Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil Run Time?

[Ulrick]

I want to run Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil for one of my D&D groups. However, I hate to start something that I won't be able to finish. The group meets for 4-5 hours every week and we get down to playing so we usually have a good 4 hours of gaming (without diversions, distractions, etc).

If this is the case, would I able to finish the the module in say, 5 or 6 months? Or would have to hold a couple marathon sessions (lasting 10 hours). Right now, the group is at 4th level.

What are people's experiences with completing RttToE and in what amount of time? Is 5 or six months sufficient?

I appreciate any answers and any advice! Thanks!

(oh yes! And I've heard that things kinda slow down in the Crater Ridge Mines--is this true and why?)

 

[maggot]

It took us approximately two and a half years to complete RttToEE. Our group played most every week for about 4 hours per game but we were a very distractable group. And we played another game every other week for the last eight months or so. And there was still adventure to go, but the DM wanted to give the game up so railroaded us through the last few parts and left a lot dangling.

You would have to be extremely focused to do this in a year of 4 hour sessions, let alone 6-months worth.

 

[BlackMoria]

Our group did it in 6-7 months, playing faithfully 5-6 hours each week.

Several things contributed to the speed of how fast we did it.

First, our group is very focused. We tend to cut to the quick when things start to drag and we tend to be very quick in the planning and discussion. We roleplay but we don't get into the 'play within the play in seven acts' (a theatre expression) , meaning, we don't get into roleplaying every little tibit to the extreme, so alot of the mundane things get handwaved unless it contributes meaningful to the story.

Our group is also go at getting intel through the adventure, so we didn't have to do alot of spurious adventuring to find out what was going (our group is big on taking prisoners and using intelligence gathering spells)

Also, you don't have to complete the entire adventure. We never did the external original temple, only about half of the crater lake mines (you don't have to do the entire mines to gain entry to the black spire), so that saved alot of time as well.

 

[Sound of Azure]

I played in a group that ran through RttToEE a couple of years back, eventually finishing after a year and a half of 4-5 hour weekly games (I actually spent 4 months in North America throughout half of the "Mines" portion of the the adventure we played in (we didn't enter the water temple at all), bringing back the same PC upon my return).

Based on that (and conversations with others who have played), you'd need long sessions and a very focused group to run it in under a year. If you have 5-6 months as a set frame of time, you could trim certain parts (such as the time consuming mine maze part, or glossing over the set up portion).

 

[Erratic K]

Played it twice. Completed successfully neither time. I think about 12 x 6-8 hour sessions was what we did. We went until TPK one time, the other time until we tangled with the final battle, but boredom had kicked in. We didn't even care when we lost.

I liked the first two parts of the module: Hommlet, Nulb etc, exploration, plot, travel, consequence. But when you start to slog through the crater ridge mines into the temple of all consumption, it has turned into a tactical battle fest. No travel, not much NPC interaction, just optimize for combat, kick in the door and repeat. It was a meat grinder both PC and for any player that isn't one that derives most of their gaming pleasure from tactical combat and optimization. I love a dungeon crawl, but it really needed some change ups.

One review says that the crater ridge mines + temple area has 300 encounter areas, I'd believe it. That area needs less than 10 to get the plot across. The rest is as one player put it, "we need more pointless leveling". If I were to run it again, I'd make sure all the players were enamoured with tactical combat and optimization.

 

[airwalkrr]

Assuming you meet once a week for 4-5 hours and you have very few cancellations, you should be able to finish in about a year. The group I ran with did it in a year and a half, although they didn't do the fire node. They had a number of "off-weeks" so it was only semi-weekly, but their sessions were 5-6 hours long.

 

[Aeric]

It took us two years to finish. We played every other week for about 1/2 to 2/3 of that time, and the remainder of it we played weekly. Occassionally--rarely--we would play twice a week, usually on holiday weekends or other special events.

 

[d12]

I would recomend getting rid of some of the non-essential encounters in the Crater Ridge Mines and having most of the critters in the mines "abandon ship" after the PCs destroy 2 of the temples there.

Note that if your players are very big in the roleplay side of things, you could offer them a chance to infiltrate one of the groups in the mines and give them lots of xp for talking their way past an entire area and finding out information.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I want to run Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil for one of my D&D groups. However, I hate to start something that I won't be able to finish. The group meets for 4-5 hours every week and we get down to playing so we usually have a good 4 hours of gaming (without diversions, distractions, etc).

If this is the case, would I able to finish the the module in say, 5 or 6 months? Or would have to hold a couple marathon sessions (lasting 10 hours). Right now, the group is at 4th level.

What are people's experiences with completing RttToE and in what amount of time? Is 5 or six months sufficient?

I appreciate any answers and any advice! Thanks!

(oh yes! And I've heard that things kinda slow down in the Crater Ridge Mines--is this true and why?)

That module took me 2 years and pretty much killed my interest in 3e. And definitely killed my desire to ever run a mega-module again.

The CRM were a meat grinder of boredom that seemed to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and ever... It wouldn't be so bad if they could take time off do some other adventures and stuff, but its kind of setup as a "stop the bad guys before they end the world!" type thing so that really didn't seem feasible. My group loves tactical combat, but the encounters were not very good and I ended up having to rewrite a lot of it to get it finished and make it more interesting, or we may have spent more time in there. I wouldn't recommend that module to anyone.

 

[lukelightning]

...we were a very distractable group.

I think that describes pretty much all gaming groups.

My group played it for almost two years and got maybe a quarter done. We ended it due to frustration at the tedious dungeon crawl and fact that our characters only had 1/4 the loot they should have, much of which was useless for our characters.