D&D 5E In an adventure called Dragon Heist I want only two things...

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Remembers the good ole days when Dragons could be President.

Dragons used to own corporations and banks!

Now they always the bad guys.

No, they all just moved to Shadowrun and took over those corporations.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Except of course that the standard D&D group size is 4-6. A group with 11 players would be quite a handful.

"Dragons 5" just doesn't sound as cool.

Yeah, even the female version of Oceans 11 could not get any smaller than Oceans 8.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

To the OP: You're not wrong.

The Alexandrian Remix addresses both of your concerns. Check it out: Dragon Heist Remix – Part 1: The Villains

Also, I'm playing a heavily modified version of this adventure right now and having a lot of fun, so it can be salvaged.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

The mistake here is that they used a name that implies something more appealing than the actual adventure.

That's just a no-no. The same goes with cover art. Never make the cover better than the book!

There's a 1977 movie called Sorcerer. As a fantasy fan in the 80s, when I saw that in the TV Guide my eyes lit up. Then I read the description and discovered it was about a vehicle filled with nitroglycerin, and not a fantasy movie at all. I might have randomly watched it if it were called Nitro Heist, but call it Sorcerer, a title that promises the rare (at the time) treat of a fantasy movie, without delivering on that, and you've lost me.

Expectations can be huge, and this is a serious marketing botch.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I've run it three times. You never quite get the "heist", because D&D doesn't do that sort of structure well. (Planning an operation first? Have you seen what players are like?)

It's an adventure with a lot of cool ideas that don't mesh together that well. You're best to expand the ideas that entertain you and your players and let the others fade into the background. In my recent play-though (more on which on my blog), I spent a LOT of time building up faction missions and less on the heist - and the tavern was ignored entirely.

Cheers!

Why not?

 

[Lanefan]

Why not?

Because to many players "plan" is a swear word, never to be uttered and even moreso never to be done.

As for the title of the adventure: with a name like that it should be set up that instead of trying to steal the treasure, you're trying to steal the Dragon...

 

[Charlaquin]

Why is called 'Heist' if there's no heist?!

There’s kind of a heist, if you really stretch the definition of the term. There’s a large sum of embezzlers dragons hidden in the city and several factions want to find it before the others. It’s really more of a race to the money than a heist. Less Oceans Eleven, more It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

Because to many players "plan" is a swear word, never to be uttered and even moreso never to be done.

Our players must be from different planets. I had to "impose a suggestion" that players do some of their planning between sessions so we could accomplish more during sessions. Otherwise, they used to spend 20-30 minutes arguing about whether to check out the the Forge of Solid Flame or the Ruins of the Water Goddess - or whether to ally with the Duke of Aubry or his son Percy of Stanwark in the upcoming battle of Calippy Hill.

 

[Charlaquin]

The mistake here is that they used a name that implies something more appealing than the actual adventure.

That's just a no-no. The same goes with cover art. Never make the cover better than the book!

There's a 1977 movie called Sorcerer. As a fantasy fan in the 80s, when I saw that in the TV Guide my eyes lit up. Then I read the description and discovered it was about a vehicle filled with nitroglycerin, and not a fantasy movie at all. I might have randomly watched it if it were called Nitro Heist, but call it Sorcerer, a title that promises the rare (at the time) treat of a fantasy movie, without delivering on that, and you've lost me.

Expectations can be huge, and this is a serious marketing botch.

Murder in Baldur’s Gate has a similar problem. It’s a good adventure, but it’s not a murder mystery, and the title makes it sound like one, which sets the audience up for disappointment.

 

[Perun]

I've run it three times. You never quite get the "heist", because D&D doesn't do that sort of structure well. (Planning an operation first? Have you seen what players are like?)

Planning, IME, is something the players always do. It's sticking to the plans that's difficult. Not having much to do with the WotC adventure, but my party is stationed in Waterdeep, and we have previously killed a red dragon whose mum (an Ancient Red) found out we're the guilty party, along with our dwarven cleric's name, so she figured the best way to get at us was to attack the city and demand we be handed over. Luckily, we weren't in Waterdeep at that time, but once we came back, we had a lot of explaining to do, and were basically railroaded by the lords of the city to deal with the mommy dragon (or die trying). Through various resources we found out that she, although as evil as any red dragon, has really strong bonds with her children (and, presumably further descendants), and that she's been known to sometimes be open to the idea of negotiations (we're desperate enough to try that, even though our previous encounter didn't really end well). So we come up with this great plan to reach her volcano master lair (we know she's currently residing somewhere on the Sword Coast, whilst looking for us), not (and this is the important bit) kill any dragons found there but just gather what information we can, so we'd increase our chances of parleying with her. So we teleport to Elversult, locate the volcano, track there, see some dragons, and estimate the location of the lair. Whilst tracking to the lair, we are surprised by two young reds, several wyverns, and two chimeras. It's at that moment that we collectively forgot our entire plan, and began fighting. One red managed to withdraw, but we expended some resources to blast it happily away. Then we noticed another group of dragons and/or dragon-like creatures approaching, and we managed to hide the body of that last dragon (the entire battle was happening in a ravine/canyon with an overhang, so it's difficult to spot anything from above, and our druid polymorphed into a giant ape to grab the body and toss it in the canyon). Now we plan to continue onwards, pretending not to know anything about any dead dragons. It simply has to go well (like all our other plans). My character is the group's leader, who occasionally suffers from bouts of sanity, so I've no doubt of the success