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I would very much like to canvass opinion on the above issue.
Could you please indicate your preference on a scale of 0 to 5, where the two extreme marks mean:
0 - you prefer your GM to run the adventure exactly as written,
5 - you are happy for your GM to make whatever modifications he wants.
Many thanks
Richard
EDIT: Since a number of players have already pointed this out, give PFS and non-PFS answers if you wish
5 I really would rather a GM tailor the adventure to his players tastes, as well as his own. I'm running RotRL and I've changed a ton of stuff. That includes things that I've left out and big chunks that I've added in.
10
The GM is the god of your god's. Whatever he wants to do is what happens. If he wants to run the adventure as written then it shall be so, if he wants to treat the published writing as a framework and expand on it, or cut things out, then that's what happens.
Your happiness as a player shouldn't depend on either factor since you, as a player, should have no access to the material he's using.
If you're challenged and at the end of the adventure you can say it was fun, then he's a good GM.
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5.
Far too many published adventures make some (utterly reasonable) assumptions about party build or effectiveness or 'irreplaceable class X' having this exact spell or skill ranking. A writer who never sees the bewildering plethora of different group compositions that may enter his scenario can't be reasonable expected to anticipate that nobody played a rogue, or that *everybody* played a rogue...
That's what GMs are for, adjudicating stuff, and why we don't just run published adventures without them, like a Warhammer Quest game, turning the page / flipping the map-tile and discovering together what we are about to face.
Non-PFS : 5 (or 6, or 10, or however much they want)
PFS : 1 (as close to 0 as possible, but some adaptation may be needed in any game)
Ditto
Depends on the GM
In my group we have a number of different people who run at different times, and they all have their issues.
GM1 has problems running fights that are challenging. He needs help to keep things interesting in combat. He does do an excellent job at world building and plots. He often takes old modules and ties them together to form campaigns. I'd put him at a "3" He needs to retain some structure, but be able to modify it to fit into his world.
GM2 also has problems with challenge levels, but the other way. Most fights would be TPKs barring deus ex machina. He does do an excellent job bringing NPCs to life. He, I would say, needs to run things closer to the book. I'd put him at a 1 or a 2.
GM3 can actually set challenges and runs a good game, but often lets the rules get in the way of fun. I'd trust him to make changes and keep things fair, so a 5.
Depends on the GM
This is the best answer, IMHO. For my current group, in which we have three very experienced GMs, it is definitely a 5. For less experienced GMs or perhaps less skilled ones (all due modesty aside), maybe move it down to a 3, at lowest. I don't do organized play so can't comment on that, but I don't think I'd want to play in a home game where the meter was set at 1.
Agree with many of the others, 0-1 for organized play, 5+ for casual play. For home/casual play though the individual GM may reduce the 5 to a 4 or 3 depending on how much I like his style and creativity.
I'm very very rarely on the player side of the equation but for the most part I'm okay with significant changes to content to create a better game experience.
That being said the job of a 3.x GM is fraught with peril and many people particularly novice GMs really really struggle with balancing encounters. Creampuff encounters or killer encounters can really send a game into a death spiral so in many cases changes to the encounter difficulty should be small incremental changes rather than sweeping revisions.
10
The GM is the god of your god's. Whatever he wants to do is what happens. If he wants to run the adventure as written then it shall be so, if he wants to treat the published writing as a framework and expand on it, or cut things out, then that's what happens.
Your happiness as a player shouldn't depend on either factor since you, as a player, should have no access to the material he's using.
If you're challenged and at the end of the adventure you can say it was fun, then he's a good GM.
This! Hehe, since I am the only GM in our, now, three groups is my vote! They all know I modify and adjust any modules I run. So far, the only complaint was a magic item that was in the module I took out because it didn't fit into my campaign.
As long as they're having fun, I'm doing okay.
Have Fun out there!!
~ W ~
5... with the caveat that I want to know, after the fact, roughly what got changed.
