D&D 5E Thoughts On The Meh 5E Adventures.

[Zardnaar]

I was surprised to find out that people had a negative view of Dungeon of the Mad Mage after our group finished the campaign after about 2 years of real time gaming. Our DM confided that he made several alterations throughout when appropriate, including the entire final battle, but our group had a blast with it. It all comes down to what inspires you.

Mines not negative but it's just a typical 6/10 sort of adventure. It's just average.

God news is a good DM can make it goid without changing it while a great one changes things up for the better.

Group dynamics kick on as well what the player likes. If you like D&D you can pretty much have fun with anything that's not terrible.

Also have you played anything "better" to compare vitamins with? I have around 1000 to compare with and Dungeon hacks aren't me.

Ultimately it's subjective as well. Only one I think is outright bad is HotDQ and others have had fun with it. I haven't read the latest ones either.

 

[TiQuinn]

Mines not negative but it's just a typical 6/10 sort of adventure. It's just average.

God news is a good DM can make it goid without changing it while a great one changes things up for the better.

Group dynamics kick on as well what the player likes. If you like D&D you can pretty much have fun with anything that's not terrible.

Also have you played anything "better" to compare vitamins with? I have around 1000 to compare with and Dungeon hacks aren't me.

Ultimately it's subjective as well. Only one I think is outright bad is HotDQ and others have had fun with it. I haven't read the latest ones either.

There's very few campaign scenarios that I'm not game for -- I've done a lot across multiple editions, and as long as I can make a character that will gel well with the campaign/setting, I'm easy to please. The last full campaign that we played up to level 15 was Odyssey of the Dragonlords, and that was excellent.

 

[bmfrosty]

Adventure structure is very much a fascination of mine. And SKT is bizarre. Some of it is great - but so badly designed. Other parts make you wonder if sections got cut out.

The basic structure of the adventure becomes a lot better if you start with Lost Mine of Phandelver (especially if you add in Essentials Kit sidequests).

You're adventurers on the Sword Coast. You start in Phandalin, then start doing more quests outside the town, until you're wandering the Sword Coast doing more adventures and no longer based in Phandalin.

Then you come upon a town being attacked by giants. You help defend it, and get a bunch more quests on the Sword Coast from the NPCs you rescue. Great! (This is a continuation of what you've already been doing for five levels).

As you do these quests and gain nice rewards, the random encounters in the wilderness become more and more populated by giants. What's going on?

Then Harshnag turns up to recruit you and tell you what the real threat is: With the Storm King distracted, there's no-one to impose order on the giants and they're all doing bad stuff. How can you fix this? Get to the Storm King and get rid of the bad influences. But the Storm King is hard to get to - the only way is through a magic item held by each of the lesser Giant chieftains.

You pick a chieftain, infiltrate their lair (or lay waste to it, because adventurers) and grab the item.

You get to the Storm King's stronghold, discover the intrigues, and eventually realise what is making the Storm King so distracted. You deal with that, and - hooray! - normal giant behaviour returns!

At least, that's how it should play according to my reading of it. But a lot of it is so badly explained or obfuscated, or divergent readings are used which just make it worse. (I've seen several DMs kill all the NPCs in the giant raid, then wonder why the adventure falls apart in the next chapter).

I love the adventure, but it's not explained that well. (And the less said about A Great Upheaval the better. It's not a bad adventure... and parts of it are inspired... but from a storytelling perspective it introduces the giants way, way too early).

Cheers,
Merric

I have to say that every time I've tried to read a 5e adventure book that the lede has been buried, and frankly the type of reading involved in reading an adventure is more of a task than a pleasure. Very difficult for me to do with a 200 page book. It's much easier to do with a 32 page module.

That all said, I would even want to do it at a dungeon level or smaller.

An Example:

The adventurers can enter at spots A, B, or C, but any which way they'll eventually get to Important thing D in room 19, with clues and important items in room 7, 12, and 15.

Reading room descriptions one after another is really boring, and while it's good prep, it's much easier to do with an overview.

I wish adventures would be written to be easy on a DM with bad ADHD.

 

[TiQuinn]

I have to say that every time I've tried to read a 5e adventure book that the lede has been buried, and frankly the type of reading involved in reading an adventure is more of a task than a pleasure. Very difficult for me to do with a 200 page book. It's much easier to do with a 32 page module.

That all said, I would even want to do it at a dungeon level or smaller.

An Example:

The adventurers can enter at spots A, B, or C, but any which way they'll eventually get to Important thing D in room 19, with clues and important items in room 7, 12, and 15.

Reading room descriptions one after another is really boring, and while it's good prep, it's much easier to do with an overview.

I wish adventures would be written to be easy on a DM with bad ADHD.

I found this to be the case with a lot of older adventures too. Reading "The Secret of Bone Hill" as a DM, even if it's not the same type of adventure as a modern edition game, I still want some sort of raison d'etre, and the module was having none of that.

 

[Ancalagon]

When EN Publishing did the adventure path War of the Burning Sky in 2007, it was pretty linear with just a few NPCs who recurred and a few narrative throughline between adventures.

When we did ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution in 2011, we upped our game a lot. I had a big notebook to keep track of all the linkages between adventures, the branching character arc possibilities of about 40 NPCs, and a suite of character hooks we encouraged GMs to use to weave the PCs into key moments of every single adventure.

