That makes sense. For a group of mostly typical D&D players who might be like those of us who come to these boards.That said, as I've mentioned before, if I ever get to run this adventure again, I'm going to make it hella hard for the PCs to take a long rest anywhere in Barovia. The howling of the wolves, the skittering in the underbrush, the flapping of wings, the scratching of the skeletal trees against the windows ... all of that will make for a restless night!
My group (and I don't know if I've emphatically stated it) are mostly teenagers, relatively new to the hobby. I think they picked out CoS from all the campaigns I offered because they wanted a chance to kill a powerful vampire - just like they might look at Rise of Tiamat and say "yay, we get to kill Tiamat!"
So the idea of horror I'm working with is Blade or Van Helsing - not John Carpenter's The Thing or something slow and atmospheric like Alien.
As an old school Ravenloft DM, working against type like this is very frustrating. They are wanting the trappings of horror, but not the feelings of dread or powerlessness that come in my understanding of the genre.
So the best thing I can figure out to do is to play into that type of heroic action. And a lot of my frustration is because I don't think that 5e gives me good tools to run a game like that, and I have to come on sites like this, and in the process look like 1) I don't care enough about my game to modify it; or 2) I don't think about my game until I sit down to run it.
But folks, it's hard to keep running a game for 5-6 teenagers every week. I haven't had a break from running 5e weekly (or more frequently) for about 5 years. But teenagers are a special kind of exhausting.
Every available bit of free time is D&D - running, studying, reading, training, etc. I haven't watched a TV series, read a novel, played a video game, since the start of COVID.
The closest thing I have to a "helper" is the hope that a published adventure works for me.