokes are never as funny the second time.
TTRPGs are so often a “you had to be there” experience, and it can make it harder to connect with others over the hobby.
However, published modules bridge that gap. If I have run Phandelver, and you have run Phandelver, we can talk about what happened with the dragon Thundertree. Each table is unique, but you can trace back to how things diverged because you at least share the same starting point.
4. Beware: you may not save time
In my past experience, I didn’t save much time in prep by relying on modules. It doesn’t feel like as much work, but it still takes awhile to read and re-read to know where the module is going. And the higher fidelity can take more time to prepare maps and other corresponding content, whereas I certainly would just sketch details for homebrew.
Final thoughts
So what did I decide? I’m using adventure modules.
My players aren’t picky about the game that I run: they have seemed pleased with just about everything (good or bad) I have thrown at them. In the end, what really mattered was what I wanted.
As I thought about my five minutes of prep, I just wasn’t proud of the game I was running. I could do better with more prep time, but if my players don’t care, I couldn’t find the energy to work harder for them.
And yet, I felt bad for running a game below my personal standard. The right compromise for me was to start running modules.
Oh, and one final caveat: this isn’t really an either-or situation: you can both homebrew and use modules, and you can do it even in the same campaign. Run a module in your homebrew adventure. Let your version of Greyhawk drift and evolve from published canon. Do what’s good for your table.
Elsewhere in Daggerheart
CHARITYHEART has started with Session Zero!
Maverick Games did a walkthrough for building a character on Demiplane. It probably doesn’t have too much if you have already played Daggerheart, but it’s another good introduction to the system.
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