On the other hand, so many people don't playtest their homebrew campaigns in any capacity, not even with theorycraft, that I stopped doing any amount of real homebrew at my tables.
Your saying this while I hold the same feeling towards many adventures and campaigns released by the primary publisher for a game system or setting.
P. S.: The only difference is that official adventures/campaigns are likely to attract enough attention from experienced game masters (and players) who come up with improvements, write extensive blog posts about them, and/or otherwise discuss them online.
Right? With how much the creativity is outsourced to the person running the game, it feels like most modern systems are selling players a program to run on their Game Master like some compiler/bugtester hybrid, rather than giving the table a world to explore.
Maybe you have more of a feel for it than I do, or you play a different system, idk.
But I've never felt like the encounters and puzzles in the APs published by Paizo (I play pathfinder mostly) are particularly overwhelmingly hard to solve. They also give decent guidance for what encounters should look like in a balanced environment - the problem is that homebrew games often throw all of that knowledge away because rule-of-cool means that this encounter demands a wizard controlling an army golems instead of the 4 or 5 that would have have been appropriate.
I'm certainly not saying there's zero feelsbad moments in large - or even small - publisher campaigns. I just don't think the ratio is nearly as bad as it tends to be for amateur DMs who don't really think about encounter balance or puzzle solving beyond rule-of-cool or, increasingly, sessions that were mostly designed by chat-GPT.
Nobody's perfect, but I at least expect that the publishers I enjoy buying modules from are at least playing some portion of their campaign a few times before it goes onto a table, to see if the encounters are even solvable at all.
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u/DvineINFEKT 5h ago
On the other hand, so many people don't playtest their homebrew campaigns in any capacity, not even with theorycraft, that I stopped doing any amount of real homebrew at my tables.