D&D 5E Rank the Official 5e Adventures (Updated)

[humble minion]

Without going into spoilers, can anyone summarise why SKT seems to be universally so despised? I'm in the middle of it now, and am actually looking forward to reading it once the campaign finishes. But the DM runs his campaigns pretty by the book, and while there's been a few parts which seem a bit lumpy, it hasn't seemed TOO bad.

 

[Charlaquin]

Without going into spoilers, can anyone summarise why SKT seems to be universally so despised? I'm in the middle of it now, and am actually looking forward to reading it once the campaign finished. But the DM runs his campaigns pretty by the book, and while there's been a few parts which seem a bit lumpy, it hasn't seemed TOO bad.

The hook suffers from serious one-point failure. The PCs have absolutely no reason to trust this cloud giant who just showed up to a town that was recently ransacked by cloud giants, but if they don’t, the adventure just doesn’t happen. Also, there’s a huge chunk of the adventure that’s literally just “run some other adventures until the PCs are high enough level for the next part” with no other guidance. I’d be willing to bet the parts that seem “a bit lumpy” are the parts that are actually written in the adventure, and the good parts are entirely of your DM’s creation. Not because they’re going off-script but because there isn’t even a script to be on.

 

[TheSword]

I think if you’re going to rank something, you should be clear what criteria you’re using to rank that way. I see a lot of people putting adventures in wildly different places and they’re doing it all for different reasons.

My ranking is based on how much fun the adventure was for me to run/read/play in - aggregated where I’ve done more than one of those things. I don’t care how easy it is to read or play. I’m not really interested in easy. I don’t pick a module off the shelf and expect it to play at the table word for word as written. Just fun. I also consider if and how long we played the campaign for to be a good indicator of fun.

Curse of Strahd
Tomb of Annihilation
Dragon Heist
Out of the Abyss
Ghosts of Saltmarsh (early days)
Rime of the Frost Maiden
Tales of the Yawning Portal
Descent into Avernus
Princes of the Apocalypse
Rise of Tiamat
Horde of the Dragon Queen
Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Storm Kings Thunder
Candle Keep Mysteries.

The listing probably say more about those posting than the adventures themselves

 

[AtomicPope]

Top Tier
1. Lost Mines of Phandelver
2. Curse of Strahd
3. Princes of the Apocalypse

Mid Tier
4. Tomb of Annihilation
5. Tales from the Yawning Portal
6. Dungeon of the Mad Mage
7. Ghosts of Saltmarsh

Bottom Tier
8. Storm King’s Thunder
9. Descent into Avernus
10. Waterdeep Dragon Heist
11. Out of the Abyss

Abject Failure Tier
12. Rime of the Frost Maiden
13. Horde of the Dragon Queen

I love Princes of the Apocalypse and Lost Mines. Curse of Strahd is a no brainer for a top tier campaign module. I put Tales ftYP as Mid Tier because it's not a single adventure or campaign but could be. I enjoyed playing the various dungeons and, with the exception of the Hill Giant fort, there's a lot of fun adventures. I actually enjoyed the Sunless Citadel MORE in 5e than I did in 3e. I didn't like Out of the Abyss as much as I hoped I would. I felt the side quests were more fun than the actual main plot. I had to put Rime of the FM as a failure. Like Horde of the DQ, it has a bad execution of the metaplot. Even though both of them are failures, they still have some parts I've used in my own campaigns (monsters, magic items, encounters), but as modules I hated playing in them.

 

[Burnside]

Without going into spoilers, can anyone summarise why SKT seems to be universally so despised? I'm in the middle of it now, and am actually looking forward to reading it once the campaign finishes. But the DM runs his campaigns pretty by the book, and while there's been a few parts which seem a bit lumpy, it hasn't seemed TOO bad.

My issues with SKT:

- It opens with 5 levels of prologue that are basically unconnected to the main story and are also a big combat slog.

