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pregenerated adventures vs. top of the head adventures

So in the realm of RPGs there are two main times of GM'ing:
1) PreGenerated Adventures aka "canned"
2) Top of the head Adventures

So which one is better? Coming from a Palladium Fantasy background myself, we always did top fo the head GM'ing. Usually our quests revolved around whatever our current favorite movie was, or something we saw in the book and wanted to throw at the players. We only tried a couple of the "canned" adventures, and they were always way to complicated to navigate the pages, and it seemed to slow down the story. So I used to be very against them. Anyway, I have since started listening to rpg podcats, from penny-arcade, as well as rpgmp3, and I have noticed that they are using "canned" adventures. I have to say, that they adventure itself moves very fulid and the story is really good. So I though to myself, maybe I just wasn't ready for "canned" adventures when I was young. So I found myself an adventure ( actually a free DnD 3.5 adventure, and I'm going to mix it into my current campaign and see how it goes. ( currently converting the stats and items over from DnD rules to palladium rules :). So I'll post more feedback on my thoughts about which one is better and why, when I finish.
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JoeGun The San Diego Savage said…
So after running through the quest, I think using "canned" quests was good for flow, but it did lack the style of my normal GM'ing. I think however using the template of a "canned" quest, but using my own ideas, should give us the best of both worlds. I also think that the chat method is working out better than when we did our voice session. It seems we can provide more detail in the text, and it just has a good fit to the flow..... It's just good to be back in the saddle of role playing again :)
October 31, 2008 at 8:17 AM
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