Sean wrote:

>

I too do this often. I usually buy the published adventures for the maps.
I don't have the time to draw out interesting areas all the time, and I find
the maps usable in a number of ways. I usually don't like the published
adventure plotline however. They sometimes cause a lot of trouble for you
when you realize that X and Z are not the same as you envisioned them in your
world. While, I haven't purchased a BR adventure yet, I have looked at them
in Dungeon mag.
In my campaign I try to taylor my "adventures" to fit the mood of my group.
For a campaign, I usually come up with an overall theme that I try to stick
to. I use this theme to guide my decisions on what to game each session. I
take the campaign one step further everytime. Sometimes the players come up
with tangents that they would like to explore, and while they are not an
important part of the overall theme, I still allow them to exhaust these
tangents.
I have found it easier in my style of gaming to "wing it". My players were
the type that wanted to play all the time and I just didn't have the time to
write everything down beforehand. I got into the habit of keeping notes on
what happened at each game session so that I could get these items straight
the next time they went through the same area or met the same NPC. It worked
great. I didn't look up a lot of things when I DMed, and whenever a
contradiction to the rules occured I kept it. My version was the correct
version TSR made the mistake. ;-)
Anyway, I think that many of us are capable of making epic tales using this
method. Just have a general plan of how you want things to turn out. You
don't have to decide everything in advance, but enough to know how things
will go for a while. If things change drastically after you start--you
forgot the name of the Gorgon and called him "Gordon", then say it was a
regional dialect. Your players won't care and they will have a great time
relating how they met Gordon the all powerful. All in all I perfer making it
all up on the spot, since everyone knows that the hardest thing to predict
are the PCs actions. Just write it down, and go with it.

Thanks, M.