- There is then a town siege scenario with a gimmick where the players are asked to temporarily run NPCs in addition to their own characters, for no particular reason. This section is a hassle to run. You might think it's worth it because the players will then feel a connection to the NPCs they've just played or the town they've just saved, but nope; these NPC characters are barely used thereafter, and the adventurers immediately leave the town on various fetch side quests, with no reason to ever return.

- For levels 5-7, the DM is basically told "Here's the Sword Coast; have them do some stuff. See you in two levels!" As a DM, the reason I'm buying a pre-written adventure is because I would like to be given an adventure to work off, not a 50-page thumbnail list of locations.

- At level 7-ish, the main adventure, advertised as covering levels 1-10, finally starts. There are some solid set-piece encounters and nice maps here, but in the end the main storyline is just okay and there's a risk of the adventurers being bigfooted in the main event by their powerful NPC allies. Also, without DM adjustments, it's quite possible that the players will never actually find out what is going on in terms of the overarching events that drive the "plot".

 

[Yora]

Fasciating. As someone who has no personal contact with any of the adventures, I was under the impression that Strahd, Storm King, and Frost Maiden are by far the most popular.

 

[Burnside]

Fasciating. As someone who has no personal contact with any of the adventures, I was under the impression that Strahd, Storm King, and Frost Maiden are by far the most popular.

Strahd is very popular, and imo still the strongest 5E adventure.

Rime is popular now mainly because it's the newest campaign; time will tell where it settles in people's estimation.

Storm King is popular but it's quite bad. I think a lot of DMs gravitate towards it because it appears to offer meat-and-potatoes generic D&D settings and encounters. It seems like an easy transition from Lost Mine of Phandelver for DMs who are looking for more of the same, and for whom superior adventures like Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation seem too weird or exotic or not their idea of what D&D is.

 

[AtomicPope]

Storm King is popular but it's quite bad. I think a lot of DMs gravitate towards it because it appears to offer meat-and-potatoes generic D&D settings and encounters. It seems like an easy transition from Lost Mine of Phandelver for DMs who are looking for more of the same.

This is my experience, and I don't want to spoil the adventure but the end is REALLY bad. Lots of Storm King's Blunder is bad. In retrospect I should put it as a failure because the execution as written is not good. However, the individual writing, the backstory, and the overall history how it ties in to the rest of the DND Universe is good writing so I want to keep it out of "failure".

 

[Scott Christian]

I would put Ghosts as a top tier.

And, although I know I am in the minority, I ran the first half of Hoard and, with very minor tweaks, and it went great. I then handed it off to a new DM and it went just as well. They were younger and newer players, and they loved it.

Lastly, in my opinion, Rise of Tiamat is fantastic. If not top tier, it is at least mid tier.

 

[Retreater]

Fasciating. As someone who has no personal contact with any of the adventures, I was under the impression that Strahd, Storm King, and Frost Maiden are by far the most popular.

I think Strahd was pretty strong. It's not the best adventure of all time - but probably the best we've seen for 5e.

I rated "Storm King's Thunder" and "Rime of the Frost Maiden" in my lower tier because of issues I had running them.

As noted earlier in this thread, SKT has one of the weakest openings I've seen. My players refused to get the quest from the NPC. The adventure has you investigating a town destroyed by flying giants and then expect the players to trust the flying giant they meet immediately afterwards, ride around in his floating tower, and undertake a lengthy quest on his behalf.

SKT at least has some good locations and fun encounters that can be used in other campaigns. The story is convoluted, the potential wasted in secret machinations the DM is supposed to hide from the characters for nearly 10 levels of campaigning.

RotFM (which I'm running currently) is worse than SKT because of its illogical, frozen, no-sun setting (at least SKT had some variety). The encounters are poorly designed - with frequent challenges that have only one solution (that is also beyond what the party can achieve at the recommended levels). The dungeons are too small to have good exploration potential. The segments of the adventure have absolutely nothing to do with each other - the main villain has nothing to do with the other factions - and is dealt with halfway through the adventure, so the party has zero reason to continue the adventure.

RotFM ranks so low because it doesn't even have good parts to take from it. I have to "beef" it up with sidequests from other adventures and ignore the stuff in the book because it is so poorly designed.