D&D General The most played D&D Adventure of all time

[wicked cool]

Keep on the borderlands

 

[Mistwell]

Is The Lost Mine of Phandelver the most played D&D adventure of all time?

If not, what would it be?

Cheers,
Merric

Hmm.

A huge number played Keep On the Borderlands because it came with the original set for so many years.

A huge number played Sunken Citadel and Forge of Fury, because it's all we had for a long period of time, both are very good, and have been redone for multiple editions.

 

[Mistwell]

I have no idea, but all of these sound like reasonable guesses.

For some hard numbers, Teos Abadía shared some data from BookScan, and from that found the top-selling 5e adventures were CoS, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Yawning Portal, and Saltmarsh. But there's a pretty significant gap between #2 Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and #1 Curse of Strahd.

At least from this part of the article, Lost Mines of Phandelver (Starter Set) was not included in the data.

Note that Yawning Portal is just adding numbers to prior popular adventures with that publication:

• The Sunless Citadel (2000)
• The Forge of Fury (2000)
• The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (1980)
• White Plume Mountain (1979)
• Dead in Thay (2014)
• Against the Giants (1981)
• Tomb of Horrors (1978)

It's one reason I mentioned Sunless Citadel is probably up there. There was a pretty popular fan-made conversion of Sunless for 4e too. I'd say Against the Giants and Tomb of Horrors are both also up there.

 

[Lanefan]

I tend to think Lost Mines as well. Wondering if Sunless Citadel got played as much as Keep on the Borderlands for people starting with 3e.

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I briefly wondered the same, then realized that the only chance Sunless Citadel would have had to be #1 all-time would be if it were brought forward and re-released in 4e and 5e versions when those editions came out. It wasn't, and so it's now well down the most-played list.

B2, on the other hand, has been converted and rereleased for 5e - it's one of that series by Goodman Games, if memory serves - which means not only does it have a 35-year head start over LMoP but it's still got some legs today.

Edit to add: another module on the outer periphery of this conversation might be 4e's H1 Keep on the Shadowfell; again the first official adventure of a then-new edition, which is an obvious trend here.

 

[jdrakeh]

Ravenloft is my guess. It has a version in at least four editions of the game.

That would be my guess, too. I've played A version of it dozens of times over multiple editions of the game (notably AD&D 1e, D&D 3x, and D&D 5e).

 

[Clint_L]

I doubt LMoP has over taken B2, or even come close, really.

You have to remember, B2 has been around since 1979, and been played by people gaming since then, who don't game any more and have never even heard of LMoP (which has not even been around 10 years yet).

45 years of fans playing B2 versus 10 years for LMoP? I know D&D is more "mainstream" and such now, but evenso I'd bet B2 is still at least double LMoP, if not more.

I have no doubt LMoP is up there, most definitely in the top 5 of all time; give it another 5-10 years and it probably will overtake B2, especially if they rehash it in further editions/versions of the game.

Most of us on this forum are kind of old, though, so I think we might overrate the ubiquity of B2. Would someone who started playing in the 90s or later think about it the same way? Would they even be aware of it?

 

[ezo]

We've been playing 30+ years and never run, but we haven't run lost mins either!

Just as long, and I've run and played in B2 more times than I can remember... seriously, like maybe more than a dozen times, with 80%+ different players, easily over 50.

LMoP I've played in once, with two other people, and I've never run it.

not sure, 5e has more players than the other editions combined… I lean towards LMoP

We have no way of knowing that. There's no reliable data from the 20+ years of the TSR era as to the actual number of D&D players, and probably the first decade of WoTC as well.

So, I'll continue to lean (heavily) towards B2.

All I have is my own (admittedly) anecdotal evidence.

Most of us on this forum are kind of old, though, so I think we might overrate the ubiquity of B2. Would someone who started playing in the 90s or later think about it the same way? Would they even be aware of it?

Who knows? I (like many others) introduced many players to D&D in the 90's and 2000's even, and played B2 with all of them. Goodman Games made a revival of B2 for 5E, which caught a good deal of attention IME.

So, again, I can only speak from my own experience, just like everyone else.

 

[ezo]

Most of us on this forum are kind of old, though, so I think we might overrate the ubiquity of B2. Would someone who started playing in the 90s or later think about it the same way? Would they even be aware of it?

Now, just as a point, if we're discussing the people currently playing (or at least "recently") then it would probably be LMoP or CoS.

But, if we include all the players from the 70's, 80's, 90s, etc. who ever played D&D, then I feel it has to be B2.

 

[overgeeked]

Considering there are more people new to D&D with 5E than all players of every other edition combined, it’s an easy guess to say it’s a 5E adventure. It’s most likely Phandelver but could be Curse of Strahd.

 

[billd91]

another part of the series has it however, with PHB at 1.5M, Starter Set at 1M, DMG and MM at around 800k

If the Starter Set sold about 1 million copies, that's doing quite well. But it's also probably not the whole story of sales since it's not a set of figures coming from Hasbro.
By comparison, the Ben Riggs values suggest maybe 1.5-1.75ish million in sales of Basic D&D sets that may have had Keep on the Borderlands in it (I don't know how easily those data differentiate between sets with B1 rather than B2 and when exactly it stopped being included). So, if the BookScan numbers are really close, copies of B2 probably got out there into more hands. And there are probably a lot of players who at least gave it a bit of a try due to the convenience of it being in the set. The number who have played it repeatedly is probably a much smaller core. I know I've played in it (partially) maybe twice and ran it once. I've actually run Return to Keep on the Borderlands more times because, frankly, it's a better adventure to run.

So, yeah, an interesting question and I really suspect it's down to those two for the top spot. B2 or Phandelver.