Which official 5E adventures have you played through?

I tried Horde of the Dragon Queen as our first foray into 5E. I hated the railroad and ended up going back to our 2E game. A year later I did a LOT of reading to learn the rules and decided to try 5E again with my group. This time I am running Lost Mine of Phandelver. I think it's a great adventure and am really enjoying the system this time around. We play weekly for 5 hours and we are 8 sessions in. The group starts Wave Echo Cave on Sunday so we will be wrapping this up in the next couple weeks. After that I will probably be running small adventures picked from the other APs, DM's Guild, or homebrew stuff. THe party had a hard time keeping their eye on the ball during LMoP so I think the longer APs are out of the question. Tales of the Yawning Portal sounds more up our alley.

I think most of them are good products and will finish buying the AP books I don't have but will use them to mine ideas or adventures, not to run as is.

V0RTEX said:

Well, were still slogging away at Tyranny of Dragons that I brought home from Gen Con 2014. Is been an epic campaign and I'm planning on taking the party all the way to level 20 by continuing the fight to the final showdown with the Queen of Dragons on Avernus.
On the first read the campaign was full of holes, but I've "rolled with the punches" and filled in the gaps as we've played and I must say it's been a beautiful thing! I suspect that this type of broad reaching, epic level 1-20 campaign with factions and politics and armies and intrigue and victories and disappointments has a once in a lifetime experience (and I've been playing for 30 years).

What more can I say!

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Very cool. It reminds me very much of my experience in running the Shackled City AP. As the first of the 3E "adventure paths" Shackled City suffers a little from the learning curve that Paizo had with APs, much like ToD suffers as the first 5E adventures.

As such, many people seem to prefer later APs, such as Age of Worms, Savage Tide or the various Pathfinder APs. However, that didn't stop my group from having an awesome time playing through the Shackled City AP. The advantage I had was that, as I ran my campaign about 6 years after the adventures originally came out, I got to piggy back off all of the awesome improvements other DMs had made to the AP.

So, despite mixed reviews from some, Shackled City is my favourite campaign, running or playing, in 20+ years of RPGs and one my whole group remembers fondly.

I've used and DMed some of all of them. OotA most of all the ones that I haven't completed, Princes being next.

Interesting that with the 620 votes I'm looking at, Curse of Strahd broke the otherwise consistent pattern of the older adventures being the most played. Curse of Strahd jumped ahead of both Princes of the Apocalypse and Out of the Abyss.

The data sample isn't large enough to really tell us a lot, but the suggestion it gives is that, at least of those prone to participate in polls on EnWorld, an adventure being set in Ravenloft was a significant draw.

If this is indicative of a broader trend, it should start showing up in WotC's sales numbers. Since the next book is also not Forgotten Realms, that could inform them more.

My best guess is that people are hungry for stuff other than Forgotten Realms. There are other interpretations (such as a secret cult following of Ravenloft on EnWorld), but that's the one I'm leaning towards.

Of course that will be complicated for the WotC crew. Because they have things set up the way they want with trans-media and everything, and it's pretty much focused around being able to set everything in the same world, more or less. But if the numbers tell them they make more money on any product they set outside of that world, then they have to evaluate their strategy and see if there is a way to better leverage that.

My bet is that they really don't want to abandon the focus on a single world, because of the trans media and organized play stuff. They can always find ways to integrate Planescape or Spelljammer, but if they want to actually use any other settings...they are going to have to leave the Realms to do it.

robus said:

You could transition to SKT with Blagothkus and his Sky Castle...

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That's a perfectly fine idea, but I know my group will definitely want to have closure on the whole Tyranny of Dragons storyline.

Besides, if I'm going to get them wrapped up in another long campaign, I want it to be Curse of Strahd.

DM'ed the Hoard of the Dragon Queen halfways through, with massive changes (The names for one thing - and also a lot of story elements, to make it more interesting). In the end found out it doesn't really fit our playstyle (this whole Reputation thing doesn't really fit our playstyle, I for example think in a mediavel-like fantasy-world there is likely an organization "The Paladins of Torm" - to name an example - but a "all Paladins organization" is very unlikely. And all organizations on one table as well. This feels much too "modern" (UN, or whatever...) to fit into a fantasy world. And it is too hardwired into the Adventure to really get rid of it asides from essentially rewriting the adventure. Would have been an option, yes, as the adventure HAS some potential. But it was easier to do one of those Adventures from Thule instead, without (many) changes needed.

It was sort of a "turn off" of the pre-done adventures, might be interested to check on the Strahd one eventually though, and maybe even the Storm Kings. Definitely not the
Abyss one, not our gaming style.

Mostly we do custom-done campaigns, mostly set in Forgotten Realms (one GM) or in a custom campaign (2nd GM) or in Thule (myselves).
Our group is more interested in non-adventure stuff from WotC, thus. Lately two of the GMs (I am still oldstyle) started to do a "Dungeonworld"-like GM-ing style (but
in D&D-rules and D&D-campaign worlds, not Dungeonworld itselves).

mrm1138 said:

That's a perfectly fine idea, but I know my group will definitely want to have closure on the whole Tyranny of Dragons storyline.

Besides, if I'm going to get them wrapped up in another long campaign, I want it to be Curse of Strahd.

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Well I plan on inserting SKT in the middle of RoT as there are a couple of light chapters that I can drop and recruiting the giants to fight in the final battle seems appropriate. But I understand your desire, I'm also looking forward to something new

Phandelver only, using the pre-gens even. It was actually pretty good.

Our other 5e games have been either sword and planet themed or something else

It took my group over a year-and-a-half to complete Tyranny of Dragons. TBH, we are all glad it was over, epic ending notwithstanding. I did my best to include side-adventures and lore to flesh out the campaign. But after that much time we are all in the mood for one-off adventures. We have no plans to start the other published campaigns. I do, however, intend to buy the upcoming Tales release.

I did the LMoP but am waiting on the pdfs (or equivalent electronic versions) of the others to play them. I have been running older edition modules for 5e mostly.