D&D 5E A brief rant about Rime of the Frost Maiden, farming, logistics, and ecology

[Burnside]

Dungeon of the Mad Mage (woof, that was a bad start to a game. I had to really bite my tongue when I was told that our agreeing to go down the well was a one-way trip. I didn't make a character who was suicidal enough to enter a death dungeon on a whim, with no way out.),

Jumped out at me. FWIW, that one's on your DM. As written, you can definitely leave the dungeon.

 

[Shardstone]

Just out of interest, why are you expending so much energy criticising a product you have no intention of buying?

I mean... I have no intention of getting my nose pierced... but I don’t go on an open assault on tattoo parlours?

Comparing constructive criticism to open assault...strange comparison.

 

[Haffrung]

Yeah, If the winters in Game of Thrones are too much to handle for peoples sense of verisimilitude then this one probably isn’t for you. Whilst popularity is not a measure of accuracy it is definitely a measure of how acceptable something is to common sensibility.

Everywhere becomes cold during a Westeros winter it isn’t limited to north of the wall. Obviously people did survive them and they are dark - the long night. With stores of food, carefully looked after cattle, and ingenuity.

You’re asking for a degree of realism that isn’t present in most fantasy games. Not that the claim that having no light kills coniferous trees and all life within two years has been referenced anywhere... it’s all based on suppositions. I have demonstrated that life can survive 3-6 months. Of course there aren’t locations on earth that have longer so it can’t be tested.

The difference with Game of Thrones is the long winter is something that’s referred to, but not experienced by the POV characters. So the obvious questions that would arise from being immersed in that environment don‘t arise.

And like others have said, I engage an entirely different part of my brain when I’m playing an RPG vs passively watching a TV show. I’m trying to reason things through, learn practical knowledge about the setting, apply real-world experiences to my decisions. My players do too. They’ve been known to hire workers to divert a river and flood a dungeon. Don’t think about it too hard it’s just a fantasy world doesn’t really cut it in our campaigns.

 

[DnD Warlord]

Just out of interest, why are you expending so much energy criticising a product you have no intention of buying?

I mean... I have no intention of getting my nose pierced... but I don’t go on an open assault on tattoo parlours?

I have no interest in getting any piercing or any I have no interest in getting a tatto. I do have an eye for art so I may occasionally comment on the skill of a tattoo artist or how a piercing looks. If I see three different tattoos coming from the same shop/artist that all look bad I most defiantly would say something... especially if my friends who like tattoos and piercings are looking into getting one there...

There is a world of difference between “I don’t like sci fi there fore I did like Star Trek” and “I don’t like sci fi but since you asked about this one episode of Star Trek I can tell you my thoughts on its story telling problems”.

we are all D&D nerds here.

 

[DnD Warlord]

Okay so my view is that this mod was most likely not written to be just a mod. Like was said above it is also a gazzater.
However it also must tow a line. I think WoTC bit off a big scary post apocalyptic story then could not chew it... so it ended up swallowing a light hearted kinda bad story.

 

[robus]

Don’t think about it too hard it’s just a fantasy world doesn’t really cut it in our campaigns.

Especially when we're supposed to basically "run the world simulator" in our DM brains as we go. If our brains can't make sense of the underlying "logic" then it makes it that much harder to keep the plates spinning as it were.

This is what I feel my brain is doing while I "smoothly" narrate the results of the players actions...

 

[Burnside]

My players are the type of players who are definitely going to want to know why everything isn't dead after 2 years of freezing darkness. The adventure has no answer to that, so that's on me to figure out. I do find that annoying for $50. To me, that is a pretty basic and obvious issue that struck me in the first few pages in. I do think more thought was needed.

Here's where I ended up:
Two years of freezing darkness = everything dead

Possible solution #1: eliminate darkness, just make it two years of winter
Problem: Screws up duergar storyline
Possible solution #1 rejected

Possible solution #2: shorten length of crisis. Winter & dark stretched through spring. Now it's summer & weather is still apocalyptic.
Problem: Now the timeline is too short to make general acceptance of human sacrifice in Ten Towns plausible
Additional solution #2a: cut human sacrifice. While a "cool" idea, the writers do almost nothing with it and it's pretty much irrelevant to the story/implications are never explored

So that's what I'm doing. It's been unnaturally freezing and dark for four months. No human sacrifices as of yet.

 

[TheSword]

The difference with Game of Thrones is the long winter is something that’s referred to, but not experienced by the POV characters. So the obvious questions that would arise from being immersed in that environment don‘t arise.

And like others have said, I engage an entirely different part of my brain when I’m playing an RPG vs passively watching a TV show. I’m trying to reason things through, learn practical knowledge about the setting, apply real-world experiences to my decisions. My players do too. They’ve been known to hire workers to divert a river and flood a dungeon. Don’t think about it too hard it’s just a fantasy world doesn’t really cut it in our campaigns.

And yet, most of the older characters The Game of Thrones have experienced winter lasting several years! They survived.

yes I agree different muscles get used in TT but at the same time fiction will always lead our expectations of RPG. Every TTRPG is derivative from some form of literature or media

 

[Azzy]

two years of deep winter

The problem with this lone of thought, though, is it's not implicit that it's two years of deep winter or that the current conditions are the same as when Auril's Everlasting Gobstoppers Winter started rather than the final culmination of Auril's.prolonged magical workings. I think that the most infuriating part of this conversation is the assumption that this nuclear divine winter just "switched on" at full strength one day rather than a slow, creeping onset of an ever-increasingly winter hellscape. Sure, you can read it that way if you're so inclined but I haven't seen anywhere where it is outright stated to be so. It comes down to a case of: do you want to interpret this in a manner that is ridiculously unrealistic or in a manner that is just fantasy unrealistic?

 

[Azzy]

So, some of these comments and suggested changes are valuable for me if/when I run this module. There's no way my players could 'suspend disbelief' if I told them it was a -50 blizzard, please make a dc 10 con check every hour. (This is probably an exaggeration since I haven't read the adventure, but you know what I mean.)

Which is fair. The fault here, though, lies in Frostmaiden's adherence to the rules in the DMG for "extreme cold" (which set a blanket DC 10 save for temperatures "at or below 0℉") and "frigid water", which it reprints, rather than something a bit more nuanced.