D&D 5E Curse of Strahd - How Long Start to Finish?

[Rils]

To add to this, I have heard this is difficult to run, unless you are an experienced DM. Even Dice Camera, Action had Chris Perkins fumbling through the book at times to keep the story moving at a good pace, and it makes me wonder, being a decent DM how i would fare?

I'd say - don't worry about, and have fun! I'm a first time DM, the first campaign I've ever run is CoS, and my guys are having a blast. Granted I've done some research on ways to organize it, plot threads that weave together, etc. There's lots of great material here on the Enworld and other blogs. And I'll admit to having stolen a few things from DCA. But "difficult to run"? Nah. It's all there in the book, more than you need actually, and just take it and run!

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I'm surprised at the responses here. It looks like the general consensus is 20-25 sessions of 3-4 hours, which is shorter than I expected.

Not that I'm overly fussed by that. It will be nice to run a shorter campaign for a bit of a change.

By comparison, I'm currently playing a PotA campaign. We're probably about 16-18 sessions into that campaign and, while I don't know how far into the campaign we are, it definitely feels like there is a lot more we need to do before we reach the end.

 

[Daern]

Its definitely shorter. There's not the same need to play through 8 dungeons. Most of the various locations end up as session length episodes. The story is strong, so players seem less intent on exploring every room. It's more about achieving an objective (like steal the silver dragon skull) and stay alive. Princes of the Apocalypse is a serious of fortresses that need to be cleared, which takes time.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Its definitely shorter. There's not the same need to play through 8 dungeons. Most of the various locations end up as session length episodes. The story is strong, so players seem less intent on exploring every room. It's more about achieving an objective (like steal the silver dragon skull) and stay alive. Princes of the Apocalypse is a serious of fortresses that need to be cleared, which takes time.

That definitely makes sense. Even though combat is much quicker in 5E (we managed to get through 7 combats in one 4 hour session, something that was unheard of in 3.5E), it still takes time.

Some of the areas in PotA are huge. I decided to start mapping about 3 sessions ago. As luck would have it, that coincided with the session that our party finding a large Dwarven city that the air cult was using as their base! I needed more sheets of graph paper pretty quickly!

 

[Charles Rampant]

You seem to be a player, so I won't spoil PotA, but it is definitely much longer. I ran that before Curse of Strahd, and I found myself rather fatigued by it in the end; there is a lot of dungeoneering action in it. They share the same page counts, but if you think about it, Dungeons are way more space-efficient (in terms of a ratio of words on the page to hours at the table) than an atmospheric area with a political or social tone to it. Since PotA is mostly dungeons, while CoS is mostly 'cool area with people that you may fight or talk to', the former covers way more ground.

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

9 months, played almost weekly either 2 or 3.5 hour sessions.

Feel like I didn't use a lot in the book - Argynvostholt, Bonegrinder, lots of castle left unexplored, blew through few rooms of Amber Temple.

Chalk it up to DM fatigue, should have taken a break for a bit.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

You seem to be a player, so I won't spoil PotA, but it is definitely much longer. I ran that before Curse of Strahd, and I found myself rather fatigued by it in the end; there is a lot of dungeoneering action in it. They share the same page counts, but if you think about it, Dungeons are way more space-efficient (in terms of a ratio of words on the page to hours at the table) than an atmospheric area with a political or social tone to it. Since PotA is mostly dungeons, while CoS is mostly 'cool area with people that you may fight or talk to', the former covers way more ground.

Yep, I'm a player for this campaign. I'm normally a DM though and I'll likely be the DM for CoS.

This is my second campaign as a player in the last 15 years and it's been nice to be back in the player's seat for a bit.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

You seem to be a player, so I won't spoil PotA, but it is definitely much longer. I ran that before Curse of Strahd, and I found myself rather fatigued by it in the end; there is a lot of dungeoneering action in it. They share the same page counts, but if you think about it, Dungeons are way more space-efficient (in terms of a ratio of words on the page to hours at the table) than an atmospheric area with a political or social tone to it. Since PotA is mostly dungeons, while CoS is mostly 'cool area with people that you may fight or talk to', the former covers way more ground.

It seems like CoS will be a good change up from PotA. Before PotA we played through a 3.5E campaign (converted from 3E) of RttToEE. So I think we've had our fill of elemental cult dungeon crawls for a while!

 

[hastur_nz]

My players have pretty much finished it now, in just under 9 months of playing a 3-4 hour session once every two weeks. As noted above, you're not going to (and are not advised to) play through every chapter. Personally I deleted a hook to Argynvostholt, and no-one picked up the Werewolves hook from the beginning. Some parts ran through very quickly e.g. they basically completed Death House in around 3 hours. Same for some other parts - if you have experienced players who follow certain key plot hooks and don't just wander around the sandbox, it can be fairly focused and quick - there's plenty of parts where there's not a lot of combat to slow it down, too.

Personally I did find it challenging to run, but in a good way. Basically there is way too much detail to remember from beginning to end, and the way its arranged makes it easy to miss key interesting stuff if you're reading off the pages at the table (e.g. key plot points scattered at the beginning of a chapter, the end of a chapter, and even in the NPC write-up in the Appendix). So I needed to re-read one or more relevant chapters before each session, add some post-it-notes in places, and keep a simple set of bullet-points to help me in terms of ideas, character hooks/notes, etc. In particular, there are just so much potential for un-scripted events, NPC's galore to play with ongoing, and everything needs to be dynamic according to how your players go about their business which can drive some fun ad-hoc from the DM.

I think you could easily do a good run-through in under 6 months, playing weekly. It's a fun adventure, especially when both players and DM embrace the dark tone of it. As someone who's been a player in the 3.5 version of this adventure, and most of "Out of the Abys", I'd say that Curse of Strahd (5e) is far superior to both, a really good sandbox for players and DM alike. As a DM, I'd say it challenged me to be more creative than a lot of other larger campaigns I've run, but in a good way i.e. adding to the story, not fixing problems.

 

[Awesome Adam]

We ran the 5 Adventure League short adventures before wisking them away to Ravenloft. It helped make them more survivable for the Death House. We did have one casualty in the big fight in the basement of the Death House, but the Adeventure League has guidelines for resurrencting characters of level 3 or lower, and we used those.