D&D 5E D&D Beyond Reveals New Golden Vault Details

Over on D&D Beyond you can read more about Keys from the Golden Vault, including information on 3 of the 13 adventures, the Golden Vault organization itself, and an overview of how the heist adentures within work.

What Is Keys From the Golden Vault? 13 Heist-Centric Adventures

Gather your crew and get to planning—you're going on a heist! The latest book from D&D takes characters of all levels on epic heists. Learn more about t...

www.dndbeyond.com

Four of the adventures include:

• The Stygian Gambit (for 2nd-level adventurers): Case a Nine Hells-themed casino and steal the prize for the Three-Dragon Ante tournament that's currently taking place.
• Prisoner 13 (for 4th-level adventurers): Infiltrate a remote prison in the tundra of Icewind Dale and extract information from an inmate.
• Vidorant’s Vault (for 7th-level adventurers): Break into the safe of a renowned thief, bypassing its many security features en route.
• Fire and Darkness (for 11th-level adventurers): Navigate the grim fortress of an efreeti and retrieve an artifact of unimaginable evil, the Book of Vile Darkness.

 

[Umbran]

Either you are a poor DM or you have a poor DM...

Mod Note:
Hey there.

1) Not having the same experience than you does not speak to overall ability - so there's no cal to be casing judgement on people.

2) Casting judgement on people makes this discussion about the people rather than the topic. You could have made this constructive, by asking what about their heist experience seemed sub-par, and maybe offer some coaching in improving that experience. But you didn't - you just decided to be insulting. How do you expect this makes you seem to everyone reading?

If you aren't going to try to make things better for anyone, and want to be mean to people, that's going to be a problem. So, you know, try to be better to folks in the future. Thanks.

 

[Reynard]

Well then you inferred incorrectly. I have played rules light and rules heavy games over the past 30 plus years. 5E does not have thousand of pages of rules at least what I consider rules. I don’t included classes subclasses as rules per say.

In the context of "rules light" versus "rules heavy" that doesn't make much sense to me, but to each their own. 5E is on the heavier side of rules because it has a giant pile of rules exceptions -- class abilities, race abilities, feats, spells, monster abilities, magic items, etc... -- that all interact with one another. Sure, the core mechanic of 5E is simple, but that hardly matters when you have to refer to some other rule or game component literally every time you engage with that core mechanic.

 

[MNblockhead]

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr have you read this adventure? This is not a hand-holding adventure, it's a railroad of the most dangerous (to the PCs) kind.

I find rail-road = handholding in many adventures. I am not a fan of this, but I can enjoy a short rail-road adventure. But with my current players, railroads are harder to run on, because they are used to more sandbox games. I find I have to do more work to get them back on the track. But in my experience, many groups prefer to coast on rails. At least that is my experience with the local AL games. Which is why I only play the AL epics at conventions or special-fundraising epics at my FLGS.

If there's any significant deviation from the plan, the most likely single outcome for any party which isn't full of highly experienced players is that a probably good-aligned party is forced into a massive prison-fight with like 70+ CR3 (!!!) monsters (who are part of an LN/LG organisation). Which I guess will end up with the PCs all in jail? And if they talk, their LG backer will presumably be in quite a lot of trouble, or at least opprobrium.

When planning something like this, one generally wouldn't want a significant deviation from the plan. I think that as written the adventures provides a number of avenues the players can take to avoid a massive prison-fight, if anything the DCs and overall defenses are rather easy to bypass for what is supposed to be fantasy equivalent of a supermax prison.

I don't think that you need a group of highly experience players to avoid a massive prison fight. If anything, I think it would be a cakewalk for highly experienced players. New players would quickly grok that they would want to avoid a direct combat approach, even if they don't care about being the "good guys." Overall, I feel it the adventure is fine as written.

What would you do to change it?

Most OSR adventures are far safer and easier to run. This is DANGER MODE stuff. It's just that the peculiar kind of danger is deviation from the railroad.

Safer? I'll admit to not having a lot of experience with OSR, but there is a lot more save-or-suck situations. I'm not sure how the edition of D&D or retroclones would address what seems to be your primary concern. The adventure lays out several approaches to get the information through subterfuge and sneaking. If the PCs ignore all of that, then they are likely killed or captured by the guards. Kinda what I would expect from an adventure that involves infiltrating a high-security prison.

 

[Clint_L]

Emphasis mine.

That statement suggests to me you haven't played many rules light games. 5E is literally thousands of pages of rules at this point.

Agree that this is a matte of perspective. I consider 5e incredibly rules dense, just less so than other editions, arguably. Trash Pandas is an example of a rules lite RPG.

 

[Reynard]

Agree that this is a matte of perspective. I consider 5e incredibly rules dense, just less so than other editions, arguably. Trash Pandas is an example of a rules lite RPG.

Lasers and Feelings is my go-to example for a rules light game that essentially infinite playability.

 

[MNblockhead]

Well then you inferred incorrectly. I have played rules light and rules heavy games over the past 30 plus years. 5E does not have thousand of pages of rules at least what I consider rules. I don’t included classes subclasses as rules per say.

Yeah, more accurate to say that it can be rules light. You can simply play with the free basic rules. Even the PHB without feats isn't that heavy, it is mostly the classes and spells that add to the heft.

But compared to Index Card RPG, Dread, InSPECTREs, Hackmaster...yeah, D&D is far crunchier. For folks that have been playing TTRPGs for 30 years, they may forget how daunting D&D can be for new players.

 

[Mistwell]

I too love heists but if Keys from the Golden Vault follows the naming conventions of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist it will feature no Keys and the Golden Vault will turn out to be someone's yellowed lunch box.

We turned Waterdeep into a heist. Because if they were not going to hand the party a heist, we were going to pull one off anyway. We considered the pirate ship, but I think we settled on a mansion of a particularly nasty rich owner who was a minor NPC. And then the raid on Xanathar's could have been a heist but it was more fun to kill or capture or chase off all the baddies. Until my PC killed that stupid pet goldfish and all hell broke lose.

 

[jerryrice4949]

Yeah, more accurate to say that it can be rules light. You can simply play with the free basic rules. Even the PHB without feats isn't that heavy, it is mostly the classes and spells that add to the heft.

But compared to Index Card RPG, Dread, InSPECTREs, Hackmaster...yeah, D&D is far crunchier. For folks that have been playing TTRPGs for 30 years, they may forget how daunting D&D can be for new players.

Fair enough. There are many games with lighter rules and many with a lot more. However 5E is relatively rules light to me especially compared to previous editions of D&D (except basic). I have two groups and one is with old friends and one is with middle schoolers who picked it up quite quickly.

 

[teitan]

D&D may not be the best game for specific options like a heist game but games built on specific styles aren’t even good at anything but their specific style without major tweaks whereas D&D just needs some mild tweaking that doesn’t break anything or change the overall game.

 

[Haplo781]

D&D may not be the best game for specific options like a heist game but games built on specific styles aren’t even good at anything but their specific style without major tweaks whereas D&D just needs some mild tweaking that doesn’t break anything or change the overall game.

Because D&D is trying to be everything to everyone and ends up being a big bland pile of meh...