D&D 5E Survivor 5e Adventure Books - Yawning Portal lives to tell it's Tale!

[delericho]

Yeah, I find this an odd final 2.

I expected to see CoS there, but was glad to see RotFM

In terms of the actual campaign adventures, I think there are very few people in this thread who really think Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is the best one or even their favorite.

IMO, CoS is the best of the 5e adventures, but it suffers by comparison with the original Ravenloft. However, I was hugely impressed with RotFM, and am looking forward to running it. So I'd probably place that at #2 in terms of quality (of the ones I have), and would say it probably is my favourite.

(I should note that I skipped both the compilation volumes, so can't comment on those, except to say that I do know that some of the originals are great.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So it's a victim of own its own success?

What use to a DM is an adventure which everyone has either played, read, or at a minimum knows the plot?

Personally, I have always found Carry On Up The Castle impossible to take seriously anyway. There is a fine line between comedy and horror, and most horror sits on the wrong side of it.

 

[jasper]

Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden 0
Tales from the Yawning Portal 19

I was sure it would be finished before I woke up but hey...it's the first final blow for me

that is cold.

 

[Burnside]

What use to a DM is an adventure which everyone has either played, read, or at a minimum knows the plot?

Putting aside the the fact that this is kind of a weird argument to make while voting for Tales from the Yawning Portal, it's also an argument made from inside a bubble of people who have been playing D&D for decades. In the past 3 years, I've run CoS for 2 groups, 10 players total, only one of whom had ever heard the terms "Ravenloft" or "Strahd", and none of whom had ever played any iteration of it. Your "everyone" isn't everyone.

Which is not to say you need to defend your vote anyway, as the whole thing is totally subjective.

 

[Maxperson]

I expected to see CoS there, but was glad to see RotFM



IMO, CoS is the best of the 5e adventures, but it suffers by comparison with the original Ravenloft. However, I was hugely impressed with RotFM, and am looking forward to running it. So I'd probably place that at #2 in terms of quality (of the ones I have), and would say it probably is my favourite.

(I should note that I skipped both the compilation volumes, so can't comment on those, except to say that I do know that some of the originals are great.)

For me, since I don't use full adventure paths, but do use the compilations to provide smaller adventures to insert into my game, the Yawning Portal and Candlekeep Mysteries were my top 2.

 

[Retreater]

Having run both, CoS is definitely superior to RotFM. Rime isn't actually playable without substantial DM tweaking. It's not bad, but it's just got such a lose plot, things that don't go together, extremely deadly encounters at 1st level, a completely illogical ecology, NPC motivations that make no sense.
Yawning Portal - I guess it's okay. It's like if your favorite album is the Eagles' Greatest Hits.

 

[Mercurius]

I'll give an example of "what's the point" of Yawning Portal, even in a group of older players.

I'm restarted up my group that played on and off from about 2008-15, mostly 4E with Next/5E during the last year or two. It is comprised entirely of Gen Xers who played D&D in college and before, but most very little since then (until we started up). Some of them might have played in some of the older classics in Yawning Portal, but if so it was decades ago and I imagine that they won't recognize them if and when we play through them.

I'm using some of the YP adventures as touchstones for a larger campaign, mixed in with other stuff (sandboxing and wherever the campaign leads us). I like the format because I can better structure my own campaign around some of the adventures, rather than run a complete campaign like Strahd or Tome.

So yeah, there's a real place for Yawning Portal - even for groups comprised of older players.

 

[CleverNickName]

What use to a DM is an adventure which everyone has either played, read, or at a minimum knows the plot?

That's like asking "what's the use?" in having a digitally-remastered version of The Empire Strikes Back on DVD, because you already saw it in theaters, or you own it on VHS.

 

[Burnside]

Having run both, CoS is definitely superior to RotFM. Rime isn't actually playable without substantial DM tweaking. It's not bad, but it's just got such a lose plot, things that don't go together, extremely deadly encounters at 1st level, a completely illogical ecology, NPC motivations that make no sense.
Yawning Portal - I guess it's okay. It's like if your favorite album is the Eagles' Greatest Hits.

Agreed. I'm prepping RotFM now and it's a ton of work to make it playable. While you can change it up if you want to, 95% of CoS will play just fine as written, which is a rarity for 5E hardcovers.