I know multiple groups of people who have played or are playing pretty much every adventure path, and these things tend to be topics of discussion afterwards -- it's fun to find out what different angles other groups took with the same problems. I don't want to look like an idiot raving about what a hard time we had with the Runelord of Environmentalism if it didn't exist in anyone else's game.
(For PFS or other organized play, as little as possible gets changed. That's the rule of organized play. I also don't expect money on free parking if I'm in an international Monopoly tournament.)
5 - I've ever played one, but the way I see it, the PCs should have absolutely no idea what the adventure would be like to begin with. In which case, modifications shouldn't make a difference, especially since the documents themselves tend to encourage it.
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I occassionally tweak things to improve the narrative flow of a game. If it is more logical for NPC X to do something then I have them do it regardless of what is written in the plot.
I always say feel free to change things if it helps the game. Rigid and slavish adherance to the plot can take you some quite odd places.
I have not messed with PFS, and I've only had one GM. This particular GM I give a 15 because he has such a unique style of injecting humor and thrills specifically tailored to his players. With him, I trust him with any sort of edit. I understand, though, that my rating would change with different GMs if I had this sort of experience.
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...but if you tell me your are GMing Rise of the Runelords leave it as is because I want to hear the story the authors and editors put together, not your interpretation of it.
I think one thing that gets lost in these discussions is that the APs are more then just a series of linked adventures. I see them as cooperative interactive fantasy novels. Many hours of work goes into making them coherent, exciting, balanced, and thematically well formed. As a player I want to benefit from all the effort the Paizo team put into the AP. As a GM I want my players to experience want Paizo has crafted in they way the feel it should be presented.
Why not play it as interpreted, then go back and read it yourself?
Best of both worlds, I'd think.
I think somewhere between 7 and 25 for me. I mean really i am perfectly happy if the dm writes their own adventures (sometimes more so). I want events in adventures to adapt to what the party does, I want stories to converge around the party. Modules dont always do that, and even when they do they cant possibly anticipate what your specific group is going to do. So basically, I think a dm can and should change whatever he or she see's fit as the game progresses.
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5.
Echoing Set's comment above re party composition--and for that matter, character build. Six 25-point characters are going to go through an adventure path designed for four 15-point characters without breaking much of a sweat. I expect the ref to adjust the opposition to match player capabilities better.
Also, contra cibet44, there are APs out there that are widely known to have issues in spots--Second Darkness is the one that comes up most often. (That's ignoring the 3.5 to PF conversion issues for the first four Pathfinder APs and the Dungeon APs, which also take some work to get around.) Part of the challenge for a ref is making the AP their own in a way that both works for them (and their players) and keeps the good parts. There are a whole lot of threads on these very boards covering discussion of how different people customized APs when they ran them.
The vast majority of posts here reflect my own feelings. It depends on the DM's experience level and/or party composition, but as a rule of thumb, I vote 5.
Because I want to play the adventure as written not read it. Why not just read every AP and play none of them? Kind of defeats the purpose....but if you tell me your are GMing Rise of the Runelords leave it as is because I want to hear the story the authors and editors put together, not your interpretation of it.
I think one thing that gets lost in these discussions is that the APs are more then just a series of linked adventures. I see them as cooperative interactive fantasy novels. Many hours of work goes into making them coherent, exciting, balanced, and thematically well formed. As a player I want to benefit from all the effort the Paizo team put into the AP. As a GM I want my players to experience want Paizo has crafted in they way the feel it should be presented.
Why not play it as interpreted, then go back and read it yourself?
Best of both worlds, I'd think.
Perfectly acceptable way to play things. My only caution is that if you want to play it exactly as written, then you really need to confine yourself to the character build assumptions for the written adventure. For the Paizo APs, for example, I believe this is 4 15 pt non-optimized builds (or perhaps 20 I can't remember) or their equivalent and Core Rulebook material only. If you have more generous builds or allow more material or have more players, your game won't be balanced. The primary reason I have to change all written adventures is to compensate for the fact we roll stats with a pretty generous mechanic and we have seven players, some of whom are reasonably good optimizers. Material as written would be a boring cakewalk.
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My only caution is that if you want to play it exactly as written, then you really need to confine yourself to the character build assumptions for the written adventure.
