D&D 5E Thoughts On The Meh 5E Adventures.

[MNblockhead]

I divide the adventure books into great to run versus great to use parts of for homebrew. Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation are my favorite adventure books from 5e for running a campaign. Stormking's Thunder I would hate to run as a campaign, but I find it a good resource.

The most useful for me are books like Tales From the Yawning Portal and Keys from the Golden Vault, where I can pull out an adventure for a one shot or tweak and place into a homebrew campaign.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I feel like the 5e Adventures are too long, and the Anthology Adventures are too short (or more precisely, they cram too many of them in, and cut material to fit).

I have a solution (not that I expect them to follow it): You split each $60 HC into three arcs, with individual (but thematically linked) stories, their own end-bosses, their own conclusions. The idea would be to purposefully put downtime in-between arcs. The scale of the adventure would escalate with the tiers (like it's supposed to, but with more story support) and the characters would have some time off between adventures (so y'know, they wouldn't go from zero to hero in a week or two). And a DM could choose to run only 1 of the adventures, or all of them, or mix-n-match with other adventures.

I don't know about you, or WotC, but I'd sure like it that way.

 

[Blue]

I'm amazed every time I hear praise for Curse of Strahd. It was hands down my worst experience among the Hardcover Adventures, and with a DM who had done others well.

I'm just fine with a non-level specific sandbox. But when (a) the party is given specific items to find from the card reading, (b) not given really any other direction except "everything sucks" so you don't want to go places you don't have to, and (c) to preserve the horror not allow the characters information when the expected level suddenly spikes, and all we got was lots of characters deaths and a party that was to cautious to go anywhere without literal sessions of trying to convince people.

As it was run for us, it failed the minimum for a non-level-specific sandbox.

Add in things like absolutely no way to afford better armors and the other things that created imbalance between the classes. You could end up being nerfed for the entire campaign by choices made during character creation.

I've only played about a quarter of the hardcovers, so I can't say CoS was the worst of them all. But of the ones I did play it claimed that title by a wide margin because of horrible design.

 

[Rabbitbait]

I'm amazed every time I hear praise for Curse of Strahd. It was hands down my worst experience among the Hardcover Adventures, and with a DM who had done others well.

I'm just fine with a non-level specific sandbox. But when (a) the party is given specific items to find from the card reading, (b) not given really any other direction except "everything sucks" so you don't want to go places you don't have to, and (c) to preserve the horror not allow the characters information when the expected level suddenly spikes, and all we got was lots of characters deaths and a party that was to cautious to go anywhere without literal sessions of trying to convince people.

As it was run for us, it failed the minimum for a non-level-specific sandbox.

Add in things like absolutely no way to afford better armors and the other things that created imbalance between the classes. You could end up being nerfed for the entire campaign by choices made during character creation.

I've only played about a quarter of the hardcovers, so I can't say CoS was the worst of them all. But of the ones I did play it claimed that title by a wide margin because of horrible design.

Just goes to show, different styles fit different people. I played in that one and my group loved it precisely for the reasons your group hated it.

 

[Tormyr]

When EN Publishing did the adventure path War of the Burning Sky in 2007, it was pretty linear with just a few NPCs who recurred and a few narrative throughline between adventures.

When we did ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution in 2011, we upped our game a lot. I had a big notebook to keep track of all the linkages between adventures, the branching character arc possibilities of about 40 NPCs, and a suite of character hooks we encouraged GMs to use to weave the PCs into key moments of every single adventure.

When you play adventure 6 at 11th level, you go to a brand new country but can run into one NPC you met in your home city in adventure 2 when he fell afoul of a gang, another NPC you encountered while you were undercover on a train in adventure 4, a diplomat you protected in adventure 5 can help you get political connections in this new nation, AND a minor VIP who had cameos in adventures 1 and 3 is revealed to be a new villain trying to make a play for power.

Your interactions with them before affect what happens now, and your choices in this adventure might result in the villain being an ally later, and various other little flairs for the different NPCs.

And the adventures do a lot of work to help the GM keep track of all of this. But damn if it was not a fair bit of work for me as the line director. The original idea of having a different author for each adventure became infeasible after adventure 5 because I'd have to write 10,000 words myself just to bring a new guy up to speed, and they'd invariably not grasp all the nuances for what the long-term plan was.

But the groups who have finished the whole adventure path seem to have really appreciated how deep and rich the world ends up being, because we gave the players opportunities to build genuine relationships with recurring characters.

One thing I really appreciated about how broken apart the adventures of WotBS are is that it allows more space for things to go off the rails. If the PCs fail adventure 3, they can pack up and move on to adventure 4, pick up the pieces, and hopefully start a new base of operations. Each adventure can still happen, and the consequences become evident at the end.

Narratively, the weaving together of the Zeitgeist adventures are amazing, but I feel that managing the consequences of failure would be more delicate in certain adventures.

Either way, I have really enjoyed both and appreciated all the work that went into them.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm amazed every time I hear praise for Curse of Strahd. It was hands down my worst experience among the Hardcover Adventures, and with a DM who had done others well.

