Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
A DM certainly can adapt adventures. And official play ones encourage you to adapt them for the number of players, because they're based on CaS principles. But that's a modern approach. Someone thinking that modules should routinely be tailored to the specifics of your party, or even the numbers of them, can't have been playing for more than a decade. (No disparagement intended, I'm trying to get to the root of where the thinking comes from on my part vs others.)

But reading the question more carefully, it was an adventure "that has nothing to do with them". Cluedrew, that sounds more like a statement of failure to plot hook than a statement of lack of (for example) tailoring the adventure to the fact that the party has no solid melee warriors or healers. So maybe I misunderstood what you meant by "tailored to" in this case? Are you talking about plot hooks to draw in and involved the PCs?
The modules I have played (mostly Dungeon Crawl Classics) also use pregens. And its pretty obvious from a DM point of view that those modules would fail to have the same impact if players brought their own characters. Part of the fun of those modules was for everyone to look through the pregens and find traps in how the characters were geared - for example, you'd find that the rogue was statted up with an item that would actually make the barbarian a lot more effective, and so on.

That said, those were very good for modules but fairly mediocre on the scale of overall tabletop gaming experiences I've had. The upper ends of the scale have been strictly 'tailored' stuff, but not tailored so much in the sense of 'I'd better use a fire immune white dragon because these guys have a fancy fire magic amplifier schtick' but rather tailored in the sense that the system and setting were constructed and modified on the basis of the known tastes of the players in a persistent group that gamed together for a period of years - and then from that starting point, were left in an explicitly extensible form where both GM and players could (and did) add new mechanics or new details or even new setting elements on the basis of what the campaign as a whole felt like at that point. If we decided to all become merchants and struggle over control of trade, within a few weeks we'd have cobbled together a plausible ruleset for doing so even if up to that point we had been playing a system geared towards being pirates looting stuff on the high seas. Having 20 pages of trade control rules would have been pointless - up until the point where someone decided that this was going to be the thing their character was really interested in and got some buy-in to the idea from the party.

Even for the best modules I've played, I never really escaped the board game feel that the boundaries of the scenario were well-defined and I could see them from where I was.