D&D 5E Let's Talk About Yawning Portal

iserith said:

I believe some are asking for an official option more on par with earlier editions. We don't have that now.

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Heh. Join the Warlord club.

Lancelot said:

D&D modules should be designed for 13-16 year-old players who have been RPGing for less than a year. End of story. That is the only way we grow, or even maintain, the brand. The teenagers who started out with 1e and OD&D (ahem... like me...) are getting long in the tooth, now. And we're experienced enough to recognize and pump up the difficulty of a module when we need to.

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I appreciate your point here, but I have to note: designing the game downwards to be easy imposes a cost in terms of the kinds of stories you can tell. If you're designing a module for players who LIKE high difficulty and risks, and maybe have some or a lot of player skill on top of that, you can do things like design dungeons where the traps are plausibly designed to kill you instead of tickle you and give you XP; you can have an adventure where doing the wrong thing results in HUNDREDS of people turning into CR 5 Spawns of Kyuss or Vampire Spawns within the span of hours or even minutes--you can't do that if you're sticking to DMG guidelines because a hundred Spawns of Kyuss is 14x Deadly even for a 20th level party. On the other hand, if the players do the RIGHT thing (pickpocket the artifact from the bad guy and replace it with a duplicate?) they might be able to win without fighting anything at all.

There are certain kinds of stories you can only tell if you're willing to totally ignore DMG difficulty guidelines. That's how you get adventures that are suitable for levels 1-20. You make sure that even a low-level party can win if they play skillfully and creatively, and that even a high-level party will struggle if they just try to power through everything. And those kinds make the best stories.

...Players in my campaigns know that diamonds are almost impossible to obtain...

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And therefore valuable, no? Scarcity + utility = high value. Since the utility of diamonds in 5E is tied directly to their value... even a tiny chip of diamond ought to be worth 300 gp under those conditions, and therefore usable in Revivify.

Corollary: an amusing alternative would be to say that diamonds are so commonplace that a 300 gp diamond is unwieldy, the size of a small boulder, and that you therefore need to return to civilization to buy a diamond for Revivify.

zaratan said:

If a party go for all adventure and DM give exactly the itens described, they will end up with 5 magic longswords (I counted, maybe there is more). Man, I hate magic longswords.

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Fine. Put them in a box and send them over here.



Lan-"in character, I never met a magic longsword I didn't like"-efan

Prakriti said:

Personally, I'm choosing to be optimistic. If "Midway" is the upcoming mechanical expansion, then they probably gave themselves a break this spring so they have more time to work on the new mechanics. As surely as Yawning Portal is low-effort, a mechanical expansion is very high-effort. The two balance each other out.

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A break in the spring wouldn't help. If Midway needed all hands on decks it'd the summer book they'd make story lite. Because those are the books overlapping in design time.

I was about to say that Perkins is responsible for the adventures while Meals and Crawford do the mechanics. But, looking at the Yawning Portal credits, Perkins wasn't involved. It was Kim Mohan and Mearls.

Yawning Portal might have been a quick product to give Perkins a break, after he killed himself with SKT and the convention season of games plus Force Grey.

Hemlock said:

Since the utility of diamonds in 5E is tied directly to their value... even a tiny chip of diamond ought to be worth 300 gp under those conditions, and therefore usable in Revivify. Corollary: an amusing alternative would be to say that diamonds are so commonplace that a 300 gp diamond is unwieldy, the size of a small boulder, and that you therefore need to return to civilization to buy a diamond for Revivify.[/COLOR]

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Heh. Cute. As an Economics major, I appreciate the argument.

In actuality, my campaigns do have a basic application of supply-and-demand. My players, upon hearing that someone has diamonds for sale, will always sigh heavily and ask how much the NPC is demanding for 300gp worth. Yeah, it's nonsensical... but we assume that the PH is actually using gold values as shorthand for quantity. It's the quantifiable weight of 300gp-value of diamonds in an ideal world where supply is constant and demand is "ordinary". Hence, my players know that if they ever find 300gp of diamonds in our home campaign, it's going to cost them 1,500gp of gold coins (or more!) to obtain them. Call it an 80% transaction cost, or a levy, if you will.

