D&D 5E Justin Alexander's review of Shattered Obelisk is pretty scathing

[mamba]

You can see it if you log out too, and that removes the temptation to try and respond.

I guess I am automatically logged in, hence the ‘workaround’, but since you are logged out in either scenario, the ability to respond is removed

 

[Ancalagon]

Key info buried in paragraphs is a pet peeve.

YES!

We don't always have the prep time we wish we had, or sometimes the PCs go in an unexpected direction (a segment you haven't prepped for yet). This leads to the party interacting with the room when suddenly a sheepish GM will go "Oh... there are 2 hostile ropers in here. Roll initiative!" (or similar kerfuffle)

The presentation of a lot of WotC is awful

 

[Parmandur]

The worst adventure of the modern era - in my opinion - is Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. Yes, there are bits that I like - and you can mine the devil descriptions for adventure ideas. But as to structure and encounter writing, DiA one is horrid. (The only one I advise people avoid).

I'm currently playing through The Shattered Obelisk. Unfortunately, one of my players has been away for two weeks, so we haven't quite got through the Lost Mine portion. Soon, though! From what I've read, the fact that it came out around the same time as Baldur's Gate 3 does it no favours. Since BG3 uses lore-accurate mind flayers in key villainous positions, and this one... sort of has them around?

That may not be entirely fair, but to my mind, the adventure that works best as a follow-up to Lost Mine of Phandelver is Storm King's Thunder. Or Princes of the Apocalypse. Since they take the idea of wandering adventurers doing small quests and build it into something more.

The idea of adventurers doing quests for factions got expanded a little more in Dragon Heist. Not exactly well, but you can get the bones of how it works. It's also worth playing Lost Mine merged with Dragon of Icespire Peak (Essentials Kit). I ran one campaign like that, and it was awesome.

But with The Shattered Obelisk, it explicitly tells you the factions won't matter, and then depreciates almost all the NPCs you meet in the Lost Mine chapter. After telling you that it's important to build a bond with them due to later events. Only a very few get referenced in later chapters, and never in a manner that allows you to bond with them. Instead, the adventure introduces a Brand New Character who is the important one. Rather than using an existing character.

I think it will play okay based on what I read, but if it doesn't, I'll report that. I just don't see it as an inspired adventure. There are a lot of 5E adventures that are flawed, but I think are inspired. Tyranny of Dragons. Tomb of Annihilation. They challenge you to rise above their flaws and see what you can make of them. (Tyranny of Dragons is very close to my favourite adventure of all time because it just clicks with me).

I might be wrong, but I guess the play experience will tell, soon enough.

Cheers,
Merric

I haven't played it yet, myself, but in a read through I would agree with all of these criticisms. And I enjoyed running Tyranny of Dragons in practice, too!

 

[Parmandur]

Even the statement “there’s not enough design space for both fancy weapon tricks and spells” kinda checks out with how they described the weapon mastery system as “like martial Cantrips.” You can follow the logic, where they created the design space by shifting their thinking around weapon tricks, to conceptualize them as essentially spells you cast with weapons.

I think the original context (which granted I listened to like 5 year ago at best) was a question about just giving everyone Battlemaster style Manuvers. And those Manuevera are Spell equivalents.

 

[Umbran]

You can see it if you log out too, and that removes the temptation to try and respond.

Mod note:
So, the person you were responding to was asked to please not actively inform people how to subvert our control features.

Apparently, you were not wise enough to think that warning would also apply to you.

If you want to make sure people think that you don't care about others, this is a good way to start on that. "Screw what they want! You can get around it this way," is pretty rude stuff.

 

[doctorhook]

That's what I find disappointing. Dragon's Crown shows that Baker can write a big adventure that's fun and varied. Other than the plot involving one class being nerfed for the duration of the adventure, Dragon's Crown is pretty much my ideal Big Adventure. But Princes is essentially a little surface investigating followed by One Huge Dungeon.

You’re right, PotA is basically “One Huge Dungeon” (well, 13 large dungeons all directly linking to each other). But that fact by itself is compounded a couple of ways: 1) it’s an elemental adventure, so a lot of the enemies are the same flavour in each segment, which gets repetitive; and 2) 5E doesn’t (or at least didn’t) have much in the way of specific mechanics to support prolonged delves. Altogether it was just too repetitive; visiting the dungeons in a different order doesn’t change the experience much.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

You need to account for the modern grading schemes for reviews:

A+: This is genuinely a great product.
A: It's good.
A-: It's okay.
B+: This is worth the money that the reviewer personally paid for it, and not a penny more.
B: Badly flawed, but with some salvageable content.
B-: It sucks.
C: Forest Oracle. The review probably gives more entertainment than the product.
D: This product has serious objective flaws - the covers are falling off, it had dark grey text on a light grey background, or similar.
F: Actively hateful material: FATAL, or similar.

Man, A's an B's are doing a LOT of heavy lifting there.

I actively loathe a scoring system like that. What's wrong with A) It's great. B) It's good. C) It's good, but has some problems. C-) It's not totally without merit, but almost. D) It's actively terrible. F) It is incomplete/awful/offensive.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Nothing wrong with seeking out information. It was the people who think the word of that single source is sufficient (posting early on in this thread) that I found disturbing. Naming them would be against forum rules.

What made you think that was what they were doing? I took those early posts to mean that this review put them "over the top" so to speak, not that they'd given no thought to it before Lord Justin Spake the Truth.

I agree with the overall point you're trying to make, but I'm not sure the point was needed here. It might be your obvious (and understandable) distaste for Alexander that got you a little over-the-top with your critique of the early posts. Just a thought.

 

[delericho]

Man, A's an B's are doing a LOT of heavy lifting there.

I actively loathe a scoring system like that. What's wrong with A) It's great. B) It's good. C) It's good, but has some problems. C-) It's not totally without merit, but almost. D) It's actively terrible. F) It is incomplete/awful/offensive.

I know. It wasn't an entirely serious post.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Mod note:
So, the person you were responding to was asked to please not actively inform people how to subvert our control features.

Apparently, you were not wise enough to think that warning would also apply to you.

If you want to make sure people think that you don't care about others, this is a good way to start on that. "Screw what they want! You can get around it this way," is pretty rude stuff.

Sorry I missed the previous warning, my mistake.