D&D 5E The Flaw in Each Campaign Adventure (Spoilers)
toucanbuzz
No rule is inviolate
Curse of Strahd. As written, Strahd is just a dick who pops in from time to time to attack the group, but not enough to kill them because that would just be bad writing. As an eternal being obsessed with a curse, he has nothing better to do than harass low level adventurers. He needed a total rewrite in line with his storybook and lore character. Once done: totally one of the best adventures I've ever run.
Out of the Abyss: The 2nd half. There's a fun premise (go get the ingredients to an awesome spell) once you get past the piss-poor premise (we got all these epic heroes here but since you were in the Underdark for a few weeks, we need you to save the world, and here's some bare-bones stuff to do in our dwarf city), but there's nothing even remotely close to justifying the XP gains recommended for the finale. OH MAN, time's ticking and we need to stop the Demon Lords, but let's wander random tunnels in hopes of level appropriate random encounters...OR man, I just went from level 10 to level 13 in one week. I rock!
Out of the Abyss: The 2nd half. There's a fun premise (go get the ingredients to an awesome spell) once you get past the piss-poor premise (we got all these epic heroes here but since you were in the Underdark for a few weeks, we need you to save the world, and here's some bare-bones stuff to do in our dwarf city), but there's nothing even remotely close to justifying the XP gains recommended for the finale. OH MAN, time's ticking and we need to stop the Demon Lords, but let's wander random tunnels in hopes of level appropriate random encounters...OR man, I just went from level 10 to level 13 in one week. I rock!
I agree with a lot of what's been said. Lmop works well because it's kind of a sandbox filled with people who have simple to convey and understand motivations that won't derail things if misinterpreted or even ignored.
A lot of the published adventures by comparison are double railroad things that run into problems if the party does anything unexpected in the storyline railroad or even worse derails the other railroad just by not acting as expected by the author.
A lot of the published adventures by comparison are double railroad things that run into problems if the party does anything unexpected in the storyline railroad or even worse derails the other railroad just by not acting as expected by the author.
werecorpse
Adventurer
These are all helpful comments and solutions. I like a lot ofthe adventures but always change some stuff. Knowing what to change before you start can sometimes be tricky.
Re SKT I think the way the various beginner quests get introduced is also a poor tool and the GM should try and fix this, I’m not sure how yet as I haven’t run it. I think the giant in the floating wizards hat tower is fairly pointless. I also think the whole raison d’être of the campaign is weak. A solution seems to be to combine this campaign and tyranny of dragons which requires a bit of work but could make a fun sword coast travelling campaign. I haven’t run or played in either but I plan too.
Re Out of the Abyss, I agree the use of initial NPCs is more trouble than its worth. I like your idea to maybe give the players some background traits. The group I ran got tpked in Gracklstugh, so I went totally off the rails, they made up new Underdark appropriate characters and spent the next 8-10 levels there interacting with the Out of Abyss adventurers league adventures and other stuff which I tacked on. They have just overthrown the Deepking and replaced him with an ally who they hope will keep the city strong against various demonic armies building in the Underdark while they now finally head to Blingdenstone for reasons.
Re Tomb of Annihilation, I played this one and our DM doesn’t really kill PCs and we kinda just forgot about the timeline as it didn’t directly impact us. I think a better way to impose a timeline is baked into the campaign. Undead issues, the rising of Ras Nsi, rival explorers from Thay looking to ally with the undead and make Chult a province, ruined cities to explore before the bad guys can. That’s plenty enough motivation. The side quests in this are good but solving them was often a bit too easy and didn’t really go anywhere, so a bit of a let down.
Re SKT I think the way the various beginner quests get introduced is also a poor tool and the GM should try and fix this, I’m not sure how yet as I haven’t run it. I think the giant in the floating wizards hat tower is fairly pointless. I also think the whole raison d’être of the campaign is weak. A solution seems to be to combine this campaign and tyranny of dragons which requires a bit of work but could make a fun sword coast travelling campaign. I haven’t run or played in either but I plan too.
Re Out of the Abyss, I agree the use of initial NPCs is more trouble than its worth. I like your idea to maybe give the players some background traits. The group I ran got tpked in Gracklstugh, so I went totally off the rails, they made up new Underdark appropriate characters and spent the next 8-10 levels there interacting with the Out of Abyss adventurers league adventures and other stuff which I tacked on. They have just overthrown the Deepking and replaced him with an ally who they hope will keep the city strong against various demonic armies building in the Underdark while they now finally head to Blingdenstone for reasons.