...but I do like the way your mind works. I'm going to have to remember that diamonds-common-as-dirt trick...

But, isn't ramping up difficulty to reflect your particular group part of the job description of a DM? It's relatively easy to ramp up difficulty. Just add more dice to that trap or increase the number of monsters.

Reducing difficulty isn't particularly hard either but it does require the DM to know the system well enough to be able to do so.

So an easier module is fine for newbie DM's and players. And experienced gamers can adjust to taste. Isn't that the better way to go?

I haven't gotten the book yet, but it is going to be the first adventure book of 5e that I'm going to get within a few weeks of release. Some of the others are interesting enough that I'll eventually get around to them, but I haven't yet. This one is immediately useful because it includes multiple adventures of intermediate length (not a whole campaign, nor a 4-hour side-quest). I've wanted that for a long time. I don't think this was lazy design. More likely, they are testing the waters to see if there is sufficient demand for this sort of thing (since some people have expressed such desire).

Hussar said:

But, isn't ramping up difficulty to reflect your particular group part of the job description of a DM? It's relatively easy to ramp up difficulty. Just add more dice to that trap or increase the number of monsters.

Reducing difficulty isn't particularly hard either but it does require the DM to know the system well enough to be able to do so.

So an easier module is fine for newbie DM's and players. And experienced gamers can adjust to taste. Isn't that the better way to go?

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This is still using the reasonable "how hard can it be?" line of thought.

But it is completely insufficient to describe the real situation.

Take a representative encounter from Out of the Abyss as an example: where 10th or 12th level heroes are pitted against...

Goblins. Or Minotaurs.

It's not a matter of just adding one more Minotaur or a couple of extra goblin archers and a boss bugbear. If that would have helped, things would be reasonable and nobody would be complaining.

But it's not. It's so off the scale easy it isn't funny.

The reason I use the denigrating term "carebearian" is because 5e is far too often completely and utterly off base in its challenge level.

You don't need an extra Minotaur to properly challenge mid- to high-level characters. You need to entirely erase the idea that such lowly creatures are appropriate at all, then you need to scrap the encounter and start from scratch. Perhaps a Goristro or two, with a dozen Minotaurs as mooks.

The point is that in previous editions, your line of thought held true. Even when things perhaps became a tad easy for power gamers, the game was still in roughly the same ballpark.

5e on the other hand, is noticeably and aggravitingly made so easy it impacts your DM preparations.

I am entirely unaccustomed to finding that published modules are unusable as written and must be essentially rewritten to offer any challenge whatsoever and I don't like it.

More to the point, I dislike how some posters uncritically let WotC get away with it, with the "think of the children" argument.

I dont buy that for a second.


Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

Quick question on xp. How do I give out for Adventure League. I making the jump for modules to the hardback.

Edit to add. Mondays....
Page 12 of D&D adventures league FAQ version 6.1
a general rule, milestones are not used in Adventurers League play. Instead you should award XP normally... So old school it and write the number of critters defeated.

Prakriti said:

I think what actually happened is that they were working on an Undermountain campaign, and the Yawning Portal stuff got recycled here when they gave up on it.

Thankfully, the material is well-written and it will be useful if I ever want to set another campaign in Waterdeep. But it's a little dangerous using the Yawning Portal as a framing device.

Just imagine sharing all that amazing backstory and history -- ancient dwarven tunnels -- strange magic -- Halaster Blackcloak -- adventurers entering never to return, or coming back stinking rich. Heck, the entrance to the Undermountain is the center-piece of the Yawning Portal. It's right in the middle of the tap-room. Durnan built the whole inn around it. Then you get this exchange...

Players: "Awesome! When do we go in?"
DM: "Er... you don't."

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This post was amusing. Certainly, I imagine that this will happen for some groups who lean heavily on the 'tavern talk' element of the module. For my part, it works perfectly - since I'm going to run a campaign in Waterdeep, so I can add these adventures as very low-effort sidequests to the game; the players consistently hear about these things when they take a break from Undermountain or Politics adventures. However, it does bode poorly for an actual Undermountain mega-dungeon, as you say. Dare we assume that they plan to revisit and expand on those 2 1/2 pages in a future product, thus making this effectively an easter egg?