I'm just fine with a non-level specific sandbox. But when (a) the party is given specific items to find from the card reading, (b) not given really any other direction except "everything sucks" so you don't want to go places you don't have to, and (c) to preserve the horror not allow the characters information when the expected level suddenly spikes, and all we got was lots of characters deaths and a party that was to cautious to go anywhere without literal sessions of trying to convince people.

As it was run for us, it failed the minimum for a non-level-specific sandbox.

Add in things like absolutely no way to afford better armors and the other things that created imbalance between the classes. You could end up being nerfed for the entire campaign by choices made during character creation.

I've only played about a quarter of the hardcovers, so I can't say CoS was the worst of them all. But of the ones I did play it claimed that title by a wide margin because of horrible design.

Alot of that us persobal preference.

The carrots cards I thought were a clver way to inform the players as to what's available go find it.

One could recycle a lot of CoS into a different adventure and it would be good.

Eg dump the Doom and gloom, Castle Ravenloft is the Citadel the village is a large town.

There's a lot on there I would expect some people to dislike the fontents/presentation. It not for everyone's taste.

 

[Blue]

Alot of that us persobal preference.

The carrots cards I thought were a clver way to inform the players as to what's available go find it.

One could recycle a lot of CoS into a different adventure and it would be good.

Eg dump the Doom and gloom, Castle Ravenloft is the Citadel the village is a large town.

There's a lot on there I would expect some people to dislike the fontents/presentation. It not for everyone's taste.

None of these were the problems that we had, which was mostly about non-level-specific sandbox with next to no information about when we moved to a location vastly more powerful than us, which led to lots of character deaths and a party that became too cautious to do things and we spent session after session just information gathering to see where we could go that wouldn't kill us, ignoring the plot. The cards would have been fine if the above wasn't true. There's an science to running a non-level-specific sandbox, and it felt like CoS didn't even try.

I played back in the original Castle Ravenloft back when it came out, I'm fine with the tone of the contents. (Not-a-Spoiler: we failed, tried to escape, and only had a single PC successfully get out of the castle. Still loads of fun.)

Also the price multiplier meant any expensive mundane gear like the better heavy armors was never within reach during the campaign. So some characters were nerfed before play. This our DM eventually saw as a problem as well and modified the module to let us find some stuff.

As a side note, I was rating from my play-through - I have no idea about how much could be harvested for reuse outside the adventure. That's not my shtick while GMing anyway, I find homebrew easier to remember.

 

[Zardnaar]

None of these were the problems that we had, which was mostly about non-level-specific sandbox with next to no information about when we moved to a location vastly more powerful than us, which led to lots of character deaths and a party that became too cautious to do things and we spent session after session just information gathering to see where we could go that wouldn't kill us, ignoring the plot. The cards would have been fine if the above wasn't true. There's an science to running a non-level-specific sandbox, and it felt like CoS didn't even try.

I played back in the original Castle Ravenloft back when it came out, I'm fine with the tone of the contents. (Not-a-Spoiler: we failed, tried to escape, and only had a single PC successfully get out of the castle. Still loads of fun.)

Also the price multiplier meant any expensive mundane gear like the better heavy armors was never within reach during the campaign. So some characters were nerfed before play. This our DM eventually saw as a problem as well and modified the module to let us find some stuff.

As a side note, I was rating from my play-through - I have no idea about how much could be harvested for reuse outside the adventure. That's not my shtick while GMing anyway, I find homebrew easier to remember.

I played a cleric and couldn't buy the best armor. 5E so easy I didn't need it.

Hardest fights were death house and windmill. Paid attention to the DM snd didn't go to far off what they were saying.

Once you hot level t or 6 there's not much there that xsn outright kill you vs retreating or going nova.

 

[Blue]

I played a cleric and couldn't buy the best armor. 5E so easy I didn't need it.

If your DM made CoS so easy, you've missed out on the actual adventure.

Plus, unless your cleric was a dedicated front-liner, it definitely affected our ability to tank. We had a melee fighter and a paladin, and their AC was several points lower than expected.

Hardest fights were death house and windmill. Paid attention to the DM snd didn't go to far off what they were saying.

Once you hot level t or 6 there's not much there that xsn outright kill you vs retreating or going nova.

We, for example, walked up to a treestump house and got attacked by CR 11 vines that killed a party member before their initiative even came up.

I guess you missed most of the module.

 

[Zardnaar]

If your DM made CoS so easy, you've missed out on the actual adventure.

Plus, unless your cleric was a dedicated front-liner, it definitely affected our ability to tank. We had a melee fighter and a paladin, and their AC was several points lower than expected.


We, for example, walked up to a treestump house and got attacked by CR 11 vines that killed a party member before their initiative even came up.

I guess you missed most of the module.

Nit sure. My cleric was the front liner CR 11 isn't that high either.

We knew roughly where to find the weapons I think rng put most of them in Strahds castle.

Inadvertently had a powerful party with a lit of synergy eg haste+rogue, order cleric and rogue.