I'm not at all a PFS sort of guy, so I may not be able to grasp what you're getting at, but:
What if you all wanted to play a party of gelatinous cubes? Still need to play it 'as written'?
I would prefer my GM not to use published material at all except for inspiration. I prefer more sand box style of play.
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Non organized play:
5 - I don't care if I play Carrion Hill or Hill of the GMs festering Nightmares. I probably didn't know the Adventure beforehand and the most important thing to me is to have an interesting time.
That said, I know GMs that shouldn't change too much, because they aren't very creative or they can't improvise at all and most of the time forget to flesh out the (sometimes very cool) changes they want to make and thus bring the adventure to a stuttering halt.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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For Pathfinder Society play, a 1 or perhaps a 2. Even the guidelines advocate the GM ret-conning details to allow PC to accomplish their goals. (There are some scenarios where the paty needs to succeed on, say, a simple Perception check to advance. What if they all miss? Should the GM say: "You found nothing here. Thanks. That's the end of the adventure.")
And I appreciate a GM who will roll with a hare-brained scheme. Many PFS scenarios are pretty strict railroad adventures, marching from one encounter to the next. I would welcome a GM who keeps true to the plot of the adventure but lets the adventurers try different things.
In home games, my first reaction would have been "5". I would feel bad if a GM decided to "stick to the script" even if she knew that changing this or that would make for a more enjoyable evening of gaming.
Upon further reflection, it depends on the social contract. If the GM begins with "Hey, I'd like to run you folks through the Age of Worms AP" and we all agree, then my answer would be closer to 3. We all agreed to some baseline rules about what we're doing, and I'd feel a sense of loss if the GM became fascinated with Iuz half-way through the campaign and went entirely off-book.
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5.
I prefer the adventure to be customized to my character, if possible. Also, in almost every game I've been in, this has happened:
The GM pauses, looks up at us from the adventure in his hands, and says, "Well... I'm not running this part!" He then flips past a few pages and continues the adventure.
Perfectly acceptable way to play things. My only caution is that if you want to play it exactly as written, then you really need to confine yourself to the character build assumptions for the written adventure. For the Paizo APs, for example, I believe this is 4 15 pt non-optimized builds (or perhaps 20 I can't remember) or their equivalent and Core Rulebook material only.Thats pretty much what we do. However...
If you have more generous builds or allow more material or have more players, your game won't be balanced. The primary reason I have to change all written adventures is to compensate for the fact we roll stats with a pretty generous mechanic and we have seven players, some of whom are reasonably good optimizers. Material as written would be a boring cakewalk.
This is a different issue to me. Balancing issues are not the kinds of changes I have in mind with regard to this topic. For me balancing changes are fine and don't impact the story. If a GM wants to add a few monsters to an encounter or reduce an NPCs hit points or abilities that's fine.
The kinds of changes I am talking about are wholly story based.
So when your PCs want to take a left turn where the story turns right, does your DM tell you that's not the adventure as written, or does he add stuff and do a little soft shoe to get you back on track. Or have you all read the AP in advance so you never want to go the wrong way?
The PCs in my games are constantly taking detours and so the story changes. Sure, I try to hit the major encounters, but I will also cut stuff that doesn't fit IMO or (particularly) will change PC motivation for certain actions.
CoT is a good example. I despise Arael and Janiven and the way the adventure is setup for the PCs to go do something because A and J say so. CotCT's first installment suffers a similar deficiency IMO. Sure, the PCs end up largely working for Kroft, but I also tried to have some encounters grow organically from the PC's contacts, friends and family in town.
All that said, my ratings are:
PFS : 1
NOn-PFS prewritten: 3
Homebrew : 5
5.
A Dm should make the adventure his own. When you tell a story that you know and had a part in creating you tell it better. If you've ever heard someone read a speech written wholly by someone else you know how choppy and scripted it sounds... 9 times out of 10 making it your own makes it better.
Additionally, I love customization... especially when it adds to storytelling and the back story of one of the parties characters.
