D&D 5E Why is Hoard of the Dragon Queen such a bad adventure?

ad_hoc said:

Basically there are kobolds and bullywugs in the castle. You don't have to ally with either of them, but you can sow discontent, particularly with the kobolds and encourage them to turn against the bullywugs.

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I always have a soft spot for talking with the small and cute monsters. Even though they usually end of pilfering all my stuff.

I ran HotDQ and RoT when they came out first and enjoyed them, it is quite railroady and takes a lot of prep though. You just have to get a sense of your group and adjust, for example there was no way that ‘another fake mask’ was going to fly with my group so they found real masks and Tiamat was consequently weaker etc

Tallifer said:

I always have a soft spot for talking with the small and cute monsters. Even though they usually end of pilfering all my stuff.

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My girlfriend has the same problem; most of the time she ends up playing one of them after her character dies. I used the Sunless Citadel as an intro adventure to HotDQ and now she's been playing Meepo the Kobold for 6 months as an ''Arcane Slinger'' (arcane archer but uses a sling).

As a side note, where do you find those hand drawn, black and white picture you always post with your comments? Do you make them yourself? As a fan of some OSR games, those would be amazing for someone wanting to illustrate OSR adventures.

vincegetorix said:

As a side note, where do you find those hand drawn, black and white picture you always post with your comments? Do you make them yourself? As a fan of some OSR games, those would be amazing for someone wanting to illustrate OSR adventures.

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Drawings I drew for XP in various games. Some of the drawings are by one of my players.

I think HoTDQ should have, come chapter 4(the road trip), made a clear statement that ‘now is the time to practice building your own sessions. Here are some ideas and NPCs’ and then given a bit of advice on number/type of encounters and such.

I ran that section so poorly. However it had cool ideas for one off sessions and my players, despite all of us not enjoying that part of the adventure, distinctly remember a number of the NPCS.
I should have run that part as a site by site ‘tour’ up to Waterdeep with the wagons being kind of a mobile ‘home base’.

cmad1977 said:

I should have run that part as a site by site ‘tour’ up to Waterdeep with the wagons being kind of a mobile ‘home base’.

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This.

In fact, I think the whole first half of HotDQ works better if you treat it like this. The module spends about one page, and a fraction of a single game session, getting the party from Greenest to the caravan leaving Baldur's Gate. When I DM'd the module, this journey took about 10 game sessions, because I had the players actually play through all that -- encounters in the Greenfields, a two-session subplot in Elturel, an encounter at Fort Morninglord and a couple more onboard the barge on the Chionthar, and a major subplot in Baldur's Gate involving followers of Severin (the Calishite leader of the Cult) based in Little Calimshan.

My players loved it.

Note that all this is not a complaint about the module, per se. And doing it this way takes an already DM-prep-heavy module and exacerbates that issue. But, for confident DMs with time on their hands and a committed play group willing to tack a few months' play onto the beginning of the campaign, I think this is the way to go.

KarinsDad said:

Both fought the dragon and won, but in one case, the DM was giving out info on exactly where the dragon was

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This was in the module. If you go to talk to Reidoth, he tells you about the cultists and the dragon.

KarinsDad said:

It's still just a game. Meant to be fun. Sorry, but rolling up a new PC because the module designer thought a CR 8 encounter against level 3 PCs would be fun for the DM, does not make it fun for me as a player. This level of "campaign world realism" where a too powerful foe (or foes) is in the adventure because "it could happen" in a campaign world is not the reason to write these uber monsters into a module. It just means to me that the module designer made a design mistake.

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Then have house rules like we do. If a character wipes, the player gets to choose 1 of 2 options. 1) Create a new character like the official rules say to do; or 2) Your character miraculously survives and shows up after that particular combat is over, but has gained no loot or experience (and usually gets picked on pretty badly by his companions by fainting during the fight). If the entire party wipes, we use WoW rules and ressurect right before the battle. In that scenario, we frequently rethink our battle plans.

sithramir said:

Maybe you could blame it for not having options on how to properly scale up and down?

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It actually does give options on scaling up and down in several places.

The Green Hermit said:

It actually does give options on scaling up and down in several places.

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Welcome to the board! Have some XP.