When you play adventure 6 at 11th level, you go to a brand new country but can run into one NPC you met in your home city in adventure 2 when he fell afoul of a gang, another NPC you encountered while you were undercover on a train in adventure 4, a diplomat you protected in adventure 5 can help you get political connections in this new nation, AND a minor VIP who had cameos in adventures 1 and 3 is revealed to be a new villain trying to make a play for power.

Your interactions with them before affect what happens now, and your choices in this adventure might result in the villain being an ally later, and various other little flairs for the different NPCs.

And the adventures do a lot of work to help the GM keep track of all of this. But damn if it was not a fair bit of work for me as the line director. The original idea of having a different author for each adventure became infeasible after adventure 5 because I'd have to write 10,000 words myself just to bring a new guy up to speed, and they'd invariably not grasp all the nuances for what the long-term plan was.

But the groups who have finished the whole adventure path seem to have really appreciated how deep and rich the world ends up being, because we gave the players opportunities to build genuine relationships with recurring characters.

I haven't praised Zeitgeist as much because I'm just a player in that game and it's hard for me to tell if it's the GM or the adventure that is stitching things together so well, but I've been pretty impressed by the experience!

 

[RangerWickett]

I haven't praised Zeitgeist as much because I'm just a player in that game and it's hard for me to tell if it's the GM or the adventure that is stitching things together so well, but I've been pretty impressed by the experience!

Where are you in the campaign? What's your character?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I honestly think that 5e's "batting average" when it comes to adventures is significantly better than other editions.

However, I don't think any of the 5e adventures are put together very well when it comes to making them remotely easy to run. As @Ancalagon says, they take a LOT of work for the DM to beat into an actual game.

They're written very well to be excellent stories - they generally have the "hook" that @Rabbitbait speaks of. If your DM can take that story and beat it into a game, then they run very very well.

BUT, they have very little guidance on the most important thing for a DM - what to do TODAY at the table, in this session! I understand that this is difficult to write for, as most prep won't survive meeting the players, but it CAN be done much better than 5e does it, IMO.

For example, 4e, which generally had absolutely terrible adventures (with a few exceptions) was much easier (for me) to run directly from-the-book. It was all in the presentation.

I hope they find a better way to present adventures in the future.

Oh - they're also too LONG, but that's another story.

Strangely, I think that the best "era" for adventures was in the "gray space" between 4e and 5e. The D&DNext era. Murder at Baldur's Gate, Legacy of the Crystal Shard, Vault of the Dracolich, Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle, and Scourge of the Sword Coast are all BANGERS, IMO.

 

[Ancalagon]

Where are you in the campaign? What's your character?

The campaign is currently on pause due to the DM having health issues, but we were trying to infiltrate an important Obscurati meeting via soul swapping, I hope that helps?

We were playing a PF1e game, and I had a level 11 elven Magus - expert at stealth, intimidation and doing tons of damage. I honestly would prefer if the campaign was in 5e (I know there is a 5e version!) because the system takes a lot of work at this level, but I have to admit that translating a magus into 5e is easy to do "vaguely" and impossible to do exactly... but a price I would be willing to pay.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

As above, it's very hard to judge adventures based on playing through them unless you DM is very open about what they did or did not change/add. I'm running Curse of the Netherdeep right now, and I've been changing/adding tons of stuff because the adventure as written is extremely sparse with content (and, IMHO, simply badly written from a narrative perspective). There's points where it assumes you simply walk across a zone facing 1-3 random encounters and a RP stop and level up, or similar. My players are enjoying it, and have loved some of the stuff I've added in, but a core experience would be very different. To @Ancalagon 's point, there's lots of moments where the connective tissue is absurd stuff like "NPC drops a teleport tablet to zoom the players 3k miles away!"

So I'd put COTN in the "meh" for sure, running Curse of Strahd for the second time I also think it's pretty meh actually. The dungeons are a mess and deeply boring mostly, and the general expectation seems to be that you shoehorn in some degree of external content. No desire to ever run it again for sure.

There's some gems in the compilations, but those benefit from a degree of focus mainly missing in the sprawling adventures.

DoD is by far the best written to play at table large scale book published adventure I've seen, not that it's WOTC official, but even it could use some better organization and cross referencing. Plus its premise kinda sucks for heroic players IMO.

I found the level pacing in CotN pacing very uneven, and those 3 wilderness encounters - the difficulty is very high. And the caravan stop has a cool map and disappointingly little to do. On the other hand, Ank'Harel is my favourite fantasy city, and well worth expanding upon.

 

[RangerWickett]

The campaign is currently on pause due to the DM having health issues, but we were trying to infiltrate an important Obscurati meeting via soul swapping, I hope that helps?

We were playing a PF1e game, and I had a level 11 elven Magus - expert at stealth, intimidation and doing tons of damage. I honestly would prefer if the campaign was in 5e (I know there is a 5e version!) because the system takes a lot of work at this level, but I have to admit that translating a magus into 5e is easy to do "vaguely" and impossible to do exactly... but a price I would be willing to pay.

I feel you on the Magus thing. My friends and I played Iron Gods in Pathfinder, and we had TWO magi who ripped folks apart.