5 for APs/Modules (Party composition, campaign setting, challenge ratings, etc all make a published adventure malleable by necessity.)
<2 for PFS (some modification may be needed due to time/party composition)
My only caution is that if you want to play it exactly as written, then you really need to confine yourself to the character build assumptions for the written adventure.I'm not at all a PFS sort of guy, so I may not be able to grasp what you're getting at, but:
What if you all wanted to play a party of gelatinous cubes? Still need to play it 'as written'?
Hey, I'm not actually in the play it as written camp, I just think it is acceptable to play it that way if that's what everyone wants. To each his own. I think implicit in the play it as written style is a contract that the players also won't do anything outlandish that makes it impossible to play as written. Every group is a basically a social compact, each one unique.
[This is a different issue to me. Balancing issues are not the kinds of changes I have in mind with regard to this topic. For me balancing changes are fine and don't impact the story. If a GM wants to add a few monsters to an encounter or reduce an NPCs hit points or abilities that's fine.
The kinds of changes I am talking about are wholly story based.
Understood, but both types of things have been discussed in this thread, and they can be seen as related.
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5.
A Dm should make the adventure his own. When you tell a story that you know and had a part in creating you tell it better. If you've ever heard someone read a speech written wholly by someone else you know how choppy and scripted it sounds... 9 times out of 10 making it your own makes it better.
Additionally, I love customization... especially when it adds to storytelling and the back story of one of the parties characters.
5!
I agree with Mage Evolving...
As a DM I like to mix things up a bit, and tailor the adventure to the group going through. Often in the pre-written adventures, there are a number of "blank spots" that need to be fleshed out anyway. For example, in LoF there was an old fort on the map with only a 2 sentence description. I turned it into a full blown adventure spot with 66 encounter areas, with a two level fortified manor and 2 levels of dungeon. I think the group appreciated that I took the time to write up the area.
As a player, I want my GM to make changes and run the game that fits his/her style of play,and that of the group. In addition, I have read through a number of adventures, and if we are going through something that I am familiar with, I absolutely want the GM to throw me a curve ball with changes. Often if the GM runs the adventure as published, it feels a bit flat. Also, I recognize that as a player, I may wander off the beaten path, and I like GM's that can quickly adapt and add additional content. A buddy of of mine was running us through RotRL, which I was familiar with, and he made a number of changes to the monsters to provide the group with more of a challenge, and I had no problem with this.
I have no idea what PFS play is like. Also I rarely have been in games that use modules as most of the people I know have been playing since the 70's and 80's so we generally run games using our own adventures.
I will go with a 5 either way though. Modules are suggestions for your game, not scripts that have to be followed. Sticking to close to a module has led to problems that I've seen the few times I've played in module games. The first was the player who read the module and was able to "win the game" because he knew the best choices to make. The second, which happened every time I've played in a module game, some one tries to do X but X isn't taken into acount in the module. The GM stops game to try to find the answer and then decides that X doesn't work because there is nothing in the module about it. This is a new GM mistake who believe they have to run the module as is rather then improvise.
I'd honestly rather see modules give a premise for an adventurer, locations with ideas for encounters and monsters to use, ideas for plots and complications, sample dungeons, and idea on where to go once the adventure ends. Essentially giving ideas but allowing the GM to construct the adventure as they see fit.
I have no idea what PFS play is like.
The main relevant bits about organized play for this discussion are:
You play only a given ~4 hour module with a given table. In other words, your GM and all the players change constantly throughout a character's life. Thus, your responsibilities shift a bit because you're "sharing" GMing with the dozens (or more, in a campaign with longer PC longevity in terms of adventures played than PFS) other GMs a PC will have in his life, as well as the administrators of the campaign.
So you can't, for example, disregard a seemingly throwaway mook encounter as something to be skipped -- even if it's incidental to the plot of the particular adventure you're running, it may turn out to be a plot point in the greater story of the campaign and a big deal five years later. You don't know.
PFS 1
Includes any society game play in any game system. The module should be the same for players all around the world.
The module is a play by play script to be followed.
Non-PFS 5
The module is more like gudelines.