D&D 5E Tell me your positive experiences with HotDQ

[jayoungr]

My group gave me Hoard of the Dragon Queen for Christmas and asked me to run the adventure for them. Now, I've seen a lot of negativity about this module in online forums, so I'd be interested to hear about what has worked for other groups. Who's had fun with it, and what made it fun?

(Also, if any DMs have suggestions for helping the adventure to run more smoothly, I'd love to hear them, either in this thread or in this other one that I started a while back.)

 

[DEFCON 1]

I have been running it and it's done exactly what I personally needed from it. It has given me a story spine to based my current campaign on... given me several "encounter areas" to use as needed if/when the parties go there... given me a whole hostful of NPCs with agendas in which to have the party interact with... and most importantly just been chock full of ideas to pull from and use.

That being said... I'm also a DM that fully expects my parties to go off in directions not dictated in the script of the adventure, and am fully capable of not only improvising when they do... but also fully capable of dropping things from the module back into their new directions to see if they choose to come back to the plotline. I never *force* them to follow the story... but at the same time, the story is occurring parallel to what the parties are doing, and thus they are getting wind of what the Cult of the Dragon is doing even if they aren't directly involved. Which only inspires them to sometimes steer back into the HotDQ because it's a threat they know about and thus want to combat.

But I didn't need the module itself to explain to me how or why to do that... I was able to do that just on my own. So I can understand why some people have complained that the module doesn't.

 

[Astrosicebear]

My group is having a blast. Some needs some work. Some is pretty good out of the book. Best suggestion, make sure to read the entire book to get an idea of whats going on, so you can add things/take away that might make your campaign better.

There are a few sources out there that have great ideas on running the module.

Slyflourish has some great writeups.


Hack and Slash has some of the best change notes.

Im sure there are even more out there.

 

[Zaran]

I thought the Dragon fight was fun. I thought when my players snuck into the vampire's tower and had a fight with her an her guards that it was a fun fight as well. The chapter 4 Merchant caravan section, I thought was really fascinating but my players just weren't into it. All in all, if it wasn't for heavy railroading I would have liked it a lot better. Making the entire campaign be about saving the world got old really quick.

 

[keterys]

I'd suggest starting it at 2nd level, at least. It makes the whole first section much more fun. It might even work to level up to 3rd later in the day as a pseudo-rest mechanic (pretty sure there's enough XP there).

I'd also avoid random encounters in Greenest. Have the threat of them ready, sure, but there's already far too much stuff going on to possibly fit it in, there's no need to add random who cares fights on that bump out more interesting ones.

The caravan bit was kinda meh.

 

[dream66_]

My absolute favorite thing was the first session I played, I was playing a Paladin with a noble personality. When it come they needed a single champion to fight an overpowered enemy. Of course I stepped forward knowing my brand new character would die in the process becoming one of my favorite characters ever. I felt like a hero, Spoiler alert, she lived, haven't felt like as much of a hero in the rest of the adventure.

 

[Wolfskin]

My players are loving it, though I had to adjust some encounters due to the fact that (1) there are three players at my table and (2) some encounters IMO are kinda silly (e.g. the two berserkers in the Dragon Hatchery are actually tougher than the boss fight itself!). I had my share of reluctance about running the adventure, but I decided to do it because I had already bought it and after a thorough reading it became evident to me that the adventure has more bad rap than it deserves. Even the WTF moments such as the dragon champion duel or the blue dragon amazed the players, one of whom outright stated "I can't believe we tried to kill a dragon at first level, that was awesome!".

Also, IMHO Rise of Tiamat makes Hoard better in retrospective.

 

[Netherstorm]

My group loved it. The highlights were probably the dragon fight in episode 1, the dragon eggs in episode 3, the whole open-ended castle in episode 6, and the final battle against the white dragon... which was epic.

I wrote a gigantic guide to running Hoard here.

 

[Khasimir]

I'm with DEFCON 1. It's given me a good, solid outline and I add or modify where needed. The Hack N' Slash blog has helped me with some ideas on refining things further and I've thrown in quite a bit of wrinkles so there's plenty of change of pace, not mention taking it from a rather linear episodic AP into something of an ongoing story.

Really the best time we've had was episode three. I've added more bad guys in each encounter to make them challenging and have tried to play the bad guys as being savvy opponents. I also changed the fungi encounter to that as recommended on HackNSlash and added the wrinkle of players needing to continue to roll saves for the hallucinogenic effects if they stayed in the lower area. I haven't laughed that hard gaming in years.

 

[lvl20dm]

I had a great time running this, but the party had gone through Lost Mine first and I basically dropped them in to Chapter 5 (I had the Cult attack Phandalin to get things rolling). It was entertaining seeing what the party would come up with (particularly in the 8th chapter, when they were pretty confident that one wrong move would be a total-party kill).