Re Tomb of Annihilation, I played this one and our DM doesn’t really kill PCs and we kinda just forgot about the timeline as it didn’t directly impact us. I think a better way to impose a timeline is baked into the campaign. Undead issues, the rising of Ras Nsi, rival explorers from Thay looking to ally with the undead and make Chult a province, ruined cities to explore before the bad guys can. That’s plenty enough motivation. The side quests in this are good but solving them was often a bit too easy and didn’t really go anywhere, so a bit of a let down.
pukunui
Legend
My thoughts, plus some responses to your thoughts, plus some commentary on the adventures you didn't touch on:
Storm King’s Thunder
I have played all the way through is adventure as a player, and I am almost finished DMing it. So far it has been one of my favorites. However, I acknowledge it has some issues, so the other DM and I both put a fair bit of work into addressing those.
The DM who ran it for me started with Nightstone, but replaced the Dripping Caves with an older adventure, the name of which I cannot remember, and skipped Zephyros. We ended up going to Goldenfields and thence to Grudd Haug. We then paused there and "rebooted" with a new set of characters so the DM could use more of the giant lairs. He had us start with a modified version of Murder in Baldur's Gate that was moved to Luskan. We ended up completing SKT and have since moved on to a modified version of Scales of War.
For my SKT campaign, I skipped Nightstone and ran "Trouble in Red Larch" from PotA, followed by Scourge of the Sword Coast. We are most of the way through SKT. The PCs are hunting down some giant lords before taking on Iymrith. So far it's been a blast. That said, some of my players are big Skyrim fans and loved the whole "open world full of sidequests" sandboxy element.
Tomb of Annihilation
I wholly agree with you here. I want to run this campaign again as just a jungle sandbox without the Death Curse. I also want to kick things off with the mini-adventure from The Tortle Package. I might introduce the Death Curse later on, once the PCs are high enough level to seek out Omu and deal with it, but I might just ignore it.
Princes of the Apocalypse
My beef with this adventure is its repetitiveness. I don't think I could run it as a full campaign. That said, I love "Trouble in Red Larch" and have used it to kickstart two separate campaigns now. I remember some people saying they start every campaign with The Village of Hommlet. For me, it's Red Larch!
I have also used elements from this adventure in different campaigns to great effect.
Tyranny of Dragons
Yes, it's a bit railroady. I started it off with the PCs already in town (and they were also 3rd level). I had the right group of players, though, so they didn't mind the railroadyness and had a blast with it. Both adventures struggle with some pacing issues, as well as some incomplete rules issues. I wish the recent reissue had done more to address those, but it sounds like it was pretty half-assed.
Out of the Abyss
I like the idea of this more than the execution. I don't think I could ever run it as a campaign. However, I have used it as a sourcebook for the Underdark and have used bits of it in other campaigns. For instance, I ran "Neverlight Grove" on Halloween as a sort of bad acid trip one-shot during an episodic campaign.
Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage
I can't speak to it as a campaign, but I wanted to run pieces of it for a different campaign and a) couldn't find any dungeon levels (that were the right level for the party) that I liked and b) struggled to figure out how to separate them out from Undermountain as a whole. It also sucks that they left out the big shaft in the middle of Undermountain that made it easier to reach the lower levels.
Descent into Avernus
I haven't even read this one yet, let alone run it, but I've read about it, and it seems the glaring flaw here is that the actual Avernus content is sparse. Apparently WotC went the DLC route with this one, relying on the DMs Guild Adepts to fill in the gaps. It also had like 16 writers and apparently that shows as well.
Curse of Strahd
This one is fantastic. It's not perfect, but nothing is. I've both DMed it and played it as a player and really enjoyed it both times.
Lost Mine of Phandelver
Another good one. I think it suffers a little bit in the middle, where the players are encouraged to do a bunch of side quests in order to level up instead of going to look for the missing NPC guy. That's easy enough to fix, though: I let the PCs find him first and then said he needed time to recover from his ordeal, so they went on the side quests until he was well enough to take them to the climactic location.
Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
This one is just plain awful. Worst of the lot. It doesn't know what it wants to be -- a railroad or a sandbox or a tavern simulator. It's got horrible pacing, some of the most egregious examples of railroading I've seen in a long time (that make Tyranny of Dragons look good in comparison), and to top it all off, it's got a bunch of content you probably won't ever use and a terribly anti-climactic ending that will most likely be resolved by uber-powerful NPCs like Lady Laeral Silverhand.
Tales from the Yawning Portal / Ghosts of Saltmarsh
I haven't run all the shorter adventures in these compilations but I have run a few. I think some of the selections are questionable at best, and I also question the value in such straight updates to 5e. Some of the older adventures don't translate that well to modern RPG sensibilities, while others should've had more than just a literal update. Some more thought needs to be put into these if they are going to do any more.
Rabbitbait
Adventurer
Tomb of Annihilation - I like the fact that you go into the jungle without any idea of where to look and then find clues along the way. It all seems to hook together nicely for my group. However the Death Curse is on way too tight of a timeline and by the time my group got to Ras Nsi he was almost dead already. I think the timeline should be way longer, but by the time the group is getting close to Omu they should start losing 1hp per week as the soulmonger starts taking the essence of every living being. That will certainly get the tension up without actually having too much in-game impact.
FrozenNorth
Hero
I have played “Curse of Strahd”, I owned “Out of the Abyss” and I thumbed through “Tomb of Annihilation” to decide whether to buy it. For me, they all had the same flaw: you made a character with an interesting backstory? Too bad! Your character must immediately go somewhere where the background won’t matter, there is zero chance of running into someone who might know you, and you are indistinguishable from all the other murderhobos.
I understand WHY they did that, it’s just that it is possible to make an adventure background agnostic without making backgrounds completely irrelevant.
I understand WHY they did that, it’s just that it is possible to make an adventure background agnostic without making backgrounds completely irrelevant.
Urriak Uruk
Gaming is fun, and fun is for everyone
The direction on getting to Omu is relatively simple; you ask the guide you hire. They won't know, but they usually know where the Naga oracle is, who in turn does know where Omu is.
None of the groups I've DMed hired a guide who could help. They all got betrayed by the yuan-ti. Haha.
But it is a pretty weak connection even under the best circumstances. IIRC, the party has to guess they need to find Omu, guess who knows where to find it, guess where that person would be, etc. It's the weakest part of the adventure.
MarkB
Legend
One of the things about Out of the Abyss that I'd want to tweak if I ran it again is the whole concept of the places you visit having been somewhat twisted by the madness unleashed as the demons invade the realm. The big problem with this - and I feel like maybe this is one of the reasons they added the NPC companions, to serve as viewpoint characters - is that the Underdark in general and the locations the adventure covers in particular are going to be strange and unfamiliar enough to most players that there's no really obvious line between the demonic-inspired weirdness of the adventure and the more generalised weirdness of the setting.
I'd be tempted to re-write the initial chapters - the capture by the Drow, and the exploration/survival section - and replace them with something of a whistle-stop tour of some of the major locations - Blingdenstone, Gracklstugh, Sloobludop - as, say, part of a merchant caravan, so that the players can see these settlements in their normal state, maybe make a few friends and enemies, get a feel for the setting.
Then boom, have the caravan attacked by Drow, and just as it's getting overwhelmed and most of the NPCs are dead, have the Drow in turn be attacked by demons. Leave the PCs stranded in the underdark with a rough idea that they'll need to hit up their contacts in each of the major locations in order to gain passage back to the surface, and then let them see how the spreading madness has started to affect the various settlements they're familiar with.
I'd be tempted to re-write the initial chapters - the capture by the Drow, and the exploration/survival section - and replace them with something of a whistle-stop tour of some of the major locations - Blingdenstone, Gracklstugh, Sloobludop - as, say, part of a merchant caravan, so that the players can see these settlements in their normal state, maybe make a few friends and enemies, get a feel for the setting.
Then boom, have the caravan attacked by Drow, and just as it's getting overwhelmed and most of the NPCs are dead, have the Drow in turn be attacked by demons. Leave the PCs stranded in the underdark with a rough idea that they'll need to hit up their contacts in each of the major locations in order to gain passage back to the surface, and then let them see how the spreading madness has started to affect the various settlements they're familiar with.
