Hi all,
Nowadays I only run prewritten adventures. I have found that I don't have time in my day to come up with a coherant plot and stat up opponents for my players to face. A good prewritten adventure takes all the hassle away.
That said you can easily fall into the trap of thinking that you need not do any work. Thinking like that can get you into trouble fast. So here are my five top tips for running prewritten scenarios.
1) Manage player expectations. A prewritten adventure will have it's own style, so make sure you let your players know what characters will work and what characters will fall flat. For example, an adventure may start at sea but 90% of it may take place in a dungeon where sea based skills and abilities will be useless. It's therefore important that you let the players know this.
Tied in with this is making sure concepts fit the campaign. If the campaign calls for eco warriors try to steer the players away from corporate stooges. Likewise if a player has her heart set on playing a total coward in a game where you become superheroes, it may be an idea to steer her to a different concept (or at least a modified concept). Communication is the main thing, without it the players may feel railroaded and by extension resentful.
2) Preparation is still key
So the plot is written for you, the NPC's statblocks are generated, everything is there for you so no work is needed right?
Wrong. I'm not saying that running a pre written adventure doesn't take out some of the grunt work of creating a game but nor does it mean that you have nothing that you need to do. The trick is not to memorise the whole thing but to get the flow of the plot as written. That way you can make the game flow to your style. Be confident in how the plot works. Ask yourself how the players get to a certain point and then make sure you give them the opportunity to get there. However...
3) Find the break points
A wise man once said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Well the same can be said for RPG's. Of course it's feasible to allow your players to go completely off the rails and do something random. If the players want to spend their time running a bar rather than follow the plot then sure, knock yourself out if that's what you want to do.
That said by buying a prewritten adventure you have a perfectly acceptable plot that you have paid good money for. My contention is that you should try to run according to that plot wherever possible. Does that mean you should follow a plot religiously? No, and I will cover that in point 5. However if Bob the Lich is the enemy of the campaign it's a bit disappointing if the players don't end up fighting him.
To that end you have to find the break points. These are the points in an adventure where the writer will make an assumption about what the players will do and if they don't do it then the campaign can't continue. The trick is to identify these points before they come up and have a contingency plan in place in case the players don't do that.
A good example is in Paizo's Legacy of Fire Adventure Path *obvious spoilers here folks*. The first adventure has one of the players become semi possessed by a friendly spirit. This is contingent on a particular monster hitting a PC and said PC failing a saving throw. If they don't become possessed then as written the plot comes to a shuddering halt in the second book because they wont find a secret passage without said spirit's help.
As a GM you have a few options here. Fudge things so someone automatically gets hit and fails the save (that's what I did btw) or have the secret door automatically found by the players. What you do is not important what is important is that you identify these problems before they occur.
4) Messageboards are your friend
Messageboards are an odd little thing. I love posting on them but I often find the vitriol and ignorance expressed on them to be a pain in the arse to wade through. The fact that I often am responsible for some of the vitriol doesn't exactly help.
However messageboards are a great resource for identifying issues with prewritten scenarios. Reading about what people are saying about an adventure gives you a great insight into the issues you can encounter when running it. It can help you identify problem encounters, plot issues and break points and the responses can help you mitigate problems before they occur. Use other's pain to your advantage.
5) Personalise and alter
The last point and the most important. You know your players better than anyone else, what they like, what they hate and what helps you to all have a fun game.
Everybody's game is different even when it's a prewritten adventure. Running as written never works unless you adapt it for your players and their PC's. Find ways to include your PC's more closely in a plot, give them ties to important NPC's, implement their backgrounds into the plot. They will have much more fun if you do this. After all the story is about the players, they should feel intrinsically linked to the plot.
Also if there is an encounter that you don't like or you feel would work better in a different way then just alter it. The players will react better to interesting encounters than cookie cutter opponents. In addition no one likes annoying pointless obstacles. If an adventure has encounters that are not a threat but take up time (such as a Guards and Wards spell that isn't being monitored by an NPC) just handwave it. No one wants to sit rolling dice for no reason when they could be getting on with the plot.
I hope you find these tips useful. Let me know if you feel that this list could use an extra entry.
Your resident Games Monkey
Fall of Camelot
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