D&D 5E How Wotc can improve the adventure books.

[Guest User]

It doesn't say that. Rime of the Frost Maiden does give a lot of advice though.
More then other WotC offerings of the past.
What do you think needs more details?

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Since Robus and others are on a tear about Icewind Dale having some problems, What are some things Wotc can do to improve the next adventure book?
1. Encounter difficulty included. Hard, Easy, Deadly. And MAYBE some suggestions like Adventure League does to adjust the level.
2. 5 and 55 year review. As a 55 57 year some of printed maps are hard to read. Either lighten up on the dark colors, or white grid lines if you go dark. The story should be reviewed by both a 5 year old and 55 year.
3. A little bit more world building. Waterdeep Heist was not great. It was not Oceans 11. But it did have a full chapter for Waterdeep.
4. Minor. Page listing for monsters Ex Orc MM 246
5. Have the Marketing team read the book. Waterdeep was not Ocean's 11. Icewind is too cold.
6. Better binding.
Next person.

1. Fairly good suggestion, but would only apply to well balanced parties of a certain size. Adding a variable table for each encounter uses too much space.
2. -
3. Too much worldbuilding, and the module becomes too specific to a specific setting. These books have kept it vague enough that you can conceivably drop them in your own homebrew world.
4. This uses too much space, hard pass. If you really need this, download the D&D Beyond app, way more convenient than flipping through the MM.
5. The marketing team reads the book. Don't blame them for falling for their excellent marketing and buying a book that is not 100% faithful to its title.
6. Agreed, but I swear I'm the only person here who hasn't had binding problems yet. Maybe I just treat my books nicely?

Only thing I actually want is an index at the end for key NPCs, events, magic items, etc.

 

[Burnside]

The marketing of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist was quite misleading in terms of what was actually in that adventure. But otherwise I think it's been reasonably on point.

 

[Shardstone]

"The maps are fine, get better glasses."

What?

 

[R_J_K75]

I say make the adventures shorter. Consider all the classic adventures, they were 32, 64 or 96 pages. These mega adventures that have been put out for 5E, Ive read through bits and pieces, used very little here and there but have never run any start to finish. Theyre just too big for me to justify reading, then prepping/modding & running for 6-18 months. Besides CoS, from the reactions Ive read, I havent heard anyone say that the other 5E adventures were great or modern classics. I just think theyre too married to small release schedule so they try to cram too much into an adventure and they probably suffer from it.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Let us know what CR an encounter is......lots of stuff lately seems to completely ignore this. It is very important for newer DMs, and somewhat important for the rest of us.

Just a nitpick, but encounters don’t have a CR. The have and XP budget and deadliness.

 

[Haffrung]

I say make the adventures shorter. Consider all the classic adventures, they were 32, 64 or 96 pages. These mega adventures that have been put out for 5E, Ive read through bits and pieces, used very little here and there but have never run any start to finish. Theyre just too big for me to justify reading, then prepping/modding & running for 6-18 months. Besides CoS, from the reactions Ive read, I havent heard anyone say that the other 5E adventures were great or modern classics. I just think theyre too married to small release schedule so they try to cram too much into an adventure and they probably suffer from it.

Somewhere along the way, the level 1-14/16/20 campaign in a book became the default for D&D and Pathfinder. Even though WotC‘s own research shows 90 per cent of campaigns end before level 10.

As with most of the other baffling adventure design and presentation choices, I suspect the real explanation is WotC is tailoring its books to the 50+ per cent of buyers who will never actually use them in a game.

 

[R_J_K75]

Somewhere along the way, the level 1-14/16/20 campaign in a book became the default for D&D and Pathfinder. Even though WotC‘s own research shows 90 per cent of campaigns end before level 10.

As with most of the other baffling adventure design and presentation choices, I suspect the real explanation is WotC is tailoring its books to the 50+ per cent of buyers who will never actually use them in a game.

I think youre correct. Im more of a collector at this point, but buy the adventures with the assumption maybe I'll get around to running one, and I can always mine them for ideas. It'll be interesting to see what products they come out with in the next year or two.

 

[robus]

I say make the adventures shorter. Consider all the classic adventures, they were 32, 64 or 96 pages. These mega adventures that have been put out for 5E, Ive read through bits and pieces, used very little here and there but have never run any start to finish. Theyre just too big for me to justify reading, then prepping/modding & running for 6-18 months. Besides CoS, from the reactions Ive read, I havent heard anyone say that the other 5E adventures were great or modern classics. I just think theyre too married to small release schedule so they try to cram too much into an adventure and they probably suffer from it.

I’d love to see a plethora of starter sets, a number of 6-10 adventures, a few 11-15 and a couple of 16-20. Each setting should have a dedicated starter set IMHO.

 

[R_J_K75]

I’d love to see a plethora of starter sets, a number of 6-10 adventures, a few 11-15 and a couple of 16-20. Each setting should have a dedicated starter set IMHO.

Id actually like to see WotC do some scalable adventures. Always seems whenever Im looking for an adventure to run for a certain level and number PCs I can never find it, so most of the time I just end up writing my own, but all I wanted was to read a shorter adventure to run for a few sessions.

Im not sure every setting needs its own starter box but at least a good starter adventure. LMoP seems to have gotten great reviews and that was on the shorter side 64 or 96 pages if I recall.