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Are Published Adventures Easier to Run?

by Mike on 15 September 2025

No.

GMs often hold a common misconception that published adventures save GMs time and effort. It's often easier and faster to build your own quick adventure in your own campaign world for one big reason — it's your world and your adventure.

But published adventures offer much beyond time savings including high production value, a story you might not otherwise come up with yourself, a shared experience with other GMs, and more thorough playtesting.

You get to decide if you're better off with a published adventure or preparing your own adventure.

Published adventures can be quite beefy. Crown of the Oathbreaker is a whopping 916 pages — making Monte Cook Games's Ptolus setting look svelte at only 674 pages. That's a lot of reading and a lot of prep. Of course, these adventures are extreme examples. Adventures by the Arcane Library are often under 20 pages and built to be easy to prep and easy to run.

But a lot of published adventures are big hefty books. A big hefty book takes time to read, digest, and prepare when you're getting ready to run it for your group. That's a lot of effort — often more effort than you put in running your own adventures which can consist of scratchy penciled notes on some index cards.

If they don't make your games easier to prepare, why use published adventures?

The quality of the materials.

Published adventures include:

Excellent professional art.
Often beautiful and well-designed maps.
A rich and detailed story you probably wouldn't come up with yourself.
A shared experience with other GMs and players.
Often excellent integration with a published campaign world or setting.
Playtesting.

Published adventures offer a tremendous value you can't get when building your own adventures. You can't commission all of that artwork or design all of those maps. Your adventure's story is probably pretty cool but not likely as deep as the one you'll find in Empire of the Ghouls. When you think about what you get for the money you spend, it's a lot compared to building your own adventures.

But there are other costs for a published adventure beyond price. It takes time to read and absorb the adventure. An initial skim-read isn't often enough to internalize what's there. You'll likely want to customize the adventure to fit what you enjoy and what works for the characters. That takes effort as well.

What about homebrew adventures? There are several advantages to running homebrew adventures:

You can easily customize your adventures for you and your group.
You can often find art and maps to fill in your adventures.
You can change the whole campaign based on the actions of the characters.
There's lots of material to inspire your own homebrew adventures.
Preparing an adventure takes as much or as little time as you have to give it.
If you have a clear system for game prep, you can prep an entire adventure in about 30 minutes.
It's all yours. You know everything about your adventure and world because you're the one who wrote it. Everything is true. Everything is canon.

In the end, it's up to you whether you're better off running homebrew adventures or published adventures. Find an approach you like that fits your style and your group. There's no clear winner between homebrew adventures and published adventures. Whichever way you go (and there's no reason you can't try both and even switch back and forth), ensure you're using the advantages of the path you choose.

We can dispel one myth, however. There are many advantages to running a published adventure but saving time is often not one of them.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

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Last week I also posted a YouTube video on What is the Best 5e?.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

More monsters offer a greater challenge than fewer bigger monsters.
Ensure terrain effects are challenging and not just annoying.
Clarify how terrain effects work so players can make informed choices.
Give the characters a comfort session where they can enjoy dinners with NPCs before being thrown back into the gates of hell.
Foreshadow with short interludes or visions.
Take note of random names the minute you state them.
Get answers to major choices by the end of your session so you know what to prep next.

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