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

[Bolares]

I love a lot about rime, but

Spoiler

I can't fathom why they put the frost maiden in the middle of the adventure

 

[Charlaquin]

Dragon Heist rant:

I'm more upset that you use only 1 villain.
You don't visit their dungeon or deal with them directly.
The climax of the adventure is so boring and anti-climactic that few players will feel any sense of accomplishment.
You can't keep the treasure.
The chase scene for the Macguffin is so railroaded that you can't let your players win before the designated time.
The mystery is amazingly easy to solve by anyone paying attention - or if their characters have above average rolls.
It's a poor substitute for Volo's Guide to Waterdeep, and the city isn't well fleshed out.
The maps are low quality scribbles.

My opinion is that it’s a cool concept that fails spectacularly in execution. If you do an Alexandrian Remix level overhaul, you can get a really good campaign out of the ideas presented in it. But it fails completely as a product meant to allow you to run an adventure without having to lay that kind of groundwork.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

One thing I would note, from looking at the lists-

The only "classic" yet completely new adventure is LMoP. Phandelver is, near as I can tell, the only generally acknowledged great adventure they've put out, and that was in 2014.

It's now 7 years later, and most of the upper echelon adventures (such as CoS) are from borrowed material. Most of the "new" adventures are either polarizing at best (Tomb of Annihilation) or generally considered trash, with some people enjoying it (Waterdeep, Avernus).

This does not seem to be a great hit rate on the APs.

I would say that the overall quality has been ... fine. But it does seem really really weird that we are now seven years in, and it's hard to think of a single brand-new AP that I can wholeheartedly recommend.

 

[Burnside]

My opinion is that it’s a cool concept that fails spectacularly in execution. If you do an Alexandrian Remix level overhaul, you can get a really good campaign out of the ideas presented in it. But it fails completely as a product meant to allow you to run an adventure without having to lay that kind of groundwork.

Yes. Also feels like they published it when it needed to spend about 6 months more in development. Like there is an interesting and quite fresh adventure in there somewhere, but they didn't have time to actually get it into a playable state that actually works at the table.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

My opinion is that it’s a cool concept that fails spectacularly in execution. If you do an Alexandrian Remix level overhaul, you can get a really good campaign out of the ideas presented in it. But it fails completely as a product meant to allow you to run an adventure without having to lay that kind of groundwork.

I think Dragon Heist is essentially perfect as what it's meant to be; the opener, or the first chunk, of a bigger campaign. It's only level 1-5 and is purposefully setup to be the beginning of a larger campaign. Now, I think it's terrible that it's supposed to be the opener to Dungeon of the Made Mage, which would absolutely be a full 180 in campaign style if you actually did it.

I always run Dragon Heist as if the villains win the fight in the vault, and take the treasure back to their lair. Then the PCs actually get to do a heist against the villains in their lair, which seems like it probably was meant to be the adventure but they cut it for some reason.

 

[Burnside]

It's now 7 years later, and most of the upper echelon adventures (such as CoS) are from borrowed material.

In Curse of Strahd's defense, I would say it takes classic 1E adventure as its base and updates, expands, and improves on that adventure every way. That's not as easy as it sounds. Imo it's a classic in its own right.

 

[Malmuria]

One thing I would note, from looking at the lists-

The only "classic" yet completely new adventure is LMoP. Phandelver is, near as I can tell, the only generally acknowledged great adventure they've put out, and that was in 2014.

It's now 7 years later, and most of the upper echelon adventures (such as CoS) are from borrowed material. Most of the "new" adventures are either polarizing at best (Tomb of Annihilation) or generally considered trash, with some people enjoying it (Waterdeep, Avernus).

This does not seem to be a great hit rate on the APs.

I would say that the overall quality has been ... fine. But it does seem really really weird that we are now seven years in, and it's hard to think of a single brand-new AP that I can wholeheartedly recommend.

There seem to be a lot of external pressures at that company. For example, they tend to hire a lot of freelancers to write bits of each adventure (instead of hiring full time writers). They also seem to face some corporate pressure to 'synergize' their products across media (e.g. the rumor that the balder's section of avernus was added to tie in to the video game (which is still not fully out)). And of course they've committed to nostalgia-based products. That would be the favorable way of saying it. The less favorable view is that they are not careful as editors or project managers (either for content or language), and they know they can rely on the community to fix or change their products (and even get paid by those fixes via dm's guild).

 

[Burnside]

I think Dragon Heist is essentially perfect as what it's meant to be; the opener, or the first chunk, of a bigger campaign. It's only level 1-5 and is purposefully setup to be the beginning of a larger campaign. Now, I think it's terrible that it's supposed to be the opener to Dungeon of the Made Mage, which would absolutely be a full 180 in campaign style if you actually did it.

I always run Dragon Heist as if the villains win the fight in the vault, and take the treasure back to their lair. Then the PCs actually get to do a heist against the villains in their lair, which seems like it probably was meant to be the adventure but they cut it for some reason.

I think you're right about the lairs, and I hope in 10-15 years Chris Perkins or somebody will explain to us what was originally supposed to happen with some of these adventures, and how and why we ended up with what we did in some cases.

 

[Charlaquin]

One thing I would note, from looking at the lists-

The only "classic" yet completely new adventure is LMoP. Phandelver is, near as I can tell, the only generally acknowledged great adventure they've put out, and that was in 2014.

It's now 7 years later, and most of the upper echelon adventures (such as CoS) are from borrowed material. Most of the "new" adventures are either polarizing at best (Tomb of Annihilation) or generally considered trash, with some people enjoying it (Waterdeep, Avernus).

This does not seem to be a great hit rate on the APs.

I would say that the overall quality has been ... fine. But it does seem really really weird that we are now seven years in, and it's hard to think of a single brand-new AP that I can wholeheartedly recommend.

Yeah, the quality of the published adventures has been really poor overall this edition. Which is kind of wild to me given that the playtest modules were really great! Murder in Baldur’s Gate, Legacy of the Crystal Shard, Scorge of the Sword Coast, and Dead in Thay were all fantastic! I didn’t read Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle, but I heard good things about it. The Blingdenstone adventure in the playtest packets (can’t remember the name) was really good too, and of course Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread are classics. It seemed like they had really stepped up their adventure design coming off of 4e, so I was really thrilled for Horde of the Dragon Queen… and then was very disappointed to find it was like… the opposite of everything I liked about the playtest modules.

 

[Bolares]

Tomb is my baby. I will defend it to the death (curse). My only criticism is that it gives such a compelling setting, that the main plot urges you to ignore. My players really wanted to explore chult, but their characters all had stakes in the death curse. I also love Out of the Abyss, but running it is almost a job.