No surprises there. It seems to be the fan favorite. It's a bit of a shame though that the biggest hit of the edition is its first adventure. Though on the plus side, it means that many people will have experienced it.
That's subjective. They have several great adventures. Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, and Out of the Abyss are a few pegs above "good".
I'm just not sure that they are "great," with possibly the exception of Curse of Strahd. CoS, however, does seem more like a genre piece as opposed to a generic module that you can plop into a given world.
Yes, I would say it is quite subjective. I would also say that I ran 3 official 4e adventures, and compared to the 5e ones, they were very unremarkable. Lost Mine of Phandelver IMHO delivers one of the best in D&D history, and should rank in the Top 10 of any edition list.
Curious. Which three 4e adventures did you run? I would say that the major criticism I would lay at 4e adventures is that WotC wasn't really aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the 4e system yet, so it felt as if they were still mostly designing the adventures for a different system than 4e.
Lost Mine of Phandelver is excellent, I'm running it a second time right now for a newbie group and liking it even more the second go around.
Oh, and I want to add 3.0 Red Hand of Doom was another awesome adventure but I never got the chance to run it. But it would make a superb 5e adaptation.
Both Lost Mines of Phandelver, Princes of the Apocalypse, Red Hand of Doom were written by Rich Baker.
Red Hand of Doom is also on my wishlist. I may run it for 5e, but then set it in the Nentir Vale. (Coincidentally, 4e's Nentir Vale setting was also designed by Rich Baker.)
I am currently running Sunless Citadel (a great 3e adventure updated for 5e) for a new player as part of a solo campaign. It is set in the Vale, and I placed it where Kobold Hall is located. The player character is the leader of a patrol squad for Fallcrest, with a rotating selection of NPCs he can select per each mission. In Sunless Citadel, he is searching for the whereabouts of his old squad and captain. I changed Irky Timbers so that he was also a character on that team. So this adventure acts as an introduction to D&D and as an in-game handing-off-the-torch of his old squad to his new one.
BUT...I can't stand running D&D past 10th level. I can recall saying to myself multiple times toward the end of Princes, PCs were 11th or 12 - God, I hate this game. 8th or 9th is typically where I like to end it. I don't use XP either, thank goodness, so I deliberately slow the roll with PC progression. I will keep them at 1st to 8th for a long ass time and enjoy the game, because if it goes on far past that then I quit having fun. PCs are nearly impossible to threaten, they can escape from any situation, and combat encounters take too much work to create a consistent challenge. At low level it is easy to throw an encounter together and it works correctly.
Agreed. I will be slowing down the leveling for the above campaign, but then depower some of the threats. I may make it so that he does not get to level until every squad member has been on a mission.
But anyway, I hear that this is a thread where Zardnaar reviews Pathfinder 2.